SG - Suicide Game Read online

  Suicide Game

  First published in 2013.

  Copyright Haidji 2013

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Haidji has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1998.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual events or to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Haidji.

  www.haidji.blogspot.com

  Selected songs, ringtones and soundtrack available in 2014.

  This book is dedicated to Raffaello

  Table of Contents

  Cast

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  About the Author

  Cast

  Main Cast

  The Council of Seven

  White The White Council member

  Yellow The Yellow Council member

  Red The Red Council member

  Green The Green Council member

  Blue The Blue Council member

  Purple The Purple Council member

  Black The Black Council member

  Seven Candidates

  Candidate 0907 Moma

  Candidate 1518 Fabio Giovanni Cristiani

  Candidate 3507 Anthony Henrik Gustav

  Candidate 4914 Jens Plaato

  Candidate 4918 Sarah Mondstein

  Candidate 5151 Bianca White

  Candidate 7195 The Scientist

  Cast (in alphabetical order)

  Albion

  Alessandra

  Alphabot

  Anna

  Calvin

  Cassandra

  Clare

  Demir

  Diana

  John

  Life in a Wire

  Luca

  Marcel Michaelsen

  Marco

  Metz Wurss

  Michael

  Morris

  Philip

  Steven Laurence

  The Baby

  The Betting agents

  The Children’s birthday party make-up artists

  The dog

  The Entrance woman - Elisabeth

  The Food street vendors

  The Geek

  The Gravedigger

  The Hare Krishna’s

  The Hostess

  The Pharmacy guy

  The Supermarket couple

  The T-shirt vendors

  Tim

  Tom

  Vincenzo Cristiani

  And many others…

  Original Music

  Suicide Game

  Lyrics - Gabriel Holtschlag

  Music – Ralph Sahrmann

  Suicide Freak

  Lyrics - Ralph Sahrmann

  Music – Ralph Sahrmann

  A Kiss in Heaven

  Lyrics – Haidji

  Music – Ralph Sahrmann

  Death on Death

  Lyrics – Ralph Sahrmann

  Music – Ralph Sahrmann

  One Way Road

  Lyrics – Haidji

  Music – Haidji, Ralph Sahrmann

  A human life

  Is the time that happens

  while

  The Earth takes a break

  For you to live

  between

  Inhaling and exhaling your soul

  from the un-endless space

  Named infinity

  Introduction

  Inside the Night Stadium it was almost dark, a kind of misty twilight atmosphere, no matter if day light or night-light.

  It was the special effect that was the origin of the Stadium’s name, created to allow special visual effects in every period of time, regardless of the season or weather conditions.

  Created by one of the most important architects, Steven Laurence, it was the reason for his winning each of the Pritzker, Lubetkin and Global-Architecture prizes. Filtering and keeping part of the sunlight, inspired by micro resonator bottles, the Night Stadium was new, shining, intriguing and captivating, all at the same time.

  Round and with capacity for 100,000 persons, the circular stadium had one main entrance, and of course, visible from inside of the first Stadium wall, all emergency doors were built. Once inside, there was a large Corridor all around the Stadium perimeter, with entrances to the Stadium’s different sections and seating places. With small shops and spaces in the corridors for different purposes: the usual washrooms, personnel rooms, the Control room and the Council’s Boardroom; the last two, with a view over the Stadium.

  Special screens on the outside walls of the Stadium could make the Stadium turn into the colors around it, as would it be invisible sometimes; at other times, transparent, creating the impression for persons outside that it was possible to look inside through the Stadium’s walls, as would they be watching, sitting inside.

  Steven Laurence, also called The Architect, used laser and plasma projection technology to show outside the Stadium what was happening inside the Stadium, in larger than life, three-dimensional images.

  The same projection technology was also deployed in certain places inside the Stadium, in front of seats and in the corridors; images floating in the air so people could see from every angle, inside and outside the Stadium, what the Council wanted people to see.

  The Suicide Game was the Stadium’s first official event.

  Chapter 1

  Step 1 – Day 1

  A young girl was walking around inside the Stadium wearing a beautiful white dress, elegant in her Manolo shoes, carrying a baby in her arms, facing forward, and trying to cover its eyes with her hands while listening to a voice...

  ‘The new game

  The new mania

  8000 candidates and

  Only one will survive

  Only one can win!

  Live from the Night Stadium

  Nothing compares to what you'll see here

  Nothing compares to what you'll watch

  See, choose your candidate, bet

  Participate! It is …

  The new and unexpected... Suicide Game!

  All that the girl, Alessandra, was thinking about was to get out of there, to walk quickly between the black shiny chairs into the dark corridors and disappear. She had entered the Stadium to apply for a job as one of the models, and she withdrew her application as soon as they explained to her exactly the Game’s rules.

  Alessandra was 20 years old; she was probably too old for the job, but she saw the announcement that they needed more models to work in the Game. She wasn’t a model, but she looked like one, so s
he decided to try. She was happy as they called her and happy that she passed the initial casting a week ago, so she was there just to sign the contract and to start work on the same day.

  But the Game rules made her feel terrified.

  This…wasn’t…a job… for her. For sure not.

  Alessandra wanted to leave the space, but was hesitating for a moment, thinking about how to pay her bills, because she used up all her savings in the last months. Figuring out what to do now, with no money to pay her next rent; she was an optimist, she could feel, she felt she would find ‘something’, and she trusted her intuition.

  She had thought this ‘something’ was the job in the Game, but it wasn’t. Or maybe, in a certain and unexpected way, it was.

  What she found, instead of a new job, came in front of her while she walked a little bit in circles, without finding her way out of the Stadium. It was a baby, crawling in front of her. ‘Who brings a baby into a place like this?’ she thought, while she took the baby in her arms to see if she could find the parents or someone responsible for it.

  The baby smiled and embraced her.

  Nobody she asked was looking for a baby, and she saw only a man with a Red Cross uniform running in another direction.

  With her high heels, Alessandra couldn’t run after him, and he did not look nice anyway; she decided to keep walking around with the baby in her arms, to see if she could find the baby’s parents.

  Walking between the black seats in the already full Stadium, she could hear the Hostess of the Game and her words on her left side...on the right side, she could hear a religious group singing a Hare Krishna mantra in front of the Stadium. The Hostess’s voice spilled over the boundaries of the Stadium and the Hare Krishna mantra seemed to be a bizarre kind of background music.

  Alessandra noticed the Game was starting as she was still there, walking around the Stadium with a baby in her arms.

  In the terror she felt, she surfaced the thought to protect the child she was carrying and to run away as soon as possible…out of there, and maybe try to find the baby’s parents outside.

  But it was a direct transmission of the Suicide Game, the cameras and monitors were already connected and turned on everywhere, so even if she didn’t want it, she could hear the Hostess’s voice everywhere, and see the live video images from the monitors.

  The Stadium gates were already closed—no one could enter and no one could go out of there because the Game…the Game—had already started.

  The gates had been closed to avoid the crowd in front of the Stadium invading it. There were no more places available inside the Stadium. People who couldn’t buy a place to sit anymore were watching the Game on the big projections visible outside the Stadium. The automobile traffic had been rerouted. Only the food trucks had permission to enter and park at their rented spots at designated times. Deliveries to the Stadium and the minivans were also allowed, of course. People brought their chairs from home, sitting on the street as would they be in their living rooms, watching the Game on the projections outside and around the Stadium’s walls.

  There was nothing Alessandra could do to stop the Game, and there was no way to prevent it.

  The Council had met, their decision had already been taken, the Game would begin in a few minutes and nothing she could do would avoid it. All she wanted, for now, was to bring the baby away from there, into a safe and quiet place. But, where was a quiet and safe place?

  She passed through rows of chairs in the Stadium, listening to the mantra on the right and seeing the Hostess’s images on her left.

  The candidates in the Game, as a crowded mass of humanity, were being prepared; all with the same black clothes, bright black clothes, with a leather glove on their left hand, a glove attached to a line, a line of a new material. A new alloy material, very flexible and resistant. The glove was connected to the line that would bind them to life or death...the thin line.

  The glove was also connected by an automatic docking system to a super-thin skin suit of Kevlar, invisible under their clothes. The Kevlar skin suit cradled the pelvis and shoulder joints, so no joints could dislocate or bones break when they jumped. Bones were important and precious, no matter if they were alive or dead; better to not break any more than necessary.

  John, one of the makeup artists, walked among the candidates, accompanied by Cassandra, who helped him with the makeup of those who were not yet prepared for the game.

  Groups of two hundred candidates would jump together, one group after the other, for four days, day and night, until the first step of the game would finish; all eight thousand candidates would have a chance to be seen by anyone wanting to see the Game live and in person. Or maybe, everyone would see or hear about them anyway, given the media saturation.

  And the first two hundred candidates were almost ready, waiting for the starting signal.

  Ten groups each day, four in the morning, four after lunchtime and two in the evening, before the sunshine of the next day.

  Cassandra was concentrating intensely and working hard to finish the makeup so they all could look great and gorgeous, because each one of them could be a winner...and she wanted to feel that she participated in their success. To be a part of it.

  And she followed the rules: ‘white faces, no expressions, the orange Game Symbol between the eyebrows, white lips’.

  John was worried about the clothes and gloves, and was preoccupied looking at the hooks that attached the wires to the gloves of the candidates who were there for today’s game. He saw the t-shirts, belts and pants, socks and shoes, gloves and lines, all in black except for the makeup, white face with the orange Symbol and white lips, as would they have made a new image from the traditional street pantomime artist’s image.

  The Stadium was round and so was the stage, which was a platform that came from the center that was like an open elevator that could elevate up to fifty-five meters over the ground floor.

  The candidate’s jumps would be from a height of fifty meters above the ground, the same height as the principal rows of chairs, the most expensive seats in the house.

  The wire length was about twenty meters, and the Stadium crew was already prepared with their cameras and reporters. Even the welcome cocktails for the survivors were ready, inside a corridor on the ground level, waiting with the models to be placed on the platform, to be seen by the crowd and then given to the survivors, all part of the spectacle.

  Looking down to the ground of the Stadium and to the elevators that also brought the minivans and candidates to the ground, Cassandra felt dizzy. She saw the platform on the ground of the Stadium, fifty meters below the principal row of chairs, as would there be a precipice in the middle of the Stadium. She tried to concentrate on her job; it was probably good that the make up teams worked in rooms on the street level. Cassandra tried hard to be focused in her work. After finishing, she could go home and watch it all on the TV, and probably she would see more than what she could see there live, because she was working and could not really see or appreciate all that what was happening around her.

  She was part of the first makeup artists’ team. It was an honor for her to prepare the first candidates of the Game. There was not much time, she could spend only a few minutes with each person, and they all needed to look alike; there was lots of work to do and only a short time before the official start was to begin.

  The first group was almost ready and after the second group, there would be a ten-minute break and then two more groups jumping before lunchtime. But in this situation, lunchtime was no time for a real meal, and she was already starving.

  Two hundred persons dressed the same way, and ten makeup artists, divided into five different teams, all with the same outfits, just in non-shiny clothes, as if they were all kids or clones coming out of the same laboratory, all sharing a deep desire...the desire to win at any cost.

  The Hare Krishna mantra continued, even though no one had said they were hired to be there to perform, but they appeared, a
nd maybe it seemed they had been hired for the event, because their voices and orange clothes seemed to naturally become part of the environment.

  It did not seem odd that they did not have their usual money donation cups in their hands, or Hare Krishna books to sell along with incense; those things would seem to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time, because it seemed no one would want to buy them.

  And finally, and almost unexpectedly, a few minutes before the start, the first group was ready. Going down the elevators, they had a last check of their gloves inside a room on the ground floor. Coming out of the corridors on the ground floor, they walked through the sand ground onto the round platform, in the middle of the Stadium, where each candidate tied the hook of his or her own wire into a metal ring on the edge of the platform, showing once again their own free will about their decision to be part of the Game, but with impassive faces, as if showing their ambition would have cut their souls, demolishing their own free will.

  From above, for the audience they looked like black ants coming from different directions walking to the round platform. But everywhere there were screens and projections, showing them up close and in detail, while the platform was rising from the ground to the height of fifty meters. All of the persons in the principal row of seats, at the fifty meters’ height, were already seated.

  Accompanied by the voice of the pretty Hostess, and while the security personnel, also wearing the same clothes as the rest of the staff, adjusted the ropes, gloves and candidates, the time counter started at 50, matching the jumping height in meters of the platform.

  The counter started to show on the projections inside and outside the Stadium, showing the number 50 and going down second after second. 49…48…47…46…45…

  With her Alexander McQueen Shoes and Elen Danielle ‘Femme Fatale’ red dress, green eyes and long brown hair, she was almost floating over the platform coming up from the Stadium’s ground. Waking up deeply grooved fantasies in the male and female public’s minds, the Hostess walked in silence for a few seconds, as would she be coming out of their dreams.