They Just Fade Away
(Disclaimer: I have no business connection with HUNGER GAMES. My only purpose in writing this story is to have fun and maybe share it)
Chapter 1 BLACKOUT
Chief Gamesmaker Paula Femus settled into her control chair with satisfaction. The Sixtieth Hunger Games had been going for a day, without a hitch. Five tributes dead at the Bloodbath, two killed later that day. Enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty of viewers, but still leaving seventeen to hold the audience's interest. The naysayers who had complained about her innovation had had to shut up.
Her innovation had been to design the smallest arena in Hunger Games history, not counting the earliest days when they used stadiums in the Capitol. Barely half a square kilometer, giving targets little space to get away from their predators. But the targets had been given another advantage. The arena had been covered with small hills that blocked sight lines. The hills, in turn, were riddled with caves, too numerous and standardized to be natural. Each cave was set up with a camera, in case a tribute hid there, but the Careers and other predators had no access to that view. They would have to search each cave to determine if their quarry was hiding there, creating tension and suspense. Paula was quite proud of her design. She just wished that people would stop calling it the Rabbit Warren Arena.
Then the monitors all went black.
"What happened?" demanded Paula.
"I don't know, milady," said the communications officer. "We lost all of our feed from the arena."
"Can you get ANYTHING? Signals from the trackers?"
"Nothing."
"What are the Hunger Games viewers seeing?" she asked the TV expert.
"A canned message that we have some technical difficulties. That's automatic."
That wouldn't stall the viewers for long; people in the Capitol were used to instant gratification.
"Get back the signal!"
"We're trying, milady. There's a special cable running from the Capitol to the arena carrying all the communications. It's blocked somehow."
"Get it unblocked! We need to get this taken care of before we get a call from -"
"President Snow on the line, milady," said her secretary.
Paula groaned. "I'll take it in my office." She did NOT want her entire staff listening in if the President decided to rake her over the coals.
She went in the office and shut the door. "Paula Femus here."
The President did not look amused. He looked very dangerously irritated. "Miss Femus, I've lost my broadcast of the Games."
"Yes, sir. It's not just you, sir."
"Is ANYBODY able to see the Games? What about the control room?"
"Um, no sir—"
"FIX IT! I don't want to hear that we've had a mass murder in the arena and we don't even have footage!"
"Yes, sir, we're working on it sir."
"Do so. Or I'll ask my Peacekeepers to start working on methods of punishment. Snow out."
Paula steeled herself to go back in the control room. Why did this have to happen in her moment of triumph? Some crazy accident or – could it be sabotage?
"Milady? We have an idea. We can send a powerful signal that will bounce back when it hits the obstruction. The time gap will tell us how far down the cable the the problem is."
"Do it!"
"We'll need to reconfigure some things. The cable is not designed to work that way. That'll take about an hour."
"Get started. And send out a hovercraft along the route of the cable. Maybe there is visible damage that we can spot."
Subordinates rushed around obeying orders, while Paula sat in her chair and sulked. It wasn't fair. She was getting a lot of praise for her design of the arena, and it was going to evaporate because of a technical problem beyond her control. That it was far more unfair to put 24 innocent teenagers in danger every year did not occur to her. Not did the fact that the Rabbit Warren concept was somebody else's idea and that she had claimed credit for it.
After about 40 minutes the screens lit up again.
"We have the signal back," said the communications officer.
"Good work."
"It wasn't us. It came back on its own."
"Can you tell what went wrong?"
"Not yet."
"Keep at it." If the system inexplicably went wrong once, it could do it again.
"Should we turn the broadcast back on?" asked the TV expert.
"No. We need to evaluate the problem and be ready to answer some questions. Can you find the tributes' trackers?"
"Trying," said the tracker tracker. "One, two, three,…. ten signals."
"There are supposed to be seventeen tributes out there!"
"Yes, milady. But I'm only getting ten. We're not even getting "This One's Dead" signals from the others."
The control room staff stared at each other. In spite of the most stringent security in the world, they had just lost track of seven tributes.
(TO BE CONTINUED)