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Around the office this particular meeting room was nicknamed ‘The Firing Line’. Jonjamin Billsley wiped the sweat from his brow as he sat and waited for his boss to send someone to do the dirty work of firing him. It was late afternoon, and he’d had less than fifteen minutes’ warning that today’s work might be his last, or at least his last under the prestigious Head Gamemaker.
His fear turned to confusion when said Head Gamemaker entered the room, rather than some lackey with the redundancy paperwork already filled out. Seneca Crane was an imposing figure, but today he just looked tired.
“Jonjamin,” he said by way of greeting. “You must be wondering why you’re here.”
“Mister Crane,” Jonjamin stuttered. “I didn’t realise–”
“I’m rather short on time so I’m going to have to make this quick,” Crane interrupted. “I’ve been pulled away on some rather urgent business dealing with the aftermath of the 71st Games, and I need someone to temporarily manage the preparations for the upcoming Games in my stead. It’s nothing too onerous, you’ll just be keeping the schedule on track and making minor decisions that are outside of a regular Gamemaker’s remit. It also involves authority over the rest of the team, of course. Hiring, firing, that sort of thing. Congratulations. I believe the role comes with a temporary increase in salary.”
Jonjamin almost choked on his own tongue. This was more power than he’d ever thought he’d have in his whole life. His dickhead coworkers – subordinates now – would finally have to listen to his great ideas. The supplier who’d tried to pass off sabergrass as the much rarer and more expensive raspgrass, then lied to Jonjamin’s face about it, could finally be blacklisted the way they deserved. Still, there was one flaw in Crane’s reasoning.
“But I’m,” less skilled, less connected, less prestigious, less prepared, all true but all things he couldn’t say to his boss, “less experienced than some of the others.”
“The shortlist was compiled by my staff, but I personally selected the person most suitable for this role,” Crane told him, face cold. “I trust you’re not casting doubt on my judgement?”
“Not at all!”
“It’s settled then. I’ll be in touch on occasion, but the day-to-day decisions will be left up to you.”
“Thank you for this, this honour, I won’t let you down–”
“See that you don’t.” And on that ominous note, Seneca Crane left the meeting room.
-O-
The team responsible for the 71st Games was heading off for celebratory drinks, easily a hundred people, and most of the folks working on Project 72 followed suit. They had almost a year till their own big deadline, so what was the rush? Jonjamin stayed behind, reading through reams of schedules and work orders and plans and draft proposals. He’d been happy enough working in his little corner, with the sign announcing Plants, Poisonous; Plants, Venomous; Plants, Miscellaneous outside his office door, but now he needed to get an overview of the whole project.
The standard process for designing a good Hunger Games was to start with a theme for the arena. After that, work would begin on landscaping and installing any larger machinery – weather generation, water dynamics, any fog or poison cloud generators, and so on – while Gamemakers came up with key set-pieces. There was a long list of reliable yet dull problems that could be thrown at the tributes at any time, but each year, there needed to be a few highlights that would wow the audience. There was no guarantee that they’d all be activated, since the tributes could be guided, but they had a tendency to mess up the Gamemakers’ plans. Extras could be recycled for the next Games, assuming they fit the theme.
Every year the arena itself was breathtaking, but Jonjamin preferred the elegance of the colour-coordinated three-ring binder that laid out every detail before the first stone was placed. Now, with trembling hands, he opened the overflowing beige binder marked as ‘72 - Overview’ on the front.
As far as paperwork went, the binder was a war crime. Footnotes referred to appendices that simply didn’t exist, some subfolders were in the wrong order, signatures for approvals were either missing or redacted, and in one place half the pages were upside down. Requisitions and resources were scattered and disjointed. Most of the items that had been ordered didn’t even have a warehouse number – it was the most critical information in the whole overview, and it was missing.
Some of the specialty gear had a lead of time of several years, and couldn’t be replaced if it was lost or damaged.
He fired off a panicky message to Seneca Crane, but all he got back was a simple ‘You’re in charge, make whatever changes you need’.
The next day, Jonjamin ordered a full inventory. It took a week, and in that week nothing else got done, but at the end of it, he had a list of every item and where it belonged.
It made for grim reading.
“Are you sure this is right?” Jonjamin asked one of the other Gamemakers, brandishing a report.
“I spoke to the foreman at the warehouse personally. It’s gone, all of it.” Babara looked haggard, like she hadn’t slept at all. It had become common around the office as the audit went on. “A year and a half of work to get the snake breeding program under way, and they were requisitioned out from under our noses.”
Most of the keystone pieces had disappeared, somehow. The paperwork was contradictory, and in most cases the missing parts were noted down as a temporary transfer of authority to another department, but in all cases they were physically gone from the warehouses.
Jonjamin tried to put together a draft of an alternate plan, using only off-the-shelf parts or custom items that could be produced inside of six months. He refused to throw untested elements into the Games – there wasn’t enough slack – so he needed a little extra time to weed out any unfit parts. The result was pathetic. It would be scarcely more interesting than the very first Hunger Games, which simply put all the tributes into a large chamber with a knife each.
“Can we reuse some parts from last year?” Babara asked. She wasn’t quite a friend, but since she was near retirement she had fewer reasons to brownnose than some of the other Gamemakers. She was rapidly becoming one of his favourites.
Jonjamin shook his head. “The big finale where they set the forest on fire got out of control. One of the machines malfunctioned and was leaking hydrogen for days with no-one noticing, so it burned hotter and faster than planned. Pretty much everything is scrapped, even the set pieces that weren’t used at all.”
“We’re fucked,” she told him, then quickly added on a “sir.”
“Yes we are.” He didn’t have it in him to lie. The 72nd Games were going to be the shoddiest in a decade, and every Gamemaker involved would miss out on the next promotion cycle. It was a three-to-four-year setback as far as career progression went, regardless of whether they were to blame or not. “Better get to work so we can at least mitigate the damage. Demotion’s better than being fired, after all.”
She nodded and stalked off back to her desk. Most of the Gamemakers were in a foul mood, at least on Project 72, and Jonjamin was worried about morale. He was worried about other things, too. There were rumours about what happened to anyone who embarrassed the government, and while Jonjamin didn’t put much stock in them, it was enough to make a man wonder.
Seneca Crane had stopped replying to Jonjamin’s messages altogether, apart from the occasional terse ‘You’re in charge, sort it out and stop bothering me’. The next Hunger Games was in a dire state and Crane was asleep at the wheel. Jonjamin was honest enough with himself to admit that he was out of his depth, but there was nobody else he trusted to fix things. It was his name on all the paperwork and his neck on the line.
Some things still weren’t adding up, so Jonjamin sent Babara to snoop around on his behalf. She was, after some digging, able to track down where one of the missing set pieces had gone. There was no need to follow the paper trail for the others, afterwards. They’d all ended up in the same place. Crane had borrowed them for the 71st Hunger Games to fill some holes in the arena, expecting to return most of them. It was an elegant plan – most years, there were low-priority areas where tributes were unlikely to go, so at most a couple of pieces would be revealed. Jonjamin could see how it was a tempting idea. Nobody would even need to know about the logistical sleight of hand. Then the unplanned fire at the end of the Games had destroyed everything, and now Project 72 was dead in the water.
The one silver lining was that the situation couldn’t get worse. Or so he thought, anyway, until one morning Jonjamin walked into the office and found a cluster of concerned faces around the message board. He overheard snippets of conversation as he approached them.
“–going to be a disaster–”
“I could have done a better job–”
“–can you imagine their faces?”
“He’s here,” one of the office drones said and they scattered back, revealing the revised project plan Jonjamin was trying to scrape together. It had been pinned to the board and had a sticky note stuck on top, complete with a frowny face drawn on in black marker.
“Who’s responsible for this?” he asked the sea of silent Gamemakers, thinking fast. “Who is it that broke into my office, took an incomplete and theoretical exercise and shared it with the world?”
After a long pause, one of the interns raised her hand. There was an audible gasp and she quickly lowered it, looking scared.
“I, I didn’t steal it, but I have a question.” The attention of the whole room was on her, but she forged on. “If it’s a theoretical exercise, why are we doing all the things in it?”
“We were, um, coming up with a draft in case we needed to run a second Hunger Games in parallel for some reason.” The obvious lie hung heavy in the air, but Jonjamin couldn’t think of anything better.
“That’s a relief, delivering that pile of crap would be career suicide,” Fret Hermise, head of freshwater aquatic creatures, said. He grinned to try to break the tension.
“Get your things and get out.”
“What?” Fret asked, stunned.
Jonjamin stalked over to him and prodded him in the chest. He was shaking with anger, and knew he was making a mistake, but he couldn’t help himself. “Get. Out. You’re fired.” He didn’t wait to watch Fret leave, and instead hid in his office for the morning. Nobody dared disturb him.
The mood of the office that day was truly foul and very little work got done. Jonjamin wracked his brains for a way to turn it around and came up empty. For lack of options, he decided to wait two weeks and see if things got better or at least stabilised.
That turned out to be a mistake.
Four Gamemakers had handed in their resignations by Friday, and rumour had it that they’d been seen in the office two floors down, working on Project 74. It was only the start of all the talent bailing on him, Jonjamin knew. They’d be rehired by other projects or move to less prestigious but more stable careers outside of the Hunger Games altogether.
It wasn’t just the Games themselves that were at risk. They were the culmination of Panem’s culture and society, tying together politics, entertainment, education, civics and a grand artistic and technological showcase. Every few months President Snow gave a speech that was mandatory listening for all government offices, and the most recent one had been entirely about the Games as a lens through which to view society.
Snow understood what the Hunger Games meant to the country he ruled over, perhaps better than anyone outside the Gamemakers themselves. He spoke about the tradition they represented, about the unbroken line tying Panem back to those first years after the civil war, and the stability they brought. Every line about the importance of Games that not only entertained but also educated was another hammer blow to Jonjamin’s fragile hopes. Not every Hunger Games needed to be bigger and better than the previous one, but it had to have something, some wow factor, and many of the Gamemakers on Project 72 pulled him aside to ask what that was going to be.
Jonjamin dismissed the concerns around his coworkers, but in the safety of his office he’d had several panic attacks. He kept a couple bottles of whiskey in his bottom drawer, and his filing cabinets were now padlocked. Project 72 had been shaky when he’d been put in charge, but now it was on its last legs.
That night he slept in his office, too drunk to consider the walk past the front desk and to his apartment, where people might see how low he’d sunk. He stumbled to the bathroom, whiskey in hand, at three in the morning and mostly missed the toilet. The harsh lights and the mirror combined to show him a man at the end of his tether.
“I’m not smart,” he hissed, throwing the mostly-empty bottle at his own reflection. Glass shattered all over the sink and floor. “I didn’t get the job because of talent or skill or anything like that. I’m fucking expendable and that’s all I’ll ever be!”
He was staring down the barrel of his own inadequacy. There was no time left to turn things around – this year’s Games would be a depressing failure and Jonjamin would take the bulk of the blame. Crane had seen the way the wind was blowing and lined up a scapegoat to take the fall.
For lack of other options, Jonjamin committed to the pathetic plan he’d put together.
It would be a smaller arena, half the width of last year’s and a quarter the size, so that fewer challenges would be needed. To give the illusion of a larger space and stop the tributes from stepping on each others’ toes, Jonjamin added walls of a particularly nasty type of hedge that bristled with thorns. The end result was a bootlegged sort of maze. It looked shoddy but was effective enough. Most importantly, it grew fast when primed with the correct stimulants and fertilisers.
Rather than breed and train customised dangerous creatures, he ordered shipments of wild animals in from the outer districts, and when progress was slow, he dispatched Babara and a team of Gamemakers under her to hasten things along. They conscripted squads of locals and sent them into the wilderness with nets and tranquilisers, not letting any return until the quotas were filled. It worked, though with a nasty attrition rate. The monsters would need stimulants to be sufficiently aggressive, and the danger level would vary more than was ideal, but maybe they would get away with it.
The traps were harder to integrate on an ad-hoc basis. Project 72 was running low on Gamemakers and good ‘dynamic environmental hazards’, as they were known internally, required a specialist’s touch to ensure they performed to the right standards. Tuning the danger level was critical – more than one or two tributes dying in them, or traps that looked unfair to the audience, would drop the ratings and lead to complaints.
The next few months had a steady trickle of Gamemakers resigning, often after they were already behind schedule. The stadium wasn’t even close to being ready, though the safety checks needed to happen soon. Jonjamin was able to get some forced labour from the outer districts, and worked a few of them to death, but it didn’t help as much as he’d thought. They were still lagging several weeks behind the target.
Jonjamin himself was making mistakes as well. He danced on the ragged edge of exhaustion and a few times he approved the wrong orders, or had work start too early or too late on some aspect of the stadium. One morning it all came to a head, and after ordering a shipment of the wrong kind of concrete, he couldn’t face heading into the office. He considered calling in sick, but decided it wasn’t necessary. Who was going to tell him off for missing a day of work? Crane hadn’t shown his face since the meeting that set this hell in motion, and everyone else was nominally below Jonjamin.
The plan was to take a day off and recover, but it was impossible to stop focusing on the Games. After a stress-filled morning Jonjamin decided to lean into it. He visited the place that had set him on the path to becoming a Gamemaker, back when he was just a child – the Panem Hunger Games Museum.
It had been prestigious once, with dozens of exhibits and a steady flow of awestruck visitors. Now it was a shadow of its former self. Many of the side rooms were empty and closed off, and some exhibits had been removed or covered with big white sheets. The only room as impressive as Jonjamin remembered was the main attraction, the venue for the very first Hunger Games. Every schoolchild visited it once, in order to instil a proper appreciation for the role the Games played in keeping society in order, and so there was specially earmarked funding for the maintenance of this room in particular.
It wasn’t physically imposing, just a grey concrete bowl with the now-traditional glass tubes for tributes to enter the arena. They were kept in working order so that visitors could experience the same feelings that the tributes would have. On a whim, Jonjamin asked the pair of curators watching over the room to run him through the process.
There was a grandeur to the bleak and empty chamber as he was lifted out of the floor within his glass tube. He looked at the other entry points and imagined more men and women rising up, each of them with a single knife handy. The Gamemaker in him admired the elegant simplicity, though it was missing something, perhaps some reward for whoever seized the initiative. His forefathers had yet to elevate the Games to their current state, where they were art and science both, but that made their achievements all the more impressive.
One of the curators must have realised who Jonjamin was. By the time he left the room, the head of the museum had been rustled up and sent out to offer him a personal tour. It took a while for Jonjamin to realise that he was being buttered up for a funding request. The first Games arena needed a lot of work done and the money wasn’t enough, even if the other exhibits were shuttered. Could he arrange for some of his work crews to pitch in, and bill it to his own program?
“I don’t have the authority,” he told the old lady who was showing him around. He followed it up with a burst of unusual honesty. “Truth be told, I’m not even going to be able to save my own neck.”
“I’m not surprised. Those who hold the purse strings don’t care enough about us to ever visit.” She gave him a sad smile. “We few who remember what the Games are really about, not just the shock and awe factor but the history, the culture, we’re a dying breed. I wish you all the best, even if you’re not able to turn things around. It was a pleasure to meet you.”
“If only more people saw what we saw,” Jonjamin agreed. Then it hit him. He froze in place as his thoughts set to racing, finding the one glimmer of possible salvation for him and her alike.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
He grinned. “I have to go, there’s work to be done. And perhaps, just perhaps, I might be able to help you after all.”
-O-
The Seventy-Second Hunger Games of Panem were being broadcast, and every household in the country was watching. The planners had been tight-lipped about what to expect, though the last few weeks had been an absolute frenzy of planning and organisation, as if a whole new project were being spun up at the last minute.
The feed cut from the pre-game talkshow hosts to a live view of the arena. Twenty-four tributes rose into view at the perimeter of a bare grey chamber. The walls were likewise bare and fifty feet tall, and the space itself was a circle with a diameter of two hundred paces. Nothing interrupted the smooth concrete save for twenty-four knives, each without a guard, the blades without ornamentation and a uniform six wicked inches long, placed in easy reach of each tribute. In the very centre of the room was a sword.
It was one of the shortest Hunger Games on record, not even lasting five minutes. Jonjamin watched long enough to make sure there would be a winner – not the strongest of them, nor the fastest, but the one who had instantly committed to racing for the sword – and then turned off the screen he was watching on. Sweat dripped down his back at the thought of how many people had witnessed his desperate gamble.
Thirty seconds later the phone rang. It was a woman’s voice, though she didn’t introduce herself. “President Snow requires your presence at the post-Games reception this evening, happening in the Presidential Palace at 8pm.”
“I’ll be there,” Jonjamin croaked. She hung up with a click.
In all his planning for the Games themselves, the calling back to Panem’s roots, the emphasis on tradition with some small additions to show the progress that could be made, he’d completely forgotten that there would be an after. He had an old suit at the back of his closet – the fanciest item of clothing he owned – but it fit poorly and was a mite uncomfortable. It was still better than showing up in his wrinkled and stained uniform.
He made it to the palace just in time, ready for whatever awaited him. Congratulations, castigations, perhaps even arrest. Instead he was met with complete indifference. There were hundreds of people, many of them powerful or famous and all of them wealthy, and not a single eye turned his way as his presence was announced. He descended the steps into the main hall and overheard some snippets of conversation as he wandered past some of the socialites out in force tonight.
“The Games themselves being turned into living history! What an inspiration! Crane’s outdone himself this year!” This was coming from a slender woman with nails like claws and a hairdo that looked like a snarling lion’s face coming out of the back of her head.
“I loved the new arena, it was almost indistinguishable from the one used for the first Hunger Games,” a rotund and balding man said.
“It was the old one,” Jonjamin corrected him before he could stop himself.
The man turned his way, looked Jonjamin up and down and sneered. “Anyone who truly knows the Games would have caught the small differences. It’s obvious to anyone with enough class to wear appropriate clothing to events like tonight.”
Before he could be drawn further into the brewing argument, Jonjamin felt a tug on his elbow. A member of the security team beckoned him away, past the security perimeter and into the small circle around President Snow.
“A moment’s privacy, please,” Snow said, and the others drifted away, leaving Jonjamin alone with the President of Panem himself, as well as a pair of silent guards. He took his cue from the president and ignored them as he tried to calm himself. The smell of roses was overpowering. “Let’s have a look at you. Billsley, eh? Good work, I have to say, and more spine than I expected from one of Seneca’s brood. Normally he likes them wet and mewling, sounding like kittens and twice as helpless.”
“I, uh–”
“I called you here for a reason,” President Snow interrupted him. The tone was casual but Jonjamin knew better than to assume that meant anything good. “Let’s start by congratulating you on cleaning up Crane’s mess. It was inspired, and I’m sure they’ll be talking about it for years to come.”
“Thank you, President Snow sir,” Jonjamin said. He swayed as relief coursed through his veins, robbing him of the tension that had been keeping him upright. It had all been worth it, every early morning and late night, every drop of sweat or blood, all the suffering of the last year released in one sharp blow. “It’s an honour to be recognised.”
“Quite.”
A horrible suspicion crept over him. “Will I be expected to give some sort of speech?”
Snow stared at him, unblinking, for a moment. Jonjamin could almost see the wheels turning in his head, moving numbers around as he came to some implacable conclusion. Then the president spoke. “Your ambition is getting the better of you, it seems. Crane will get the credit for today. Given the insight you’ve displayed about the nature of the Games, I’m sure you understand that order must be maintained. In this case, that order is clear. If you were to claim the laurels, it would be tantamount to pushing him out, and that I cannot abide.”
Jonjamin rocked back as if struck. Snow kept talking, throwing some platitudes and vague threats his way, but they barely registered. He only escaped the stupor when he felt the mood of the entire room shift.
“Now presenting the Head Gamemaker, the man of the hour, the mind behind the Seventy-Second Hunger Games of Panem, I present… Seneca Crane!” The announcer’s voice was loud enough to cut through the cheering crowd.
“I hope you enjoyed the party, but I’ll have to ask you to leave now. We can’t have any distractions.” Snow turned and strode towards the centre of the hall, one member of his security detail following while the other led an unresisting Jonjamin out of a side exit.
Jonjamin ambled home and drank whatever he could find around the apartment until he slipped into an uneasy sleep. When he woke up the next morning, he found a rambling, incoherent mess of a message to Seneca Crane, asking what would happen to him now. He was too worried at first to read any incoming messages, but after a cigarette he worked up the nerve. Crane had sent nothing back. For lack of any other ideas, Jonjamin stumbled his way to work.
His office was cleared out, all his belongings returned to the small room labelled Plants, Poisonous; Plants, Venomous; Plants, Miscellaneous. A memo had been sent congratulating the team on their hard work, with a footnote announcing that all temporary roles had expired on the completion of Project 72.
Jonjamin sent another message to Crane, demanding a meeting. This time there was a reply. He was in luck, and could be seen immediately.
Once again Jonjamin was invited to the office he’d met with Seneca Crane in, what felt like a lifetime ago. Crane wasn’t there, just some lackey of his with a plain face and a nondescript suit.
On the table lay a set of redundancy papers addressed to Jonjamin Billsley.