A shrill horn blast cut the air and was answered by a deep metallic rumbling that echoed throughout the amphitheater. It was a sound like rolling thunder. Massive iron doors, fifteen meters tall and nearly a half-meter thick groaned in protest as heavy turning gears and ramshackle hydraulics wrenched them open. Loose dust billowed from the ancient cogs as they turned, forming small clouds at the yawning mouth of the amphitheater's Eastern gate. With the hubris of the Greek gods after which he had been modeled, Veles pushed through the dust and strode onto the synthetic blood-soaked sands of the arena.
As he emerged from the Gate of Life and into the light of the brilliant summer sun, the crowd erupted into a deafening roar. A stampede of forty-thousand feet stomping in anticipation shook through the stands. The sound of their pounding shoes and feral shouts was like that of a charging legion: something in it awoke fear and a portent of violence in the heart of the passive listener. Nascent electricity hung on the air, it blanketed the throng and clung to every writhing body. The mob surged with impassioned potential — potential that might make for a lively sporting event, start a riot, or burn a city to the ground. The hands that now held banners, hotdogs, and clackers might as easily have held batons and stones — and little more than an unfortunate shift in the wind separated the two potentialities. The general ruckus of the great crowd coalesced and pushed forth from all directions as walls of sound. It was the very sound of human bloodlust.
Had his eardrums been entirely organic, he supposed permanent damage might have been incurred. Veles couldn’t help the sardonic smile that pulled at the corner of his mouth.
“The stands are packed to the brim,” he thought. “They must have another A-lister in the lineup; perhaps they will even pit them against me?”
Veles tightened his fingers into fists, the metal in his mag glove gave a slight click under the pressure. He filled his synthetic lungs with air — and on exhale — he breathed power into his muscles the way a blacksmith might pump the bellows of his forge. There was play in his dark skin as inhumanly powerful fibers drew taut beneath — arching through his body from forearm to shoulder. It was like watching an archer pull the string of a notched bow all the way back to his ear; all the potential energy needed to kill was there — just straining to be let loose. Veles basked for a moment in his own power. He looked up into the bleachers, at the thousands of roiling spectators that encircled him and he wondered to himself. Was this what worship felt like?
A poly-rotored camera drone shot down — at what would have been alarming speed — from the first tier of bleachers. Instead of barreling into him like a cannonball, the watermelon-sized whizzing sphere froze impossibly only several meters away from him. Its singular black lens trained on him like a sniper. In a surreal moment, the feed of the colossal viewing screens suddenly cut to a close-up of Veles. He glanced up to see himself, looking every part the god he felt he was at the moment.
“Gather ‘round, you bloodthirsty animals, and scream your throats raw. This is what you came to see.”
He watched as his own dark, muscled form strode forward, cut brilliantly by a cape of deep royal purple. His Roman-style leather armor fit his form like a second skin. A bronze gladius swung in its sheath at his side and the iconic spear of the Velites — his namesake — was slung menacingly across one shoulder. Strapped to his left forearm was a matching bronze aspis with a smooth, semi-circular groove hammered into the side like a waning moon. The design was intended to provide maximum protection, while still giving his gladius room to work.
However, to the knowing eye, Veles's most menacing adornment was not his gleaming weaponry. It was the dull, plain Iron Wreath that rested unassumingly over dark, curly locks. It looked like scrap metal to the unknowing, but it was a crown of greatest honor for a gladiator. It was known as the Ferrum Centum, the iron hundred, and it signified a gladiator who had experienced one hundred synthetic deaths.
Because of the gruesome nature of death in the arena, AI’s programmed for gladiatorial combat — or glads — were incredibly susceptible to psychological damage. Although their owners could win a lot of prize money on them over the course of their lives, the average glad’s AI program deteriorated quickly (typically five years or so). Most glad’s minds were severely damaged by their thirtieth death and nearly unsalvageable by their sixtieth. An AI’s memory recall was unmercifully perfect. After a couple dozen gruesome, fully neuro-simulated deaths, it was easy for an AI to go utterly insane. It took a nigh unbreakable will to last longer than that. Thus those who had died over a hundred times were lauded with the highest of accolades, and viewers would pay outrageous sums to see them live.
Veles was on his one-hundred-and-twenty-first life, having died one-hundred-and-twenty deaths. He had spent them all —at his owner’s behest — entirely devoted to perfecting the art of combat. He had come from meager beginnings — slaughtered nine times in the arena before finally winning his first match. His seniors had massacred him. They showed him no mercy — as there had no doubt been no mercy shown to them. Mercy didn’t sell; the lanistas knew that. Perhaps in a kinder era, an occasional quarter was shown to an especially valiant opponent. But those days were as gone as Old Rome herself was. The pollice verso would only turn one way in this colosseum: downward. The verdict was always death for the defeated.
In his earliest days, Veles had tasted humiliation and defeat often, but he hadn’t let the weight of it crush him. On the contrary. He had let it enrage him. In the secrecy of his heart, (or whatever inner sanctum of the mind an AI had in the place of a heart,) he swore visceral oaths of hatred and vengeance against all things that stood against him. He had awakened within himself an ancient fury, a primordial instinct imparted by the human template used to construct his synthetic mind. It forbade surrender. Doubtless, it was the long-dormant drive that had pushed homo sapiens beyond their ancestral arboreal home eons prior, awoken anew in his artificial body. With every pitiless death he had suffered, his resolve to ensure his own survival had grown more ferocious, more intense. He would push with greater force than he was pushed. If he was created to suffer for the amusement of others, he would make sure that the suffering he dealt back was a hundredfold what he received.
Veles had succeeded in that endeavor. Now the old generation of glads who had slain him so contemptuously in his youth was gone. Veles remained — having most often settled the score several times over before they went out of commission. To the knowing, his dull iron wreath gleamed like the halo of an angel of vengeance. How Homeric he had been, how utterly herculean. Veles was a legend writ large. His rise through the ranks: an epic. His story read like a myth — written in synthetic blood on the colosseum sands and played out on televisions worldwide. He was Odysseus. He was Achellis, and they knew it.
To his lanista, the fight coordinators, and the mega-corp sponsors that put on the games, he might have been nothing more than a product. But to them — Veles took a sweeping look out over the thousands of emotional faces. All heads craned towards him, like sunflowers following the sun. Some of them were cheering for him; shouting his praises and waving banners emblazoned with a black spear and laurel on a field of purple — his colors. Others spat curses and viler things, booed, and taunted him. The only thing absent was apathy. Whether worshiping admirers or vicious revilers, Veles loved them both for the same reason. In those moments, he was — if ever so briefly — more than mere entertainment. He was loved. He was hated. It was as close to human as he could get.
He rewarded them with a triumphant smile. The feeds took their cue and zoomed in sharply on his face. He found it amusing how the wide scars on his cheek and nose clashed against his otherwise flawless features. The roar of the crowd swelled to an even greater intensity as he raised a hand to hail them. Tokens of affection and good luck were thrown to him. Coins, flowers, jewelry, and even a brassier fell from above and collected in the sand at the edges of the arena. Veles’s eyes fixed upon the fallen lacy undergarment and his smile wavered. He found himself struck by the paradoxical nature of the provocative act — and all at once — the colosseum’s illusion of splendor began to crack.
Veles was an android. In other words: he was not a human. Human rights were not afforded to him, and he was legally considered the property of his owner; it was a well-known fact that all glads were. He could not legally own, buy, or sell anything. Furthermore, he was prohibited by law from traveling outside the perimeter of league property. Any glad found outside of these boundaries was classified as a rogue AI, a threat to public safety, and a kill-on-sight target. The capstone to his isolation was that he was allowed no visitors — neither human nor android — other than his lanista. Such seclusion was thought to keep the glads’ cold killer programming from becoming soft and muddled from the warmth of relational bonds.
Irrespective of his human psyche, society deemed Veles a machine — not a person. Yet, enthusiasts of the Blood Games seemed inclined to a certain suspension of belief regarding that particular fact. Spectators would shower him with gifts that he would not be allowed to keep and coins he would not be allowed to spend. Certainly, each of them knew the restrictions. Nonetheless, all seemed content, and even eager to participate in the communal make-believe that the glads were real people. So deep ran the readily-swallowed delusion, that he was even afforded the humanity of being an object of sex appeal. But Veles saw the truth, even though twenty-thousand liars denied it themselves. He would never feel the warm caress of a lover; it was the cold bite of sharp steel for him.
Yet, with time around him frozen in place, he gazed on the discarded brassier with a pang of dull yearning. It looked delicate and soft — as so few things in Veles’s hard life had been. Perhaps she who had dropped it down to him might take him tenderly into her arms with the same softness? Then, with all of the pomp and pageantry of the Blood Games stripped away — in the deep intimacy of a quiet place where only two were present — she would see him as a fellow thinking, feeling someone. He felt the sudden urge to look up into the stands and search for her — whoever she may be. A strangled but strong voice within him now spoke — a voice that dared to entertain the dream of being something other than he was.
“Could I ever be seen as a someone by them?” the voice asked.
Of course he could have been; no natural laws of nuclear physics or thermodynamics forbade AI equality. It was exactly that maddening possibility of such a sweet but unmanifested reality that stuck like a knife in Veles’s heart. Yet despite the possibility of the thing, Veles knew that it would never be. In the next instant, as suddenly as the unattainable desire had come — his mind had banished it. While the obstinate and paradoxical minds of humans often resisted unfavorable inevitabilities with wasteful defiance, the ever-rational artificial mind could find no recourse but sheer acceptance of them. Veles was an eidolon — with a form loved by all and an essence known by no one; he understood that. He had always understood that. Veles hardened his eyes on the center of the arena and strode onward toward his unfavorable fate. He did not look back at the bleachers again.
Once he reached the center of the arena, he unslung his spear from his side. Then — in a choreographed flourish as practiced and mechanical as lacing up his sandals — Veles spun his spear at blinding speed and leaped into the air. His back arched, and his form — rippling with power — twirled through the air like an acrobat. Then, employing the kinetic energy of his fall into the downward thrusting of his spear, he sent the weapon hurdling into the earth at a lethal velocity. There was a short, dull ring as the bronze tip plowed suddenly and violently through the grainy sand. The spectators responded with shrieks and cheers of awed delight. With a smirk and a stiff jerk, Veles dislodged his spear from the sand and paced a slow, deliberate, boastful semicircle at the center of the arena. All the while, he spun his spear with easy dexterity the way a marshall might spin a baton.
A second horn blast cut through the din of the audience, and there was a stirring at the Gate of Life. Veles ceased his showboating, slowing his spear’s rotations until they stopped altogether. His pacing slowed too until he stood in still attention — eyes transfixed upon the figure emerging from the great darkness betwixt the gates. A blanket of silence fell over the entire colosseum, as all within strained to see beyond the massive shadowed maw of the hypogeum.
As the new figure stepped fully into the light, the silence shattered — the crowd’s baying redoubling in strength. The red plum of a bronze Corinthian helm flashed brightly in the sunlight — and immediately — Veles knew who he would be facing today. A small pang struck him in the pit of his stomach — a strangled, but still-persisting glimmer of that quality indelible from the mortal mind: Fear.
“Mars.”
He had faced the approaching challenger several times before, both androids having slain the other more than once. According to Veles's memory banks, the standing was currently 3:2 — Mars's favor. Today would be an opportunity to literally even the score. It wouldn’t be easy though; every time they clashed Veles had either died or come very close to it. Synthetic blood pulsed at the tips of his fingers. He was in for the fight of his life and was nearly slavering at the prospect of it.
The glads were never told in advance who they would be fighting, otherwise, they might rely extensively on training against that opponent’s particular style, or even adopt a temporary new style to counter their opponent’s. The fans didn’t like that, ergo the rules reflected the wishes of the paying patrons. Each big-league gladiator had their own brand, their own distinguished style of fighting. That’s what the people paid to see: their favorites. It was reliable and marketable, and those were the only things that mattered to the people operating the fights.
But for veteran warriors like Mars and Veles — it was so much more.
The glads who lasted as long as they had were the ones who learned to love the pit despite its despicable nature. It was a gruesome place of pain and slaughter for the entertainment of the masses, but at the heart of it, the blood games were the purest form of contest. Will against will, body against body. Endless hours of training and diligence, pain and exhaustion — all coming to fruition in a clash of steel and fury. Perhaps it was his programming — perhaps his brainwashing, or maybe his mind was truly starting to atrophy, but Veles actually pitied the spectators. They were the unfortunate ones. They would never understand the ineffable euphoria of a contest to the death. Only a true athlete — only an Olympian could understand that.
Mars strode to the center of the arena with much less fanfare than Veles had. His personality and general pathos had been modeled by his marketing team after the stoic warrior. Although much less flashy than his somersaulting opponent, his entry was welcomed with yet more fanatical ecstatics than even Veles had received. It made Veles smile. The greatest test of skill was in competing against one’s better. Excitedly, Veles opened up communications to greet his opponent.
“Mars. It’s been a while.” he signaled.
The approaching android removed his plumed helm, revealing a wild mane of curly locks that flowed out from under the dull iron wreath that he wore about his head. The wreath was identical to Veles’s in all ways but size. As an ancient Spartan captain might have done in a time millennia before, Mars held his helm under one massive shoulder. The volume in the amphitheater crescendoed further, but as far as Veles was concerned, they could have been silent. He adored the worship, but what were mortals to him now when he was in the presence of a fellow god?
“Veles,” Mars acknowledged, halting opposite of him.
From the corner of his eye, Veles caught the camera drone dart into position as it zoomed in for a chilling close-up of Mars's supernatural burning red eyes. The crowd responded with rapturous screams of fear and delight. Where Veles had been modeled as the archetypal valiant hero — handsome and regal — Mars looked every bit the god of war that was his namesake.
He stood at a colossal two-and-a-half meters, taller than Veles by about two heads. Gnarly white scars covered his exposed face, forearms, and legs — testaments to how long it had been since his last death. Wide as the hood of a car, his bronze cuirass emblazoned with the golden emblem of a double-headed eagle swelled as he breathed. He flexed his shoulders menacingly, his muscles flashing their incredible power with impossible definition. The leather straps of his pteruges fell over thighs thick as tree trunks and ended just above the knees — beneath which — brazen greaves as big as Veles’s thighs protected his shins.
Like Veles, he also carried an aspis and spear. However, both were much larger versions of Veles’s armaments. Most distinguishing, Mars’s heavy shield bore the black letter 𝚲 of old Laconia. It was the mark of the Spartan: a mark that only the most exemplary of warriors would have the audacity to make their own. The massive iron-tipped, leaf-bladed dory spear that he hefted in his left hand also outclassed Veles’s weapon by several centimeters and kilograms. Veles shuddered as memories of being savagely impaled by that spear flooded his mind.
“I have to admit, a small part of me hoped it would be you today. When I saw how wild the crowd was, I knew it had to be an interesting match-up. Good to see you, friend.” Veles transmitted silently over his short-range coms.
“You’re a welcomed sight yourself.” Mars transmitted back. “For nearly a year, the Lanistas have thrown me against nothing but unblooded greenlings. They treat me like some exotic tiger, sending an endless parade of fledgling glads for me to devour while the crowds gawk in witless amusement. I am their wild beast – their execution ad bestias. Dumb, base, insipid idiots, the lot of them.”
Veles himself had suffered a similar fate for the last couple of months. There were so few glads still in commission that had the kind of experience that Veles and Mars did. Fights between veterans were hard to arrange and came at a high risk to the owners. Old glads fought better than young glads — but the fragile nature of their battle-scarred psyches meant that any death could be their last. Thus it was a safer strategy for the Lanistas to put their veteran glads in fights that they couldn’t possibly lose. The spectators had no qualms about watching a one-sided slaughter, and the greenlings got to have a hands-on learning experience with a veteran.
“Gird your loins, old man. I’m going to give you a lot more hell than a greenling would.” Veles said, rolling the haft of his spear 360 degrees across his right wrist with roguish swagger.
“I’m counting on it,” Mars replied, and Veles felt his artificial facial muscles pull into a genuine smile.
Stoically, Mars once again donned the Corinthian helmet, and like a line pulled taught, he stood up straight, tapping his spear against his aspis twice in solute. Veles did the same. They stood like that for a moment. Two masters of an ancient blood game with nothing but respect for the other.
Then, as if rehearsed, they simultaneously planted their right feet back, raising their shields in a defensive stance. Veles activated his mag glove, feeling it thrum to life in his hand. His artificial mind became ablaze with calculations of possible attacks Mars might make — how to avoid them — how to riposte. The fanfare was over. The roar of the crowd had decrescendoed to a hush. Each one of them leaned into the silent tension between the two warriors, waiting for that inevitable moment when the formalities would end and killing would begin.
“Are you ready, god of war?”
“Let’s find out.”
The silent tension seemed to draw out almost to the point that one’s attention might have started to wane until it was suddenly released in three consecutive explosions. The first was the explosion of sound that reverberated throughout the colosseum: the sound of a massive gong being rung. The second was a physical explosion of gravel and sand as giant, staggered pillars violently erupted in showers of sand from the colosseum floor, sending Mars and Veles airborne at velocities that would have killed the average man. The third was an eruption of energy, as gladiator and spectator alike collectively burst into blurs of movement and potential.
Veles arched his frame as he tumbled through the air, using his shoulders and legs as a counterbalance to regain control of his fall. He caught Mars out of the corner of his eye as the bulkier android tumbled less gracefully through the air, his body knocked skyward in the opposite direction of Veles’s own trajectory. Even though he was nearly thirty meters away, Veles took aim and hurled his spear at Mars’s flailing, falling form. He cursed as the potshot went wide and clattered off into the forest of newly raised pillars.
Veles turned his attention towards his own landing, collapsing strategically into his fall in order to disperse impact throughout his body. He landed with a spray of gritty sand, but quickly got back up onto his feet. He cursed again. When within its effective range, his mag glove could quickly retrieve his spear in the case of a missed throw. However, its effective range was only about ten or fifteen meters, and he had thrown it much further. He would have to locate it.
Throwing it midair had been a risky move, but Veles couldn’t pass up the chance of possible first blood. Now he would be at a disadvantage until he could relocate his spear. Fortunately, the moderators had chosen terrain that favored Veles’s lighter, more acrobatic build. In a battle in the open, Mars had the undisputed advantage, but the dynamic battlefield certainly helped level things out.
Drawing his Gladius, Veles quickly climbed up to the nearest tall pillar for a better vantage point, scattering loose sand as he made his way up the staggered obstacles like a flight of disjointed stairs. He scanned for any sight of Mars or his spear. Nothing. He made a quick glance over at one of the two colossal viewing screens that stood at either end of the colosseum and saw a sweeping aerial view of the battlefield from a drone’s perspective. The image zoomed in sharply on a cluster of pillars below where Mars’s bulky, bronze-clad form could be seen darting swiftly between them. The drone overtook him, panning its lens down directly upon him. From such an angle, Mars looked like little more than a toy soldier scurrying frantically through a rat maze.
Veles was in the middle of scanning for Mars’s position by way of his treacherous little overhead observer when a second, hitherto unseen camera drone lurking stealthily above Veles cut to its own feed. Veles was taken aback for a surreal moment as the image of his ten-meter-tall, high-definition doppelganger flashed onto the screen before him — replacing the live aerial footage of Mars’s mad dash through the forest of pillars. Velese stood there, addled for the moment — conspicuous as a raised banner, he felt naked and exposed. The feeling was quickly consumed by fiery irritation. Analyzing the camera’s angle, Veles quickly triangulated the position of the tell-tale drone and found it hovering several meters away from his head.
The drone’s singular evil black eye beamed down at him, flashing menacingly in the light of the harsh sun. The viewing screens, although typically useless, were a powerful weapon with the arena in its current configuration — and the weapon cut both ways. If Mars were to only look up at the viewing screens, he would all but have Veles’s location.
Veles’s eyes fell upon the tattle-tale camera drone with intent. It was about seven meters away: much more doable than his previous shot. He took aim and whipped his gladius overhead with deadly precision. The crowd let out a collective gasp of shock as the massive viewing monitors cut to black with a sudden flash of bronze. The camera drone dropped like a dazed fly, spiraling out of the sky and careening into the raised metal pillars below. Veles pursued quickly not wanting to lose his only remaining weapon.
The crowd’s surprised gasps slowly transformed into rolling grumbling and murmuring followed by loud shouts and oaths of angry protestation. The feed was cut; the feed had never been cut before. The colosseum full of sports fanatics didn’t take well to the sudden interruption in their spectating. Veles couldn’t help but crack a wicked smile. The lanistas wouldn’t like that at all. He would certainly be punished severely for the destruction of league equipment later, but he didn’t care. Veles knew he had to move fast. It would be a matter of seconds before another camera drone would fly in to replace its fallen brother. Wasting no time, Veles dove into the forest of pillars below to retrieve his gladius from the smoking wreck of the camera drone and get out of sight.
The gladius had struck true, its vicious point driven destructively through the drone’s glass lens and into its mechanical nervous system. Veles braced the spherical chassis with his foot and wrenched the shortsword free with a metallic groan and shower of shattered glass. Black, acrid smoke vomited from the mouth of the drone’s lethal wound, obscuring the vicinity with heavy rolling clouds. Veles stifled a cough, drawing his cloak about his mouth. He began to retreat from the wreck when glancing back, a quick line of risky thinking stopped him.
Veles’s eyes and throat burned as he crept beneath the cover of the thick, choking smoke. He tried to stay low to the ground where there was a thin layer of clean air that separated from the rising fumes like oil in water. Stumbling half-blind through the smog, Veles found the top of a small sand dune that overlooked the crash site. The smoke was thinner there, but thick enough — Veles thought — to obscure him from the drones. Getting down onto his belly, he crawled for the safety of that sandy slope that rose like an island out of a black smokey sea around it.
Veles caught his breath at the top of the small slope, having found a pocket of relatively clean air. Keeping low to the ground, he shuffled around so that he faced the wreckage and spread out his purple cloak so that it would cover him as he lay slightly inclined against the top of the small dune. While otherwise brilliant and painfully conspicuous, the cloak could be activated with a simple command. The holo-fibers shimmered to life — and like an octopus hiding in a reef — the colors adjusted to Veles’s surroundings creating a decently effective camouflage. Unlike an octopus, the cloak couldn’t match its environment’s texture — so on close investigation — it could be easily picked out. However, the cloak proved quite effective from a distance, and with the added obscuring effect of the smoke screen, Veles had all but turned invisible.
Veles smirked to himself, feeling rather clever. He clutched his gladius close. His muscles tensed up like loaded springs ready to strike like a sand viper if Mars came into range. If he could just get Mars to push into the smoke in pursuit of him, he was sure he could slip out undetected to retrieve his spear. Or… If Mars was particularly unobservant, he had a chance to end it right here.
Veles strained his ears to hear any sound of Mars’s approach, but the impatient and now incessant grumblings of the masses drowned out anything as delicate as an approach on foot. Veles chanced a peak out from under the cloak. It was hard to make out much through the smoke, but Veles caught a flash of bronze piercing through the dense nebula. A moment later, Mars emerged, his flaming eyes flickered from here to there as he made a careful perimeter around the smoking wreck. Clearly suspicious of an ambush, Mars crept in semicircles from pillar to pillar — at all times keeping a column between himself and his blind spot.
Veles gritted his teeth impatiently. If he struck now, Veles knew that there was a good chance he wouldn’t be able to close the distance between himself and Mars without giving Mars adequate time to react — and then he would be out-ranged by that dreaded dory spear. However, if he waited much longer, the smoke would clear and Mars would inevitably spot him. A stray desert breeze was already beginning to blow some of the precious cover away, and with each passing moment, less and less smoke belched from the wound in the wrecked drone.
Veles dug into the sand hard with his toes and sprang from the top of the dune like an ambush predator. He dove forward shield-first, with his sword arm tensed and spring-loaded right behind it. The still active holo-cloak billowed behind him, distorting the light around it like a tear in the fabric of spacetime. Mars’s head jerked in the direction of the sudden movement, alerted at once to the ambush. His spear was a blur as he thrust it forward to intercept Veles. But Veles was too fast; with a backhanded swing of his shield, he batted the spear aside leaving Mars’s left flank unprotected. Veles landed with a sandy skid on Mars’s newly exposed flank; his eyes flashed over the vulnerable armpit. Seeing his opening, he didn’t spare a moment in contemplation. He pushed with every ounce of strength that his legs could muster against the sifting sands and lunged forward in a second explosive leap. With his shield hand, he gripped the pommel of his gladius and drove it toward the giant’s vitals in a two-handed thrust.
Mars tucked into a roll that saved his life. He let his massive upper body drop like a stone, causing the gladius to rip into his shoulder instead of his thoracic cavity. The blade cut deep through skin and muscle tissue, scraping the top of his scapula. Mars grit his teeth and dove hard, creating enough distance to prevent an easy follow-up attack. He tumbled hard, kicking up columns of sand behind him. He finished out the roll in a low-profile crouch with his right knee touching the ground and his left leg extended behind him. He raised his aspis and spear defensively — struggling a little with the spear. Blood oozed warm and sticky from the wound on his left shoulder. The trauma had been so sudden that Mars had felt no pain, but the damage was undeniable. His spear arm tremored and the weapon he held seemed to weigh twice as much as it had only a moment ago.
The crowd erupted at the elation of first blood — which was unsurprising, but another sound underscored it. There was a monotonous droning buzz overhead. Not daring to take his eyes off of his opponent even for a moment, Veles cocked an ear toward the sky and heard the soft whine of several camera drones swarming in overhead like vultures to a newly discovered corpse.
A small pack of the spherical spectators had been recording Mars’s pursuit into the smoke. Apparently, the video team wanted enough lenses trained on the reignited action so as to prevent Veles from disappearing again. The fight was pay-per-view and noticeable stretches of time wherein one of the main combatants was missing and unaccounted for were sure to garner complaints from the viewers. The buzz of their whirring electric motors grew louder as they began to descend upon the rediscovered Veles with a seemingly vengeful intent. They seemed now as if they might begin diving at him, cutting into him with their rotors, tearing into him with those vicious pinions, and thus exacting justice for their slain brother.
The wind generated by each of the drones’ four, furious rotors seemed to churn into a singular violent vortex. Veles’s hair whipped about his face and sprays of errant sand stung his cheek. Veles cursed beneath his breath. The league was clearly trying to send a message. Veles was forced to squint as the miniature dust devil howled around him. This caused his image of Mars to blur into a nebulous cluster of light and shadow. If Mars advanced upon him now, he would be fighting half-blind.
Mars’s muddled form shifted. Fearing a counterattack in this vulnerable state, Veles opted to retreat. Ducking out from under the oppressive downwash of airflow, Veles’s sandals pounded hard against the sand as he made for the nearest pillar. Mars had used the distraction caused by the drones to cast off his brazen aspis and shift his spear to his uninjured right arm. He took aim at the fleeing Veles and hurled the mighty lance.
Veles scrambled behind the closest pillar as the missile slammed into space he had occupied only moments ago. The spear hit the stone pillar with the force of a cannon ball, sending bits of rock exploding away from the place of impact. Wasting no time, Veles leaped on top of a short, squat stoney stump and continued his flight through the tree-like pillars. It was only a matter of time before Mars used the mag glove to retrieve his dory spear, and Veles didn’t want to be in range when that happened.
Veles now effortlessly leaped from pillar-top to pillar-top, putting more distance between him and his opponent. Out of the corner of his eye, a darting black object caught his attention. One of the poly-rotored drones had locked onto him and now matched his pace, hounding him. The camera trained on Veles, relaying his every movement to his opponent. Mars — using the guidance of the colosseum viewing screens — was able to pursue from below with ease. Veles was flabbergasted. Never in his long career had he seen the league so flagrantly tip the scales in favor of one glad over another. Occasional meddling and league favoritism were inevitable — but this? Veles didn’t stand a chance with Mars receiving advantages like this.
Veles was mid-leap between pillars when he watched Mars below him take aim with his good right arm and unleash his spear once again. With lethal accuracy, the projectile flew skyward to intercept Veles. He moved his aspis to block the inevitable missile. It all happened so fast, that the spear might have appeared to bounce harmlessly off of the shield, when it actually pierced into the bronze like it were made of aluminum foil. Pain and metal both lanced through Veles’s arm as the spear slammed into him mid-air. His carbon-fiber bones were several times stronger than a human’s, but regardless he felt his radius and ulna both splinter under the impact. Veles managed to keep his trajectory and land on top of the pillar he had been aiming for. He tumbled onto it gracelessly, coming to a stop precariously close to its curved edge. It was a bad position, but he was out of line of sight for the time being.
Pain flooded him: blurring his vision and enraging his senses. The crowd absolutely erupted in elation at the successful counter-attack. Veles watched as the viewing screens used the present pause in the action to replay the clip, catching all the gory details up close that distance might have omitted. To his right he once again heard that familiar infernal buzzing. The treacherous camera drone stared down at him, its singular black eye trained on his face. He watched as the viewing screens changed to glorious high-resolution footage of his injured and bleeding form. A mingle of despairing and celebratory sounds cascaded throughout the crowd. They were eating it up.
They were eating him up. His struggle for survival, his suffering: they devoured it. Some, the sadists — savored it, relishing each bite. They felt elated by his pain and humiliation, reaping revenge by proxy for the thousand humiliations and pains they no doubt suffered each day in their own lives. Others, like masochistic gluttonous fools, gorged themselves on his suffering. Suffering that they would never have to bear — that they could never understand — stretching themselves thin with false pity. He was a product: merely another morsel to be consumed by an unending quantity of consumers. He was whatever they needed him to be: an upstart, the unfavored, a hero, a champion, a veteran, a villain. All titles that the press had no doubt applied to him at some point or other in his gladiatorial career, but they were all projections. Beneath all that… What was he beneath all that?
Time slowed to a relative crawl as Veles’s synthetic synapsis blazed with a million simultaneous processes that rendered thought and pain in equal amounts. For a moment, he simply lay there, staring at his own reflection mirrored back to him on the viewing screen. Like Narcissus lost in the infinity of staring into his own eyes, he too stared into that personal infinity. Transfixed. Unblinking.
“Am I really in there?” The thought came unbidden. “Is there really something inside of me? Is there really something behind those eyes?”
Veles wasn’t sure why he was having these thoughts. Why here of all places, why now of all times? Anything but total devotion of mind to the contest at hand was sure to get him killed; that was a truth he had learned intimately. Thinking about anything other than survival was a death sentence. A glad lived by the sword, to meditate on anything else was the road to insanity and atrophy. Yet it always happened — even the most hardened warriors broke eventually — usually suddenly.
Veles watched it happen once. A veteran glad by the name of Nebo had thrust his head into the giant gear mechanism that opened the eastern gate, crushing his skull and shattering the tungsten carbide housing box that kept his artificial consciousness protected during the games. Nebo had been one of Veles’s many mentors. They had spent hundreds of hours training together, and during all that time Veles didn’t remember a single moment that might have indicated a countdown to a mental breakdown. He just suddenly snapped… Had it been sudden? No, surely Nebo’s mind had been dying little by little for a long time before that last invisible push sent him over the edge into oblivion.
Veles wondered, had he been dying all this time too? Breaking apart so slowly that he never knew it was happening. Was it happening now? Was this it? Was this that irresistible atrophy? He had staved off all of these thoughts before; he was no stranger to them. But he had always managed to wrestle them into place within his own psyche. Now they smashed through his mental fortifications like colossal rampaging beasts; no force could subdue them — not even the will of a god.
Veles was smiling. He wasn’t sure why; he only knew that he was. He could see it in third-person — meters-wide on the viewing screen. The whole colosseum could see it — a hint of mirth, starkly defiant of all circumstances.
“Today” he thought. “I will be something of my own making…”
With his good arm, he unclasped the dented aspis from his shattered arm. He saw his own fragmented reflection, on its brazen, blood-smeared surface. He gripped the shield firmly with his right hand before hurling it like a discus directly into the infernal little drone’s single black eye. To his great satisfaction, the drone went down with a metallic crunch, bouncing off of the elevated cylinders like an old-fashioned pinball machine. The crowd erupted in a chorus of exasperated shrieks and shouts as the viewer once again went black. Veles laughed. As he struggled to his feet, he heard Mars address him vocally for the first time ever.
“What are you doing?” The deep baritone voice came from right below him. Veles resisted the automatic thought that he could use the moment to drop down and drive his gladius through Mars’s skull.
“I hadn’t planned on it at first, but I think I’m going to try something different today.” Veles answered back, wincing as he tested his shattered arm. The crowd was getting impatient now, their dissatisfaction perpetuating and descending into malcontent shouts of anger.
“It looks like you’ve lost your mind,” Mars said plainly.
“ — Feels like it too. I think you might have finally broken me, friend. That was one hell of a throw.” Veles squinted against the light of the blazing sun, making out the tiny darting forms of two new drones that descended from high in the stands and were now racing towards him at dangerous speeds. He crouched low and readied his gladius in his good hand. From his peripheral vision, he saw the hulking form of Mars appear in a flash of bronze to his right. In a single great leap, he had jumped nearly ten meters straight up, landing with a heavy thud on the column beside Veles’s own. Veles braced for the spear’s violent impact into his flank. This time he would not resist it; but no such impact came. The drones had made it to the edge of the pit and were now hurtling straight for them. They were about a hundred meters away now and closing the distance quickly.
“After so many years, why are you doing this now?”
The drones were seventy meters away now. The viewing screen came to life once again in a blur of color, as the rapidly approaching drones turned on their feeds. The masses rallied with a collective roar of renewed excitement . . . sixty meters . . . Closing fast. Veles took aim at the one in the lead. If he moved fast enough, he could take it out before the second one smashed into him.
“I guess I wanted to see — ”
Fourty . . . Thirty . . .
“— If I was more than just a program in a body.”
Ten . . .
In a moment that transcended language, the two moved as one. Veles and Mars were Gemini. It was as if the same impulse that moved through Veles’s own right arm moved through Mars’s. They were two broken halves of the same thing — put together to make a whole. In perfect synchronicity, the two androids leaped and lunged with their weapon at the oncoming black battering rams. In a sparking clash of metal and fury, their weapons crashed into the drones’ chassis.
Functioning more like a bat than a blade, the gladius’s cutting potential was wasted against the drone’s durable metal exterior. However, the crude kinetic force of the strike coupled with the force of the drone’s charge was enough to obliterate it on impact. Mars hadn’t even bothered using the blade of his dory spear and instead opted to swing the haft like a giant quarterstaff. He used the weapon’s additional reach to intercept the second drone from behind the first. Both drones blew apart spectacularly in a shower of shrapnel and glass. Veles used the hand of his broken arm to shield his eyes.
Veles was sure that his arm had been taken off at the shoulder. However, when he opened his eyes he saw it was still attached — though bloodied and mangled from the exploding drone. He flexed his fingers and found that his grip on the gladius was still sure enough.
Mars had fared better, his armor proved impervious to the flying shrapnel shards. Only a few stripes of red had opened up along his exposed forearms. Most importantly, as the dust settled, it became apparent to all that neither android had been knocked down from their pillars. For a moment, the audience sat silent in stunned confusion. As the slow realization of what happened took hold of them, the crowd erupted into the very zenith of excitement.
True, this wasn’t the show they had paid to see. This was totally unprecedented: new. interesting as well as violent. The crowd had been uncertain before with the constant interruptions to the viewing screen’s feed, but now it was unanimous. They leaned into the action collectively, ignoring the viewing screens altogether. With their own naked eyes they watched as the two tiny figures at the center of the colosseum rebelled against their creators in what was certain to be a final and bloody act of hubris. If the lanistas were shocked at all by the unpredicted turn of events, they didn’t show it. As long as the masses remained, the show would go on.
Veles watched now as a small cloud of camera drones emerged from the lanista’s viewing booth like a swarm of enraged hornets from a hive. They descended upon the two warriors — slower this time: deliberate and menacing. A black cloud of buzzing doom.
“You know what this will mean for us, don’t you? The league doesn’t tolerate glads who don’t abide by the rules of the arena.” Mars signaled. He had to resort once again to short-range messaging as the noise of the crowd was too much for his voice box to overcome.
“We make the rules down here, Mars. We always have. Even if they don’t know it. They don’t have anything without us.” Veles looked down at the blunted and blackened gladius in his hand and sheathed it. With his still serviceable arm, he removed the iron wreath from his head and let it fall from his hand. It landed with a quiet thud in the sand fifteen meters below. Next, he unfastened the clasps of his holo-fiber cloak and let the gentle desert breeze carry it away from him. Without a need for explanation, Mars had followed suit and begun removing his own armor. Mars’s spear, cuirass, and greaves fell one by one, joining the ever-growing pile of armaments on the sands below. With both hands, he removed his magnificent red-plumed helm, letting loose a tangled mane of hair that fell below his shoulders. He let it too fall into the sands below along with his own iron wreath. They landed atop the pile of discarded metal with a dull ring that sang out a grim finality.
Veles took a seat upon the tall metal pillar, letting his legs dangle almost carelessly over the edge. He had doffed his Grecian style leather armor and undershirt so that he was naked from the waist up. The sun felt warm on his dark synthetic skin, and for once — he appreciated it as more than just a mere mundane reality of the world. He leaned back, supporting himself with his good arm, and basked in its light. Mars too had taken a seat.
Veles noticed, somewhat disinterestedly, that the fickle crowd had once again fallen to silence, their profound disappointment palpable. Gone were their gasps of shock and elation. The magic and pageantry of the colosseum had been broken. There would be no final confrontation: no war between creation and creator. There would be no bloodshed, and there would be no entertainment. The warriors sat and waited for their enemy peacefully and the mob watched with silent disbelief.
The only sound to remain was the high, winy buzzing of the encroaching drones. They were almost overhead now, like some sort of personal raincloud coalescing above Mars and Veles. A single small, black spherical payload fell from the sky — from perhaps thirty meters above. Then another. Soon a rain of these small black spheres fell from the droning cloud above. One of them landed right next to Veles on top of his pillar. He watched it flash with the telltale blue light of a plasma charge. Veles knew that this would be his one-hundred-and-twenty-first and final death.
Veles looked up at the midday sun one last time. He found that he was smiling. He wasn’t sure why; he only knew that he was.
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