For the 50th annual Mini-teki tournament, they emptied the streets of Fruholm, Denmark. In fact, they emptied the buildings too. The entire town was made into a ghost town. They were calling it Major-teki, as if they were inventing a new game. But the game was the same.
A bit like life itself, the game had survived in popularity so long by creating the most complex situations from the simplest rules. With each piece captured by one player, the conditions changed for the others, always according to the rules. The game was no more random than chess. But the depth of its rules, or "genes," would have made the game hell to play with wooden pieces on a board, without a chip to do the calculations. But Mini-teki was perfect for Fruholm; or perhaps Fruholm was perfect for Mini-teki.
The town of Fruholm never had a traffic jam. Not one. The town was not the ant colony the century had made out of most urban concentrations; its tiny cars lacked the sensors that let cars in America or Britain or Japan confer with overhead cams to make decisions about which streets were to best take during rush hour. These cars made no decisions at all. They were every one a slave to Fruholm Traffic Control.
That was the finest but not the only centralization of Fruholm's business. Every pedestrian crossing on the blind, narrow European streets was handled by the Traffic Control as well. Fibers laid in the road changed color when it was safe for pedestrians to cross; red swaths turned to green ones whenever the cars were diverted around that stretch of street. To an aircar hovering above, the town on a busy day already appeared like nothing so much as a giant game board.
But there was one final cap to that delightful symmetry. The cars that peppered Fruholm's streets were not privately owned; they were held and maintained by the city, nearly every one a silver subcompact handy for running errands and visiting friends. Anyone could swipe his card by the door, disengage the car from the charging post and rent it for as long as it took to return to another charger. The cars were shiny and immaculate. (The citizens were, of course, Danes.) The cars were also identical; but in a fit of practical whimsy, the planners had installed a bright plastic LED box on the top of each one, rather like the signature of a taxi cab. What colors and patterns the box displayed could be chosen by the driver, allowing townsfolk with imperfect memories to find their car again in the cinema parking lot. They might program a car with their names, with patterns, with pictograms of turtles and cats.
The display could also be chosen by Traffic Control. This made a handy way to alert police in the rare instance a wanted notable used his card to rent a car; this day, however, as the cars were remotely disengaged from their posts, each wore on its roof a cap of solid red, blue, yellow or green. The streets were silent. The citizens of Fruholm were at the houses of friends or enjoying the free lunch at the soccer stadium two towns over. On the stadium's giant screen was the view from one of the aircars stationed above the town: the town's organically laid streets curved and looped about each other, the intersections blinking red and green as the crosswalks were tested, the colors reversed now to indicate whether or not game pieces, rather than people, could pass.
It was a perfect day; overcast, but not raining, allowing the LED boxes and the road strips to stand out through the gloom. It was almost noon. In a booth at the top of the stadium, the four contestants waited.
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