Corrupting Power
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Kingmaker - Episode 1
🕑 Added 2025-08-21 01:52:41 +0000 UTCKingmaker
By Devin McTaggart
Episode One – Daybreak
I could taste that telltale sting of copper on my tongue that told me I was waking up from a tantrotetrohydroxazine coma, and even before my eyes opened, I knew about what to expect to see when I opened them. But I opened them anyway, and sure enough, it was exactly what I suspected.
There’s a morning sky over my head that I know isn’t natural. Sure, it looked like the sky. It’s supposed to. It’s not real. It’s artificially generated. Just like the weather. Just like the day and night cycle. Just like the foliage.
Well, the foliage was natural, it’s just not naturally occurring in here. It’s cultivated, tended to by trillions of microscopic machines, each making sure the plants are getting whatever they need to grow optimally. Just another thing that the machines are watching over.
I was in Habitat B.
It’s the set for “Kingmaker.”
The second of the Two Big Shows.
This had always been in the realm of possibility; I’d just assumed they would’ve talked to me first before throwing me into it. My name’s Alastair Neoni, and I was the winner last season on “Second Chance,” the other of the Two Big Shows.
“Second Chance” was set on Habitat A.
The air of B tasted a little cleaner, a little better than Habitat A. That’s no surprise, really. Habitat B is ten times as big, and it’s much better maintained. That’s why the show has the bigger audience. Well, one of the reasons.
“Attention Kingmaker participants,” a voice said into my jawbone, something I’m a little used to, although I’d’ve bet everyone else was freaking out. The bone conductor speaker implant is one of the easiest cybernetic modifications they give us before starting either show. It allows The Directors and our Coaches to communicate with us without giving our position away. But they still let the audience hear the directions we’re getting, if they want to. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. It’s situational.
Number One Rule of The Big Shows – Give The Audience What They Want.
“You will find that you cannot currently move or stand up because you are restrained,” the voice of The Head Director said into my skull, along with everyone else currently in Habitat B. “This is so you can be reminded of the core rules of Kingmaker. Every weapon in the arena is designed to be non-lethal but simulates a fatal injury. Should a player receive an injury that would normally ‘kill’ them, they lose one life. Each player has three lives. A player’s final life can only be taken by a member of their own gender. When the sun is down, you will be confined to a relatively small area, and the show will be on hold. No conflict may happen during this time. Attempting to eliminate a player when the sun is down will result in a loss of one life. There are two ways to win – be the last man standing, or be the man with the most points at the end of the 100 days. As per tradition, the winning man will be allowed to select five women to win with him, no more, no less. That man will be crowned CEO of this year’s selected corporation for Refreshment – Dreaded Technology, and the women will be his retinue.”
Damn. They weren’t playing around this year, were they? With only 500 corporations in the world, when one was chosen each year for Refreshment, it was always a big deal. For the last decade, they usually been pharmatech companies or transportation companies, for obvious reasons. Dreaded Technology, or DreadTech as they were usually referred to, were one of the five military/combat technology companies in the world. Hell, a lot of the stuff used in The Two Big Shows was produced by DreadTech. That meant they were going to be watching this a great deal more intently than they would a normal season of “Kingmaker” because they needed to know who’s going to be in charge of them once the game’s over.
I had to admit, the idea of the game being ‘non-lethal’ was pretty funny, because anyone who’d ever watched a season of “Kingmaker” knew there were a thousand ways around that particular loophole, and all of them typically won them favors from the audience.
We hadn’t had any such luxury on “Second Chance.”
“And here’s the live execution of DreadTech’s former CEO, Randal Eckerton the 3rd!” This part was just to let us know why we were still locked in place and nothing was happening to us. The home audience watched briefly as Eckerton was disintegrated before their very eyes. It’s kind of gimmicky, but it certainly sets the stakes, and gets the audience fired up. Last year’s Kingmaker, I’d been watching in a local tavern and the gathered crowd had drummed their beer steins against the bartop, and the bar’s neighborhood bookie had been taking bets on whether or not the guy would cry before he kicked it.
“There are twenty men and eighty women in this season of ‘Kingmaker,’ and they range across all sorts of skills sets, backgrounds and financial upbringings,” The Head Director continued talking. “As always, ‘Kingmaker’ is set in Purgatory, the abandoned city inside Habitat B. There are buildings, traps, tools, weapons and hideouts to be discovered, as the layout is changed every year in between games. And this year, we introduce a new twist – The Chain. If a male player trusts a female player enough to think they’ll stick with them to the end, they can add them to their Chain. If they do, each player in the Chain gains an extra life. If anyone on your Chain is eliminated, however, the entire Chain will be eliminated. It’s high risk versus high reward, on this season… of ‘Kingmaker!’ When we return, the contestants will be released from their shackles and will be let loose on the arena. Don’t miss it! Right after these important words from our sponsors.”
Everything goes into Freeze Mode and the artificial sun dims a bit, something I’m sure that’s coming as a total shock to almost everyone inside. When Freeze Mode is on, nobody in the Habitat can move, although we can talk. Most of the time, however, when Freeze Mode is on, we’re encouraged to talk to our Coach.
Speaking of which…
“C’mon, Al, this is old hat for you,” an extremely familiar voice, smooth like Scotch and chocolate, said in my head. “You’ve been through thousands of commercial breaks.”
“Jesus, Jill, is that you?” I laughed. “I figured after our performance on ‘Second Chance,’ they must’ve executed you. I certainly didn’t get my prizes from that show, but I figured that was from us circumventing the ‘unspoken rules.’”
Each player in either of the Two Big Shows was assigned a ‘Coach’ at the beginning of the season. That person’s fate was tied to their Player’s. If the Player won, the Coach won. If the Player was eliminated, so was the Coach. And if a Player actually died on the show, so did that player’s Coach.
Jill (or JJ I sometimes called her, on account of my habit of constantly saying “Jesus, Jill”) had been my Coach for ‘Second Chance,’ and part of our survival plan for that show had been to follow the rules to the letter, not the spirit of them. As such, we’d gotten a couple of warnings, but nothing we’d done had been explicitly banned by the rules, so we’d gotten away with it. We just didn’t get the winner’s treatment we’d been promised.
“The public got to vote on whether or not we’d won fair and square or not, and they decided we did, but that we also didn’t deserve to get away with that last big rule bend scott free. They voted to keep us as a team and enter us in ‘Kingmaker,’ which I think was more for their own edification than ours. But win or lose, as long as you live through this, you’ll get the prizes from ‘Second Chance.’ The public, however, wants to see if there’s rules you can bend in ‘Kingmaker,’ so that’s why we’re here, you and me both.”
“I didn’t sign a contract for ‘Kingmaker,’ Jill, so this is already starting on dicey footing.”
“Gotta learn to read those contracts closer, cowboy,” Jill said to me. “The contract you signed is good for both of the Two Big Shows, and you agreed to abide by their decisions regarding rule breaking. The price of our last little stunt from ‘Second Chance’ is we get to be the guinea pigs introduced to break the rules of ‘Kingmaker’ and see what we can get away with it.”
Jill was basically just a voice in my head, someone to help me keep sharp and give me space for planning, but she was damn good at her job. She was smart, sexy and confident, although I didn’t have a clue what she looked like, or even if she was real. There was always a chance she was just another AI, like all the Directors were. I didn’t think so, though. She’d felt too human, too fallible, too genuine. “That goes for you too, yeah?”
“It does,” she said in my head. “If you survive ‘Kingmaker,’ I get my second chance, no strings attached. And if you actually win the whole damn thing, I’ll be part of your entourage, although I don’t count as one of the five women you can have on it. But I gotta tell you, Alastair Neoni, CEO of DreadTech, it has a nice ring to it…”
“One day at a time, JJ,” I told her. “What odds are they giving me on the big board?”
“Eighteen-to-1, which puts you in the middle of the pack,” Jill said. “You’re not the front runner, but I think that guy’s gonna be one of the first out.”
“Anyone I’d know?”
“The former CEO of DreadTech’s son,” Jill told me. “Calls himself Quad. A paramilitary brat from day one. Trained in all sorts of armed and unarmed styles of combat. Think he was hoping it would be someone other than dearest Daddy’s company he’d be fighting to get control of, but here we are. He’s got four-to-three odds, but everyone’s missing out on the big key difference between ‘Second Chance’ and ‘Kingmaker.’ If he were your opponent back when you were on ‘Chance,’ I’d have been way more nervous. But here? Psssh. Guy’ll be out before the end of week two.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He’s a typical lone wolf alpha dog machismo bullshit trench rat. He’s not going to play well with others, and you’re gonna have to do that here.”
“You’re just looking forward to seeing me get laid, aren’t you?”
“I have to admit, cowboy, the thought has crossed my mind more than a few times since I started prepping for this last week.”
I furrowed my brow at that. “Last week? We were still in ‘Second Chance’ last week.”
“Negative, Al, ‘Second Chance’ finished up a little more than a month ago. You were dumped right into cryostasis a day or so after it finished, and were just dethawed this morning. That’s where your time loss is.”
“Great, just great,” I grumbled as I noticed the artificial sun start to warm back up, meaning we were coming back from commercial break. “Talk more later. Looks like we’re about to get this show rolling.”
“We’re back and it’s time to get started!” the Head Director’s voice said both in my head and to the audience across the worlds. Mars and the outer stations hated that they were on delay, but that was the price they paid for being away from the homeworld. “We are about to unleash the candidates upon Purgatory, but keep in mind, none of the players, nor the coaches, nor even you folks at home, know the current layout and conditions of the city, as they change from season to season, and Daedalus has made some very bold decisions regarding this year’s Purgatory, which you’ll discover at home along with our players. Many of our most popular features, including the Top Ten Most Requested Features from previous seasons, are back as you remember, or in some cases have been remixed and expanded! We don’t want to spoil too much in advance, but we can confirm that both the House of Mirrors and the Lust Garden will be making their return this season!”
“Well, the Lust Garden should be fun to watch,” Jill purred inside of my head, in between the Head Director’s spiel sections.
“As is tradition for ‘Kingmaker,’ there are loot boxes scattered throughout the arena, color coded in standard 7-color rarity, with red being the most common and lowest price and violet being the rarest and with the highest price. Each box contains either a weapon, to help you defeat your opponents, or a tool, to help you survive. Meal boxes also will arrive in similarly colored boxes, but have no price to open. The price to open a loot box is a rule which you will need to follow or a task which you will need to complete. Failure to follow a loot box rule will result in one loss of life. Loot boxes are hidden all over the arena, but additional loot and meal boxes will be air dropped in at regular intervals. Meals are dropped every eight hours, and the color of your meal box will indicate your current popularity among the home viewing audience. All other loot boxes can come any time day or night. Typically that means first thing in the morning, when programming starts and you are released from nocturnal lockdown, there will be a mad scramble for these loot boxes. That’s it, in terms of rules for ‘Kingmaker.’ Now get out there and prove you are the best humanity has to offer.”
I could hear the telltale ‘click’ that meant we were all unshackled, and the first thing I did was make my way over to the nearest tree, climbing up it with more than my fair share of practice. As expected, I was at the outer ring of Purgatory, like I suspected all the contestants were. Purgatory, or Habitat B, was a circular contained space with a five-mile diameter, and a mix of land, water, concrete, steel and titanium. The core of it, about a mile and a half in diameter, was Purgatory City, which typically varied from one to ten story buildings, and about as many subterranean caves, caverns, tunnels and basements beneath.
There were probably a couple of contestants nearby, but the last thing I wanted to do was be the first person someone spotted. I had no idea how they’d scattered them out, and it could there was another man within vision range of my current location. It was best to not draw attention to myself early on. There were tactical advantages on both sides of the argument – getting early allies could be beneficial in case I found a good defensible spot, but it also meant I might get some people who were dead weight. The tactics in “Kingmaker” were entirely different than they were in “Second Chance,” because “Chance” was a one-player-takes-all game, and “Kingmaker” had been devised to add sex and romance into the entertainment draw. I glanced around as best I could, but there was too much foliage for me to pick anyone out.
“There’s some fine pieces of ass in this tournament for you, Al,” Jill told me. “I mean, there’s some truly deadly black widows, but there’s also just a handful of utter model-level pretty eye-candy that would definitely get some audience surges in your direction.”
“Sure sure, but I don’t want anyone who hasn’t got half a brain in her head,” I told her. “Or, at least, I don’t want anyone like that to stay around for long. I’m not above love’em and leave’em tactics, if it comes to that, but I’m not pulling dead weight across the finish line, so you best start doing your homework on everyone else trapped in this place with me, because I don’t want to be caught flat-footed again, like I was with Dagger Donny.”
“He was intended to be a mid-season surprise, Al. They didn’t tell anybody about it, and you just happened to find him first. Nothing I could do about it.”
“Well, for the record, I still wasn’t happy about it.” I wasn’t worried about anyone listening in on my conversation. While the camera microdrones were always filming me and uploading me to the master stream service, the audio portions were only on when multiple players were together, or we were in immediate conflict. And when the audio portion was off, there was a blur filter over my mouth, to prevent lip reading.
The competition in “Kingmaker” got fierce, and Coaches had been known to try and get any advantages they could. Now, Coaches were locked in their own little pods and not allowed to communicate with the outside world, although they could do research on other competitors using any information the Directors had.
And, of course, they could check the betting stats and the popularity polls.
From the vantage point of the treetop, though, I could see Purgatory City off in the distance, although it looked more inviting in person than it did when I’d seen it on screens over the last twenty years. Each year, it looked a little different, but this year in particular, the edges were more rounded, the surfaces less cold, and the feeling more inviting.
Back when “Kingmaker” had started in 2126, it had been an attempt by the AI council to quell the raging riots, as “Second Chance,” which had started some thirty years prior, had done previously. “Second Chance” had kept humanity mostly in check for the entirety of its run, but in the in the early ‘20s, a movement called “Humanity For Humans” had started up, determined to overthrow the AI council that had been both humanity’s safekeeper and its warden for nearly half a century.
“Humanity For Humans” referred to “Second Chance” as ‘a modern bread and circus distraction,’ and I suppose they weren’t wrong, but with “Kingmaker,” the AI council had killed two birds with one stone. They had created a draw for people to watch, but it also gave them someone to root for, like the sports teams of old. And there was a certain sense of social upheaval, as whoever took over one of the Corporations inevitably made things better for the people who worked for that company, at least for their first few years.
Corporate humanity had settled into an all-too predictable pattern – those at the top started taking advantage of those at the bottom. As such, “Kingmaker” had been started. Each citizen had been given a fifty-question survey about the corporation they worked for, and the company that had lowest score annually was volunteered for the show, and their CEO was executed. A week before the show started, the five lowest scoring CEOs were sequestered and put into a holding cell, to think about how they’d let down their company, and then, when the show started, the ‘loser’ was announced and executed, and the other four CEOs went back to their lives with fear in their eyes, having watched the execution of their fellow corporate raider in front of their eyes.
During the time while the season of “Kingmaker” was on, the company being played for tended to be a bit in freefall, but the AI council also ensured it wouldn’t be taken too much advantage of during that period.
Any “Kingmaker” winner was given a ten-year grace period to turn the company around, and, to date, no company had appeared on the show more than once.
“Hey, JJ, now that I think about it, you gonna be part of my harem if I win?” I asked.
“I will, in fact, be one of your wives, Alastair, so I hope that isn’t a problem,” she purred at me. “I’m never going back to the Projects, but either way this turns out, I don’t have to. Even if you don’t win, as long as you survive, you and I are guaranteed private island life, the prize we were promised from ‘Second Chance.’ But if you win, well, being a corpo wife doesn’t sound like the worst option, even if I have to push a couple of gremlins out of my crotch.”
I remember back when I was a kid in school when they told us about the great AI neutering, how men were chemically castrated from the age of ten until they were granted ‘reproduction rights’ by the AI council, who reviewed all applications, so that the planet’s population wouldn’t escalate out of control again. Overpopulation had been one of the contributing factors to the birth of the AI council in the first place, along with global warming and the rise of fascism. But CEOs, they were exempt from that, and were granted reproduction rights as part of their position, considered to be ‘holy bloodlines.’ I’d actually won the right to have one singular child, as part of my prizes from “Second Chance,” but I’d made the one mistake I hadn’t considered – I’d become a crowd favorite.
Jill had told me as the season had gone on that I’d been more popular than any “Second Chance” player in the past twenty years, and that ratings for the show had been actually knocking on the lofty viewership numbers “Kingmaker” typically put up. That was up nearly forty percent, and that meant they’d exercised my option clause to get entered as a contestant in “Kingmaker.”
I was about to slide down from the tree when my eyes caught sight of an orange chest, just off in the distance, mostly covered by foliage, but my elevated position had given me a perfect eyeline to it, and I didn’t see anyone moving towards it. That was good, so I decided to make a go for it.
I maneuvered back down the tree quickly and quietly and started sprinting in the direction of the chest, using a particularly gnarly tree as a visual bookmark, so I didn’t get lost, because from ground level, the chest was completely obscured.
Orange was better than red, but not by too much. Still, there was a chance it could be a weapon, and having an advantage like that early was far too important to pass up. I reached the pile of vines and leaves and started peeling them away to reveal the orange chest, a box about the size of a shoebox.
I wiped my hand across the top of it, and the screen quietly blossomed to life, displaying the following: “On offer – B.A.G. Lvl 1, 2 rounds, duration: 48 hours. Price – Convince a woman to kiss you within the next 24 hours. Accept? YES / NO”
“No brainer,” JJ said inside of my skull. “Sure, those things are terrible at any real range, but it’s a lethal weapon with two shots in it, so as long as you’re up close, that’s two confirmed lives you can take off your fellow players.”
“And you’re not worried about me having to convince a woman to kiss me?” The initials stood for Basic Automatic Gun, although players tended to refer to them as Basic-Ass Guns instead. They were legitimately awful at hitting anything over fifty feet away, but at five-to-ten feet, they were a handy thing to have around. The duration meant that if I hadn’t used the two rounds in 48 hours, the gun would melt and disappear without me getting to use it. That happened a lot with the weapons in The Two Big Shows. Even the truly high-end stuff typically only came with a duration of a week, tops. Use it or lose it, that was the motto. “Hell, I gotta find a woman first.”
“Al, baby, that should be a no-brainer. The women are going to want to start forming alliances as quickly as they can, and all you have to do is tell the first woman you meet she can’t get in with you unless she kisses you. Knowing you, you’ll have this done in a matter of hours. And any weapon is better than no weapon, am I right?”
“Yeah, hard to argue with that,” I grumbled as I tapped the YES button and the top of the box flipped open. On the skin of my left arm, just above my wrist, a small little 24-hour countdown clock began ticking downwards. It was so I could tap it and get a reminder of what rules I was operating under during any given window. Once we were deeper into the game, there would likely be half a dozen of them covering my left arm at any given point. Inside of the chest was a small pistol with a trigger lock preventing its use. Once I’d completed the challenge, the lock would melt and I would have access to the firearm, but until then, it was just a giant paperweight clipped onto my belt. “Okay, weapon semi-acquired. Time to get out of here.”
The outer ring of Habitat B was dense, artificial jungle for a reason – to keep the players from encountering each other too early. One of the risks the early seasons of “Second Chance” ran into was exactly that – the players started the action too fast, and blew their wads before the audience had a chance to get invested in the characters of the show.
Say what you will about the AI directors of The Two Big Shows, but they learn and quickly. So as the seasons went on, they introduced verticality to Habitat A, putting some players high up in buildings and some down in the lower levels. That had helped, but when they’d built Habitat B, they’d expanded in all directions. They’d established green zones and red zones, so there could be places players could meet and have conversations without immediately attacking one another.
That was another reason why “Kingmaker” had been such an immediate hit beyond what “Second Chance” had brought in. It wasn’t just violence; the show had sex and romance and emotions as well. “Second Chance” had been purely about survival; “Kingmaker” was about forging a group of individuals to help you get through a continually escalating series of problems.
I hopped over the large artificial tree root and started moving towards Purgatory City, as I spoke to JJ again on the intercoms. “I’m sure you’ve already looked at all the women running around in her, Jill. Any ones I should definitely try to find? Any I should definitely try and avoid?”
“Too many options to worry about this early in the game, Al,” she said inside of my head. “Just remember, it’s a long way to the finish line, and just because you bring someone into your group doesn’t mean you have to keep them there.”
“We’ve been over this, Jill,” I tell her. “I play these games strategically, and if that means I leave some bodies along the side of the road, so be it.”
The sky above me flickered and I looked up to see a screen floating seemingly in midair. A list of ten names, mine included, each with a 3 after their name… except the last one. Whoever Yancy Visser was, he’d been the first to lose a life, and instead of a 3, had a 2 after his name, and was alone in 10th place, with the other nine of us still tied for 1st. Then one of the names moved from the pack, and Zero Croyden, whoever he was, moved up to be in 1st by himself, and the other eight of us into 2nd.
“That was quick,” I muttered to myself.
“FIRST BLOOD! Yancy Visser, you have lost your first life to a successful attack by Zero Croyden. As such, you cannot lose another life today, nor can you take anyone else’s life until tomorrow. Two more deaths, and you will be eliminated from ‘Kingmaker.’ To all our contestants, good fortune! And we will see one of you in the Winner’s Circle.”
I continued my pace, heading more and more towards Purgatory City, but as the foliage began to sparse out a bit, I slowed my tempo some, and took more time concealing my movements, hiding my tracks and muffling the sound of my progress.
The trees that surrounded me, the dirt beneath my feet, it was all one elaborately constructed habitat, and any of it could be trapped, tainted or toxic, so I needed to be careful. I’d studied Habitat A for nearly a month before the show started, but I hadn’t had any of the luxury time to devote to Habitat B, which meant all I really knew about it was what I remembered from growing up, watching the show, and even then, the Habitat changed so much from year to year, I couldn’t be sure how much good that would do me.
I thought I heard the sound of splashing water ahead, so I tried to move closer to get a better view. As I’d thought, there was a small pond, too tiny to be a lake, and in the center of it, I could see a singular figure swimming near the middle before they dove down beneath the surface.
I watched for a moment and then saw the figure return to the surface holding a small yellow chest, and as they swam towards the shore, I could start to make out the details of a woman in her early twenties, small, fit, with her hair tied back.
As she stepped out of the water, her suit began to vibrate, shaking the droplets loose, drying off the fabric as she glanced at the chest as she sat down on a log.
“Hello there,” I heard a feminine voice say, just before a fist clocked me in the face.
Comments
Shaqjor477
So it says that there are 20 men, but then the leaderboard only has 10 names on it? Did I miss something?
Kaywye
I am liking this story. I have only one nitpicky issue. The MCs name is Al and there are AI directors of the show that they speak about. When nice read either Al or AI I have to take a split second and/or re read the sentence to figure out which you meant. Lol. Otherwise I'm hooked!
