Obsession: Part #2

(Read part #1 here!)

Strangely enough, the consequences for his meltdown were not as dire as he had feared. He was banned for a month by the Player Council, but it was soon forgotten. Perhaps if it had been Girona that had reacted that way, it would have been more of a scandal, but it was roguish, temperamental, handsome Scolo. Tennis needed personalities, right?

Even the journalist who had asked the question was not immune to his wiles. He remembered her face distintinctly. Shock, initially, at the unexpected violence, but then there was glee. Yes, glee. He distinctly recalled the hint of a smile breaking out at the corner of her lips, out of place in the confusion and anger and fear on the frozen mask of her face. Scolo knew that most journalists craved the chance to truly eviscerate someone, to impale someone with acid barbs and no fear of rebuke. This was her chance, and not only could she do it without worrying about payback, but this would probably even shoot her into tennis journalism’s stratosphere. 

So, Scolo did what Scolo did best and pre-empted her by offering to do an exclusive scoop. When she agreed, and when they met and he saw the cold, tight outlines of her face, her folded arms and distant expression, he knew he would have to turn up the charm to change the narrative. But this was just another game he knew he could win. The journalist was tough, but she was no Girona. Scolo mixed genuine humility and contrition, with flashes of humour and rakish charm. When his eyes weren’t downcast with shame, they stared directly into her eyes as if in naked confession, until he watched the journalist’s defences melt away. A couple of weeks later, there was an article in Tennis Week: ‘I forgive you’, and a lengthy defence of Scolo’s behaviour, arguing that heartfelt attempts to better oneself must be appreciated, not mocked.

His tennis life fell into a familiar routine that somehow felt less satisfying than it used to. Forehand drills, wins over lesser opponents, trophies, backhand drills, everything seemed to meld into a single monochrome image. The only thing that sharpened his focus and infused his life with colour was the thought that he was the only one who knew about Girona’s cheating, and he would be the one to bring him down. 

And yet, he managed to keep his obsession with Girona in check, or so he thought until something happened that would reignite the flame. The day before it happened, Scolo was talking to Coach about Girona’s chances against Patel. 

“Styles make fights, “ Coach said. “And Patel’s style is hard for Girona. Which is why he has a two match winning streak against him.”

Scolo did not even look up as he said, “This time though, Girona is going to win in straight sets. Bet on it?” 

The next day, as he warmed up in the locker room for his own match, he saw Girona for the first time since the meltdown. Before he could even make sense of his own emotions, Girona had smiled and waved at him politely. Scolo fumed. It was like he had never even been called a cheater. How could someone be this equanimous? Perhaps it was the drugs, it had to be. Girona probably felt eyes on him, because he paused in the middle of rummaging through his kit bag to nod at him.

Scolo, perhaps to distract himself from his black mood, looked at Girona with fresh eyes. He was tallish, but below average for a tennis player. He had good posture, but it wasn’t impeccable. There was the hint of a slouch, imperceptible for anyone but Girona who had an eye for this kind of thing. A thick head of hair was conservatively parted to one side, but liberally gelled to survive the rigours of a tennis match. He was handsome in a conventional, athletic way - with lean, angular, well defined features, but Scolo felt that there was an openness, an amiability to his face that made him less attractive than a surlier aspect would.

Then Scolo did something unusual: he finished his warm up and sat down in the lounge to watch Girona’s match. Was this the action on which his destiny hinged? Perhaps it is natural for human beings to seek, especially in the wake of an inexplicable catastrophe, a sharply defined moment in time that, even if not quite an explanation, at least separates the before from the after. The truth is rarely that simple. Anyway, as Scolo watched Girona quickly turn the tide against Patel, winning four games in a row to take the first set, his mind drifted away, jumping from thought to thought, as he distractedly scrolled through his social media feed.

In an instant, he was alert, because he noticed soft light spilling from a nearby doorway. It was Girona’s private locker room, and he had forgotten to lock it behind him. Almost before he could think, he was up on his feet and inside the room. Rifling through open bags, and unlocked cabinets, he looked for anything that could prove that Girona was cheating. Working himself into a mad frenzy, he was halfway through a particularly large drawer, when it occurred to him that there might be cameras. It was too late to worry about that now. The most he could do was rearrange everything so that they would have no reason to look at the camera footage. He continued searching, methodically replacing everything he moved, not pausing to think about what he was really looking for, afraid that his nerve wouldn’t hold.

Suddenly, he could hear footsteps outside the room, and he had only a second to put away the bag he had open, before Girona swept in, flushed, breathing heavily, and happy. 

“I knew I could.. “ He paused, confronted with an unexpected sight. “Scolo..?”

“May I help you?” Scolo scanned his face for hostility, or suspicion, but he couldn’t see anything. What could he possibly say? It was hopeless.

“I… dropped a ball I was warming up with and it… rolled into.. er.. your locker room.”

“Did you find it then?” Girona asked, without the slightest trace of sarcasm. Scolo nodded and shuffled out of the room, wondering if his excuse was better than he realized, when he saw Girona’s coach standing beside the doorway. Naked hostility was plain to see on his face. He knew Scolo had been up to no good, and his lips moved as if he was about to say something, but he held his tongue. Girona had moved on, there was no point making a scene.

Back in the safety of his locker room, Scolo let out the breath he had been holding for a long time, and unclenched his fists. He probed his mind for fear, or second thoughts, but there was only a burning determination. He had not felt this alive in a long time. 

Scolo began to be polite to Girona. He struck up conversations every time they passed each other, and Girona started to open up to him more and more. No one else but Girona would even entertain the idea of considering a professional rival a friend, but he laughed again at his naivete. (So the drugs didn’t make him immune to his charm.) Even when they played, and Scolo inevitably lost, he managed to do the hardest thing: smile gracefully and congratulate his opponent. 

There were dinners and parties. At one dinner, Scolo was with Cara and Girona with his girlfriend, whose name he couldn’t remember. As Girona narrated one anecdote after another, he could see Cara begin to warm to him. After all, everything she knew about Girona was through Scolo’s eyes. The fake amiability, the drugs, the cheating, the drugs, the smarmy oily falseness that she expected just was not there. All she saw was the most successful tennis player in the world sitting in front of her, without a trace of pride, treating her like an absolute equal, narrating embarrassing stories from his childhood. Scolo stayed silent for a long time, as he could feel Cara’s eyes on him. Perhaps she didn’t believe him anymore. 

Scolo stopped taking Cara along to parties. He told himself that it was because he was only using the parties as an excuse to find out Girona’s secret. But why did he not tell Cara what he was doing? He saw the unasked question in Cara’s eyes all the time. The truth was on the tip of his tongue, but he could not bring himself to say it out loud. 

“I’m sorry, Cara,” he muttered like a chant in his mind as he hovered from one glittery person to another at one such party, making his way to Girona’s bedroom. This was the first time he was at a party at Girona’s place, and he was not going to let an opportunity like this pass. He spotted a few kit bags by the window, and started to make his way to them, when he heard a voice call out to him.

“Scolo, lost again, looking for the bathroom?” It was Girona. Resisting the urge to turn sharply, he looked back to see a friendly smile. 

“Yes, yes, of course! How silly of me, must be all the wine I have been drinking.”

Remarkably, every time he snuck into Girona’s rooms and found nothing, his resolve only strengthened. As everything else in his life began to fall apart, this mission - and he had begun to see it as one - clarified into an almost holy one. 

His form suffered. It wasn’t just Girona he began to lose to. At this peak, he had a presence that repelled conversation as he strutted through the locker rooms. He spoke to no player, and no player spoke to him. That fort he had built around himself began to crumble, as whispers of veiled concern impinged on his conscious mind. They thought he was crazy? He would show them they were all wrong - WRONG - when he found incontrovertible proof of Girona’s shame, and they would bow down in front of him. He redoubled his efforts. Sometimes, he walked into Girona’s private locker room without invitation, and while his back was turned, pocket shower gels, vitamin pill boxes and the like. 

One day, he received an email from Coach that he was quitting. It was as amicable as it possibly could be. They had a great run, but he had taught him all he could, and now he needed something different. A brief white hot flame of fury rippled through his body, but then it was gone. All this meant that he would have to finish his mission sooner. He began to nudge Girona into hosting parties at his place more frequently. 

But Coach leaving was nothing compared to what happened next. When he got home after another tame training session, Cara was waiting to speak to him. She firmly rejected his protestations of tiredness, and said it would only take a minute.

“Are you cheating on me?” She asked without evident anger, gently, too gently, as if dealing with a mentally ill person.

All his frustrations, all the pent up anger, all his failures converged for a moment into an act of madness. Scolo screamed at Cara, and before she could react, shoved her to the floor.

“SHUT UP!”

In an instant, his anger was extinguished, and there was shame and guilt. Painful, stomach churning amounts of them that he knew would take a long time to dissolve. That was before he saw that Cara was bleeding from a cut on her temple where she had struck her head. 

Cara left the next day.

There was a brief moment of introspection. His behaviour had been suspicious: not talking to Cara anymore, going to all those parties, returning late at night, and not saying a word about what he did. It clearly must have looked like he was reverting to Playboy type. All he had to say was anything at all - the truth - and Cara would have supported him. But he hadn’t. And now he had another party to go to. 

There was one cabinet he hadn’t searched yet. That had to be it. 

At the party, out of the smoky darkness, a gold bedaubed vision from heaven appeared in front of him. For the first time in a long time, he really took in the sight of another woman. He admired her supple, athletic form. The dress hugged parts of her body, revealing and hiding at the same time, hinting at unexpected curves. She was speaking to him. He responded, she laughed a practised laugh, and in a heartbeat they were kissing. 

Girona was there. He was saying something.

“... you want to do this? Are you sure you want to do this, Scolo?” Concern filled his face.

Scolo didn’t say a word. He pushed away the woman sitting in his lap, picked up the lamp by the side of the sofa, and swung hard, as hard as he could at Girona. The woman was screaming, he was screaming, the nature of the noise all around them changed. But he missed. Girona, agile as a cat, skipped out of the way, shock and betrayal on his face.

And that was it. Scolo’s long and brilliant career was over that instant. After a lengthy ban, he returned to playing tennis again, but he barely won a match. Someone pressed charges, but he lawyered up and got away without jail time. Cara did not report his attack, but he never heard from her again. Occasionally, he would see her perfect face on advertising hoardings, and he would smile for her.

__________________________________________

He was nervous, but not for the reason he expected. There was no doubt in his mind that Girona would have forgiven him for the way their friendship ended, none at all. Instead, he wondered what he would think when he saw the broken husk of a man Scolo had become. He tried to puff out his chest, and walk straighter, but that messed up his gait, and he looked clumsy. Sighing, he untied and tied his shoelaces one last time, and walked into the locker room.

Girona was practically unchanged. Of course he must have been, given that he had not stopped playing, but the sight still took his breath away. The tennis player is the perfect athlete, and the athlete is the human being pushed to physical perfection. There were more lines on his face, and he wasn’t as lean anymore, but the contrast to his own withered form was as clear as night and day. Intense nostalgia flooded through him and roared in his ears like thunder. He could see concern briefly flit across Girona’s face, but it was wiped away, and he smiled and said something, but Scolo could not hear a thing. 

A hand on his shoulder snapped him out of his reverie. 

“Before we play, “ said Girona, “I want you to have something.” Then he pressed something into the palm of Scolo’s hand. It was a bright, blue pill.

“What is it?” Scolo asked robotically. There was a strange expression on Girona’s face.

“It is an implant that resets your memories. I have used it all of my career to forget the sensation of losing.”

Scolo did not say anything in response.

“My problem was always mental. If only I could forget the sensation of losing, I would be the perfect player, I thought. And then I discovered this. It works by… “

“... you were right all along Scolo. I’m sorry, I really am but I suppose it doesn’t matter now anymore.”

“Then why tell me now?” Scolo asked dully.

“Because I want you to find peace.”

And Scolo knew right away that he did find peace. It was like a physical weight was lifted off his shoulders. He knew, and probably Girona did too, that he would not report this to the authorities. All he wanted was to be right, and he was. It had cost him everything, but he was right, and he knew he could finally move on with the pieces of his life. He smiled at Girona, genuinely for the first time in his life, and walked out alongside him to play the last tennis match of his life.

Seeing Red

Nothing ever really changed on Cerise. 

The sky was a fiery orange in every direction. A uniform red sea of rock stretched from horizon to horizon, almost uninterrupted, except for free standing stone hills that erupted from the surface on occasion. These hills, sometimes hundreds of metres tall, did not look like anything produced by blind geological forces. Thousands of granite steps folded and locked together to form one intricately patterned hill. Anywhere but on Cerise, one would think them abstract monuments to a forgotten race of giants. But here, their geometric precision was natural, and did nothing to detract from the timeless permanence of the world around them.

Nothing quite changed on Cerise, except for the monsters.

The exterminator was looking at one right now. Lying flat on his stomach, he peered through the telescopic lens briefly again. Yes, it was definitely a yuni. It was roughly the size of a horse, but that was where the similarities ended. Every inch rippled with powerful muscle, where it was not covered by a near impenetrable scaly armour. Between fissures in the plates, two metre spikes would be propelled like bullets, if the creature felt threatened. And this was all what he could see of the back of the beast, because if he was looking at the front of it, he would be dead in a second.

The digital watch on his wrist beeped numbers at him. (The exterminator insisted on calling it a watch even though checking the time was what he did the least with it.) Eighty two metres it said. The yuni’s mace like tail swished once, as it scanned for prey. 

He could take it out with a bazooka from this distance if he wished, but then he wouldn’t have it to protect himself from something bigger and deadlier than yunis. And yes, such things existed. He continued to crawl forward.

Sixty metres. Beep. 

Fifty metres. Beep. 

Forty four metres. The watch beeped something different, a lower frequency tone - an alarm. He was too close.

“Alright, alright,” he told himself. 

He had heard of exterminators being ripped to shreds before they could aim an already loaded gun and let a shot off. The statue like creature in front of him was deceptively quick. Taking a deep breath, he fell into an almost deathly stillness. His forefinger tensed, ready to pull the trigger.

And then suddenly, he felt, rather than saw a movement off to his right. The exterminator had no time to see what it was because, in a blur of motion, the yuni had swivelled around and was looking at him directly. He resisted the urge to shield his head from the inevitable barrage of spikes. It would make no difference. Instead, he ignored the whizzing and clanging of the flying missiles all around him, and slapped a button on his skin suit to switch to the bazooka. 

The yuni charged. 

Where one would have expected a face, there was something, but it was hard to call it a face. A lipless, gaping hole where the mouth should have been, was full to bursting with teeth. Where the nose should have been, there sprouted an immense horn. If there were eyes, they weren’t like any he had seen on Earth. But its face was not the most terrifying thing about the yuni.

It was its speed. The yuni had a pair of wings, because of course it did, but it could not really fly. Instead, it combined the lift generated by the wings with the power from its four strong limbs to accelerate to incredible velocities. 

Clawed hooves screeched, and wings like blades swished, louder and louder, until his whole world was nothing but sound. The bazooka clicked into existence by his side. He had no time to aim, but hopefully he didn’t need to. He punched the side of the cylindrical surface of the weapon, and there was an explosion of fire. And then, there was silence.

The exterminator became aware of the thundering of his own heart. It felt like he was about to burst. He watched the yuni disintegrate into chunks of flesh that sprayed in all directions. The watch beeped an upbeat tone. One down, three to go. There was blood, a lot of it, but now, only a second later, he could not see it at all. He knew it was there, but it was so well hidden away in the red gravel and the red rocks, that it might have never existed. The display on his watch told him that he had no bazookas left, and advised that he request an extraction as soon as possible. 

He was safe for now, but he stood there for a long time and stared at the fist sized chunks of flesh that lay all around, as the sky howled at him. There was no wind on Cerise, there would be no drifts of sand that would pile up and bury them away. But nonetheless, when his heart no longer hammered a painful beat in his chest, a long time later, he could no longer see anything but rocks.

___________________________________________________

The exterminator had done this many times before, but something was different this time around. He could feel the beginning of a strange new emotion gnawing at the edge of his consciousness. 

“It’s just like a hangover,” he told himself aloud. You don’t stop going to parties just because you have hangovers the next day. That was all it was - the aftereffects of a nightmarish experience. The yuni would have cut him open in an instant. It was do or die, right? Besides, he was doing this for the greater good, because the future of humanity was at stake. Even in the comfort of his own mind, the grand pronouncement rang hollow. 

He was nearly back at the shelter when he recalled that something had spooked the yuni. It had to have been a lizzo that had unwittingly stumbled into his hunt. Just as the thought occurred to him, he spotted one foraging in the distance. He made a snap decision; he would destroy the nest. While lizzos were usually no more than inconvenient pests, they were hive animals and they had been known to take down exterminators in packs. 

“Better safe than sorry, “ he mumbled.

Unscrewing a tiny pouch attached to his utility belt, he picked up a marble sized something and tossed it in the direction of the lizzo. The creature paused to watch it arc towards the ground, and then continued to forage like nothing had happened. Momentarily, his watch beeped that the lizzo had swallowed the bait. 

He didn’t really need to follow the lizzo, because the nugget that it had swallowed was a smart explosive that would go off once it detected that the lizzo was back in its nest, but the experience with the yuni must have dulled his senses. Scrambling up smooth granite steps, he climbed the hill higher and higher, until his legs began to wobble at the thought of a fatal fall. Presently, a cave opened into the heart of the hill. 

Chittering surrounded him all around as lizzos of all sizes snoozed in warm recesses. A part of his brain half heartedly noted that he was in grave danger. But he only had a moment to observe that the lizzo he had followed dropped its collection of rocks on the cave floor, and that other lizzos - identical in every way, except they were much much smaller, no bigger than chameleons - were crawling towards the stash, when the cave lit up in a flash of light. The exterminator turned and left before the bomb went off. The howling sky masked the unearthly screeching from the cave. Nearly.

___________________________________________________

He was back at the shelter. It was a spartan room, and there was barely any space apart from a bed, a bathroom, a small fridge, and a workstation. The yellow and black logo of Terraforming Corp was slapped on everything from the computer wallpaper to the faceplate of his skin suit. Considering they were the ones arranging his trips to Cerise, it wasn’t that odd. A caption accompanied the logo: “Planet of Monsters”.

The exterminator was still a wealthy man, by any measure. He had made his money by being one of the first to start a grey market interplanetary shuttle service, and he had made a lot of it. One trip to Cerise was a dream for your average Earth billionaire; this was his sixth. He had made a lot of money, but most of it was gone. Suppressed rage simmered under the surface. He sipped a beer as he contemplated his situation.

If he culled two more yunis, Terraforming Corp would reimburse his travel fare. The monstrous face of a yuni appeared unbidden in his mind’s eye, and he shivered. The adrenaline of the hunt seemed like a distant memory. He could try and tag a dino instead, but he put that thought out of his head. He had never heard of anyone even seeing one, let alone tagging one, so that was a pipedream. While a part of his brain coldly worked through the numbers, another part wondered how he had ended up in a situation like this. He had so much money! He had thought he would keep coming to Cerise forever. He had even entertained a vague notion that when the terraforming project was complete, and the first human settlement had sprung up, he would stay and volunteer as a glorified security guard. But that was before today; that was before he had almost died trying to conserve ammo. Was it the sense that he was moments from death that bothered him though, or was it.. was it that a friend’s betrayal had brought him to that edge?

______________________________________

It was a new day, but the term was arbitrary. Cerise always had the same amount of light, a pleasant cloudy tropical illumination that never varied. The sky continued to howl its perpetual lament. He had heard that massive planet wise storms raged in the upper atmosphere hundreds of kilometres from the surface, and the only sign of all that violence was the howling that seemed to come from all directions at once. 

The exterminator checked his watch. He never booked the same map each time, so he could not go off on memory. Green lines lit up indicating the sectors he had already covered. A tiny ticker on the right blinked that he had 42 hours until extraction. He turned left towards an unlit sector.

The rhythmic clomping of his boots on the gravel lulled him into a stupor. Despite his best efforts, his thoughts drifted in a now familiar direction. He chuckled at the irony that the only business partner he had ever truly trusted, even gone as far as calling a friend, the only one he had rescued from crippling debt, the only one he had cared about, had been the one to betray him. He had stolen all of his business, and most of his wealth away from him. Perhaps it was a fitting lesson. In his line of work, the murky semi-legal world of human transport, there were no true friendships, only alliances of convenience. 

“Every good deed is its own punishment.” He chuckled at his own wit.

And yet, he knew deep down that he did not truly believe that. In fact, he had only got into this business as a way of helping a friend who had found herself on the wrong side of the law. 

“What now?” He frowned at the watch. All it ever did was beep and boop, but the exterminator felt like it understood him, and he understood it. Now, it was telling him that he was very close to the edge of the map, and that he had to turn away. He sighed, but complied. Another sector done, and no yunis spotted. How many more trips to Cerise could he afford?

Something glinted in the distance, and nothing should ever glint on this planet. The exterminator instantly fell to his stomach and clicked a button on his skinsuit for his rifle. Scanning back and forth with the zoom lens, he quickly spotted the source. There were only two ways he could ever spot another human being on Cerise, and both were so unlikely that he never planned for it. But it was undeniably a human being that shambled slowly into the crosshairs. It was a pirate.

Annoyance flashed across the exterminator’s face. He had heard about pirates who had somehow missed extraction and been stuck on Cerise for longer than they intended. They survived by stealing from other exterminators. If the pirate spotted him, he would kill or maim him for sure. Yes, he could not see what kind of weapons he was carrying, even through his zoom lens, but.. 

He watched the pirate shuffle and stumble aimlessly. His finger hovered over the trigger. It would be so easy. Pirates were no longer tracked by Terraforming Corp and he was perfectly entitled to kill anything that moved in his map. Besides, if the pirate hung around in his sector, he might mess up his hunts. And he might have weapons and ammo he could use. He snorted and pressed the button to launch a flare instead. The pirate flinched at the light and sound and ran. The exterminator watched him through the lens until he was sure he had crossed over into a different map, and disappeared behind a rock hill.

“Just perfect.” He shouted at his rifle, as if it was the rifle’s fault he didn’t shoot. When it didn’t answer back, he smacked it with his palm and it collapsed back into his skinsuit. All his previous trips had passed without the slightest hitch - there was not even a stray lizzo attack - but this one, the one that he needed most to be issue free, the one after the betrayal that had left him with next to nothing, was just one disaster after another.  

“Ah well, it can’t get any worse, can it?” The sky continued to keen, and he took it for assent. But he was wrong. It would get worse. 

It was the last sector in the map, and he was almost done with it. There was nothing there, no yunis, just a solitary granite stepped hill. He stopped to press a button to confirm extraction. Four hours, the watch beeped back. He was only a few hundred metres away from the shelter, when he spotted a lizzo dashing away in a mad sprint. But the strange thing was, it was not running towards the hill, where presumably its nest must be. It was running away from it. That was when he saw the hill move. 

The world shook. Rumbling that jarred him to the bone threatened to knock him off his feet, but somehow he managed to stay upright as he sprinted towards the shelter. The exterminator swore to himself that if he survived this, he would never again come to Cerise. He was done. He was done. With each planet shattering step, the rumbling got louder, and the dino closer. With each planet shattering step, everything in his eyeline danced a mad dance, rocks rose in the air, stayed suspended for too long, before they fell to the ground. And then they jumped again, higher this time. Distant hills throbbed in sync with the inexorable drumbeat.

And then he was inside the shelter. He curled into a foetal ball until the rumbling and shaking went away, after what felt like hours. A flashing light on his work station told him that there was still three hours until extraction. Calmer now, his brain observed professionally that he had just spotted a dino. All he had to do was report the coordinates, and his trip costs would be waived away.

“I know. I know.” He told his trembling fingers. Instead of doing anything, he opened the hatch to the surface, and sat on his haunches. His watch blinked red warnings, but he ignored it. A lizzo scuttled into view. The exterminator pulled out his pistol, the smallest in his weapons cache, and pointed it at the creature. The lizzo froze.

“So you know what this does, eh?”

A strange feeling gnawed at the edges. He put the pistol away. 

“It’s your lucky day. One of your kind saved my life today. Maybe it was you?” He squinted and peered closer at the beast, that was peacefully scooping up Cerise rock, only a few metres away. It was about the size of a dog, but scaly like a reptile. A frill of tough skin surrounded the monstrosity that was its head. He ignored the teeth, and the claws, and focused on the frill. It was folded away into a saggy pouch at the moment, but he knew that it could flare into a hood twice the size of its head when the creature felt threatened. He knew that already, but what he found interesting was that it was covered with an intricate orange pattern. 

“You are one ugly bastard, you know that.”

“And you could take my leg with one bite, so I have to take you down. But next time. Off you go!” He finished, the last sentence a touch louder. The lizzo paused at the sound for a moment, but then scuttled out of sight leisurely. The exterminator finished his beer, and left the planet.

________________________________

Three months later, he was back, and to the same map. He told himself that it was because of the dino. He hadn’t reported its coordinates, and he wanted to hunt it himself. Bringing down a dino would mean free Cerise trips forever. Terraforming Corp would probably even send him a nice hand written letter thanking him for his services to humanity. 

It would not really be that hard. You did not have to be an expert tracker to follow a building sized creature on a planet that did not even erase footprints, even if said creature could camouflage itself as a hill. And he was a good tracker. On the other hand, if he didn’t take down the dino, he would not only never return to Cerise, but he would likely be in a lot of money trouble. From the richest man in the world - or close enough - to swimming in debt, a tale as old as time.

It would not really be that hard. So why rush? He grabbed a couple of bottles of beer and refilled them with a touch. Snapping open a small foldable stool, he sat down under the flaming sky and sipped beer. Was it really an unchanging world? The atmosphere in Cerise was hundreds of kilometres thick, but the giant red star it was locked to was immensely bright, and close. Surely, if he only tried hard enough, he could spot it? Were the clouds really uniformly thick and opaque? The star was so close to Cerise that it would take up half the sky. He stared, unblinking at a patch of sky, until he was convinced he could see the faintest arc of starshine.

He closed his eyes for a second.

Chunks of flesh rained all around him. Wind - wind? - whipped them into a demonic maelstrom, as rivers of blood rushed in torrents and disappeared into black volcanic rock. The howling sky melted into screeching, and the cave, and burning lizzo children, and his eyes snapped open.

There was a lizzo standing in front of him, less than two metres away. Had he really fallen asleep on the surface of a planet of monsters? The lizzo was so close, he could count the fangs in the gaping maw that passed as its mouth. The frill around its head pulsed, as if in anticipation, but did not flare out. The intricate orange pattern around it was beautiful. Why had he never noticed that?  A part of his brain wondered if this was the same lizzo that had run away from the dino and saved his life, and the same lizzo that had come to see him later. The rational part of his brain scoffed, assuring him that such an occurrence was exceedingly unlikely. Besides, lizzos did not go to ‘see’ anybody. 

He sat as still as he could. “So you are here to get me before I can get you, eh?” he whispered softly. There was no way he could draw a weapon before the lizzo reached him, and strangely the thought comforted him. Perhaps it was not quite comfort, but a lack of tension. He did not have to be on edge anymore, it was out of his hands. 

The lizzo scuttled away, with the chaotic, yet perfectly balanced, gait of a chameleon. The exterminator tried to let out a sigh of relief, but he had not been holding his breath. He wondered about the yunis. Were they pack animals too? He knew their only food source was the lizzos, and the dinos preyed on the yunis, but he wondered what the yunis did otherwise. Did they have elaborate mating dances? Did they even have sexes? Did they even reproduce? The image of the charging yuni was branded in his mind. The whirring blade like wings, perfectly adapted to the planet, cut through the thick air like butter, the cloven hooves that gripped the gravelly surface for maximum speed. Swish. Crash. Crash. Swish. Crash. Crash. A mad symphony, with the howling sky an enthusiastic participant.

Even the hills did not seem as eternal as they used to. Subtle changes in light caused the granite steps to gleam dully. He wondered for the first time how they came to be. Why was he here on Cerise?  His head throbbed and his skin burned with a fever. The exterminator shut the hatch and lay in bed, but his racing thoughts would not slow.

The planet of monsters had an austere beauty. All he needed was to track the dino, shoot a couple of bazookas at it, and he would never have to return again. Even if he could. The planet of monsters was not an unchanging vision of hell. It would only take a couple of hours to track down the dino. It was an absurd video game world of exterminators versus pirates, yunis versus exterminators, dinos versus lizzos, humanity versus monsters, monsters versus monsters, it was all a synthetic lie. Humanity’s saviour - remaking an ugly, cruel world into a golden haven. Revulsion flooded through him, and his stomach clenched into a painful knot. His trustee watch beeped that only an hour remained until his scheduled rest. There was no point heading out now. He drifted into a tortured sleep.

____________________________________

The next day, the exterminator walked directly to the nearest edge of his map, and crossed over. His watch blared warnings, so he ripped it off his wrist and tossed it away. It had been his only companion, but his decision was made. He continued walking in spurts, pausing to scan the surroundings with his most powerful lens, until finally, he spotted the other exterminator. He looked ridiculous in his orange camouflage skinsuit, as he lay flat on the ground, clearly tracking something. Was it his dino? He jiggled the lens until it focused on a yuni in the distance. The yuni hadn’t seen either exterminator yet, and continued to serenely, methodically scan for prey. It was a difficult shot at this distance but he could take down the yuni, and then the other exterminator would have a couple of options. He could shoot him dead, no questions asked, because he was trespassing after all. Or he could agree to negotiate some form of resource sharing with him. 

The exterminator pointed his weapon at the yuni, and pressed the flare button. The yuni was probably too far away to spot him, but he did not care. The yuni started and charged in the direction of the flare, and within moments was out of range of the other exterminator’s weapon. The other exterminator turned his gun towards the direction of the flare, and sprayed bullets wildly, but there was no one there. 

Obsession: Part #1

In the dimly lit bookshop, an old man shuffled wearily from shelf to shelf, dusting the tops of books ineffectively. His eyes, if there was someone around to see them, were glazed as if focussed on something inward. Midway through his chore, he seemed to give up and slump into the solitary chair in the shop. A stray beam of sunshine lit up his face, and brought with it a surprise: the old man was thirty five years old at best. The rounded shoulders, the tired demeanour, and the unnaturally haggard droop to his cheeks conspired to fool the casual observer, but Scolo was definitely a young man. His eyes were still glazed over, and in his mind, he was doing what he did every day of every year since the time his other life ended. 

This was a memory so polished from repeated replay that it almost glinted at the edges like a shiny HD video. It was the memory of a tennis match; no, two tennis matches actually, with a point from each playing side by side, frame by frame in his mind’s eye. The opponent in both matches was his great rival Girona, his downfall and nemesis, but on the left side, he wore a fearful grimace on his face, while on the right side, an angry scowl. Yes, this wizened old-young man had been one of the best tennis players in the world. 

Scolo served. Left Girona and right Girona played a rally ball back. Both halves were so in lockstep, it was like they were the same match. Except for Girona’s face, of course, which seemed to resolve into hyperreal clarity. The rally went on back and forth for a few more shots, until Scolo sensed a tipping point - a tingling in his racket fingers that suggested that something was about to give. Scolo just knew in that moment what he had to do. Taking the pace off his shot, he massaged it straight back at Girona. Left Girona grimaced and shanked an easy forehand way out of the court, but right Girona - his nemesis and downfall - stepped in to smash it away for a winner. Confusion overwhelmed his thoughts - it should have worked! It had worked before! - confusion from the match bleached into the present like no time had passed at all, and he held his head as if willing it to go away.

It was always the same. If not this rally, if not this match, it was something else. But Girona, the man who everyone thought was a saint... the vicious spiral of his thoughts was interrupted by the tinkle of a bell. A visitor?

Old man Scolo shuffled to the door. It was the postman. Muttering to himself about unwanted advertising, he opened the unmarked envelope to see this letter.

“Dear Scolo,

I’d like to play an exhibition doubles match with you before I retire. For old times sake. And to bury the hatchet. Don’t turn me down.

Girona

“

Viscous rage flowed into his veins, rough from a lack of use, but familiar like a close friend that had drifted away. The nerve of that man! But he knew, even in that moment, that he was going to say yes. He hadn’t struck a ball in years, but he was going to say yes.

In retrospect, it had all started falling apart at that press conference. It was after a third consecutive loss to Girona. He had just lost his number one ranking, and every question in the press conference stung harder than ever before. He still didn’t know why he did what he did next, but he hung around in a small, darkened room by the main press area after his conference was done, to watch Girona’s press conference. None of the journalists knew he was still there - oh what a scandal it would be, he thought impishly - but made sure to leave the door slightly ajar.

“What did you make of your performance?”

He watched Girona shade his eyes, a tic he knew all too well, using that moment to reset his thoughts and reply with the bland stock filler answers tennis players give.

“I am happy. There are little things that maybe I can improve, but this opponent.. I have full respect.. One of my toughest opponents… Very happy.”

Stock question after stock question followed, and pat came the inoffensive, cliched responses, and Scolo began to switch off. He wondered what Cara was up to. She was probably much more busy than he was. She definitely was, considering he was lurking in a dark room daydreaming. But presently, his eyes snapped back to the press room, as if alerted by some supernatural instinct.

“Girona, in the early part of your career, despite being widely acknowledged as possibly the more expansive talent, you lost nearly every match you played to Scolo. And now you’re on a winning streak. What’s changed? What’s the secret? I’m sure Scolo would like to know.” Amused chuckles filled the room.

“Scolo hasn’t tailed off, not really. His record against almost every other player is still as good as it ever was. It’s you. What’s the secret?*

To Scolo’s utter surprise, Girona did not immediately respond with a press friendly cliche. (“Oh, I’ve been lucky a couple of times, I’m sure Scolo will fight back”, “At the highest level, tennis matches hinge on a handful of decisive moments that are hard to pinpoint.”) A very awkward pause filled the room as Girona stared straight back at the journalist. Eventually,

“Could you repeat your question?”

And when the journalist did, Girona still seemed frozen. Wondering murmurs spread among the throng, but still Girona said nothing. The press coordinator leaned in to whisper in Girona’s ear, nodded at his response, and proceeded to announce to the journalists that Girona was suddenly taken ill with a dizzy spell and would have to cut the press conference short. 

The buzzing drone of stifled conversation slowly dissipated as all the journalists filtered out, but Scolo stood there in the dark for a long time. He was shaking and his eyes were aflame with sudden revelation, because he knew, he knew with absolute certainty that Girona was cheating.

To understand Scolo’s conviction, you had to understand the kind of tennis player Scolo was. Yes, he was very talented, fairly hard working, in decent shape, but so was everyone else in the top twenty in the world. Where he stood out, and what allowed him to be the number one player in the world for two years, was an almost divine sense of intuition that guided his game. It wasn’t just that he knew each player’s weakness and could target them, again, probably every player in the top twenty could.

It was that he knew to millisecond precision what shot each player was going to play in each given situation. Again, this was nothing as naive as saying that this and this player played more forehands down the line than cross court, but much more sophisticated than that; he would know with certainty that at a given point in a rally, at a given point in a match, given the way his opponent had played thus far, given the way his opponent was feeling mentally, given how tired - or not - his opponent was, he would know with certainty that he would next play a down the line forehand.

Scolo couldn’t explain the formula to you if he tried. Instead, he embraced his gift and trusted it and rode its power to the top of the world. Girona was, in the beginning, one of the easiest kills for his spider sense. He was only six months younger than Scolo, and everybody - even Scolo himself - freely admitted that Girona was probably the most talented player the sport had ever seen. But faced with Scolo’s unerring anticipation, his beautiful shots fell apart to almost amateurish proportions. Occasionally, Girona would cling to his game long enough to steal the shorter matches, but the head to head was embarrassingly one sided. Scolo 12 Girona 2.

And then Girona had begun to cheat. It had to be that!

A faint, faraway whine resolved itself into the voice of Coach. A very annoyed voice that made it very clear that it was repeating itself for the four hundredth time.

“Running forehand drills?”

As he smacked ball after ball back at the brightly lit moving laser targets on the opposite court, Scolo’s mind drifted to the Girona question again. It had to be drugs. How often was Girona tested? Players didn’t know one another’s testing schedules, but he was fairly sure there was a lot of out of competition, random testing. Yet, clearly, Girona was somehow beating the system. He was - 

“Ouch!”

Coach had just smacked a vicious forehand drive straight into his midriff.

“What are you playing at, Coach?”

“No, what are you playing at? Where’s your mind at? You’ve never been the most industrious pupil but this is ridiculous.”

“Have you even noticed that the targets have been moved up to the net for you to practice your passing shots?”

Scolo looked up in mild consternation. Yes, they had been moved, and yes, he hadn’t noticed. And Coach, a normally mild mannered man who had to be pushed to say a word, was furious.

“Sorry, Coach. So, here’s the thing.”

“I think Girona’s cheating.”

Scolo paused for the full import of that statement to sink in, but Coach didn’t even blink.

“It is possible, and I won’t even ask why you think what you think, and I don’t care. It’s forehand drill day, and that has nothing to do with Girona or cheating. Let’s get on with it.”

Scolo was jolted out of his thoughts. He didn’t know what he was expecting Coach to say, but it wasn’t this. He was instantly grumpy but finished his drill before it got too dark. 

He seemed to get over his dark mood in the coming days. Racking up win after win, and not playing Girona definitely helped, but it was probably more Cara. Cara always helped. She was gentle and sympathetic, but always impartial and slow to judgment. She had always helped. After a whirlwind lifestyle as a young professional, with numerous flings with actresses and supermodels, page three scandals, and money and endorsements and more money, Cara came into his life. She was a supermodel too, so it wasn’t like that movie where the dashing hero romanced stunning woman after stunning woman before finding out that the homely neighbour was where his heart lay all along. No, Cara was a stunning woman herself. He was a handsome, young tennis player with a charisma that enveloped everyone in his presence and lifted them into a higher plane of existence, a heady, exalted plane that made them feel special. Cara was not immune to his wiles, and he added her to his list of conquests. 

Or so he thought, because to his everlasting surprise, he actually fell in love. Cara became a homebody supermodel, and he, the almost comically quintessential Casanova figure with the roving eye almost never flirted again. Yes, Cara, lovely Cara, had been sympathetic to his suspicions about Girona, but merely warned him to keep a hold of his emotions and not say something in public he would come to regret.

Famous last words.

Both Girona and Scolo reached the final of the Madrid Open. Scolo knew this might happen the moment he saw the draw, but the rapid rate at which his hard won good feeling fell away, to be replaced by a black, knotted rage surprised even him. Hours before the final, he skulked his private locker room area and muffled screams slipped from his lips from time to time, despite himself. He punched a wall so hard he wondered if he’d broken a finger. He had never done that before. It didn’t help. Despite losing the first set, Girona came back to take the next two and win the match.

He could barely look Girona in the eye during the post match handshake. Girona probably didn’t notice that he was trembling, that man was so amiable that he was practically blind. He knew he should take a breather for five minutes before the press conference, but he walked straight in.

Somehow, he survived the first round of banalities. But then the red mist descended in an instant when a journalist asked him about his losing streak against Girona.

“Do you think Girona now has a mental edge against you, and that is why he is winning against consistently?”

“He’s winning because.. He’s a CHEATER. HE’S A FUCKING CHEATER!” His voice rose to a scream. A shocked silence fell over the room. The journalist who asked the original question recovered and began to speak again.

“What do - “

“SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!” Scolo picked up the water bottle in front of him and hurled it at the journalist. Without looking to see what happened next, he stood up and stomped out of the room.