When “CheezyNacho420” live-streams the war-bot chopping off his leg, it’s not that he wants to necessarily shock people (though it helps) or bag a few extra subscribers (though that’s even more helpful). It’s that he wants to get ridiculous, out of control, crazy famous. And really, in this day and age, is that such a bad thing?
Meg sure thinks so. That’s why when she’s finished wiping the blood splatter off her face while Cheezy soaks his stump in the expensive-ass limb RE-GROW© gel tub he bought after he reached two hundred mill. subscribers, she’s gives him a look like she just stuck her nose in her own vomit. Cheezy wants to make a meme of it. Even takes a snapshot with his retinals. Who knows. Might make for a good thumbnail someday.
“Never do that again,” Meg says chucking the bloody rag onto the bathroom floor.
“I was thinking both legs next time,” Cheezy says as he reviews the vid’s view count in his retinals. “You know: a Part II. Maybe use lasers instead. I dunno. What do ya think?”
“I thought you hacking off your nose was gross. But your whole leg? Come ‘on, Cheezy. That’s sick.”
Cheezy smiles. “It’s sick, isn’t it. So freaking sick.”
And as Meg rolls her eyes and walks out of his bathroom (the cave-themed one complete with custom stucco stalactites and stalagmites), he closes his eyes and listens to the chimes of subscribers growing. And he grins.
He’s going to be hella famous. He’s going to the top. He’s going all the way.
What stops Cheezy from doing Oops, all legless! (Part II) (a working title) isn’t the ungodly expense of all the RE-GROW© gel and ketamine dermals. Or his lackadaisical entourage who are all just getting stoned in his living room. It’s that while he’s flexing the new leg, feeling the synth muscles bend, he hears the ding of an unlinked account DMing his retinals. Which is unusual. Cause Cheezy’s getting pretty famous these days as a streamer. Not as famous as he’d like, but famous enough that it’s hard to squeeze a DM through his filters.
“Some rando wants to collab,” he summarizes to the boys.
“Sick,” says Barfy from the couch. Barfy’s their techie who re-programmed the war-bot to do that hilarious Fortnite dance after chopping Cheezy’s leg.
“What kind of collab?” Poo-dog asks. “Gross out? Prank?”
Cheezy shakes his head. “Dunno.”
Cheezy plops onto the giant wrap around sectional couch that cost almost as much as that lambo he rolled into the Grand Canyon two years ago. There’s some kind of holo-movie playing in the vid-pit, but most of the boys aren’t paying attention, too stoned and too lost in their retinals’ vid-feeds. Cheezy takes a sec to dig a little. Checks the guy’s profile. His subscriber count. Very respectable. Not CheezyNacho420 respectable. But respectable. A quick compare shows there’s a distinct break between his and Cheezy’s subscribers. Only an 8% overlap, but the AI analyzer seems to think that’ll grow to 79% if they collab. Considering how many subscribers the guy’s got, that’s a terrific boost. One too hard to ignore. He reads the DM one more time.
Hey, Cheezy man! Big fan! Really digging the latest leg chopper vid! The sound when your femur cracked? Oh, man, so sick! Anyway, was reaching out cause I was thinking of doing a new live-stream that’d make for an excellent collab. I’ve got an inside scoop on this old military base out in the Rockies. Make for some excellent content. What do you say? Peace, Lil’ Drizzle.
Up till now, Cheezy has never heard of Lil’ Drizzle. But he likes the directness. And he likes the stats even more. And yeah, sure, Oh crap! I cut off BOTH my legs! (extra femur crack!) (other working title) would be a pretty sweet follow up to his last. But Cheezy’s thinking maybe it’s time to shake things up. And he’s thinking about those delicious stats. About rising up to Numero Uno, baby.
The coordinates Lil’ Drizzle sends him tags the old military compound somewhere out in the Rockies nearby one of the old towns that collapsed after the war. The boys take Cheezy’s new cherry red Jeep Wrangler XT with custom gold spinner rims, the one he doesn’t know how to drive but pretends to anyway while the AI does all the work. The coordinates are way deep. Takes them at least two hours, wandering through lodgepole pines and aspens. When they get there, it’s just an old dinky town, completely abandoned.
“Some old ski resort,” says Poo-Dog as he takes a piss all over a rusted Pabst half buried in the dirt.
Barfy’s already deploying the cam-drones. The drones swarm about them, archiving footage for the live-stream’s intro, lots of close-ups of them looking all puzzled, like what the hell, what is this place? Lil’ Drizzle and his crew roll up a minute later in a purple Toyota 4Runner with LIL’ DRIZZLE stenciled on both sides and a sick decal of two dragons doing it in a bed of lava. The bass booms so loud Cheezy can feel the beat in his back molars.
When the doors crack open, Lil’ Drizzle comes clambering out in a cloud of smoke, and Cheezy can see why they give him the name. The guy’s a shrimp, five foot three, not even. But he’s got that on-camera personality, that beaming smile that makes him look so genuine. And Cheezy’s feeling a little wary. Cause he wants to be the king, of course, but he’s wondering just who this collab’s going to boost more. Him? Or Lil’ Drizzle?
“Yoh, Cheezy, my man, the pleasure’s all freaking mine,” says Lil’ Drizzle as he goes in for a handshake and back pat, like the two go way back. “So freaking awesome you came, man. I think this is going to be the best vid yet. I can feel it.”
“Yeah,” Cheezy says, nodding. “Barfy, let’s get a little intro here of Lil’ Drizzle and I meeting.”
“Already got it covered,” Lil’ Drizzle smiles and points to one of his own cam-drones bobbing next to them, rotors quietly whirring.
“Nice,” Cheezy says, but it doesn’t feel that nice. It feels like Lil’ Drizzle is running the show, not him.
“So what’s the collab then?” Cheezy asks. “We exploring this abandoned dump or what? Cause honestly, man, that sounds lame as shit.”
Lil’ Drizzle’s smile grows to a mischievous grin.
“You’ll see, man. Trust me. It’s going to be freaking awesome. Pete’s never steered me wrong. Right, Pete?”
That’s when Cheezy notices the cent-man standing by Lil’ Drizzle. Silver eyes. Bionic implants. All gangly limbs who hovers over Lil’ Drizzle like a scarecrow. Cheezy didn’t know they still minted cent-men. Thought it was just for the wars till they discontinued the procedure after it turned soldiers bat-shit bonkers. But he’s a cent-man for sure. Cheezy can tell by his cold eyes. He can almost see the bionic wiring humming behind that glare.
“Pete’s the one who found the place,” Lil’ Drizzle says, thumbing to the cent-man. “He’s my algo guy. Came up with the whole collab idea.”
Cheezy just gives the cent-man a single nod. He gets an ice-cold stare back.
“You got a pre-estimate then?” Cheezy asks.
Pete nods. “If AI editing done right, the upload top trends in less than five minutes and stays for two weeks straight, with at least 20 mil. subs a piece.”
“Jesus Christ,” says Poo-dog. “20 mil. in one vid?”
“Bullshit,” says Cheezy. Because even he knows a number like that can’t be for real.
“No, no, no, dog, Pete’s the real deal,” Lil’ Drizzle says. “For sure. Was in the war and stuff. He fucks with the algo, man, big time. Knows about this place from way back.”
“So, Pete, how exactly are we getting 20 mil. each out of a single vid?” Cheezy asks.
“Easy,” Pete says. “We just give the algorithm what it wants.”
What the algorithm wants, apparently, is for them to trudge to the middle of nowhere up some ruddy switchback till they’re huffing and puffing at the feet of an old military compound cordoned off by a giant chain-link fence. The only entrance is a gate, its handles crisscrossed by a lemniscate of rusted chains with a drooping padlock about the size of Cheezy’s face. Seems a little lax for military. But it’s out here in the boonies and abandoned, so maybe nobody gives a crap.
Pete approaches the padlock and slips out a key, a real ass metal key that makes a click sound as he twists it inside the lock. The padlock plops into the dirt and he rattles out the twisted chain that joins the padlock on the dirt in a rusted coil. Then Pete swings the gates open, and the gang is inside the grounds, headed to the main building.
Barfy’s already whipping the cam-drones with his control glove in sync with Lil’ Drizzle’s fleet as they creep into the compound. More intro footage. They’ll be live in a second. Until then, good to gather extra stock for the AI editor to pull from. Meanwhile, the upload-AI has already cobbled up a few proto-thumbnails that it’s passed to Cheezy for review, with various title suggestions:
(1)We went into an old military compound and found . . . WHAT? (ft. Lil’ Drizzle)
(2)A military compound in the middle of nowhere. What could go wrong? (ft. Lil’ Drizzle)
(3)Wait, we found WHAT inside this old compound? (ft. Lil’ Drizzle)
Cheezy taps the sub-dermal pads under his palm and selects option (3) and the second suggested thumbnail of him and the boys looking spooked along with Lil’ Drizzle. As he does, they enter the compound and start rolling over to live. Lil’ Drizzle is already staring at a cam-drone.
“Hey what up, Drizzles! Cheezy and Lil’ Drizzle coming at you live from in this creepy ass compound. Bro, I dunno about you, but this place is trippy. Am I right?”
“It’s creepy ass for sure,” Cheezy says.
And that’s no lie. The compound is dark and musty. Looks like an old airplane hangar. Only there’s no planes or hardware or any of that military crap. Just chipped concrete.
“Dude,” Barfy says. “Bet it was a robo-dock for sure, man. Look at those big ass couplings. That’s for a T-72 mech, no doubt. They must’ve had a serious arsenal out here.”
“In the middle of the freaking woods?” one of Lil’ Drizzle’s crew asks.
“For sure,” Lil’ Drizzle says. “They got all kinds of secret bases dotted out here in the mountains. Tested all sorts of rad shit. Ain’t that right, Pete?”
Pete, whose bionic eyes glow icy blue in the dim, nods his head. “Something like that. Here. This way.”
Pete leads them to an old door that creaks open like a submarine hatch and they file down the tight confines of a hall, passing doors aligned on either side like a hospital wing. The drones bump about them in the tight quarters, their red sensors blinking as they slash at the dark with lights till the crew comes to the last door at the end of the hall that Pete unlocks with another key and swings open.
What’s inside is too dark and too big for Cheezy to see. Cheezy points his flashlight out into the dark, but it just swallows the beam up, like he’s pointing it into space. Not until Pete flicks some switch do the high-watt arena lights flash on with a loud , illuminating in crystal white LED brilliance the maze below them.A maze.
A freaking maze.
“Holy shit,” Cheezy says.
The drones are up in his face now, getting more close-ups of him and all the boys while another does a flyby over the maze and the elevated terrace ringing the whole thing like a stadium, the one they’re standing on. The maze is huge. Goes on and on and on. Cheezy can barely make out the end of it. He wishes Meg was here to see this craziness instead of sulking back home.
“What the hell is this?” one of Lil’ Drizzle’s crew asks.
“Close combat urban testing maze,” Pete says, like he’s reciting from a textbook. “Mostly used to test special units. Been abandoned for ten years now.”
“Whoa,” says Cheezy as he leans over the railing and gazes down at the maze.
Already he can feel it in the dermal implants, the subscriber count ticking up, the views accelerating. The virality is like a high. Gives him a euphoria almost better than sex. In his retinal, he checks the view window and sees the video blowing up. And they haven’t even dipped into the maze yet.
Damn. So the little dude was right.
“Lil’ Drizzle,” Cheezy says. “This is straight dope.”
“Oh, man,” Lil’ Drizzle smiles. “You ain’t seen nothing yet. We gotta go down in it.”
Barfy scoops up a loose piece of concrete and chucks it down into the maze. It pings off something that looks metal, but not quite metal, lying slumped against one of the maze’s walls. Cheezy squints to see what it is, but Lil’ Drizzle’s waving to him to follow.
“Pete,” Cheezy says, looking back at the cent-man as they head toward the top of the descending ladder. “You coming or what, man?”
Pete just stares at him. “I’ll be right there.”
“Guy’s freaky, man,” Hamster, another of Cheezy’s crew, whispers to him as they make their way to the ladder.
“Tell me about it,” Cheezy says. “They must’ve minted all the personality out of him.”
And as Cheezy climbs down the ladder into the maze, he glances one last time at Pete.
Pete’s two cold eyes stare back.
The maze rules. They spend thirty minutes just dicking around, the walls towering over them, the corridors so wide you could drive two trucks down’em easy. Hamster, Poo-dog, and Barfy are bonding with Lil’ Drizzle’s crew, all of them having a blast, finding all kinds of cool shit.
“Whoa, dude, check this out,” Lil’ Drizzle shouts as he runs to pick up an old buzz-blade hilt. “Wonder if it still works.”
He flicks a button. The internal support rod periscopes out of the hilt with the buzz-string hanging taut like a fishing pole. Another button and the string vibrates until its buzzing so hot it glows red.
“Ah, sick,” Lil’ Drizzle says. “The force is with me, boys!”
One of the guys finds an old robo head lying about with a spaghetti tangle of wires and neural cords dangling from its neck. They spend a little time tossing it granny style while they all take turns swinging at it with the buzz-blade, the drones hovering over, gulping all the shenanigans in. Cheezy has a go and makes contact. The blade slices the head in two like a coconut. Everyone cheers. Cheezy smirks a little.
“Dude,” Cheezy says. “This place is nuts.”
Lil’ Drizzle winks. “Wait till you see what’s at the center, man. Pete told me it’s off the chain.”
Cheezy smiles. Whatever shreds of jealousy he had for the little dude, it’s gone now. The guy’s the real deal. He’s already thinking future co-labs, maybe do a whole series just exploring the compound. Makes him feel for the first time that he might actually make it to the number one spot.
It takes them almost an hour to find the center. By that point, they’ve stumbled upon all sorts of whack stuff: guns and swords and old robo carcasses and even something that looks like a solidified mound of melted slime. The center is a large opening. Like a colosseum. Most of the drones are already there, circling about. A giant manhole takes up the very middle. As they get close, it splits in half and irises open to reveal a dark hole. A few of the guys peer over the edge down into the dark.
“Sounds like something’s moving down there,” Barfy says as a thrum of machinery starts to pulse under their feet.
“No shit,” Poo-dog says.
“Dude,” Lil’ Drizzle says. “Bet it’s like an elevator or something.”
It is an elevator. Or, more accurately, a platform rising from the shaft’s bottom. And on that platform, curled up like a giant, is something Cheezy has never seen before. The platform shudders to a stop when it reaches the top. The drones are all over it, circling about the curled mountain of metal like flies.
“It’s like a mecha or something,” Barfy says.
Mecha or something is right. The things got to be at least twelve feet tall, and it’s not even standing, just curled into some kind of sleep mode, its spider-like limbs pulled tight below its belly. The whole carapace is bumpy with warty sensor pimples and quilled with fine hair receptors. And there’s all kinds of limbs tucked against it: claws and grippers and blades. The mecha’s practically a swiss-army knife of destruction. Cheezy’s meshed into enough war sims to imagine the kind of havoc that thing could rip across a field. Or in a maze like this.
Or in a maze like this.
Oh damn.
“Where’s Pete?” Cheezy says, suddenly realizing the cent-man isn’t with them anymore. Hasn’t been with them since they entered the maze.
“Dunno,” says one of Lil’ Drizzle’s crew.
“Ah, sick, dude,” Lil’ Drizzle says as he walks up to the curled mecha. “Now that’s some content.”
Lil’ Drizzle gives the mecha a good pat. Like he’s slapping the flank of a prized horse.
Then there’s a flash and a bang. And Lil’ Drizzle isn’t there anymore. There’s just a smoking column where Lil’ Drizzle was and a black, sizzling scorch mark in the concrete in the shape of a large asterisk.
It takes Cheezy a full three seconds to see the vapor-cannon swinging on its pivot. And then another second to notice the red tiara of photoreceptors glittering about the mecha as it raises itself on its crab legs.
“Oh my god,” Barfy says. “Oh my–”
Cheezy pushes Barfy out of the way and runs. Behind him all he hears are screams and the bzzz of some kind of vapor canon. From the corner of his eyes, he catches a mecha leg impale one of Lil’ Drizzle’s crew, skewering him, the guy’s legs and arms flopping as the crab mecha tries to shake his lifeless body off its leg like it stepped in some dog shit.
Cheezy disappears into the maze. He’s running like a mad man. A drone chases after him, zooming in and out of his face.
“Get out of my way,” he screams. “Get.”
But the drone keeps pace, hovering just in front of him.
Cheezy can barely feel it through the sweat and tears and pounding heart, but the hot tingle in his left pinky tells him his subscriber count is shooting through the roof. The live views are smashing records each second. There are comments scrolling in on the left retinal, cracking jokes about Lil’ Drizzle, wondering what kind of gel time he’s going to need to heal from this one.
Cheezy feels like vomiting. Somewhere distant a scream echoes from the maze.
The maze. He’s lost in a freaking maze. He glances up at the drone staring right into his face.
“Show me how to get out of here,” he coughs.
The drone doesn’t respond. And without Barfy, he can’t shift it into manual command.
Then he notices the live-stream feed in his left retinal. The one that, every once in a while, the view switches to an overhead shot of the maze. Too fast for him to study in his panic-stricken state. But maybe not too fast for Chat.
“Chat,” he says, staring into the drone’s fish-eye lens. “Some crazy shit going down with your boy Cheezy right now. Need your help, Chat. Need to get out of this maze. Get me out of this maze.”
And just like that, chat is going nuts.
Go left
Nah, go right, go right.
Back the way you came man!
Cheezy almost regrets asking, but he can distinguish the serious comments from those just trolling and follows their directions. Right, left, left, straight for a bit, then left again. On the way, he scoops up the buzz-blade hilt lying next to the robo head he sliced earlier, strangling the grips of the hilt tight in one hand as he stumbles to the edge of the maze. Finally, he arrives at the ladder, all breathless, sweat dripping off his nose.
“All right, Chat,” he says. “Anyone else made it?”
Just you man!
Dude, I don’t know how you planning to re-grow Poo-dog after that carnage, but damn. Best vid yet! Cheezy for life!
Cheezy looks up the ladder. Starts climbing, the buzz-blade hilt lodged in his pants. Suddenly he’s thinking about Meg. He’s thinking about that look of disgust she gave him when he sat in the RE-GROW© gel, and all he wants to do is hold her, tell her how sorry he is. He wants to tell her he’s a selfish prick, that he’s just trying to make content, and this time it got way out of control. He’s going to propose, that’s what he’s going to do. When he gets back, he’s going to buy Meg the biggest freaking diamond and then he’s going to shut the channel down for good. Well . . . maybe a vid for the wedding could be nice. And some of the honeymoon. And what if they have some lil Cheezies of his own? Would be sick to live-stream the birth.
He’s at the top of the ladder, the cam-drones now flitting around him. He notices the computer console station next to the handrails, the one that blinks TEST IN PROGRESS. And there’s Pete standing in front of it, staring at him with his cold blue eyes.
“Dude, what the fuck?” Cheezy yells.
Pete walks over to him. Stares at him for a moment. Then Pete roundhouse kicks him over the railing and back into the maze
Cheezy breaks his legs on the fall, both the old and the new one. Without the ketamine, the pain is excruciating. One of the drones zooms into his face. Another takes a close-up of the exposed bone sticking out of his legs. Up above he can see Pete staring down at him, craning over the railing
“It’s algorithmic,” Pete shouts. “That’s the problem. I’m just giving the algorithm what it wants. You understand.”
Then Cheezy sees the crab mecha trundling through an opening in the maze. It looms over him, its red photoreceptors glaring. It’s got an abattoir of blades and barrels trained on him, but the one it’s picked out is an old vibro-scimitar that looks a lot like the one the war-droid used on Cheezy’s leg in his last vid.
“It loves the live feed,” Pete says. “All those live comments. All that human data to analyze reacting to its kills. It does wonders for the algorithm. Absolute wonders. It’ll be the last test for a while. But the data we’ll pull will be worth it. I just thought you should know. Thought you deserved an explanation.”
Cheezy stares as the vibro-scimitar rises above him. He reaches for his own blade, but the hilts gone, probably lost in the fall. Chat’s going absolutely bananas. The subscriber count is shooting to the moon and back, its projected rate making Pete’s estimate look conservative. It’s set to be the number one vid of all time, easy. Cheezy can see the comments rolling in faster than he can read. The cam-drones are all buzzing around him, getting about every angle they can. Cheezy turns to look at the blade one more time.
“Make sure to smash that subscribe button,” he says.
Then he closes his eyes and waits to give the algorithm what it wants.
J. R. Dewitt is a writer who’s only claim to fame is that Buzz Aldrin once rode in his car. His work has previously appeared in Allegory, Planet Raconteur, Sci Phi Journal, and Daily Science Fiction. (jrobertdewitt.com).