Subjugation on Broadcast
Dong-hyun opened his eyes onto a sun-drenched plain. Men and women in identical clothes lay scattered across the grass, every last one of them stirring as if they'd just been torn from sleep.
"Wh-what the hell?! Where are we?!"
A man who looked to be in his forties or fifties lurched to his feet and bellowed. The shout sent the others scrambling up, eyes darting around in a panic.
What the hell? Wasn't this supposed to be a broadcast?
Even Dong-hyun couldn't make sense of it. The theme had been Subjugate Them on Broadcast, so he'd figured he'd be breaking some celebrity. Whatever this was, it wasn't that.
A groan slipped out of him. The headache arrived right on cue. This was the third time he'd gone through it, and it still hadn't gotten any easier — a strange, invasive sensation, as if an entire life were pouring into his skull, paired with a dull, splitting pressure that made his head feel ready to crack.
This body belonged to a man named Ahn Jin-woo. Twenty-eight years old. His memories were a highlight reel of beatdowns and shakedowns — a gangster, in a word. He'd been brawling with a rival crew when someone cracked him across the back of the skull. He'd blacked out. And this was where he'd woken up.
Dong-hyun got to his feet and started counting heads. Everyone was moving, so an exact tally was tough, but it looked like about thirty people. The gender split seemed roughly even.
For now, he stepped back and quietly took stock, trying to figure out how this was going to play. The place was a genuine wasteland — no mountains, no trees, nothing in any direction. The grassland stretched on forever, beautiful in a desolate way, and it offered not a single clue which way to go.
Then the ground began to tremble.
A deep, rolling vibration shuddered up through the earth, and a section of the plain heaved upward. A massive gate rose from the upheaval. It swung open, and a squad of men in black uniforms and white masks poured out, fanning around the crowd until they had everyone surrounded. Drones dropped out of the sky.
Every one of them wore a white mask — except for a single figure in a clown's face, who stepped forward.
"Hello, everyone! I'm Joker, and I'll be your host for Winner Take It All!"
He bowed with a clown's exaggerated, ridiculous flourish.
The middle-aged man from earlier stormed straight up to him.
"Who the hell are you people?! You're the ones who kidnapped us!"
He looked ready to throw a punch, shouting as he closed the distance.
"Whoa, whoa... Contestants, please. Settle down. We've brought you here to offer you an opportunity."
"Opportunity my ass!"
The man had his fist cocked, ready to swing — and then his body locked up cold.
"I said settle down. Am I speaking a foreign language?"
Joker had drawn a pistol from somewhere and pressed the muzzle against the man's forehead.
"Th-that's a toy, right? There are no guns in Korea..."
"Heh heh heh. Shall we test that theory against your skull?"
"N-no..."
"Shame. I've never actually pulled the trigger. I was rather looking forward to it. Now, would you kindly return to your place?"
The man stumbled backward.
"Alright! Sorry about the little interruption. Let me start over."
"Winner Take It All — Win-Tae-All for short — will be broadcast worldwide. You are the contestants. Of course, the only people watching this are elites. The kind of people who run global corporations."
Joker kept talking. So this game was a toy for the world's richest.
"The sole survivor of this game will receive a prize of fifty billion won — along with the authority to turn every other contestant standing here into their slave. That includes the power of life and death."
The crowd erupted the instant he finished. Slaves? In the modern world? It was insane.
"Who the hell signed us up for this?"
A woman stepped forward this time. She had a taut, athletic build — the kind of body that said she'd spent serious hours in the gym.
"Hmm... You've already been entered."
"On whose authority?"
"Authority? Whose permission do we need? We decided to do this. We picked you, too."
The sheer absurdity of it shut her mouth.
"That's... that's ridiculous..."
Joker tapped at a tablet in his hand a few times, then spoke.
"Cho Yu-min, yes? The fitness YouTuber. Woke up yesterday and found yourself here. Must be quite a shock."
So that was her name. One of the five subjugation targets. Dong-hyun's eyes lit up. Identifying who he needed to break was the first priority.
"An Arab prince watched your videos and requested that you be entered this season. That's why you were selected."
"What? That's a thing? Someone just says they want me in and you people kidnap me?"
"Of course it's a thing. He sponsored us to the tune of a hundred billion won to make it happen."
Throw enough money at them and they'd snatch whoever you wanted and drop them here. That tracked for someone famous like Cho Yu-min. But who the hell would pay to have a two-bit gangster like Ahn Jin-woo grabbed?
"Then what about me?! Who paid to have me kidnapped?!"
The middle-aged man shouted again. It was the question on everyone's mind.
Joker flicked through his tablet once more.
"Kang Woo-ram. Age forty-seven. Yesterday you drove drunk, hit someone, fled the scene, then wrapped yourself around a roadside tree and passed out. We scoop up garbage like you for free. Who in their right mind would pay money for a maggot like you? We just take you. In short — the people standing here were either sponsored by someone, or they simply got lucky. So don't waste your energy thinking too hard about it."
In other words, a good chunk of them had been snatched at random.
"And if we refuse to play?"
A man who'd been listening quietly raised his hand.
"The game proceeds as scheduled. Refuse to participate and you'll be treated as having lost — which means you become someone else's slave. And if you still won't obey after that?"
Fear flickered through the crowd. Joker talked about people as if they weren't people at all.
Dong-hyun, though, found himself thinking of it as just another game. To subjugate everyone, he'd need to win this thing. Or at the very least, turn his five targets into slaves before he got eliminated.
"Alright! Let's begin the first game. Think of this as a warm-up. A monitor will display a sequence of colors. Memorize them and answer when asked. That's it. You'll be ranked by how many you get right. In the event of a tie, older contestants rank higher. Starting from first place, you'll have the right to choose your opponent. Once sixteen pairs have been formed, each pair will compete in further games for the right to enslave the other."
In short: a memory game, and the winners got first pick of who they wanted to face. Whether the next round would be physical or mental was anyone's guess, but picking someone you could beat was clearly the play.
"Ah! One more thing I should mention. If both members of a pair choose not to compete and opt for mutual cooperation instead, neither becomes a slave. You'll remain equals on the same team. Do keep that in mind!"
A few people looked visibly relieved.
"Now then! Eyes on the monitor!"
Like it or not, they needed a good score, so everyone locked in. There was no opting out. A higher score meant first pick of your opponent — and that was everything.
The colors flipped every three seconds. There were a hundred of them. Nobody was expected to memorize all hundred. This was just a ranking exercise.
"I assume you've all memorized the colors. Time for the questions. Pick up the colored papers in front of you and hold up the first color. Everyone looks ready, so let's begin. Hold up the paper for the first color."
A countdown ticked down from five on the monitor.
There were exactly thirty-two people here, and of course everyone remembered the first color: green. No one had dropped out by the fifth color, blue. Then came the sixth — and one man got it wrong. He sank to the ground in despair. After that, they started falling one by one.
The staff began checking off the eliminated, name by name. By the thirtieth color, only four people remained.
Dong-hyun was one of them.