Gladiator

Outside, a crowd roars.

Before you, kneeling on the ground, a youth prays. Improvised beads clack through his fingers one after another. The sound is almost perfect, matching the steady, quick tempo of your heart in your ears.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Light filters through cracks in the board ceiling, bathing motes of floating dust in sickly, yellow beams. You remember the shafts of sunlight filtering through clouds by your home, the far away haze of rain on the horizon. For a moment the scent of morning dew on green grass fills your mind.

Overhead, the crowd roars.

You look around, eyeing the dozen other sweaty, scarred bodies in the darkness, looking for familiar faces. Hints of seared flesh show in the rays of light, badly healed scars grasping desperately onto gleaming chrome implants. Clawing them down, trying with the desperation of the dying to push them away. Failing at both.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

The bench underneath you protests loudly as a woman, three prisoners down shifts. Prisoners? You don't belong with prisoners. You were trained, stolen, beaten, starved, but trained. You showed promise! Then again, implants like those you see don't come cheap. Hundreds, no thousands of Terrars each.

The bench creaks again and a pained whimper leaks through cracked and bleeding lips. You feel the dry rasp of the air against your exposed skin. You can almost taste the blood on the air. Almost. You know it's there, and you can almost taste it.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

More moaning, louder now, draws your eye back to the woman. Whatever was ultimately done to her was sloppy, puckered scars around the chrome still crack as it weeps clear and red tears with every motion. Again, the bench protests, but the sound is lost to you. The woman, maybe trained enough to put up a good fight, to warrant the expense, is not meant to live. None of you are.

Desperate for anything to fix on, your eyes remain locked on the woman and her chrome. Ghosts of previous fights linger on its surface, hidden from a distance by the almost mirror- polish but visible to you. Barely more than a meter away from it, you can see the scratches and scores that tell the chrome’s story.

You don't try to guess who wore it last. You don't try to guess their end, what good is it to guess what is certain?

Some of the lessons from school stick in your head. Some. And so you think about the kind of wire-brushes that could bring it to such a mirror shine. There are tells you remember, but you fail to bring them to mind.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

A clock? Ticking down to what?

The youth with the improvised beads’ muttering gets louder. You don’t know his name and don’t think to ask, he’s only a distraction now. A distraction from-

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Outside, the crowd roars.

Each repetition louder, longer, lustier. You know the sounds, though you’ve never heard them before. The blood drunk bellowing of a beast long beyond the need for savagery watching its favourite prey die. Something in it speaks to the core of your being, your heart aches with empathy for the victim.

Of the night before, you remember nothing. There had been training, but then there was always training. Always more to learn, more to practice. There had been the general kind of pain, the usual kind of fatigue and then...

Then...

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Then...

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

...An invitation?

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack..

Yes. You remember the invitation. Straining your mind, you reach back and grasp the memory with sweat-slicked fingers. It wriggles, formed of nothing grasped in ever-tightening will alone you struggle with it, teeth gritting as you try for anything. Anything!

An invitation alone, you must be content with that. With the knowledge that you were invited, and that you accepted. Glancing around the low, stuffy, and overcrowded room in which you sit and stew in mingled sweat and fear, you wonder. Did you really accept this? You cannot imagine it, that someone poured enough anything into your ears or down your throat to make you accept this.

The woman with the oversized and over polished chrome groans again and lists drunkenly to one side. No one rises to help her. No one offers her so much as a hand to clutch in her misery. You do not. The thought that it should be you to extend the first helping hand does not cross your mind. Instead, you manage to drag your eyes away from her, back to the ceiling.

Overhead, the crowd is roaring.

Planted death waiting to ripen sits in filth around you, and overhead the crowd roars again. And again.

You fill your thoughts with it, try to drown out the woman with her fortune of chrome. Try to ignore what had once been a child there in the corner furthest from you.

You want to scream to the cheap ceiling through which the false sunlight shines and demand answers, but you don't. You merely sit and stare.

And try not to remember.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

The youth with his beads is louder now. What started as a hum, a mosquito's whine at the edge of hearing is now a rolling thunder in your ears. Repeated over and over, their are words you once knew but they are now lost behind the noise.

You cannot remember how you came to be in this place. You do not know why you are sitting in the semi darkness, waiting, waiting, waiting. You know what is coming but refuse to accept it.

You know for what the crowd is roaring and you know the purpose that the people surrounding you serve. In the back of the room what was once a child sobs. It's a broken, mechanical sound.

You don't look at them. Don't see the gleaming chrome crudely grafted to their face, obscuring their mouth. The child has long since stopped trying to scream. An empty sound, barely above the ranting, chanting, braying of the crowd as they watch another die. And another. And another. Beyond the overcrowded cell you know to your bones that people are dying. Fed to 'deranged' constructs, torn asunder by augmented fighters, devoured by crafted beasts of legend.

You know where you are, but cannot force yourself to admit it. You know what will happen when the doors, wherever they are, open.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Overhead, the crowd howls. Rabid, blood-drunk glee laces the air as the youth with the beads continues to pray.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

This is not your place, if you only knew how you arrived maybe you can escape. The crowd roars, another death. A tally on a wall that no one will see and a name that will never be remembered. You were told stories about places like this at your grandfather's knee, stories from the chaos of the Market Wars. Stories to scare you into behaving.

"Do as you're told," the old man had said, a gentle smile on his lips. "Behave yourself and the skin-mongers won't come for you."

Skin mongers and the fighting pits. Stuff of legend, remnants in your mind from a time long since dust. A time and a culture and a people buried under the sheer weight of history piling on top of it. The roaring of the crowd should not exist.

But the weight of muscle and skin and the chrome you don't want to admit to on your bones is heavy. And the memories heavier still. You lived in a training centre, after being taken. Skin-mongers, your grandfather had called them. Skin-mongers, as though they flayed children in the night and left their bones to be found in the morning.

A sweet lie to cover the truth you now know.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack..

The sound is one too many.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Breathing and clicking and whirring and grinding in the semi-dark around you.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

The contented howling of the mob above.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Barely discernable screams from somewhere. Somewhere.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

The over-chromed woman down the bench is sobbing now. A steady, trembling weeping that layers under the other sounds. She keeps whispering to herself through her tears. From the corner of one eye you watch her hand, gleaming, pristine from a distance, trace the puckered, leaking wounds around her chrome.

You don't speak her language; you do not know her name. Nonetheless you know the words. They run laps in your own head, round and round and round. "Why me? What happened? Where am I? I don't belong here. I want to go home. Mother, Father, help me…"

The same words, over and over again. They layer in and amongst the prayers of the youth with the beads. One atop the next, a tapestry of misery that grows longer by the second.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Clackclack.

Desperate, you raise one hand and slash it through the air. You try to order him to stop, to order any of them to stop. Simply STOP! But there is no sound, save a sharp, snick! that maybe, just maybe, only you heard.

Clackclack.

Clackcla-

Thud!

No one speaks. The woman with all her chrome is silent now, her misshapen face turned towards you, single human eye full of tears as she stares. Stares.

In the corner, what had once been a child curls further into itself, mutilated face to knees, head shaking. Their bare, filthy heels scrabble at the dirt floor of your cell, trying to curl deeper, an ever-tighter ball.

Outside, the crowd howls.

The beads are silent now. And you refuse to look. Refuse to see that the beads, for so long a rolling metal river of sound in the confined space, now lay motionless on the ground. They lay millimetres away from outstretched fingers. Human skin, without a gram of chrome to be seen from fingertip to shoulder.

But you refuse to see him. Refuse to feel the weight at the end of your arm, extending at least a half meter from your still closed fist. Refuse to hear the steady drip, drip, drip of something hitting the floor.

A new sound.

At the end of what extends from your still-closed fist a tiny weight, barely perceptible, gathers. It swells as gravity pulls it, distorts it, drawing it down, down, down, until drip. Another. Drip. And again. Drip.

The wetness along your chrome does not exist. The youth on the ground does not exist. You are not here, that is what you tell yourself. That you are not here, and when next your eyes open, you will be home. For the first time in months, home. HOME!

Drip.

You cannot feel the wetness there. The one you refuse to see. You cannot feel it gather and roll down the length of what extends from your closed fist. Cannot feel it gather and bead and-

Drip.

Before you on the ground the youth lays in a spreading puddle. In two pieces.

Drip.

A sound rings in your ears, a sharp, painful sound. You have never heard it before and understand, deep in your marrow that you will never hear it again. This is what they told you about, in those days you try to forget. Among the grunting of those who are about to die saluting the reaper on their way past, you were told about the sound.

One to avoid, even unto death.

Drip.

In the corner of your vision, words flash very briefly. Green text, fluorescent and almost painful in the gloom. "Demerit. Penalty applied."

Trembling now, you force yourself to look at the youth.

Drip.

You force yourself to see the length of sharp, silvery metal smoothly grafted to your arm. For the First time, you acknowledge your fist hidden behind it and will it to open. The blade retracts, a sound just beneath hearing filling the nearly silent space around you. At your feet, the body of the youth who had been praying lays. Motes of dust, shaken loose by the crowds overhead, land in the blood surrounding what is left of him. His eyes, blank and empty in death stare at you from a face frozen in the ghost of surprise.

Drip.

The last of the blood falls from your chrome fingers as the blade returns to its hiding place in what had once been your arm. For the first time, you gaze down at what had been done to you and see it, truly see it.

Gleaming metal, intricately placed to look like the scales on a fish from your shoulders down both arms including the hands. It moves like skin. Warping and flexing your fingers, your spasming thoughts congeal around one word. "Beautiful."

After so long, you gaze on what was made of you and your lip draws back in a sneer. They thought to change you, to carve and rebuild you after what they did. You remember the moment, the second or less before the door closed and you see the face of the one who sold you here. At least they had the decency to look embarrassed.

Everyone around you lurches backwards, shoulders flinching up and hands automatically flying to protect their face. Words are floating in the middle of the space. Huge, glowing, and this time it is clear that everyone else sees them too.

"Gates opening in 30... 29... 28...27...26...25..."

Like the rest, your hands moved automatically, from the right the blade extends again. To either side and ahead of you, people shy away. What had once been a child, still hiding in one corner as though the world would simply pass them by, shies away from you. The thought to comfort them does not cross your mind.

In the mirror-like polish of your chrome you catch a sight of your face. And the scream that builds and builds and builds in your chest tears at your heart. Like the child, it has nowhere to go.

Careful of the weapons built into your arm, you reach up and gently cup your chin in your fingers. You cannot feel through the chrome. Cannot feel the metal fingers playing across where your lips had been. Cannot feel the sharp, crafted metal that had replaced your nose.

Gazing at your reflection in the mirror-polished shine of your arm you can watch the terror and the rage and the questions boiling behind your eyes. You can see your chest convulse, the muscles remembering how to scream. Failing. Last night, just last night you had been yourself! They had promised you PROMISED! that you would remain yourself. Not become one of their monsters, if only you played their game...

"15...14...13...12...11..."

Outside the crowd roars.

Around you, people shuffle. They watch the glowing letters the same way they might have at a person lost in drug-delirium. Glances are thrown around the room, eyes or their replacements skating over the rotting metal walls. More than a few find their way to you, sitting with a corpse at your feet.

"FIVE!"

You remember the scent of blood and imagine the taste of it on the air. You remember the feeling of it running across skin that no longer exists. You remember how to scream as another ghost of one wracks your chest.

"FOUR!"

What used to be a child rocks back and forth in the corner. Their shoulders shake, like they're trying to cry but you hear nothing. And no tears fall from their eyes. You feel them on your own cheeks, just above where the metal respirator ends. You feel them roll down your skin and feel them vanish off the edge.

"THREE!"

Before your eyes, your whole life flashes. You remember being a child, crying about monsters in the dark. You remember school, and you remember work, and you remember play. You remember laughter and tears and sorrow and rage.

You do not remember being processed. But you remember being trained. This was never your place, it was a nightmare from under your bed. Now it's real.

Around you, corpses who have not yet realized their deaths stare at the countdown. Most of them would have training. Though you recognize none from your own, you know they must have, no one wastes good chrome without getting a fight. Unless... unless maybe it was all for show... rippers aren't exactly rare...

"TWO!"

Distant and fuzzy, almost imagined. Faded and out of focus like a memory from a dream you feel the pain. Its ghost sears across your chrome, the silent echo of breaking bones and rending flesh singing in your ears.

Chrome fingers desperate, you claw at your metal throat for a heartbeat. Just one. Almost too late you remember and wrench your hands away from your head. The merest thought of them, the panic your heart pumps through your veins, brings both blades sliding out almost silently.

Behind you, the wall grinds upwards and the bench pulls sharply into the ground. People fall, crying out if fate left them vocal cords and you envy them their freedom.

You do not fall. You spin and stare, trying to understand what you see. A dozen other cages dot the arena, each with the same number of people as yours. Or fewer. Corpses show among the other prisoners, and a few on their feet still have blood on their hands, visible under the harsh arena lights.

This is not your place; you raise your hands and intentionally draw out both blades. You do not belong here, but a whispered promise drifts into your mind, a memory from before the surgeries. Before they knew you were valuable.

Assuming you survive this mele, only nine more fights. Only nine, and then... and then...

"ONE! DON’T DIE… HAHAHA!