It’s Christmas Day, 2065.
You’re playing VR ping-pong in your state-funded elder enrichment facility, trying your hardest to bend your knees exactly how your physical therapist (an avatar of Squidward, as per your request) told you to. It’s almost time for VR Call of Duty, but you might just nap.
You’ve reached that stage in life where you’ve started asking yourself, “Wait… that was it?” and the question is beginning to make you angry.
Imagine your relief when the drones arrive.
You take your goggles off and see a couple hundred matte-black drones carrying boxes just outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of your mid-tier elder enrichment facility.
The parcels descend on cables as thin as thread into neat stacks on the porch. The orderlies do not need to investigate.
Your least favorite orderly, Winston, opens a box with your name on it, and hands you your NeuroSight One Headset.
It’s lighter than it should be. No wires. No ports. Just two intersecting Helix shapes forming an X on the inner lattice.
You put it on, and find yourself standing in an empty Octagon.
Beneath you, a muted gray canvas is stretched tight and level. The corners around you are farther apart than they seem on TV. The fence is taller.
The surface gives under your foot, just a fraction of an inch, then answers back — remembering you.
You yank the headset off — still standing on that rock-hard, floral-pattern carpet you hate so much.
After a split second of shock, you remember the neurolink that your daughter basically forced you to get.
“It must be getting into that somehow,” you think. Back on the headset goes.
Your palm presses down on the canvas: it’s textured and faintly warm.
A figure resolves in front of you. He looks familiar. Kinda like John Malkovich, but it’s not John Malkovich.
“Good morning,” he says, like he already knows you. “Thank you for joining us. Feel free to walk around.”
Your knees feel weirdly good right now, and you know Squidward will be pleased about these extra steps.
“You may occupy any position. Beside a fighter. Beside the referee. Or as the referee, if you wish. Choose a corner to listen in on between rounds — or move freely between them.”
Your hand reaches for the matte-black fence. It’s cold. Not imaginary cold. Metal cold.
“Every takedown, every collision with the cage is rendered somatically…”
You try to poke his shoulder and hit nothing but air. He smiles.
“…Only the fighters themselves cannot be felt.”
He shuffles away from you, playing it off like he’s pacing.
“NeuroSight One integrates live markets that update continuously. Wagers can be placed neurally at any moment.”
“Uh-oh,” says the voice in your head that you’re not going to listen to.
“Myth,” he says, “has always been watched from a distance.”
He looks up at the LED sky.
“We intend to collapse that distance.”
He fades.
You take off the headset, and your knees feel awful. Absolutely horrendous.
The groans and swears of your peers fill the rec room. Someone’s calling out for ice. You scan the carnage and put the Over/Under at four broken hips.
Your old iPhone 38 — the one that everyone teases you for still having — is blowing up with alerts:
There’s another headline about some protesters in Phoenix setting a pile of headsets on fire or something. You skimmed it pretty fast.
That night, you go to the Cheesecake Factory by yourself. They’re one of the last chains that still have human staff — at least up front — and the bartender there knows his way around a Moscow Mule.
There, sitting at the bar, sipping on a Long Island Iced Tea, you see me. My hair is a little greasy. My T-shirt is a size too small. You notice I have an iPhone 38 too, and that I’m using it to watch clone fighting highlights. You think about saying something, but decide against it. We never acknowledge each other.
Let’s Fill In Some Gaps…
I should mention it is my firmly held belief that MMA is the oldest and least arbitrary sport possible.
A fighter’s job is to remind us of what the human animal is capable of when it isn’t safe. A man looks to a fighter the way a dog looks to a wolf.
When Grandma’s Bichon Frise sees a wolf bathed in moonlight on a distant ridge, I’ll bet some part of his little mind wonders, “What exactly did I give up for the belly rubs and the prescription ear cream? What was lost?”
Personally, I’d rather be a dog than a wolf. But if I were a dog, I’d sleep better knowing the wolf is out there, doing his thing.
Back to Business…
The year is 2040. Poverty and the climate crisis have been solved.
PROJECT ALPHA SAPIEN follows shortly.
The project inspires countless documentaries, including the 2092 classic, “The Gods We Made.”
Sadly, you do not make it to 2092 (your elder facility’s resident pet chimp rips your face off in 2078), but this particular doc has a killer opening monologue that sets up the whole ordeal better than I ever could…
[A MAN WITH ANCIENT EYES AND NEWBORN SKIN WALKS TOWARD US ON AN EMPTY STAGE.]
It started with an old question…
“What are the limits of human form and function?”
After a decade adrift in post-labor abyss, Homo Sapiens decided that the question alone was no longer enough. PROJECT ALPHA SAPIEN was born.
One hundred and forty-four of the greatest athletes in the history of their species would be cloned, and each genetic duplicate would be raised from birth with optimal training, coaching, diet, and psychological conditioning — each with the goal of becoming the definitive mixed martial artist.
Allen Iverson vs. Pele
Jim Thorpe vs. Derrick Rose
Bo Jackson vs. Herschel Walker
Each fight — etched forever into the collective memory of a generation.
But one fight — the fight — was predestined to stand above the rest.
Two apex predators — born more than a century apart — would meet in the Octagon to fight for the title of Alpha Sapien: Humanity’s ultimate champion.
[HE STOPS. TAKES A BEAT.]
And there they stood, under the weight of six billion eyes — and for the next eleven minutes, Man saw what he had made in his own image.
It’s more than likely he’s referring to the title fight of the Ultra-Weight division. (295+ lbs.)
Why that division?
Because that’s where the most unbeatable fighter would be. Weight classes exist for a reason.
Who might our two contenders be, you ask?
I have a hunch…
(In the spirit of keeping this all theoretically possible, if this is a deceased person we’re cloning, we have to know where their bones are buried. We can’t clone Achilles.)