Citizen Karl

[Karl Jak]

December 2009

It was all over the news.

“Successful television producer accepts offer from off-world start-up company!”

There weren’t many people with more charisma than Karl Jak, and one of them was Damon Dukes. Not only that, the man—despite sharing Karl’s love for violence and bloodshed—led an otherwise sterling life. He had no skeletons in his closet, and those he could consider enemies were all tiny fish in the giant ocean that was Syntex. When it became impossible to find the material he would need to blackmail Damon or destroy his reputation, Karl changed his plans.

After all, the old story went that you always got more flies with honey than vinegar.

So Karl did what he did best—he greased a few wheels and stuffed a few pockets. He still had enough clout to get his rival a promotion. For the next few years, Damon Dukes would be responsible for the creation of a new production company further out in the quadrant that would be owned primarily by Syntex. Always someone who pandered just a little too much for charitable interests, Damon was more than happy to head off to plan death fights on foreign worlds, which left Karl back in command of the creative department.

Karl gave one last look at the headline before turning to glance around his new office, which provided a beautiful view of downtown Central City—the largest city on the planet. It wasn’t the prettiest city (East Ciy), the artsiest city (South City), or the wealthiest city (West City), but its size and sheer number of people made it the closest thing to a de facto capital of the planet.

With a little chuckle, the producer pulled out a framed picture from a cardboard box and placed it on the desk in front of him. It was about six years old—a picture from when he was just a student trying to finish a degree in film production. He was standing next to Michael Dunham, who used to be something of a genius in East City before a fall from grace ended in his death during the shooting of a project aimed to bring him back into the limelight.

Ironically, the movie made about the attempt to make the original film had made Dunham a cult figure, but by then, the obese director had been long dead and unable to reap any of the benefits. The director’s death had essentially shut the door on Karl’s attempt to get into making movies in East City, because he lacked any of the necessary connections to continue in the industry. Fortunately for him, Syntex had liked his work enough to extend him an internship with one of their Dante’s Abyss tournaments.

Back then, they’d just been rough tournaments fought away from the public eye on one of the company’s partially terraformed planets. In those first original contests, the fighting had been far more personal, with most of the competition being associates of one another. Who had the champion been that year? Some saiyan? For some reason, the saiyans always seemed to win the tournament, and the one year they hadn’t, people said the thing had been subtly rigged.

Karl scowled as he pushed away from the desk, lifting up his feet as his chair’s wheels carried him over to the mahogany bookshelf in the corner. He’d only managed to fill up one of the shelves with his books from college, so the picture would help momentarily occupy some of the otherwise empty space.

Rolling back to his desk, Karl set aside the still half-full box and turned his attention to the diagram he’d laid out a few hours ago. With Damon Dukes off producing hit television for aliens and a plummet in stock following a convenient leak about quarterly projections, the Board had made Karl an executive producer once more, with the intent of designing a new version of the Abyss that would meld some of the successful qualities. Karl wanted more money to be spent in advertisement and broadcasting rather than in creating fancy new bunkers or the other superfluous add-ons that Damon had insisted on brushing the dust off of.

To Karl, you don’t need to fluff up a competition about killing. All you needed was a bunch of people willing to win and happy enough to do whatever it takes to get there. If three years had taught him anything, it was that the storylines and the advertisements wrote themselves after a point. You didn’t even need to tell the people they were being recorded for them to be let it all hang out for a couple million viewers to see.

For this year’s contest, Karl had settled on a slightly different version of the island that had once claimed over a hundred souls. He’d scaled down the civilization and increased the wilderness, with the hope of hastening the degradation of the contestant’s morals. A slightly more hostile and uneven terrain would also add a few new layers of strategy when it came to certain pieces of equipment, and with how hostile the oceans would be, Karl wondered if he’d be able to flood the place halfway through the contest. How fun would it be to see ten or twenty would-be survivors flailing for their lives in a gale-force winds and mass flooding?

With a smile, Karl retrieved the paper blueprints for the island and started to go over the contouring to make sure he had everything just right.