Control Freaks

A stream of electrons trickled down a wire and pulsed through an electrode and ricocheted into a human muscle, which pulled a man to his feet. His whole body was covered in a net of wires lashed into the surface of his skin. Each wire seemed to find its way up limbs and towards his back. The wires were fine, almost translucent, but they reflected light in strange ways when he moved. His body was strong, athletic, yet the wires seemed vaguely medical. They always had to Averill. Perhaps it was that his father was a paraplegic, and the prototype of what this athletic man had built into his body had allowed his father a few more years of use out of his body. Like his father, the man in front of him was bald by necessity. More wires than the mind could grasp glittered faintly over his scalp, each ending in a tiny black speck. The wires glinted slightly almost as if he was sweating.

Averill tried to imagine what the man in front of him had been doing two weeks ago. He looked down at his hands and imagined himself to be holding one of the huge pneumatic fists that the neoball pros used. He imagined himself leaping to impossible heights under reduced gravity with huge springs attached to his legs, imagining his every move to have it carried out by computers lodged in his back, not by his own nervous system. He imagined twirling through the air and kicking a pliable rubber ball at a hoop suspended from the ceiling and supported by the floor, past a goalie and scoring. He blinked at his fist. Somehow, the whole image was wrong. Sports should be man against man, not man and machine against other men with machines.

Two weeks ago, Thorn had gripped his skyfists tightly. They were basically an extension of his arm complete with a large pneumatic spring. His feet were tightly lashed to skyrunners. The original model by XkiX was largely unchanged. Lighter and stronger alloys had been found, but the design was mostly the same, with a large leaf spring extending down from just below the knee to well below a foot beneath the bottom of his shoe. The one thing that made them different was the kicking panel attached to the front of them. The fists were very different, with the only striking surface being at the end. The other difference between the runners and the fists were that the fists were pneumatic, more geared towards absorbing huge amounts of energy, but they could also be used to punch, and viciously at that.

Thorn shifted his weight slightly and then exploded forwards. There is no other word for what happened. One second he was one place, the second he was somewhere else entirely and moving at an insane speed. A ball about the size of a soccer ball was falling surreally slowly down towards the ground. Thorn leaped an impossible 9 feet into the air, revolved gracefully around the ball and kicked it ferociously towards a spot 20 meters in front of a team mate wearing green and gray and landed gracefully using his fists and rolling. The ball moved at a speed barely visible to the eye. Green and gray colors flashed towards the interception and somehow controlled it. A split second latter, the ball was flicked towards a huge loop suspended from the ceiling and supported by the floor. A tardy goalie in black dove towards the ball, but it shrieked by, millimeters from the ends of his huge pneumatic fists.

ESPN camera men and an interviewer stormed over to the man who scored the point. Thorn's team mate towered over them due to his skyrunners. Thorn's body heaved for breath. The game had been going for over forty five minutes and had made it into overtime. Fifteen minutes after the game would have normally been done, they were finally able to kick a tie breaker and end the match. That game had been the last of three games. The Phantoms had won the first game, but Thorn's team, the Shrikes had beaten them twice to come back to a victory. It had been a tense match, especially since the Phantoms had been seeded first in their bracket. The Shrikes weren't really supposed to have won, the supposedly superior creative power of the Phantoms was supposed to have allowed them to easily over power the Shrikes, but it turned out that the Shrikes were tougher.

Thorn didn't feel tough though. He tottered over to a high seat and sat down and imagined a world without pain. Slowly, the computer chips imbedded in his back went to work minimizing the nerve's signals to the brain. It was far from perfect. The wires running all over his body were meant to help him control it, not ignore pain, but they could be used for such for short periods of time. Enough time to help me catch my breath thought Thorn vaguely as he collapsed sideways.

Hours later, Thorn regained consciousness. His eyes swam and he visualized his arms reaching up and unstrapping his fists, but as they came up, in immediate response to his first thought, he realized that someone had already removed them for him. That's odd he thought as he tried to sit up. He got part of the way up, but then waves of pain shot up to him from his abdomen. He grimaced and visualized completing a sit up, and electrodes imbedded in his skin pulsed power into his destroyed muscles and pulled him through a sit up. That has got to be some of the most pain I have ever been in thought Thorn vaguely as he reached down to remove his skyrunners. They were gone as well. In fact, so were his shoes and socks. Wait thought Thorn. What happened? He looked around. Where am I? Just then, a door opened and a woman in a nurse's outfit entered.

    "You mustn't move around yet," she stated authoritatively. "You hurt yourself in today's match, and you are going to take a while to recover. Just take it easy for a bit, eat some food, and sleep, and We'll have you on your feet in no time."

    "I... I did?" Thorn managed as he lay back. I don't think I had any high speed collisions... There was that time where I had a near miss with the ball, and another when a Phantom tried to kill me, but I didn't actually get hit... Did he get me from behind? Who won the game? Didn't we? No. That doesn't make sense. I'll just ask. "Who won the game?"

    "You did. Don't you remember?"

    "Yes...Did I get hit? Did I hit anything? I don't think anything is broken."

    "No, no. Nothing is broken; you just pushed yourself a little too far in the game. Ran a little too fast, jumped a little too far. You have to know your own limits, you know. The NSMCS can make you do what you imagine, but if you push yourself too far, you can get hurt. I think you just went a little overboard today and your muscles are more exhausted than they normally are."

    "Is that all?" asked Thorn as he considered his NSMCS. Neural Simulating Muscle Control System. It reads your neural impulses and stimulates your muscles with more energy than your synaptic clefts can generate. The tougher you are, the more pain you can take, the more games you will win, he thought as he tried to roll off the bed. Somehow he was entirely unable to move, but the nurse noticed.

    "You mustn't move at all, you have taken a pretty good beating, and if you give it a day or two, most of the kinks should start to work themselves out. Just take it easy," she said soothingly. Thorn decided to go against his grain and ignored her and visualized himself rolling out of bed, but nothing happened except for a light flashing on and off next to his bed. "I have disabled your NSMCS system for now, and it will alert us if you try to move around, so just take it easy for a while, and get some sleep. Would you like anything to eat?"

    Thorn grunted in irritation. He hadn't been bed ridden for a long time. The insane level of physical activity kept him in fairly good health, and the Shrike's dietitian had him on all organic high energy foods, so he had been quite healthy for a very long time, and then noticed to his mild surprise that he was irritated. That didn't happen very often either. Mostly he just went with the flow.

    "No…" he said vaguely. "Not hungry."

    "Is there anything you require before I leave?" the nurse asked.

    "No thank you" he replied.

    "Very well then," said the nurse. "If you need anything, just imagine a movement and it will trigger an alarm that we will receive. Sleep well." And she was gone. Thorn slowly drifted to sleep and dreamt dreams of neoball heroics.

    Averill shivered and looked at Thorn again in something of a new light. That he could simply will himself to endure more pain to outperform others… Averill shivered again. There should be a limit Averill thought to himself. He shouldn't have been able to do what he did to himself. There should be some gauge that prevents him from hurting himself. But what if he got into a situation where he was at his limit but he wasn't safe? What about paraplegics? What is their limit? Do they feel limits? These were old questions to Averill, old questions that he hated.

    The game was in a sense inhumane. There were always things about it that didn't make sense. For one, NSMCS systems were insanely expensive, and for good reason. Controlling a human is not something that can be done easily. Competitors were always odd in ways Averill didn't understand. For one, almost all of them were as care free and as pacifistic as you could hope for. Often more so than they should be, thought Averill to himself. Why would someone so evidently… lazy go to all the time, the effort, the pain, the expense of getting an NSMCS system when you don't need one?

    There were on occasion fierce animals of men who played neosports; men who were easily enraged, and who played for fame, and who played for it hard. They were dangerous types. Several had gone insane, or at least partially insane, and tried to steal from businesses and banks and things. It made no sense when you were getting a huge paycheck from whatever neosport you were playing, and when you could easily be tracked by the NSMCS system that you couldn't ever take off.

    The only thing that can be happening here is someone, probably the managers, are manipulating these people. I have to make sure and stop this animalistic sport, thought Averill as he considered the case of Thorn.

    Thorn had come from a rich family. Both of his parents were driven individuals, both were on several executive boards, and Thorn senior was the president of a well off concert venue. They were both creative, Thorn senior conducted music from time to time, and they both played several instruments. They had enrolled their son in the best educational systems available, and had only managed to get an apathetic flunk for all their effort.

    Thorn had been smart enough, he had played guitar for a time, and his sketch book was beautiful, but he had never really cared about anything enough to get him truly engaged in any one subject long enough for him to master it. When Thorn's coach had approached him with the job offer, Thorn accepted it, more because he didn't want to offend the coach than any real care for the sport. Thorn's parents of course thought it was wonderful that their son was finally doing something, and footed the bill on Thorn's NSMCS system.

    Now, instead of simply being a flop out, Thorn had a life. He had a huge following, a multimillion dollar contract, and almost anything he wanted. In exchange for all this, his coach, a man named McAry, controlled almost everything, simply because Thorn couldn't care less about anything other than neoball. McAry was something of a sneaky individual. Averill suspected that he was probably watching his interview over a hidden camera somewhere in the room, but at the moment, that didn't bother him very much.

    Averill suddenly realized that he wasn't here to interview an injured famous athlete, but to try to find basis to shut neoball down.

    Once the interview was over, Averill left and organized an accurate research paper on the rights of neoball players revealing how they were psychologically abused by their coaches to the point of self injury, but on publishing, his work was laughed down. He was called a sports hater. Several newscasts questioned his testosterone production capabilities, and three years later, Thorn died of a heart attack.