Question of the Day - 25 May 2017

[Note: This third and final part to our series on skill-based slots is contributed by Huntington Press’s long-time editor, Deke Castleman.]

In my misspent middle age, before I kicked that nasty fiction-writing habit, I completed a novel called Las Vegas 2040, in which I attempted to imagine what the place might look like in the distant future — at that time, upwards of 50 years away.

Most of the action is centered on the Ionosphere Tower, which in 2040 is 2,500 feet tall, nearly a half-mile high. It’s surrounded by the Bazaar, the world’s greatest flea market, and connected to the Emporium, the world’s greatest supermarket — one vast single-story building covered by solar-collecting diffraction tiles that not only supply electricity to the entire Ionosphere complex, but also reflect all the colors of the rainbow, providing a killer view from high above. Inside, the Slidewalk, a variable-speed people-mover (at the outer edge, little old Boomers with walkers can hobble right on; only the kids brave the inner edge that zips along at 15 miles an hour) stretches two miles, all the way to downtown.

There, the effects of the overhead 4D Experience are so credible and electrifying that disclaimers, forswearing liability for any injuries caused by the canopy projections and warning viewers of possible vertigo and delusion, are posted strategically along Fremont Street. The historic bargain hotels house the hordes of browsers and buyers looking for exotic wares and foods purveyed in the Bazaar and Emporium by vendors from every corner of the globe.

Downtown, the old-time casinos have been extinct for 20 years, since the Great Crash of 2020.

Over on the Strip, the Strop runs down the middle; it has one speed — slow — but it extends five miles, from Sahara to Sunset, the world's longest people-moving conveyor belt.

The east side of the Strip, as well as the whole worldwide wired game culture, is ruled by the Cyberopolis megacorp. The GameZone started out as a giant electronics showroom, an ever-changing tech-mad world’s fair, then expanded into the hotel rooms; last-mile optical fiber to every single house in the metropolitan area made Las Vegas the most jacked-in city on the planet, and it extended out from there—everything, everywhere, sci-fi fast.

The gee-whiz games run the gamut from the simplest random symbol generator to the most complex virtual battlefield; there are no age minimums and the buy-ins are in dollars with winnings returned in “comp points” good for catalogs full of prizes, from Vegas souvenirs to college educations. 

Inevitably, as soon as compoints became tradeable on the world’s currency markets, Cyberopolis was minting its own money. Casinos were phased out, replaced by far more imaginative competitive challenges and a much more gratifying reward system—gambling still, of course, in its most highly addictive medium, but now finally, literally, “gaming,” strictly for intense entertainment and valuable swag.

The west side of the Strip is owned in full by the colossal body machine of Sportage, which caters to the physique worshipers, body builders, super jocks, and sex maniacs—the muscleheads of Sportage facing off against the wireheads of Cyberopolis across Las Vegas Boulevard.

At the Sportage metaresort is every kind of product, service, and activity that has to do with human anatomy and physiology: ergogenicists and their electrical muscle stim and minute range-of-motion adjustments; mnemotherapists, the medics of remembrance, deprogrammers and reprogrammers of the past and future;  nanoclinics where molecular computers are injected to perform major cosmetic alterations that are permanent (until you change your mind); simskin sculptors for custom body shaping; the Accelerator that spins at up to four G’s in which you work out at double, triple, even quadruple your body weight; Lucky Lucky, on the north end of the Strip, where the last of the great vices has been housebroken, the ultimate intimacies industrialized, while the Cybordello next door is at the vanguard of virtual sex.

Sportage also does a brisk business in body parts. It doesn’t, of course, bother with the plastic skin, metal bones, synthetic blood, bionic limbs and joints, and mechanical hearts that can be implanted in any Urgent Surgery on any busy corner in the country. No, it sells the real thing, wetware, harvested from accident victims, homicides and suicides, the capitally punished, tough-guy-sport losers, and live donors, or cloned from cells, or grown from fetal tissue.

But the great money maker is gambling at events in the Rodeodome, Soccerdome, Tennisdome, Stardome, all lined up in a row like giant glastic eggs laid by some cosmic plasteel reptile. The international playoff games attract 150,000 live spectators and perhaps three hundred million wallscreen viewers. The pari-mutuel pools are in the billions and Sportage supercomputers, performing a quintillion operations per second, post thousands of propositions, adjust the odds according to the action, and rake Sportage’s cut from every wager on every play, all the while officiating the games by means of hundreds of cameras, sensors, and lasers and tracking it all on the largest scoreboards in the world.

And there, sitting in the middle of it all just off Flamingo Road, is the one independent, the lone holdout, the last pre-Crash bygone casino, the Stage Floor, with its leftover carnie games, vestigial video machines, antique clay cheques, octogenarian bosses named Tony and Vinnie and Sid sporting natural gray hair slicked straight back, black tailored suits, and black dress shoes, and people playing at games with analog cards, dice, wheels and balls — actually gambling side by side, like in the good old days.