the Clipperton legend: the Show already booked into a fifteen-year-old's body

Ross Reat, Clipperton's first victim, carries the Show's stakes in his body already: at fifteen, third seed, so plainly pro-bound "that at only fifteen he’s already starting cholera shots and mastering Third World exchange rates" for the dysenteric Satellite circuit ahead. The career the institution points every body toward is concrete enough that a boy's arm is getting inoculated for it years early — which is exactly what makes the Clipperton default such a quiet catastrophe. Reat, the kid with the future, is the one who has to hand it over without a fight.