Chapter 1:
First blood
THE OMNI GAMES
Michael woke up on a concrete floor he felt confused and he felt cold and tired it was not like the slow drift from sleep that he was used to.
He sat up. His head throbbed. His mouth tasted like iron and shit. The last thing he remembered was the parking garage beneath FC Barcelina training ground. A black van. Two men who had masks. And then nothing.
He touched his neck.And felt something,it was a metal collar.
The collar was smooth under his fingers.
He looked around.
He was in a holding room. Concrete floor, concrete walls, a single strip of light overhead. No windows. One door, sealed shut. And around him, in various states of waking, were forty other people. Men and women. Young and old. They all looked like they were from different races, by the look of them. All wearing the same collar.
None of them were talking. They were all doing exactly what Michael had done first feeling their own necks, looking at the ceiling, trying to understand the situation. A man in his fifties near the far wall was crying silently. A teenage girl with her knees pulled to her chest was staring at the door. A woman stocky and composed, was already on her feet, walking around the room with her arms crossed, studying the walls.
Michael stood up. His legs worked. He wasn't wearing his own clothes he was wearing a red tracksuit
A card was tucked into his pocket.
He pulled it out. White card with a black text that said.
You have been selected to participate in The Omni Games. Your collar is active. Elimination from any game will trigger detonation. There are no exceptions, no appeals, and no exits. Report to the corridor when the door opens. The rules of each game will be explained at the field. Have fun and good luck.
Michael read it twice. Then a third time, more slowly, looking for the thing the words were hiding as much as the thing they were saying.Detonation.
He put the card back in his pocket.
The woman who had been walking the room stopped beside him. Her collar had the same pulse his did. She was looking at the card in his pocket.
"You read it already," she said.
"Three times," Michael said.
"Anything useful?"
"No."
She nodded as though this confirmed something she had already suspected."It seemed everyone was given the same card with the same words written she said"."I am Sasha," she said. "Sasha Grimsburg. I play chess."
"Michael kunoshiro. I play soccer."
Something shifted in her expression not surprise exactly, more like a piece of information being filed away. "I thought you looked familiar."she said.
"Everyone says that."
"You are the one who doped in the semifinal of the UGL cup ," she said. "Three months ago. It was in the sports news."
Michael said nothing. He had refused. His club president a man named Fabrio Pedri had called him into his office two weeks before the match and explained, that certain arrangements had been made and that Michael's cooperation was needed.Michael refused, he was expected to lie in court about the club's scandals and take the fall
"I didn't dope," he said.
"No," said Sasha. "You didn't." She said it without judgment. "I did not dope and would never," she added. "Though in my case it was a world championship match."So why did you let your self get framed
Before Michael could answer, the door opened.
The corridor was white concrete, long and straight, lit by harsh lights .
He walked with the group. Forty people from his room, merging with streams from other doors until the corridor held what felt like hundreds of people, all moving in the same direction.
A girl came to walk beside him. She was young , tall and lean with legs of a runner and looked like someone who had already read the situation and didn't like the answer.
"You're Michael kunoshiro ," she said.
"People keep saying that."
"I've seen every match you played this season." She said. "I'm Ashley. Number D88." She touched her collar briefly. The number was engraved on a small plate on the front, Michael now noticed. His said D07."You're a footballer too?" he asked.
"Was. University team. I was meant to trial for the national squad next month.""I think the trial is now cancelled."
"Yeah," said Michael. "I think so."
They came to the end of the corridor. A set of double doors, heavy steel.
The doors opened.
It was a soccer pitch on the middle of it was a clean white text:CONTRAIAN GAME.A voice came from everywhere at once speaker arrays built into the rooms structure."Welcome," the voice said. It was calm. Female , enough to strip any identifying quality from it. "You are participants in the first game.The game is in association with soccer. Standard rules apply, with three modifications. First: the match will be played as a single elimination tournament across twenty simultaneous pitches within this structure. You will be divided into groups of approximately twenty one players. Second: each group will play a 30 minute match. The losing side of each match will be eliminated. Third: elimination means what it means here"You have sixty seconds to find your assigned group. Your collar plate carries your group number.It was chaotic.It was a scramble as five hundred people looked at their collar plates and tried to orient themselves. l Michael looked at his. D07,GROUP C.Ashley grabbed his arm before he could move. "Group C," she said. Her collar said D88. Same group. "Stay close to me," she said, "Or — I'll stay close to you.""Stay close to each other," Michael said.
Group C assembled on Pitch Three, one of twenty pitches that had been revealed when sections of the stadium floor lowered mechanically, creating separate playing areas within the larger structure. Twenty players. Michael looked at them .A large man to his left had the neck and shoulders of a wrestler. Two women near the goal talked quietly to each other in what sounded like Portuguese, both with the lean athletic build of runners. A boy stood alone near the halfway line, arms wrapped around himself, shaking so badly Michael could see it from fifteen metres away.All players were devided according to their plate numbers Left side: eleven players. Right side: eleven. Michael was on the left side.Ashley was on the right.She looked at him across the dividing line."thirty minutes," Michael said."Play well," she said.The whistle blew.Later, Michael would struggle to describe what happened in his body in that first second. He had played football his entire life since he was four years old kicking a half deflated ball against the wall of his family's house in Oklahoma, through the youth academies and the reserve squads and the first team debut and the cup finals. Football was the language his body spoke most fluently. And the moment the whistle sounded, his body spoke it.He moved. The pitch, the players around him, the space between them, the angle of the nearest opponent, the position of the ball as it was contested in the centre. His feet found the right distances automatically. His shoulders opened to receive. His head was up, always up, tracking everything at once the way only someone who had done it for twenty years could.The other players on his team were not footballers, most of them. They moved wrong looked at the ball instead of the space, stood flat-footed in positions that left gaps, didn't track runners. Michael understood within thirty seconds that most of his teammates were going to be useless to him tactically.He also understood that it didn't matter.This was not about winning elegantly. This was about winning.He found the ball. He kept it. When opponents pressed, he released it and moved, creating angles, pulling defenders out of position by the sheer habit of his movement, the kind of intelligent running that most people didn't even notice.Ten minutes in, he scored. A first time finish from twelve yards after he'd spun his marker with a dummy that had been in his muscle memory since he was sixteen. The ball hit the net . Michael stood at the centre of the pitch with his arm raised.And then he lowered it. Slowly. Because in the stand on the far side he could see the scoreboards updating.GROUP C SCORE: 1 — 0. TIME: 22:11.And below it, in red text he hadn't noticed before:COLLAR STATUS: ACTIVE.He looked at the other eleven people on the losing side. They were still playing. Still running. Still alive.For now.twenty one minutes into the match, a man named shindo Abarai, a gambler who had never played competitive football in his life, mistimed a challenge near his own penalty area, slipped on the grass, and brought down an opposing forward. Penalty.The forward stepped up. Converted it.1 — 1.Michael spent the next seven minutes running harder than he had run in years.Not for the scoreboard, not for the strange terrible thrill of it that he refused to examine for the ten people on his side whose collars would detonate if the score stayed level or turned against them. He wasn't sure whether draws counted as losses for both sides or just the team with fewer goals if it went to penalties, and he was not going to find out.He put his team 2-1 ahead in the twenty fifth minute with a free kick that curled around the wall and into the top corner. The goalkeeper got a hand to it but couldn't hold it.four minutes remained on the timer his side controlled possession, protected the lead, and Michael ran the game from midfield with and, he set up a third goal in the twenty nineth minut.The whistle blew.For one breath, Michael allowed himself to feel the relief. Just one breath.Then the screens updated.GROUP C RESULT: SIDE A 3 — 1 SIDE B. GAME COMPLETE.COLLAR DETONATION SEQUENCE: SIDE B. INITIATING.Michael turned.Eleven players on the losing side had simply frozen where they stood to the far end of the pitch. They stood in a loose group near the goal. Some were holding each other. Some were on their knees. The boy who had been shaking at the start of the match was standing very straight and very still with his eyes closed and his hands at his sides.Ashley was just staring at Michael in tears.The collars went from detonation to detonation each second heads exploded making an endless red glow of blood.Michael looked away.Michael stood on the pitch with his hands at his sides. Around him his teammates were in various states of shock , some collapsed, some vomiting, some simply motionless.Ashley was gone. All eleven of them were gone. The pitch where they had stood was empty and he would not look at the ground.The announcer returned ."Game One is complete. Survivors can now make their way back to the rest facility. Game Two will be announced in eighteen hours. Michael stood in the centre of the pitch.Everyone was murmuring now, a low and constant sound. He looked up at the nearest screen. It had updated again. GAME ONE COMPLETE. PLAYERS REMAINING: 280 He looked at his collar. Sasha found him. She was still alive. She said nothing. She stood beside him and looked at the scoreboard with him."Two hundred and eighty," Michael said."Yes," said Sasha."What was the next game?" he asked. He didn't know why he asked. He didn't know why it mattered. "I don't know," she said. "But I'll play it."Michael nodded slowly.He looked at the pitch one more time. The grass was red covered in blood.But it still looked like a football pitch.He put his hands in his pockets and and made his way to the resting fercility.In the holding room Michael sat on the edge of his cot and looked at the remaining time before the next game would start until the light went out.He did not sleep.10.hours before the next game
He sat up. His head throbbed. His mouth tasted like iron and shit. The last thing he remembered was the parking garage beneath FC Barcelina training ground. A black van. Two men who had masks. And then nothing.
He touched his neck.And felt something,it was a metal collar.
The collar was smooth under his fingers.
He looked around.
He was in a holding room. Concrete floor, concrete walls, a single strip of light overhead. No windows. One door, sealed shut. And around him, in various states of waking, were forty other people. Men and women. Young and old. They all looked like they were from different races, by the look of them. All wearing the same collar.
None of them were talking. They were all doing exactly what Michael had done first feeling their own necks, looking at the ceiling, trying to understand the situation. A man in his fifties near the far wall was crying silently. A teenage girl with her knees pulled to her chest was staring at the door. A woman stocky and composed, was already on her feet, walking around the room with her arms crossed, studying the walls.
Michael stood up. His legs worked. He wasn't wearing his own clothes he was wearing a red tracksuit
A card was tucked into his pocket.
He pulled it out. White card with a black text that said.
You have been selected to participate in The Omni Games. Your collar is active. Elimination from any game will trigger detonation. There are no exceptions, no appeals, and no exits. Report to the corridor when the door opens. The rules of each game will be explained at the field. Have fun and good luck.
Michael read it twice. Then a third time, more slowly, looking for the thing the words were hiding as much as the thing they were saying.Detonation.
He put the card back in his pocket.
The woman who had been walking the room stopped beside him. Her collar had the same pulse his did. She was looking at the card in his pocket.
"You read it already," she said.
"Three times," Michael said.
"Anything useful?"
"No."
She nodded as though this confirmed something she had already suspected."It seemed everyone was given the same card with the same words written she said"."I am Sasha," she said. "Sasha Grimsburg. I play chess."
"Michael kunoshiro. I play soccer."
Something shifted in her expression not surprise exactly, more like a piece of information being filed away. "I thought you looked familiar."she said.
"Everyone says that."
"You are the one who doped in the semifinal of the UGL cup ," she said. "Three months ago. It was in the sports news."
Michael said nothing. He had refused. His club president a man named Fabrio Pedri had called him into his office two weeks before the match and explained, that certain arrangements had been made and that Michael's cooperation was needed.Michael refused, he was expected to lie in court about the club's scandals and take the fall
"I didn't dope," he said.
"No," said Sasha. "You didn't." She said it without judgment. "I did not dope and would never," she added. "Though in my case it was a world championship match."So why did you let your self get framed
Before Michael could answer, the door opened.
The corridor was white concrete, long and straight, lit by harsh lights .
He walked with the group. Forty people from his room, merging with streams from other doors until the corridor held what felt like hundreds of people, all moving in the same direction.
A girl came to walk beside him. She was young , tall and lean with legs of a runner and looked like someone who had already read the situation and didn't like the answer.
"You're Michael kunoshiro ," she said.
"People keep saying that."
"I've seen every match you played this season." She said. "I'm Ashley. Number D88." She touched her collar briefly. The number was engraved on a small plate on the front, Michael now noticed. His said D07."You're a footballer too?" he asked.
"Was. University team. I was meant to trial for the national squad next month.""I think the trial is now cancelled."
"Yeah," said Michael. "I think so."
They came to the end of the corridor. A set of double doors, heavy steel.
The doors opened.
It was a soccer pitch on the middle of it was a clean white text:CONTRAIAN GAME.A voice came from everywhere at once speaker arrays built into the rooms structure."Welcome," the voice said. It was calm. Female , enough to strip any identifying quality from it. "You are participants in the first game.The game is in association with soccer. Standard rules apply, with three modifications. First: the match will be played as a single elimination tournament across twenty simultaneous pitches within this structure. You will be divided into groups of approximately twenty one players. Second: each group will play a 30 minute match. The losing side of each match will be eliminated. Third: elimination means what it means here"You have sixty seconds to find your assigned group. Your collar plate carries your group number.It was chaotic.It was a scramble as five hundred people looked at their collar plates and tried to orient themselves. l Michael looked at his. D07,GROUP C.Ashley grabbed his arm before he could move. "Group C," she said. Her collar said D88. Same group. "Stay close to me," she said, "Or — I'll stay close to you.""Stay close to each other," Michael said.
Group C assembled on Pitch Three, one of twenty pitches that had been revealed when sections of the stadium floor lowered mechanically, creating separate playing areas within the larger structure. Twenty players. Michael looked at them .A large man to his left had the neck and shoulders of a wrestler. Two women near the goal talked quietly to each other in what sounded like Portuguese, both with the lean athletic build of runners. A boy stood alone near the halfway line, arms wrapped around himself, shaking so badly Michael could see it from fifteen metres away.All players were devided according to their plate numbers Left side: eleven players. Right side: eleven. Michael was on the left side.Ashley was on the right.She looked at him across the dividing line."thirty minutes," Michael said."Play well," she said.The whistle blew.Later, Michael would struggle to describe what happened in his body in that first second. He had played football his entire life since he was four years old kicking a half deflated ball against the wall of his family's house in Oklahoma, through the youth academies and the reserve squads and the first team debut and the cup finals. Football was the language his body spoke most fluently. And the moment the whistle sounded, his body spoke it.He moved. The pitch, the players around him, the space between them, the angle of the nearest opponent, the position of the ball as it was contested in the centre. His feet found the right distances automatically. His shoulders opened to receive. His head was up, always up, tracking everything at once the way only someone who had done it for twenty years could.The other players on his team were not footballers, most of them. They moved wrong looked at the ball instead of the space, stood flat-footed in positions that left gaps, didn't track runners. Michael understood within thirty seconds that most of his teammates were going to be useless to him tactically.He also understood that it didn't matter.This was not about winning elegantly. This was about winning.He found the ball. He kept it. When opponents pressed, he released it and moved, creating angles, pulling defenders out of position by the sheer habit of his movement, the kind of intelligent running that most people didn't even notice.Ten minutes in, he scored. A first time finish from twelve yards after he'd spun his marker with a dummy that had been in his muscle memory since he was sixteen. The ball hit the net . Michael stood at the centre of the pitch with his arm raised.And then he lowered it. Slowly. Because in the stand on the far side he could see the scoreboards updating.GROUP C SCORE: 1 — 0. TIME: 22:11.And below it, in red text he hadn't noticed before:COLLAR STATUS: ACTIVE.He looked at the other eleven people on the losing side. They were still playing. Still running. Still alive.For now.twenty one minutes into the match, a man named shindo Abarai, a gambler who had never played competitive football in his life, mistimed a challenge near his own penalty area, slipped on the grass, and brought down an opposing forward. Penalty.The forward stepped up. Converted it.1 — 1.Michael spent the next seven minutes running harder than he had run in years.Not for the scoreboard, not for the strange terrible thrill of it that he refused to examine for the ten people on his side whose collars would detonate if the score stayed level or turned against them. He wasn't sure whether draws counted as losses for both sides or just the team with fewer goals if it went to penalties, and he was not going to find out.He put his team 2-1 ahead in the twenty fifth minute with a free kick that curled around the wall and into the top corner. The goalkeeper got a hand to it but couldn't hold it.four minutes remained on the timer his side controlled possession, protected the lead, and Michael ran the game from midfield with and, he set up a third goal in the twenty nineth minut.The whistle blew.For one breath, Michael allowed himself to feel the relief. Just one breath.Then the screens updated.GROUP C RESULT: SIDE A 3 — 1 SIDE B. GAME COMPLETE.COLLAR DETONATION SEQUENCE: SIDE B. INITIATING.Michael turned.Eleven players on the losing side had simply frozen where they stood to the far end of the pitch. They stood in a loose group near the goal. Some were holding each other. Some were on their knees. The boy who had been shaking at the start of the match was standing very straight and very still with his eyes closed and his hands at his sides.Ashley was just staring at Michael in tears.The collars went from detonation to detonation each second heads exploded making an endless red glow of blood.Michael looked away.Michael stood on the pitch with his hands at his sides. Around him his teammates were in various states of shock , some collapsed, some vomiting, some simply motionless.Ashley was gone. All eleven of them were gone. The pitch where they had stood was empty and he would not look at the ground.The announcer returned ."Game One is complete. Survivors can now make their way back to the rest facility. Game Two will be announced in eighteen hours. Michael stood in the centre of the pitch.Everyone was murmuring now, a low and constant sound. He looked up at the nearest screen. It had updated again. GAME ONE COMPLETE. PLAYERS REMAINING: 280 He looked at his collar. Sasha found him. She was still alive. She said nothing. She stood beside him and looked at the scoreboard with him."Two hundred and eighty," Michael said."Yes," said Sasha."What was the next game?" he asked. He didn't know why he asked. He didn't know why it mattered. "I don't know," she said. "But I'll play it."Michael nodded slowly.He looked at the pitch one more time. The grass was red covered in blood.But it still looked like a football pitch.He put his hands in his pockets and and made his way to the resting fercility.In the holding room Michael sat on the edge of his cot and looked at the remaining time before the next game would start until the light went out.He did not sleep.10.hours before the next game
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