Chapter 35 : Green Tracksuits

Chapter 35: Chapter 35 : Green Tracksuits

B14 had been a darkroom once. Now it was mostly cardboard. A thousand green tracksuits had come in last Friday, fourteen boxes of them, and Noah had stacked them into a fort in the corner. He was asleep inside it.

Maya came through the door two minutes early with two coffees. She set one down in front of Ethan. "Buy one, get one free."

The café she’d gotten them from had never run a two-for-one in its life. Ethan didn’t point that out. He just drank.

Sam leaned in the doorway with a cup of his own. Kevin came in hugging a box of donuts, still in the yellow polo. Student Government had sent him over as its liaison. He said he’d volunteered.

Ethan flipped the whiteboard to its clean side and drew a long rectangle across the top.

"The football practice field. A hundred yards." He dotted a row along one end. "A hundred people on this line. At the other end, a pelican about ten feet tall."

Under the rectangle he wrote RED LIGHT, GREEN LIGHT.

Noah’s head came up out of the box fort, his hair flattened on one side. "Red Light, Green Light? That’s what you told the President? And he signed?"

"He didn’t sign because of the game," Ethan said. "He signed because of UCLA."

Above the middle of the field he drew a small square hanging from a line.

"Clear acrylic. It hangs off a boom lift right over the fifty-yard line, where every camera can see it. When the game starts, there’s a thousand dollars inside. Every time somebody’s eliminated, a guy from Sony walks up and drops in another thousand, on camera."

Noah started counting on his fingers and gave up halfway.

"Ninety-nine people out, one winner." Maya didn’t look up from her coffee. "A hundred thousand even."

"So the more people lose," Kevin said slowly, "the more the box is worth."

"And the more the ones still standing want it."

Ethan reached under the table, pulled out a neon-green Super Soaker, and set it down. The tank was already full of something red.

"You’re out, you get this. Right in the chest."

"What’s in it?" Kevin asked.

"Food coloring and water. It washes out. Hendricks tried it on his own shirt yesterday."

Sam picked it up and turned it over. "On camera, a splash of this on a green tracksuit is going to look like—"

"Exactly what you think it looks like."

Ethan had seen plenty of shows with rulebooks a dozen pages long, every page clever, and not one of them had worked. People watching at home didn’t want to learn rules. They wanted a game they could understand in one sentence, a number big enough to make their pulse jump, and somebody losing everything over it.

On the next line he wrote HIDE AND SEEK.

"Whoever’s left after round one gets fifteen minutes to hide anywhere on central campus. Hendricks takes twenty volunteers in pelican masks and goes looking."

"And the people watching online?" Maya asked.

"Every five minutes, I read one tip from the live chat over the PA."

Maya nodded. "You want people sitting at home to tell the seekers where to look."

"I want them to feel like they’re playing."

"Then how many people does my server have to hold at once?"

"Fifty thousand."

Maya nearly choked on her coffee. She grabbed a marker and started working it out in the corner of the board. "Three hundred kilobits a stream. Fifty thousand people is fifteen gigabits. The pipe we’ve got at One Wilshire is a hundred megabits." She tossed the marker down. "We’d be dead at three hundred."

"Then we don’t use our pipe."

"Whose, then?"

"Sony runs every trailer they put online through Akamai." Ethan already had his phone out. "They’ve got the account, they’ve got the bandwidth, and they’ve got a brand manager who really wants this to work."

The call to Ryan took four minutes. When he hung up, Ethan nodded at Maya.

"And on our end?" he asked.

Maya thought about it. "The switcher output goes into a capture card on a laptop. I write a little Flash app to push it out. Red5 on the server. It’s open source, came out this year. Three-twenty by two-forty, maybe thirty seconds behind. Don’t expect it to look good."

"As long as they can tell who’s still moving, it’s good enough."

"So we plan for fifty thousand?"

"Plan for fifty," Ethan said. "It won’t be enough."

Maya wrote 50,000 on the back of her hand and didn’t say anything else.

The third line said SHARE OR STEAL.

"When they sign up, everybody picks a safe partner. They register in pairs," Ethan said. "In the gym, partners sit across a table from each other. Two cards each. SHARE and STEAL. On three, they flip. Both share, we flip a coin and one of them goes through. One steals, the stealer goes through. Both steal, they’re both out."

Sam whistled. "You’re going to film thirty pairs of friends wrecking each other at the same time."

"Thirty tables. Thirty cameras."

Nobody said anything. Noah climbed out of the box fort and stood in front of the whiteboard, tapping a marker cap against his teeth.

"What if..." He stopped. "Never mind."

"Say it."

"What if there’s a line in the registration form. Tiny. Way in the back. Anybody who betrays their safe partner is out." Noah said it fast, before he could take it back. "They think stealing gets them through. Then after they flip, you read them page seven out loud, and the one who got stabbed in the back is the one who goes through."

The room went quiet. Kevin’s donut stopped halfway to his mouth.

For two seconds Ethan didn’t move. He’d turned this round over a hundred times and never once thought of that.

Then he grinned and clapped Noah on the shoulder. "Wax on, wax off."

"What?"

"You’re ready, Daniel-san."

Noah blinked, then caught up. "Did you just Mr. Miyagi me?"

Sam laughed out loud in the doorway.

Six weeks ago, Noah had been holding a camera because somebody promised him twenty bucks. Ethan wrote NOAH next to the line so nobody would ever forget whose idea it was.

The lines after that got headers and nothing else. THE VOTE. TUG OF WAR. FINAL.

"What’s the vote?" Maya asked.

"After round three, everybody votes. If a majority wants out, the game ends right there and whatever’s in the box gets split even."

"And if they vote to stop?" Sam asked.

"Then that’s the episode." Ethan capped the marker.

Maya didn’t push. She watched Ethan hook an arm around Kevin’s shoulders and steer him out the door, the two of them muttering about something in the hall. Whatever this guy was really holding, it was never the thing he wrote on a whiteboard.

She was right.

Out in the hall, Ethan kept his arm around Kevin’s shoulders until they were past the vending machines.

"You know everybody, right? Student Government?"

"Pretty much." Kevin sounded wary. "Why?"

"I need ten people nobody on campus would recognize. Theater kids, people who never leave the lab, whatever. They sign up, they play, they stay in as long as they can. When it comes to the vote, they vote to keep going."

Kevin’s face changed a little at a time. "Wait. Isn’t that... rigging it?"

Ethan clapped him on the back, hard enough that Kevin lurched half a step forward and nearly hit the water fountain.

"Kevin. You’re poli-sci." Ethan’s face was dead serious. "Every election in America. Besides voters, what else does it have?"

"...Candidates?"

"Observers. People standing inside the polling place making sure the process holds up," Ethan said. "These ten are observers. They just happen to be in tracksuits."

"Observers don’t vote."

"They do in my election."

Kevin opened his mouth. A year and change of political science, and he couldn’t come up with a single rebuttal.

"So what is this, exactly?" he finally asked.

"Insurance."

"Against what?"

"Democracy."

Kevin looked deeply wounded. Ethan might as well have torn up his textbook right in front of him.

"And nobody hears about it. Not even Noah. His ears go red when he lies."

"And when this comes out?"

"It comes out when I put it out." Ethan clapped him on the back again. This time Kevin was braced for it. "In the blooper reel."

The sign-up page went live that night. Facebook had opened to everyone three weeks earlier, no .edu address required anymore, and the event page Noah built had a one-line title. 100 PLAYERS. $100,000. ONE WINNER. Under it was a link to Maya’s site.

The form ran eight pages. Page one was your name and your safe partner. Page two was the release. The other six Ethan had written off a real network contestant agreement. Halfway down page seven was one sentence, the same size as everything around it. No bold. No red.

A player who betrays his or her designated safe partner in any round shall be eliminated.

By the next morning, thirty-six hundred people had signed up. Maya turned the back-end numbers toward him.

"Average time on the form is forty-one seconds," she said. "Nobody’s scrolled past page two. Not one."

"Good."

The draw ran live on the site Thursday night. Forty-eight of the fifty pairs came out of it, and every player got a random three-digit number. Five of those pairs were theater kids nobody had ever seen before. Nobody watching gave them a second glance.

The last two pairs Ethan had picked himself.

Dylan and Sierra, 041 and 218. Mac and Owen. The second Mac’s number went up, he posted in the comments. DESTINY.

Ethan had called Tyler the day before.

"Saturday?" On the other end, a ball smacked into a glove. "We’ve got a fall scrimmage against Fullerton. Coach’d kill me." A pause. "Save me a spot for the next one."

Ethan kept his word. He sat in the front row of Intro to Mass Communication on Thursday morning and took notes by hand on actual paper. Halfway through the lecture the professor stopped, pushed up his glasses, and made sure he had the right student. Across campus, Maya handed in her data structures midterm forty minutes early.

Friday afternoon, a Sony truck backed up to the loading dock behind the gym. Ryan Cho had ridden along himself, in sneakers, sleeves rolled to the elbow, helping carry boxes.

"They didn’t send me," he said. "I took a personal day."

The command tent went up at the edge of the football practice field. After dark, Maya plugged the last cable into the DVR, and the wall of Bravias inside the tent lit up one screen at a time. The empty tables in the gym. The empty ground floor of the library. The central lawn at night. One square after another.

Noah just stood there in front of it before he finally got a word out. "It looks like NASA in here."

"NASA doesn’t have this many Sony logos," Ryan said.

By Saturday morning, the football practice field looked like nothing SCU had ever seen.

A hundred people in green tracksuits stood in a line on the goal line, three-digit numbers velcroed to their chests, black on white. Over the fifty-yard line, the clear acrylic box hung from the arm of a boom lift, swaying a little in the breeze, one stack of a thousand dollars lying on the bottom. From every camera angle, the bell tower stood right behind it.

At the far end of the field stood Captain Pete’s big brother. Twice the height of the plywood pelican from Welcome Week, fiberglass, mounted on a motorized turntable, same sailor cap, same grin. Kevin had the switch.

The bleachers were full. Hendricks stood on the sideline with his hat pulled low. Under the money box, a man in a Sony polo held an aluminum case with ninety-nine banded stacks of cash inside.

Ethan picked up the mic. He didn’t say much. The rules took one sentence.

"When the pelican turns around, if you’re still moving, you’re out."

A hundred people shifted their weight onto their front feet. The noise in the bleachers dropped away a little at a time.

Kevin hit the switch. The giant pelican rotated slowly on its turntable until its back was to them.

"Green light!"

A hundred people broke off the line.

The pelican swung back around.

"Red light!"

A hundred people stopped dead.

In the middle of the field, somebody was still moving.