Patrick Bradshaw woke up the same way he did every day, to the sound of a shrill, blaring tone. Everybody in the Wasps compound woke up as one, lest they provoke the ire of their employers. If one of them triggered the pressure sensors in their bunks five minutes after the alarm, every single one of them would get a harsh shock between their legs. He wondered where the fucking bastards who ran the Wasps came up with this stuff.
Who installed electric chastity cages on their employees without being some kind of sadistic pervert? As if he didn't hate what was between his legs enough, it was repurposed into an instrument of torture. It was like team ownership had it in for him specifically.
As Patrick stood and made his way to the team shower, he wondered if everybody else in the Crown League was subjected to the same treatment as he and his teammates were. Players weren't allowed to interact with members of other teams socially, and if they were traded their memories of their time with their prior team was wiped to protect proprietary information. At least he'd stayed on the Wasps his whole career so he didn't have his brain fried. Players who were traded regularly could barely string a sentence together.
He stood there with his fifty-two teammates as water laced with chemical cleansers poured down on them. Well, perhaps not "poured" so much as "sprayed." There wasn't enough water on this godforsaken rock for them all to have water properly poured on them. Instead they got just enough of a mist full of stuff that would surely kill them to keep them clean. Patrick tried to breathe in as little as possible in here. He took full breaths the first time they were shoved in this box, and it felt like his lungs had been scoured with a wire brush for the rest of the day.
Patrick winced as the soapy water sank into the fresh flogging wounds on his back. Losing to a chickenshit team like the Cherries would've been bad enough, but losses didn't go down easily in the Crown League. The league's security forces would tie each player to metal posts and flog them live on camera, though whether that was to satisfy team owners or the bloodthirsty fans was beyond Patrick. That particular tradition only started when the Compact war began, and while the players weren't happy about it, they couldn't do anything about it. The league, and by consequence team ownership, held all the power. Patrick and his teammates could only obey their directives.
The far wall of the group shower opened and the fifty-three men proceeded out and dressed for practice in silence. Patrick missed the old camaraderie back on Terra. They used to behave like teammates, they used to talk like friends. Now? If they wasted time with frivolities like conversations in the locker room, they'd all be shocked. The microphones in there were hooked up to a transmitter to their cages. None of them knew the exact decibel level that would trip the sensor, but they'd learned to be careful. Three years of this treatment was enough to cow anybody into silence.
He enjoyed this job, once upon a time. Thank the stars, otherwise he wouldn't have made it this long in this hellhole. There was a certain poetry to football, an artistry to a perfectly constructed play run by teammates operating in perfect sync. When they were on Terra, the labor conditions were odious, but at least they weren't treated like slaves. They had homes, they could go on vacations, they even had actual pay. Maybe it wasn't as nice as he remembered it, but even a sliver of freedom sounded like heaven compared to this.
Patrick had no idea where they were now, somewhere far away from any prying vines. His new home was a series of steel compounds on a desolate asteroid, with the sucking void of space just outside any number of easily accessible airlocks. He suspected this was a repurposed military training facility from the aesthetics of the place, all corrugated steel and desolate barracks.
The second it became clear the Affini Compact was going to conquer Terra, that sliver of freedom was ripped from his grasp, apparently never to return. The working conditions were terrible, but they were never good. But those bastards had torn the one thing he ever had from him. He couldn't love his game anymore. He could deal with the miserable conditions here on this rock in the middle of nowhere, well outside Accord space by his estimation. But if he couldn't love football anymore, what did he have left?
Patrick sighed as he pulled his red practice jersey over his shoulder pads, looking around the locker room. He knew all of these guys like the back of his hand, they had grown up together. But ever since they came to this hideous rock, they were getting harder and harder to recognize. He had spent just about every day of his thirty years with them, and now they were all so beaten down they could barely stand to look each other in the eye.
He suspected that the microphones and cameras everywhere were in place to prevent the players from doing anything about their steadily worsening conditions. Authorities in the Accord did not take kindly to organized labor; when Crown League concessions workers tried to unionize, the leaders of the movement were shot in broad daylight. Patrick would point out that workers wouldn't feel the need to organize if they were treated well, but the league wasn't about to listen to his thoughts on the matter.
His cage buzzed with a gentle current, indicating it was time to head out to the practice field. Patrick and his teammates filed out the double doors to the field, an expanse of artificially vibrant grass under harsh fluorescent lighting. Everything smelled like industrial disinfectant, although there was a faint scent of rot that Patrick assumed was endemic to this planetoid before the Crown League showed up to make it their hidey-hole. If it was somewhere the Compact couldn't find for three years, it must've been a pretty miserable shithole.
"Let's go, you lazy pricks!" Ah yes, just what Patrick wanted to hear when he was already in a despairing mood. Coach Brian Cashwell was a member of a virulent strain of football coach: the shouting prick. In his life with the Wasps, coming up in their training academy and then as a member of the team, he'd had several coaches like Cashwell. But none of them were quite so relentlessly unpleasant as he was, and none of them had quite so much power over his players as he did now.
He hardly cut an intimidating figure. He was a hair over five feet tall, with a few wisps of greasy black hair he kept in a sickening combover. As ever, he was clad in a Wasps team tracksuit, with a comically oversized fanny pack on his right hip. Once upon a time, the players loved to make fun of him for it. Those days were long gone. They ended the second Cashwell heard one of the jokes and had the offending party tossed out of an airlock.
"You sorry sons of bitches are NOT going to put on another fucking performance like what I saw yesterday!" Cashwell hollered. He rarely did anything but holler. "Ten laps around the field, right now, get a move on! You are going to run until you fucking bleed today!"
Several of the players grumbled, a few muttered angry retorts under their breaths, but nobody wanted to stand up to him. What good would it do? The last time somebody talked back to Cashwell with any kind of venom, they got spaced. As the balding man was happy to point out, each of them was replaceable. Every year, the Crown League's genetic engineering improved, bringing up another crop of brainwashed recruits for the teams to draw from. If somebody displeased their team enough, they would be replaced.
Best-case scenario, getting cut from the league meant having your memory wiped and reduced to some kind of menial service role. Some of the lucky ones got to coach or work as trainers, but a lot of former players ended up working as glorified maids for the league. But these days, you were just as likely to end up a corpse floating through space.
"Word is Cato's getting spaced next time he drops a pass," a voice said to Patrick's left. It was Devin, the closest thing he had to a friend left on the team. Most of his favorite teammates had long since been cut, traded, or thrown into space. He suspected that the league was trying to isolate everybody and keep them under control, no wonder everybody's play looked worse these days.
"Who're you hearing that from?" Patrick replied, trying to act like the notion didn't bother him. Being openly bothered by spacings was often sufficient grounds to put you next in line.
"Nash and Brand," Devin answered. "They said they heard coaches talking 'bout it right after the Cherries game."
Patrick shot Devin a brief, worried look, finding him as disengaged as ever. Devin David was easy to talk to, but it was difficult to feel close to somebody so disconnected from the world around him. Patrick had no clue whether this was a defense mechanism or if he really didn't care about anything. How could anybody discuss such matters with nonchalance?
"Would be a bummer," Patrick said, fighting to tamp down his feelings. "Cato's a damn fine player."
Devin snorted. "Not since his boyfriend got spaced," he snarked. "Dumbass shoulda just kept his mouth shut, now we're down a left tackle all season and our X wideout's a fucking wreck."
