The Entertainer

Vladimir Borshch was a man of the middle ground, a soul with one foot planted in any number of worlds. Some called him the most neutral broker alive. Others dismissed him as a once-in-a-generation merchant who could sell a pebble off the pavement for billions.

The man himself, however, cherished a far finer title than those hollow labels. He preferred to be called an Entertainer.

A word that gathered, under a single ringing banner, anyone who produced and supplied entertainment. Didn't it already set the heart pounding? Didn't it detonate a confidence that anything — everything — was within reach?

That was why he could barely sit still. The greatest show on earth — conceived by his own hand, supplied by him alone — was about to be delivered beyond the walls of Seoul Southern Prison, and the anticipation was eating him alive.

"Boss. The prisoners deployed this morning have begun returning, one by one."

"At ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠last. The journey we spent so long preparing is about to bear fruit."

He took a swallow of vodka straight from the bottle, gazing absently at the chessboard laid out before him, then rose to his feet.

Recruiting the producers — the prisoners — who would manufacture his product had burned through no small amount of time and capital. But now that every inmate had been converted to death row, he had little left to worry about. Men who would never leave this place alive had no choice but to sign with him if they wanted to scrape together even one extra coin, and that signature meant descending into the Darkzone strapped with a bodycam and a GoPro.

Roughly half of the prisoners sent down that morning had contracted with him and personally manufactured a "show" with their lives on the line. All that remained was for the Entertainer to wrap the product and sell it.

"Inform the production team that work has come in. I want a broadcast out by tomorrow evening, even if it means they work through the night."

"Sorting the worthwhile footage alone will consume considerable time and manpower, sir. Even pulling an all-nighter, I'm not certain we can make tomorrow evening..."

"Are we short on money? Or short on people? We've already pulled in the outside contractors I requested, and you're still whining. Life must have gotten comfortable lately, Alexei."

"I-I'm sorry! I never meant—"

"Enough. Spare me the pathetic excuses and do the work."

"Yes, sir! The moment the contracted prisoners hand over their bodycam chips, we'll start immediately!"

"Good. Don't make me say it twice."

Having issued the warning a second time for emphasis, he turned and walked toward the vast monitor room.

The true allure of this entertainment venture was that it screened the thing even a nearly uncensored outside world could rarely taste: the raw cut. This was not people being carved up and seared according to a prearranged script. It was not amateurs playing dress-up and cobbling together a slasher movie.

Something that did not exist in this world. Something this world could never offer. A banquet of one-hundred-percent genuine, unfabricated, tear-jerking true stories, captured from a place that was never this world to begin with.

My clients are always starving for something new. Something that stings.

And among the big spenders, these were the biggest hands of all. They had long since exhausted nearly every piece of content a human being could consume. They routinely watched, savored, and lived through things an ordinary person could not invent in a nightmare. Which meant this was an opportunity.

A flat voice spilled from the radio clipped to his chest — the subordinate in charge of the classification team, reporting in.

"A monumental first reel. Send it to the main monitor room. I will watch the uncut original myself."

A moment later, a cluster of the room's countless screens flared and began playing the delivered footage like a cinema's oversized holographic display.

The star of the recording was a self-proclaimed veteran party leader with more than five Darkzone deployments under his belt. Dropped into a dim, modern-city-styled Darkzone, he and his companions immediately fanned out, picking over the surroundings and stuffing their packs with junk.

It was a thoroughly dull stretch — the kind that would need a decent trim before it became a product — but to someone laying eyes on the Darkzone for the first time, that very dullness would register as freshness.

The trick will be how well I preserve that freshness, and how long I can make it last.

Freshness, put another way, was a flavor that faded almost as soon as it was tasted. A client might savor the novelty of so this is what a Darkzone looks like — and in the next breath start complaining that the whole thing dragged.

If I want to manage that gap properly, I'll have to sit through a fair amount of this prisoner footage myself.

He was still turning the thought over when a dozen-odd minutes of viewing had already slipped by. Then the team on camera started combing through a strange Apartment Complex and the commercial streets around it, and the atmosphere changed all at once.

"What was that just now?"

"Some kind of sound you can't even describe, right?"

"To me it sounded like a starving mutt that's gone three days without food and finally lost its mind."

There it was — the passage that took a settled mood and slowly set it on fire. The man behind the camera flinched at the sudden howling and commotion boiling up from inside the Apartment Complex, but he and his companions pressed the search anyway.

The source of the noise was another party that had already been picking through the complex. A party fleeing something that screamed. A party locked in a savage running fight. A party that had stumbled into someone by accident and gone hostile on the spot. The cameramen held their breath and watched it all, quietly taking the angles.

The angle to dart out and put a knife in a weakened party's back. Or the angle to smell the danger and run like hell.

Privately, Vladimir hoped for the former. He leaned in and kept watching, thoroughly entertained.

"H-holy shit. What is that guy?"

"Did he just crawl down from the fourth floor, one story at a time?"

"Yeah. Those ones are dead."

Exactly as the men on camera said: a party tried to sucker-punch "the other party" and got the tables turned on them, and the whole thing was captured without a single frame of mercy. That "other" party was one Vladimir knew on sight — a newly formed crew whose leader had already become something of a sensation inside the prison.

The Super Rookie party.

The leader was a freshman Orange who had smashed the Darkzone profit record three clears in a row. His companion was Elena Blavatsky, a name not a single Slavic inmate in the place could claim not to know.

Decent footage, right out of the gate.

Anything that became a topic inside the prison reached the outside clients as a matter of course. More precisely, those clients were already tracking the prison's internal affairs in real time. A celebrity like the Super Rookie became content merely by walking into frame.

"Nothing good comes from getting mixed up with those two. We head south, as planned."

"Yeah. Besides, this Apartment Complex feels wrong. The sooner we're out, the better."

"More than that — has anyone else been hearing something like waves for a while now? Is it just me?"

"Now that you mention it... I think I hear it too..."

Here and there the conversation slid into exchanges that made no sense at all, but he saw no reason to cut those parts. Even a petty little riddle could be the thing that hooked a viewer's curiosity.

"The rest of this is nothing worth mentioning."

For a man who had swaggered about being a veteran party and scrawled his name across a contract, he had not exactly thrown himself into the Darkzone. One hour after deployment he had stuffed his pack with odds and ends and bolted through a half-collapsed tunnel. As a product, it was a defective unit whose value plunged toward zero.

Not the most satisfying result for a monumental first reel — but Vladimir accepted that, too, as an Entertainer's lot. Not every producer could turn out quality goods.

Still. I walked away with a rare reel of the Super Rookie and Russia's rising star working in tandem. I can call that a profitable deal.

Too awkward to lead with as a main feature — but dropped into a teaser? Served as an appetizer to wring every last drop of anticipation from the clients?

He could already hear them screaming without making a sound.

"What is it? I was in the middle of hatching an excellent plan."

"Is there a problem?"

"Send them through. I was lucky enough to catch the Super Rookie party in the first reel. We may fish something equally good out of these."

He hit play on the next batch of transferred footage — and could not believe his eyes.

"KYAAAAAAAH!"

"Fuck! What the hell is that!"

"Get it off! Get it the fuck off!"

"You idiot! Don't fall back, hold the line! Keep formation— AAAAAAGH!"

"H-help me! Is anyone there? Help me, goddamn it!"

Roars. Gunfire. Screams. The wet sound of meat coming apart. Explosions. Screams again.

That was the new world that detonated the instant he skipped, without ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ceremony, to the middle of the reel.

No amount of exquisite, meticulous CGI slathered over a frame could have been more realistic than this. It could not, because this was real. Not a B-grade horror picture. Not a slasher some amateur had thrown together in a weekend. And not those tedious little clips of terrorists executing a prisoner, or soldiers and mercenaries hosing down an enemy until the novelty wore off.

A cauldron of chaos and terror unfolding in a world entirely apart — the very thing they had been craving, the very thing this world could never serve them. The only currencies that circulated there were pain and death. Wraiths of despair who had gone all-in on a single thread of hope were testing the limits of what a body could endure.

"Kill that bastard!"

"Something just came out of the shipping contain— ghhk?!"

"It's the Super Rookie! The Super Rookie's here!"

"After him! If we want a real score out of this, we have to take him!"

"Damn it, where's the exit?! This is insane! We need to get out of here now!"

Why bother with dazzling CGI? Why pour hours into special makeup? Right there — vivid as a brand in the memories of prisoners who had gone down into the Darkzone with their lives staked on a handful of coins — a perfectly serviceable hell already existed.

"From the sea... something's coming up from the sea."

"I can hear the waves. Goddamn it! Can't you hear them? I said I can hear ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the waves!!"

"Wait. Something just surfaced... is that a ship?"

"Heh... heh-heh! Heheheheh! They're coming! They're coming! The ones that swallow hope and feed on yearning!!"

Vladimir sincerely regretted that this room was not a dedicated holographic theater. With surround sound slamming through the walls, with images that were both realistic and fully dimensional, with just enough editing to shape the thing — even drunk on vodka, every scene would have been stamped into his skull for good.

And at the same time, he could not begin to calculate the "price" he would collect if he offered this ecstasy to his clients first.

This was what he had wanted. This was what the clients wanted. This was the once-in-a-generation show the world itself was about to want.

This is it. This is what I've been waiting for!

Mayfly lives snuffed out for nothing in the footage. Pitiful lives clawing to survive even though their deaths had already been signed and sealed. A reel steeped in their grief and their savage attachment to living was, without the faintest room for doubt, art. It was entertainment itself.

But the main event is still this.

Vladimir worked the footage remotely until he found the Super Rookie party caught in the frame. At the far end of the cameraman's gaze, two backpacks stuffed to bursting moved side by side.

The Super Rookie party had started moving before any other prisoner alive. They ran for the lighthouse, slipping the monsters that had crawled out of the sea and the ones that had dragged themselves from the warehouse. There was Elena Blavatsky's performance as she tore through the pack of inmates hunting them, and there was the cameraman himself, choosing to fight the monsters instead of her, carving out an escape route. In the end he never chased the Super Rookie party all the way — but somehow, in a melee that made the mind reel, he lived, and he got out of the harbor. The reel ended on that dramatic escape.

It was nothing next to the Super Rookie. It was, however, more than enough of a showing. It was, in fact, far more impressive than the man who had delivered the first video. Personally, Vladimir felt almost moved to pay the man a fat incentive out of his own pocket.

Still. I can't help the disappointment. If I could just get my hands on footage that actually captured the Super Rookie party's exploits properly, I wouldn't ask for another thing.

This country had a proverb about not filling up on the first spoonful. Vladimir decided, with some regret, that he would be ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠satisfied with this.

That was when a report came in from the men holding the front gate — the kind of report that made a man sit up.

"What is it? Don't tell me the guards have come calling."

"...!"

Vladimir felt it fire — the merchant's instinct, sharp as a drawn blade.

This one could not be allowed to slip away.