We've built our confidence
on broken dreams now left for dead
yet we've been condemned
to chase these dreams that never end

As I Lay Dying, “The Forsaken”

Between dreams and nightmares

The dream ended in tears.

Lannie's tears, to be precise. I heard her sobs the moment I entered our apartment.

It was a gorgeous spring morning, the daylight was still pink-and-orange with sunrise and there seemed to be no one on the streets as I walked the short distance from the pod to our flat. The weather was dry enough that my knee was not aching for once and I'd had a pretty good night shift, so I came home in a relatively good mood.

Things had been looking up for us lately, after Lannie'd had her victory in the Euroleague. We were planning our marriage and maybe even a small honeymoon, delirious with the sheer sensation of our money problems finally being over. We'd managed to pay off the debts that had been killing us. Every moment I woke up, I thought I had been dreaming and it was not true after all – but it was, and the feeling was as wonderful as it was surreal.

But then I walked through the front door and I knew it was all over. The dream had lasted all but a week and a half. We were to be married in a month. I stood in the door opening of the living room and found her in a heap on the couch, crying heartbrokenly. From the disheveled state she was in, I gathered that she'd been at this for several hours now.

And somehow I knew. In that split second before I ran through the room and took her in my arms, I knew.

“I'm so sorry,” she choked out, burying her face in my neck. I could feel her tears wet against my skin. I held her tightly and didn't ask. I didn't need words to know what had happened. In the years, we'd had enough of these kinds of scenes. Arguments, screaming, blame, racking guilt... but above all, the addiction. It had loomed over us since we'd gotten together, like a ghost. It was so strong and overpoweringly present that at times I'd thought that we should just split up, that we were dragging each other down in a downward spiral we couldn't get out of. Still, despite everything we loved one another fiercely, more than even the addiction. And we understood one another. By now we carried enough guilt towards one another that the blame game didn't even apply to us.

I should have been outraged, I should have been screaming at her. We'd finally/finally/ been in the clear. The nightmare had been finally over, we had stopped our gambling. And now this? But all I felt was a numbness. It had been too good to be true anyway, too unreal to ever have a chance on existing. And on a deeper, more base level, I was perhaps a little glad that it wasn't me who had destroyed our dream.

“I didn't mean to,” Lannie sobbed against my neck. She was limp and heavy with exhaustion, heavily leaning onto me. “I wanted to- oh God, I wanted to give you a gift and I blew it all... I'm so fucking stupid... I ruined it all...”

It all started with how we met – in a betting station. I was interviewing for a job after the company I used to work for had abruptly gone bankrupt and we were all laid off with about ten minutes notice. Since I was a frequent visitor of the betting station, I thought I'd give it a shot. After all, I had enough knowledge of the subject – I had worked in real estate, so I knew all about flows of money and how to manipulate them.

I got the job, mostly because I was friendly already with the guys who interviewed me. And there Lannie was. She had purple hair back then, a brilliant hue of violet that she accentuated in her choice of clothing. I thought she was radiant and flirted with her, until I found out that she was the girlfriend of one of the other employees. But as things go, she and I ended up in bed together.

We were madly in love. She was cute, sweet, funny, but also tough and independent. She was into athletics as much as I was, and we dreamed of participating in the Fortress or the Rookie League one day. We would lie in bed after steamy sex on a hot summer evening with all windows open and the fan blowing, and think about what it would be like to participate in the League, instead of staying up all night to watch legendary League matches. It was just dreams. If one would have told us back then where we would end up, we would have laughed... we were so young and naive. We pulled all-nighters at the betting station, biting our nails during League matches, laying in our own money on competitors. Lannie was a complete fangirl of Donny Wellington, for example. She also had a lot of money riding on his girlfriend, when she participated in the Fortress. When the girl drowned, we lost so much money that we were kicked out of our apartment and live in my car for a while. That's how bad things got. Then a few weeks later we earned the money back in another match, but it was always a thrill how bad it could be, or how good.

The most money we ever won was during the now legendary Li-Nguyen match in the Asia League. That was the best moment we ever had, and the highest amount. We threw a wild party with the prize money (nearly spent half of it on one big drugged and boozed up haze, but it was worth every penny). We lost the rest of it during the next match, but the delirious happiness stayed with us anyway. But then the debts started accumulating, and suddenly we found ourselves with a sinking boat that we didn't know how to keep afloat anymore.

We started training in earnest in a last-ditch effort to maybe make some money in participating in the Fortress, and later the League... if that would work. We practiced with shock rifles and found that we were both good shots – Lannie even a bit better than me. I had more strategical insight than she did on top of a lot of mock combat experience in lasergames and paintball, though, so we decided that I would enter the prelims for the Fortress. She would go for the Rookie League, where they shot blanks and utilized stun guns.

We were doing pretty okay for a while there, too... and then the real hit came.

We bet it all on the Stateleague of 2304; the game that everybody remembers: the one that Valentina Marin won against all odds, after an exhausting cat-and-mouse game with Laurent le Blanc. It was nerve-wracking to follow that match. Lannie and I had thought that Valentina, impulsive as she could be, wouldn't last against a strategical genius as Le Blanc. Good as she was, we didn't think she had it in her to win the State League for the third time, and especially not against quality stuff like Le Blanc. He was ice cold, that guy. And his stats with those dual guns were better than hers, too. In the end, it was Valentina's fire that burnt Le Blanc... and our money.

Things were earnestly going wrong now. I was in the preliminaries at that point, fighting for a spot in the Fortress. It /is/ possible to die in the prelims, everybody knows that. Lannie would agonize a lot over that, but I told her that I'd be fine. I didn't want to die, I had something to live for, I told her. I loved her so much, that I wanted to make it all right again. It was a simple fact that the prize money was higher if you had a chance to die in the Game, so thus I had to go for the more dangerous games.

I fought myself through the prelims, and then I entered the Fortress. And that's where it all went wrong – there was that one split moment on the roof. That one little moment. I still have nightmares of being too slow. Lannie'd always had faster reflexes than I did. But that's where it happened. There was a rocket launcher going off. I was too late to spot him, too late to shoot him instead.

The only thing I could do was jump out of the way, but that's where two things happened. The first thing is that I got hit in my leg and my knee was completely shot to shit. And the second thing was that I was on a fucking roof, and I fell three stories. I don't remember any of that, though. I woke up in the hospital, with Lannie sitting next to my bed. She was wide-eyed and quiet, her blue eyes bloodshot with too little sleep.

In the end it was my sweetheart who broke me the news that the Corporation had only done enough in terms of first aid so I wouldn't die. I'd been suffering of a severe spine trauma after my fall and they'd fixed that alright, however my knee was so shot up and missing parts that a regeneration device could not do anything for me. So they'd transferred me to a normal hospital where doctors did the rest of the work on me. Regen technology was not commonplace because it remained bloody expensive. Game participants are patched up mostly during battles in the Fortress, but the finer work (like my mangled leg) is left to normal hospitals.

And they billed us. It ruined us all over again, the bill we had to pay to the hospital. They fixed up most of it, but it would always hurt with bad weather... never mind the limp. From that moment on it was impossible for me to participate any longer in any game. I was too invalid for it. You need your knee to turn, to jump, to walk, to run. I couldn't do that anymore, not in the way I used and needed to.

So that's when Lannie decided to go for the finals in the Rookie League. It was now all up to her, she would be our only source of substantial income. I loved her for her determination, for her courage. When Lannie wanted something really badly, she would get it. I'd fought for money, back then, but she fought so much harder, so much dirtier than I ever could. She worked out day and night, read up on all literature there would be... but most of all, she was great with the media. Because the media noticed her. Our story had a certain sense of tragedy to it, and they loved it.

As she fought her way through several amateur leagues, money started trickling in. She gained sponsors, media attention. I did all of her secretary work, coached her during her exercises and fitness. I massaged her long hours after training sessions and matches, I pored over battle strategies with her. I tried to help her as much as I could. She gratefully let me do it, but I felt that it was never enough, it was never what had to be done. I should have been the one in there, talented as she might be. Maybe she was the better one of the two of us, the faster one, but I felt a horrible partner to her that I let her get out there.

She never complained, though. She even relished in it, in the fans, the media attention. Sometimes we'd lay in bed at night, cuddled up, and she would say in the darkness: “Maybe this is was meant to be for me. Maybe I was born for this...”

I loved her too much to refute. She /was/ brilliant in the Arena, truly. Despite her holes in her game strategy, she had stats that would put several League champions to shame. She was lucky, too. “All the luck I don't have in money, I do have in the Game,” she would laugh. But after that, we started to have luck in both. First there was sponsor money, but then bits and pieces of prize money started coming in. And by smart betting (I always bet on my Lannie/always/) we were able to double, triple, or quadruple the prize money. Suddenly we were paying off debts, filling holes in our sinking ship.

And then Lannie qualified for the Rookie Euro League. That's when the media circus truly began. One day she was checking out the nets on her touchscreen (courtesy of one of her sponsors) while soaking in the bathtub and squealed that she had her own /fanclub/. We popped open the bubbly at that, it just seemed too weird and too fantastic to be true. It felt as if we were dreaming those weeks before the final of the Rookie Euroleague. One big dream, flashing before our eyes. Paparazzi in the bushes, screaming fans, sponsor offers going through the roof. With sponsor money alone we could pay off half our debt already. Lannie and I, we were living on a golden cloud. It seemed like right now, after seven years of disaster, our seven years in the sunlight had finally started. Because she won, of course. My Lannie won the Euroleague in a thrilling battle. It was a close thing, but she won fair and square due to her superior reflexes and her quick thinking. Sometimes her improvisations were sheer genius – and this had been one of those moments. I was so proud of her I could have exploded.

That was when we started to discuss marriage. With our debts for 95 erased, we finally were able to get married, so we could afford to be financially dependent on one another. One night, Lannie asked if she should use the money she would win with her next wins to contact that doctor she had heard about, who was said to be able to use cybernetic implants to fix people. “Maybe he could fix you up again,” she mused.

“I'm not broken, Lannie,” I said, even though I was. Even though I resented it. “And besides, it's going to take forever for you to get that kind of money. I've heard those prizes, it's more than you could win and earn in five or ten years, sweetheart. It's okay.”

“No, it's not,” she said vehemently. She'd sat straight up in bed, sheets falling away from her. The streetlights and neon signs from outside our window illuminated her lovely body. “It eats away at me that I win and win, while you sit at home like a fucking invalid. I've never seen you more alive than when /you/ were the one doing the winning Walter, and I hate to see you in pain when it rains, or when you turn too quickly. Or the look in your eyes when we have to climb stairs. Dammit Walt, I hate it!”

“Don't worry about it. It just is that way. And maybe in five or ten years, we indeed can afford such a medical procedure,” I soothed her. “It's fine.”

That was last week. And now this. Of course I understood what happened. As her story was blurted out in bits and pieces, between the tears, the image painted itself. There had been a match last night. And Lannie had gone to a betting station, betting all of her Euroleague prize money. Not to my department, but to another one in the neighbourhood, so I wouldn't know. I wanted to kill them for not stopping her. I wondered if they could have, because Lannie usually got what she wanted. She was the kind of person that everyone wanted to see smile. Hell, I know I always gave her what she wanted just to see that radiant smile.

She had lost it all. And beyond. We were neck deep back in debt once again, like the whole Euroleague had never happened. We were back at square one, back in the nightmare.

“I wanted to give you the surgery as a wedding present,” she wept. “I'm so sorry. I ruined it all...”

That she did. But I couldn't find the heart to blame her, because in the end it might as well have been me. Eventually. We were just so hopelessly fucked up, one of us was bound to abruptly end that dream one day.

I just held her and told her I loved her for trying to make me better, trying to help me. I also told her that she was a stupid fucking idiot, but that I still loved her anyway. What was there to say? What was there to do?

Eventually she fell asleep, exhausted. I brought her to bed and lay next to her, staring at the daylight-illuminated ceiling as outside the city was waking up. Life outside was going on even though our life was ruined once again. Our dream had ended... again. I felt numb. I stared at that ceiling for several hours in a bleary haze of depression and sleep deprivation when suddenly the doorbell rang.

I cursed and shot on my jeans, walking to the door barefoot and bare-chested.

When I opened the door, I saw two men in Corporation uniforms and a tall russet-haired man in a black suit in front of me. The man in the suit looked familiar, but I couldn't quite place him.

“Mister Lane?” the man in the suit asked.

“Yeah. Can I help you? If you're here to collect the money, I'm sorry but-”

The russet-haired man smiled a smile that made me abruptly shut my mouth. “Please, mister Lane,” he said. “My name is Young, I'm here on behalf of Stender and the Corporation. I am busy organizing the World League and I have an offer for Lannie Williams that she might find interesting. Can we come in?”

And that's when the nightmare started in earnest.