Citizen Karl

[Karl Jak]

September 2009

Karl Jak sat is a half-empty office.

A year ago, Karl had been king of the world, with a fat pension, an entire planet full of people who loved to hate him, and most importantly, an endless stream of wine and dandy boys to keep him warm during the winter months. All of that had dried up six months ago, when the Board of the company announced that they would be restructuring the coming competition. Apparently, last year’s tournament hadn’t been without its controversy, and although he denied all the rumors, there had been talks that the games had been fixed from the start.

After that, all it took were a few snide words from a few jealous coworkers to get Karl slipped into the role of ‘Consulting Producer.’ It was a slap in the face for someone who had helped to reinvent the company after a ratings decline that nearly bankrupted them just four years ago. Karl had even hosted two tournaments in his first calendar year as Executive Producer of the Dante’s Abyss brand. Two! And both had been phenomenal successes, helping to transform what had originally been a tournament fought in some backwater planet into a hugely popular television program and sporting event.

Damn you, Damon…

Karl scowled as he sifted through his desk for the folder he desired. He needed to find some way to remove Mr. Dukes from the equation if he wanted back in control of the tournament. The new format had been a reversion to the older style with an extra layer of intimacy, and as much as Karl despised the lack of creativity, the concept had tapped into a lot of individual’s nostalgia of years passed. In the aftermath, Karl was on the outs, with only his wits to help him break back into the inner circle of the company.

Over the last four years, Karl had amassed a lovely little network of contacts, and he’d be startled if he didn’t find at least some ammunition with which to sully the Board’s new golden boy. Even if he found nothing, he’d reclaim his spot through whatever means he needed to. There’d be no amount of zeni he wouldn’t be willing to spend to destroy his competition.

Like it or not, Damon Dukes was going to find himself in the realest version of Dante’s Abyss ever to be produced by the one and only Karl Jak.

[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.

[Karl Jak]

June 2010

The city was its own Abyss.

It’d be a long time since the city-states had gone to war, and from the look of things, they’d had plenty of time to build up grudges. In a matter of days, the bureaucracy had fallen apart and the militaries had stepped up to handle the situation. Karl had to respect the collection of generals who had realized the vacuum created at City Hall, but he’d be damned if he was pleased with anything going on in the streets below Syntech headquarters.

People were dying by the hundreds.

Nearly a fifth of Central City had been damaged.

But the worst thing of all? The company had shelved Dante’s Abyss. Despite the fact that the competition was held off-world, the other members of the board had decided it was in their best interests to ‘postpone the event until a time when it can occur in an atmosphere of no violence.’ Apparently there were some idiots out there who thought the notion of holding the competition was ‘heartless’ given the situation unfolding across the continent.

Of course, Karl Jak didn’t care, and while there were plenty of people who would critique his lack of empathy, he knew most of the planet didn’t care about the confrontation between Central City and South City. The producer had done his research months before the violence started, and he knew that West City’s military-industrial complex stood to benefit the most from a skirmish between its two sister sisters. The nest of Capsule Corp produced equipment, materiel, and technology for every other place on the planet, and since the company didn’t allow production outside of West City, there was no out sourcing of profits.

Karl sighed as he stared out the window of his office. Although the building had since been reinforced with ablative steel plating—the same stuff they made fleet ships out of—he’d dished out top dollar to have his windows replaced with television screens. Through his connections and position, he had access to most of the CCTV. What had once been a massive window was now an enormous screen broken up into various views of the city’s streets. From his computer, he could swap out different feeds, and he could even focus in on certain areas if he wanted to watch in more detail.

All the while, he had his computer recording the data. While he was certain none of it was legal, he also knew that the footage would be worth its weight in gold. Reporters were having a hard time broadcasting from the ‘affected areas,’ which meant information was at a premium.

And if he couldn’t host his own Abyss, Karl could at least derive a mild degree of entertainment from watching the soldiers and super soldiers on the streets of the city. What amused him the most was that he noticed a few of the individuals dressed in combat green—they had participated in Damon’s Abyss. Unfortunately, the winner wasn’t among those fighting in the streets, otherwise Karl was certain he could have made a fortune off of whether or not the blue-haired princess survived the toils of ‘real war.’

Sighing once more as the feeds showed him more of the same, Karl wheeled his chair in the other direction and glanced over at the three-dimensional scale model of the island. With any luck, the board would let the competition commence after hostilities between the cities concluded. By the look of the half-assed skirmishes, the violence would become anything but eternal, which meant he’d be able to go back to the work he enjoyed.

In the meantime, he could at least tinker with his plans. The little scale model had a nice shine to it—a sheen common in unmolested plastic or freshly glazed ceramics. Walking over to it, Karl took a knee in front of the table and reached out to adjust the little clinic. After he rotated it back to its correct orientation, he brushed off some of the dust that had accumulated across the rest of the model.

Everyone loves a clinic.

The buildings were his favorite part—people always seemed to flock to them at one stage or another, hoping for resources or to cling to model society they’d abandoned the moment they signed on the dotted line. How many people had died attempting to bunker down in farmhouses or schools or police stations?

Tapping the clinic on its roof, Karl smirked. “And how many people will flock to you for shelter only to find that they had to abandon all hope the instant they left the helicopter?”

[Karl Jak]

July 2011

Karl Jak winced as he tripped and scraped his knee against the wooden floor.

“My favorite pair!” He growled as his manicured fingers squeezed into fists at the sight of the blood stains forming above the torn flesh.

He wanted to change, but a partially gloved hand clenched his own. “There’s no time to dawdle, Mr. Jak!” Without waiting for a response or even a non-verbal affirmation, the soldier yanked Karl forward, prompting a scowl from the executive.

“It’s just another damned alien invasion,” the man grumbled as he was led up to a group of men, women, and extraterrestrial species making their exodus from the main Syntech facility in Central City. Coupled with the postponement of Syntech’s annual Dante’s Abyss event, the current ‘situation’ on the planet was absolutely infuriating for Karl Jak. The Board, in their ‘infinite wisdom’ had opted to co-sponsor and intergalactic tournament on Namek to commemorate a bunch of dead slugs and starry-eyed soldiers.

The soldier—a young woman who looked half his age—turned and gave him a stern glare. “This one is different, Sir.”

Karl wanted to roll his eyes. That was the type of sappy drivel he’d expect from some promo hyping up a competition or a redemption arc for a downtrodden hero. “They’re always different. Were you even alive when the whole planet was frozen? That was what… five years ago?”

Before the young woman could provide a response, some sort of artillery shell struck the building a few stories above them. The blast tore clean through the elegant, classical architecture of the Syntech building and carried enough force to destroy the electrical systems of the centuries’-old structure. Yelps and screams started to pollute the now blackened room as a wayward Karl Jak started to retreat back from the crowd.

He had made it nearly to one of the side doors of the lobby when the small arm’s fire—either munitions-based or a handful of ki-spewing foot soldiers—tore into the crowded mass of people from five or six different angles. In the flash of lights, Karl caught a final glimpse of the young girl soldier as she took a burst of ki to the gut. The attack clipped her, which meant it left her alive just long enough to struggle momentarily to keep her charred entrails inside her stomach.

Heading into one of the side hallways, Karl shut the door as calmly as he could and found the latch. The faint glow of emergency lighting washed over the sweaty executive. The screams had lingered beyond the initial salvos, and the sheet of steel he now stared at was far too thin to muffle to lamentations.

“Senseless,” he whispered, shaking his head as he backed away from the door. He hadn’t noticed before, but his hands trembling. “We’re fine,” he assured himself as he straightened his back and ran a hand through his hair. He didn’t have a compact, but he didn’t need one to know he probably didn’t look half as good as he wanted to feel. The Earth had been a big giant mess for the last few weeks. One minute, everyone had been all eager beaver to head over to Namek to help the healing process. A few months’ prior, some alien species had invaded the planet and been quashed with the help of an expeditionary army from Earth. The mastermind behind the Earth force had been some goofball from an old-school academy.

Now, the Earth was under siege once again, and who was here to help them?

The Nameks?

Karl scoffed at the thought of the green slug-men lifting a hand. They were as bad at being allies as they were between the sheets. Too busy farming their overgrown produce and sitting around in prayer circles to help fight off the city-killing ship and the horde of Red Stallions it had belched forth onto the Earth.

There was supposed to be some sort of retaliatory force. Karl knew that there was half a dozen spec-ops and black-ops organizations centered on the planet, and he found it a little hard to believe that all of them had been caught off guard or unprepared for a catastrophe to this degree. Didn’t they have sleeper agents or some nonsense?

An explosion shook the producer’s focus and shifted his eyeballs to the ceiling over his head. Had there always been tiny cracks like that?

“Let’s go,” Karl barked as his legs started to move him down the hallway. He was businessman and an entrepreneur who worked in a company who had intergalactic interests. “Not our first rodeo,” he spoke to himself as he advanced through the side corridor. For all he knew, this was being filmed for some sort of Syntech reality show to be aired after this attack fizzled. With that thought in mind, Karl couldn’t help but smile as he glanced up at the tiles overhead. Those little spider web cracks were probably concealing itty bitty cameras.

Somewhere high over Karl’s head, a bomb went off, and even the emergency lights couldn’t handle it. When they abruptly died, the businessman broke into a sprint, allowing a photographic memory of the headquarters’ back halls to guide him through the handful of unpainted passageways as chunks of masonry started to crumble around him.

With a grunt, Karl threw himself against the steel-plated door at the rear of Syntech Main.

Without so much as a sound, the door sent the well-coiffed man stumbling backwards.

In the darkness, Karl couldn’t see the scrapes, but he could smell the tinge of blood and knew that the suit was destined for the incinerator. Balling his hands up, he walked up and felt around for the latch. His dust-stained digits found the handle, which had been twisted closed. Whenever that had taken place, it was impossible for Karl to tell. Perhaps the jostling of the structure had done it. Perhaps some idiot security guard had locked the emergency escape thinking it was something else.

“You can’t make good help these days,” he whispered as he fumbled around until he managed to wrench the latch where it was supposed to be. A beat later, he shoved open the door and stumbled out into the evening.

Wait a second…

The producer glimpsed to his wristwatch and confirmed that it was barely two in the afternoon. A look up at the sky revealed dark clouds and the even blacker shapes of alien space craft flying low over the skyscrapers of Central City. Green flares light up on the belly of the ship, and moments later, fresh plumes of fire blossomed up across the block, and an errant bolt crashed through the thirty-second floor of Syntech Main. Karl winced as smoldering office equipment and furniture spilled from the gash in the structure.

He didn’t have long to mull over who would need new walls, because there was yet another brilliant lightshow that pulled his eyes skyward. A little spec of vibrant green energy floated a few hundred feet above the city streets. One of the planet’s special little hyper-powered persons, here to save the da—

In the blink of an eye, there was a flash of purple and the floating individual was gone. The ship that had once blocked out the sun was now smoking and sporting a small, person-sized hole through its hull.

Karl watched in mild horror as the alien ship sagged and started to spiral downward, its engines flaring as its crew desperately tried to salvage the situation. Instead, whatever complement who served onboard did little but smack controls and panels until the ship tore straight into the side of Syntech Main. There was a flash of white before the fifty-story office building ceased to exist. While he found himself mesmerized and mortified by the complete and utter destruction, the producer managed to drag himself away before the chunks of super-heated steel and smoldering masonry started to rain down onto the streets.

All gone…

[Karl Jak]

August 2011

Another refuge line.

The lieutenant shuffled awkwardly from side to side as she oversaw the process unfolding across the city square.  If someone looked at the group of ‘survivors’ spread out in front of her, they might believe they were looking at the losing side of a war.

Yet, these were the winners, or at the very least, they were the lucky ones who hadn’t been shot, stab, crushed, incinerated, or otherwise slaughtered in the forty days of urban warfare that had reduced Central City’s once bustling streets and city blocks into a glorified ghetto.

“Lieutenant J?”

The redheaded soldier glanced at the young soldier who had been helping her the last few days.  “Hey, ‘Bekah, you got today’s papers?”

“Straight from the printing press,” the pilot remarked as she handed them over to her interim CO.

“Lovely,” the lieutenant muttered.

And thus the refuges filtered forward to receive daily rations of food, water, and fuel.  Most smiled warmly, while others made snide remarks that the standardized ribbons of meat paste were somehow smaller than they had been the day prior.

Over time, the morning line filtered away, save one man who had remained seated on the ruins of a fountain for the last few hours.  Like many mornings, he sat and stared blankly at the blackened husk across the square.  There wasn’t any significance in the building—it just looked like the best approximation of life in this post-Stallions world.

The man tilted his head and looked down at his left foot.  How long had the sole been missing?  His toes were dirty—there were clods of grime jammed into the corners and the cuticles were in dire need of a mend.  His other foot?  He’d lost that shoe three weeks ago.  His right foot was swollen.  A medic had told him he had likely broken one of the bones in his foot, but he didn’t feel like letting some fatigues-clad college student jam around in his skin.

Tattered purple trousers dangled around unshaven legs as Karl Jak tapped the face of his wristwatch.  It’d broken a long time ago, but it had been a gift from ‘the Board’ following his first successful live event.  That competition had featured just a dozen warriors locked in a house and tasked them with escaping within three days.  Paranoia had caused them to start killing each other, and what was supposed to have been an escape game had become a survival game.  Thus, the seeds of Karl’s millions had been sown.

Just because the Board was dead didn’t meant they had to be completely forgotten to history.  Before the city had lost its cellular communications, Karl had learned that the majority of his coworkers were dead.  Whether they were executives, office rats, or janitors… everyone was dead.

Sure, they had a few people who had been off on Namek.  Karl had managed to find those news articles just before losing cell service as well: ’Syntech Corporation, including Syntech Studios, liquidated after catastrophe in Central City.’ The scavengers had sold off all the assets, including the company’s various branch offices across the North Quadrant.  Worse than that, they’d killed him in the process.

‘Karl Jak, Syntech Chairman and CEO, among the deceased in Central City.’ It didn’t matter that Karl had escaped the headquarters—he didn’t have the means to be alive.  Earth was a wounded, isolated beast who had crawled into its cave to lick its wounds.  The politicians and bureaucrats weren’t stepping up in the aftermath of the defeated invasion, and the military brass had filed him away with the rest of the riffraff.  While Karl hadn’t created the company, he sure as shit had helped bring Syntech from the doldrums and make it a multi-trillion-dollar industry since he had joined.  He had the charisma and the business savvy, but there’d be a few hundred men and women who had played their role.

Now?

Now it was nothing.  Karl would certainly wind up with a nice memorial somewhere… perhaps a pretty page on the internet encyclopedia that would paint him in a positive light for posterity.  But Jason Jankins from Accounting?  Or Sally from Marketing?  If their families had survived, they’d be lucky enough to get a memorial page on social media with a couple followers.

Karl exhaled as he looked into the puddle of brackish water.  He saw a shell of a man, clad in the rags of a purple business suit, looking back up at him.  His bow tie hung limp on his neck.  Both his sleeves ended somewhere between the elbow and the wrist—scavengers had jumped him because his cufflinks ‘looked like gold.’  While the fat lip and black eye had healed over a week ago, the broken nose and shattered ego still throbbed with pain and fury.

Earth had been saved by a madwoman, a lunatic in a spaceship, and an untimely betrayal in the enemy ranks.  Among all of that, not a single one of the super-powered psychopaths who had participated in the various Dante’s Abyss events had appeared to stem the bleeding or stop the slaughter.  None!  They were more than willing to wander around the island and kill their friends, but when it came to defending the planet, they were nowhere to be seen.

That’s why we made so much money.  People love to watch those self-loving types be laid low and broken.

With a frown, Karl shifted on the edge of the broken fountain.  Wasn’t he supposed to have feeling in his right leg?  Had the skin always looked so ashy?  Hadn’t he washed up a week ago?  The producer winced as he tried to clear his head from the haze that seemed to settle over it so easily.  It had become so hard to focus lately, even after the crowds had dispersed.

“You okay, Mr.?”  The voice shook Karl from his slight malaise.  He looked up to see the redheaded lieutenant staring at him.  She looked young, but her eyes were old… perhaps a few years younger than his.  “You really should get your injuries checked out before you have any lasting damage.”

Karl Jak smiled and lifted a hand that sported three broken fingers.  The woman reacted as you’d expect a half-caring Samaritan to act, but he recoiled when she took half a step forward.  “No, no, it’s okay.”  He whispered.  Was that how he sounded?  Like a ghost in the wind?  Karl shook his head.  “Vagrants, you see.”

“Why?”

“Shiny baubles,” Karl whispered with a smile.  “Plus, I think they were most upset when I brought up their mothers during the preliminary stages of the beat down.”

“Lots of people are feeling a little crazy these days,” the lieutenant spoke softly.  “Are you sure I can’t help you with your injuries?  I’m told I have the magic touch,” she added without a single degree of innuendo.

Karl shook his head again.  “Save your effort on the needier… I’ve already lost everything I can lose in this world.”

The woman frowned before she reached down to her side.  The producer wanted to crane his neck, but the muscles were too store.  Instead, he waited a moment until she lifted up a heavy sidearm and rested it on his lap.  “Protect yourself.  The crazy will settle very soon, I promise, and then it’s time to let the real healing start, you know?”

Looking down at the gun—a heavy pistol with a lot of thin surface cracks on its handle—Karl nodded slowly.  “Whole new world, eh?”  He asked as he looked back up at those warm, green eyes.

“It’s going to feel like a brand new one, I promise,” she added warmly as she nodded to the man.  “I’ll leave you be, Mister…” she trailed off and Karl had enough semblance to know why.

“Don’t worry about it,” he muttered as he shook his broken hand at her.  “Old name from a dead, old world,” he chuckled halfheartedly.

“Take care of yourself,” the lieutenant whispered as she turned to go attend to other matters in the shattered, broken city.

Karl nodded.  “I will,” he added softly as he hooked his good hand around the gun on his lap.  “Bon voyage.”

Bang!

The lieutenant—eyes wide—spun and watched in horror as the man sagged backwards into the shattered fountain.  By the time she’d jogged back to him, he was already resting in a growing pool of blood from the gunshot wound that had blown through his chest and taken his heart with it.

Yet, there was a strange smile on the dead man’s ashy face.

***

“My name is Omni.”