It’s the eighteenth of March here in Australia, which means I’ve just turned another year older. We’re still fixing things up after the cyclones and floods in our neck of the wood, so it’s going to be a quiet one this year.
While I’m skipping the customary birthday selfie this year, I’ve still got a celebratory thing for you all. Turns out I’ve written a bunch of stories about birthday parties over the year, and I’d largely forgotten about this one until my “on this day” log reminded me.
It’s a story about birthdays and parties and social media, and probably a pretty good argument for why I should never be trusted with any of the three.
It also feels a lot more plausible than it did a few years back, when I first wrote it.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
Leitner’s birthday is sponsored by Cuervo and livestreamed on Facebook, Jitterbug, and A26. Vintage socials because Leitner’s whole brand is retro, bleakly obsessed with the parts of the Weft that nearby tore down the world with their reckless approach to interconnectivity. It’s 10:13 and Leitner is already trashed and shirtless, screaming insults at the Korean contingent who Wefted in rather than booking a flight or passage via transmat.
“You’re ruining the authenticity,” he bellows. “This whole night lives and dies on the strength of the aesthetic.”
Bobbi tells him to calm down, and Leitner turns his rage on her. Tears strips off his best friend, precise verbiage trying to conceal the fact he’s six tequila shots past sober.
Fucking Leitner, we all think. Here we go again.
This, too, is part of the spectacle. It’s part of the reason people RSVP yes when Leitner throws a bash.
There are three hundred and fifty-three bottles of Cuervo at Leitner’s party and one of them—randomly selected, unmarked and undistinguishable from the rest of the bottles in the crate—came laced with explosive nanos set to trigger at the time of Leitner’s birth at 11:54 PM. At the appointed time, those of us who drank from the bottle will rupture, splattering nearby partygoers with blood and internal organs. The nanobots will shape the remaining viscera into the Cuervo logo, equal parts confession and product placement on the streams. Leitner brought me in to run the calculations during the planning stages of the party, figuring how many guests he could afford to lose and still meet the numbers he promised to his sponsors.
Fucking Leitner, I thought. Only you would think murdering your friends for profit is a good idea.
But I’m a professional, so I did the numbers and delivered an acceptable total.
I accepted the invitation because I wanted to see it happen, just like everyone else.
Leitner’s story: they have groomed him for this since birth, a third-generation influencer whose grandmother went big on the TikTok before it turned into a battleground between China and the rest of the world. His mom grew up on Jitterbug, captured the heart of a streaming audience that numbered in the millions. All the firsts in her life were sponsored, broadcast, and remixed. Leitner shares his mother’s cheekbones and affection for the spotlight, although he abandoned his original fair-haired, dimpled aesthetic to become the bad boy of the Weft.
Leitner’s birthday’s celebrated in the heart of an old reactor. He’s set up a portable transmat station so folks can port in directly, and those of us who come in old-school are blind-folded and escorted from a pre-approved checkpoint to ensure we’re not exactly sure where the festivities take place. Fucking Leitner thinks about these things early, brought in a swarm of two hundred drones to shoot the footage for the streams.
A passing server offers me a shot, along with a pinch of lemon and a slice of lime. I’d idly considered trying to sneak in a sensor, but I assumed Leitner prepared for that eventuality just in case somebody tried it. Each shot is a game of explosive roulette, and he isn’t going to let me bypass it.
Bobbi Pinn is Leitner’s plus one and partner in crime on the Weft. They’ve been publicly together for three years now, and I’d argue he’s been getting worse since they fell into one-another’s orbit. It was her idea to invite the Koreans Leitner spent the last twenty-minute berating for their temerity to attend via Weft.
Leitner dresses to make an impression—leather pants, the left side of his head buzzed down to stubble—but Bobbi’s aesthetic is simpler. Flannel, thick glasses, and sturdy boots. Protective colouration. Her first viral featured Bobbi tracking some of her grandmother’s Truther friends through the woods of West Virginia, taking them down one-by-one with a bowie knife and a slingshot.
She spots me downing my first shot and carves a path through the crowd. “Ellis Parker,” she says. “Thought knew better than to show up for something like this.”
I peck her on the cheek. “Thought ‘this’ was your idea, somehow.”
“Not this time. The students surpassed the master this year.” Bobbi offers a grimace, hiding her pride. “Fucking Leitner.”
“Fucking Leitner,” I agree, and signal a waiter to bring is another shot. I take two, and offer the second to Bobbi.
She accepts with a tight grin. “He tell you how many people this will kill, in the end?”
“I’ve run the numbers. The odds aren’t awful. One in one hundred and twenty-three, and maybe one in three will do enough damage to be fatal.”
Bobbi shakes her head. “I prefer a game of skill. When you lose, you almost deserve it.”
I know how the game is played, and why she’s telling me all this. There’s a drone hovering just above eye-level, discretely recording our conversation and broadcasting on the streams. Even now, with their numbers down compared to the major players, this data will be consumed by millions and recut for future consumption on the parts of the Weft where people really gather and tastemakers decide who wins and who loses.
Bobbi Pinn expects all this to go wrong, and our conversation is the shield against the inevitable backlash.
I mingle. I drink. I meet new people and flirt with a tank girl from the streets of Kyiv, one of the next-gen adopters of the original movement who focused on reclaiming rusting tanks from war zones rather than buying the beasts brand new. As Leitner’s parties go, it’s one of the better ones, not least because I keep my head down and avoid the host’s notice.
It can’t last forever, and it doesn’t. Leitner corners me at 11:03 PM, just as the atmosphere inside the reactor chamber shifts in response to the alcohol consumed and the impending time of detonation. He grips my hand and pulls me in for a hug, slapping my back with exaggerated force to ensure the cameras get it.
“My dear fucking Ellis, I’m so pleased to see you here,” Leitner says. “I thought I’d spooked you when I laid out the plans.”
“It’s your birthday. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“You’re a sweet human being, Ellis Parker,” Leitner says. “Come with me, for a moment. I’ve got something you’ll want to see.”
He offers a hand and I take it, content to follow him through the throng. Three drones break off from the cloud overhead, following our movement. The party is in full swing now, everybody’s sweat tinged with the sharp scent of tequila and desperate hope they haven’t drunk from the tainted bottle.
Leitner leads me off the main floor, through winding corridors, to the control room. The small console is one hundred percent hardware, plastic buttons in a metal chassis, no hint of the hard light interface or AR overlays of modern tech. One drone hovers at the top of the doorway. Another slips through and takes position up in the eaves of the control room, inching sideways in the search for a good shooting position.
“I’ve got a gift for you,” Leitner says. “A little thank-you for all your help.”
He produces two powder-blue tabs of MDMA. Vintage drugs, no real tailoring for your individual biome or mental norms. Both are stamped with a crow in flight, and he dots one against his index finger to offer it to me.
“I had a friend of mine doctor these in the lead-up,” he said. “Tachyon infused to slow the passage of time, and there’s nanos with a fifty-percent chance of blocking the explosives in the lethal bottle. Figured you might want to tip the balance, make sure you walk out alive.”
I snag the pill and pocket it, all too aware of the cameras overhead. Leitner wants me to decide live, show the world whether I’m willing to play by the rules or live by the odds we’ve calculated.
Fucking Leitner, man. I tell you. He’s even worse than his lady friend.
The clock ticks towards the appointed hour. Questions overheard in the countdown:
“The thing I really want to know is how much is he leaving to chance?”
“I bet you any money we haven’t drunk enough to get to the tainted bottle. Some bastard servers going to go up a week after this party’s done.”
“It’s not like Leitner to bend the rules, is it? He doesn’t do that shit, yeah?”
“You know what I wanted for my birthday? It wasn’t killing a whole bunch of friends.”
“We’re acquaintances at best. Do you really want to die for a casual acquaintance?”
I decide I don’t like these people. I don’t know how Leitner stands them.
Then I hear it, from a Balinese streamer who flew in on the same flight I did. “Did Leitner offer you, you know, MDMA? Some of the special MDMA for his special friends?”
And in that moment, I see another game, something more than chance. A wheel ticking alongside the first wheel, and it’s no longer a game of chance.
Fucking Leitner, he’s smarter than he looks, and so many folks are going to pay for it.
It’s coming up on 11:50. Leitner’s nowhere to be seen. I search the dance floor, then the bar, then the corridors leading up to control panel. No sign of the birthday boy, but I find Bobbi Pinn. She slouches against the viewing window overlooking the central chamber, her eyelids heavy and her gestures languorous from more tequila than seemed sensible.
“Ellis Parker,” she says. “Still alive, I see.”
“Four minutes until anyone dies. We know nothing for sure yet.”
“No, I guess we don’t.”
Bobbi Pinn can’t hide the ghost of smile, the smug confidence of a woman who believes she’s been spared. My MDMA still burns a hole in my pocket, promising that death will pass me over regardless of the odds. I’m guessing Leitner offered her a similar taste of surety, and Bobbi wasted no time in downing the ecstasy.
Bobbi asks: “Have you seen Leitner anywhere?”
I haven’t. Not for a half-hour now, and Leitner doesn’t fade into the background. Hair raises on the back of my neck, and the drone hovering overhead shifts position to get a close-up.
“Bobbi, did Leitner give you something? Did he offer you a way to skip the blast?”
Her head lolls to one side, her glasses askew on her nose. She’s drunk and stoned on MDMA, otherwise, she’d see it too.
“Of course. That man fucking loves me,” she says. “He gave me the option to be safe, if I wanted to be sure.”
The gall of it is breathtaking. Fucking Leitner. I pull the pill from my pocket, show it to the drone. I offer the streaming audience a wink, then deliver a statement of my own. “Thanks for the offer, bud, but I prefer to let fate play this hand just like everyone else. If I’ve drunk from the poison chalice…”
I drop the pill onto the floor. There’s a bottle of Cuervo on the control panel, and I take another slug. It burns, going down, and my stomach is churning, and I hope I understand the game now. I hope I’m reading the situation right, that Leitner isn’t playing a game with wheels within wheels within wheels, because then I’ve fucked myself.
11:54 PM. The hour of Leitner’s birth. The hour when one hundred and thirty-seven nano explosive clusters detonate, punching holes in flesh and internal organs. Bobbi Pinn’s stomach splatters against the control room’s console and viewport. On the floor, the Balinese streamer is ripped to shreds, blasting those around here with a shower of gore and viscera.
Fucking Leitner appears on the makeshift stage erected for the party’s DJ. The Cuervo logo is everywhere, splattered on walls, on ceilings, on the stained clothing and flesh of other partygoers. The streaming numbers must be through the roof, and Leitner beams like he did in the streams of his youth, his sallow features dimpled and eager.
“My friends,” he announces. “My excellent friends… you have all chosen wisely.”
There’s a roar from the survivors as the music kicks in, and the party gets into the mood. I should go down there, be part of it. Celebrate my friend’s ingenuity and the numbers this stunt will pull. The sponsorships he’ll pick up for his next stunt, the boundaries he’ll need to push in order to keep the myth of Leitner alive and bad as he wants it to be.
I calculated the numbers for him, and he realised it wasn’t enough. A game of death based on chance is powerful, but a game of death based on choice…
Well, if nothing else, all these years of streams and influence have taught us nothing sells like people being punished for bad behaviour.
It’s brilliant, but I don’t have the stomach for the remainder of the party. My heart thumps in a panic, adrenaline spike easing off to a baseline wariness, and I step around Bobbi Pinn’s body on my way to the exit.
WANT TO CHECK OUR MORE OF MY SHORT FICTION? MY FIRST COLLECTION IS ON SALE!
The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales
Finalist for Best Collection, Aurealis Awards 2017
“Only Peter M. Ball’s fiction makes falling down the rabbit hole feel like flying. Funny and surprising, with moments of extraordinary grace.”
Angela Slatter, Author of the World Fantasy Award-winning The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings