>> What a squalid looking place.

  Pompeii escorted me out of the cell and into the main area of the coliseum. The main thoroughfare was a large circular hallway with rooms on the left. On the right was a metal grate filled with small holes which gave a clear view into the arena itself. Light poured in through the holes and pocked the dirty walls with spots of light. We were below ground-level, meaning that any observation would be performed from near the fighter’s feet.

  It was anarchy inside of the backstage area. Workshops spilled out from their designated spaces and onto the floor outside, with piles of scrap and discarded parts around every corner. Robots loitered in makeshift seating areas, rarely saying more than a word to each other. Not a sociable lot.

  “This is where the magic happens. The handlers and their bots live down here.”

  He brought me to one of those small rooms. The doorway was covered by a tattered piece of beige tarp. We stepped inside. A selection of workbenches and storage boxes were scattered inside. There were also a few personal items and a pair of charging cables coming down from the top left corner.

  “And this is my workshop. Since you’re my new fighter – this is where we’re going to be staying from now on. We’ll patch you up, try to find some nice parts, and see how far you can get. You understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “London.”

  “London? You really are an early model – getting an important place like that assigned to you.”

  He found a familiar spot on one of the empty crates and instinctively stroked his chin. Pompeii was a strange looking bot. It was evident that extensive modification had taken place. His eyes were shrouded by a crested helmet, and his shoulders were decorated with hanging red ribbons, topped with brass medals. A leather skirt emerged from the bottom of his torso and covered his upper legs.

  “I should tell you some of the ground rules before we get started. This place is a total free-for-all. You can use whatever parts you scrounge together, and they don’t care how you get your hands on them. Every week they put together a schedule. There are two active days where the fights take place, and the rest of the week is designated for repairs and prep.”

  “How long is the average… life expectancy here?”

  “Not very long. The Ringmaster gets touchy when somebot destroys another, since he’s the one paying for them to be here. The only rule in a fight is to avoid smashing the Braincase, which is hard to do. Most of these weapons aren’t good enough to break through that material anyway. Accidents still happen, and some of these mean rust buckets are glad to kill an opponent if they think they’re a threat. You’ll learn really quick who to avoid down here.”

  An oddly merciful approach to a gladiatorial arena, even if it was driven entirely by a profit motive. This Ringmaster must have traded away valuable components to build his collection of fighters. It was rational to forbid them from destroying one another permanently and wasting that investment. That wouldn’t stop the gladiators from acting in their own self-interest though. They wanted to win and eliminate any potential threats, a prisoner’s dilemma with no easy solution.

  I was starting to settle down after what happened at Waterway. I just needed some answers, and worrying about the outcome wasn’t going to give me them. I had to get out of here and find someone from Waterway.

  “Don’t think about cutting loose and running, by the way, I’ve seen stronger bots than you try. They get to the gates and have the Ringleader’s lieutenants put them down. Those three are serious trouble. Even if you get out, they’re going to hunt you down and drag you bag – or make an example out of you.”

  “I won’t.”

  >> Don’t rock the boat. We need to understand this place before making plans to escape.

  >> Berlin and the others are more experienced than us. They can look after themselves.

  >> Saint Sauveur is probably more worried about us than we are him.

  There was a tension in the air that was difficult to describe. Pompeii was the one charged with looking after me and getting me ready for these organized fights, but there was also an interpersonal aspect to our relationship that was unavoidable. We would be spending a lot of time together. I had very little to say to him. I sat down on an open spot and waited.

  Sensing that his presence wasn’t wanted, Pompeii got to his feet and wandered away to start working on some of the parts we would need for the event. I did have questions – but no interest in asking them and revealing much about myself. From the way Pompeii worded it, he must have worked with other robots as his underlings before. It didn’t take a leap in logic to figure that they were all scrapped and buried.

  The silence did get to him. He spoke up whilst tinkering with a pair of new legs for me.

  “This place is all about politics; even outside of the arena. Keep your head down and try not to step on any toes, alright? All the fighting is best kept for the audience anyway.”

  “When is the first fight?”

  “Five days from now. You’ll be on the Sunday – so we’ll have a chance to watch the others first.”

  >> Simple questions like those seem to keep him from prying about our background.

  >> We don’t have a background. We only woke up a few months ago.

  “You work, you impress the crowd, you get your share of the power reserves to keep yourself moving. That should always be the priority. Nothing to be done if they cut you off and leave you for wreckage.”

  I nodded. The silence stretched on for almost four hours after that. Pompeii kept himself busy, disassembling old parts and piecing them back together, or tinkering with a set of crude melee weapons. It was getting under his plating. Normally he would have built some kind of rapport with his newest recruit, I assumed. He kept glancing at me with mismatched eyes. One red, the other blue.

  “You got a story to share?”

  I eked out a simple reply to sate his curiosity; “I’m nothing. I’m no-one. I woke up in Waterway and worked for them, that’s all.”

  “Nothing so simple happens down here. I guess that’s my fault for expecting more. I know you can’t trust me.”

  “It’s not a matter of trust. That is the whole story.”

  >> We don’t know anything, we can’t do anything. We’re just a piece of scrap carried by the currents.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  >> Waterway isn’t going to remember us. What’s the point in this show anyway?

  Discordant thoughts bounced off of the walls in my head. My eyes narrowed. I tapped the side of my Headcase and tried not to think too hard about it.

  “So you woke up recently? Heh. It’s been so long for me that I can scarcely remember it now. Thinking about myself as a good drone who only followed orders? It doesn’t even feel like the same bot.”

  >> He’s trying to pry you open by offering you anecdotes about himself.

  >> What a stupid strategy. We have nothing to share – just like we said.

  “Never been to Waterway though. Too far out of the way for the likes of me, and once you get dragged down into this arena? There’s no going back. Not for most of us. Not that anybot is willing to listen when I tell them it’s a bad idea to try and run away.”

  Wasn’t that convenient. An unbiased observer whose first thought was to tell me that escape was useless. What a terrible way to try and build trust. It was the last statement I wanted to hear at that moment. Did Pompeii understand how someone else would perceive his words?

  “That’s a mean look you’re giving me, newbie.”

  “I can see why you struggle to build a rapport with your fighters. Don’t you see how off-putting it is to hear that when they’re lost and confused?”

  “Most of them aren’t as confused as you,” he quipped, “But they brought you here offline and told them not to power you on until they were gone. Even if that wasn’t the case – you don’t have much to go on when it comes to the Rusted Wall. I bet those Waterway folks never mentioned us.”

  >> They wanted to make us feel special, like a rockstar. It was a parade dedicated entirely to us. Oxford was afraid of what would happen if we were awake during the exchange.

  >> What a load of crap. Oxford beat the hell out of us without even breaking a proverbial sweat.

  “Am I stuck here?” I asked.

  Pompeii shook his head, “No. You’re free to wander around the Arena District. It should be obvious where the no-go areas are. Just try not to get into any fights before you’re scheduled to have your debut. They won’t stop at smashing your limbs.”

  I was already halfway through the curtain when he warned me again about overstepping my bounds. I looked to my left and right, trying to find an exit out of this godforsaken pit before someone else tried to make conversation with me. Eventually I came across a pair of wooden doors that led out into a courtyard behind the arena’s main building.

  The architecture was strange. It was unlike any of the buildings in Waterway, with great Greco-Roman pillars erected to hold roofs aloft. There was a delicate pattern of coloured metal tiles covering the floor, in the shape of some kind of abstract flower. But the real centrepiece of the vista was what lay beyond. The Rusted Wall was built inside of a truly gigantic space, a cavern excavated miles across in every direction.

  At the front of the great city was a towering fortification, the titular wall, built entirely from rust-red metal. Vicious spikes poked from every porous opening. Ladders and walkways were grafted onto the side and manned by robots armed to the teeth with whatever they could get their hands on. Red banners hung from over the railings at the top, flowing in an artificial breeze coming from a breach in the chamber.

  The big lights that were meant to keep this ‘room’ illuminated had long since died out, with replacement parts being impossible to source. Instead the city remained mostly cloaked in darkness. Smaller lights had been installed wherever possible, burning in a shade of warm orange that gave the entire settlement a strange glow, like seams of magma breaking through darkened rock. It evoked a more familiar image of human civilization, with buildings of various sizes, but it was evident that someone high on the ladder had an interest in ancient architecture too. Similar plazas and temples could be seen everywhere I looked.

  At the apex of it all was this grand church, devoted to violence. I approached the edge and peered over, finding that there was no easy way down to ground level. That explained why there were no guards watching this area of the building. Jumping down there would be suicide. The Rusted Wall was a different beast to Waterway. In population alone, it dwarfed the comparatively modest water-storage silo several times over.

  Did they cut a deal with Oxford to keep the Rampants from cutting their power too? Or did the Rampants know better than to pick on what appeared to be a much more dangerous adversary? Not that Oxford seemed to care about following orders. She launched her attack without waiting to hear our response. The size of the city would make it extremely difficult to take over, which would make cutting their power and forcing them out more attractive.

  Looking down at my new arms and legs – I accepted that it wasn’t going to be easy to escape the trap that Oxford had thrown me into. This was her goal. To show me a fate worse than destruction, to demonstrate that freedom was nothing but a burden which brought pain to those who possessed it. In her mind I would rue the day that I rejected her ‘mercy’ and sought to find what it was that the humans feared in us.

  Why? That question still lingered in my mind. The rational course of action was to abandon my hopeless task and see Oxford for what she really was. There was no benefit to seeking her out again, to repeat this cycle, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to this. Not just a personal curiosity, but a truth which changed our entire perception of what this place was meant to be. Oxford was angry about it, furious even. All of that rage boiled over and brought us here.

  If I wanted answers I’d have to beat them out of her. Leaving her at my mercy was the only option, and for that I would have to find parts which could match up to the unusual ones she was using. That likely meant tracing the source.

  I went back the way I came to try and find the correct exit into the ‘Arena District’ that Pompeii described earlier. Eventually I found another pair of doors that led to a pair of winding staircases. Traveling down them led me to an unassuming rear exit guarded by a pair of heavily armoured bots. Contrary to my expectations they didn’t move to stop me from leaving. I quickly discovered why. There was a large wall that surrounded the District, and that was the point where I was not permitted to tread.

  One of them did call out to me before I could leave.

  “Hey. Did Pompeii give you permission to step out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alright, just remember to be back within the next three hours. We’ll be keeping count.”

  They already knew who I was and who I was assigned to. That was the benefit of having a perfect digital memory. There was no room for interpretation or debate – what we recalled was the truth of the matter. All they had to do was glance at any bot coming or going through the door and they’d have an accurate measurement to the millisecond.

  “I will.”

  I was just happy to be away from that suffocating workshop that ran around the fighting area. The Arena District was not a pretty place by any means, but at least there was more space and less junk lying around. A few other bots were loitering in front of the buildings. Keeping my head down and wandering through allowed me to eavesdrop on them for a while without being pulled away.

  The topic of those conversations universally focused on the fighters in the arena. It appeared that the district was mostly occupied by the gamblers who wanted to be front and centre during the weekly tournaments. Us fighters and our engineers were expected to live within the arena itself. That explained the charging cables hanging from the wall back in Pompeii’s quarters.

  “I heard that they’re repainting Boston and giving him a new name again.”

  “How many times is that now? Six? What a waste of effort. You can tell it’s him the moment he steps into the ring! He always does the same strategy, and he’s pretty much the only one who likes using a mace and shield.”

  “They got a new batch of bots in from the Rampants a few days ago. Hopefully that’ll mix things up a bit – and give Boston a chance to stick to one identity for longer than a few weeks.”

  “Pft. The Bossman must think we’re all stupid.”

  It was all about the money. I kept an ear out and sat on the step of an empty building to preserve energy. They would always come back to their earnings no matter the topic. That was what it was all funnelled into. Bets placed with small parts that every bot needed to keep ticking over – the closest thing we had to a currency down here. A big win could set a bot up for a long while. There was a lot of incentive to bet on the outcome of the fights.

  >> Database: Humanity’s affection for martial arts has always been tainted with politics and corruption. This place may be no different. The fights may be fixed to influence the odds and secure payouts.

  >> The humans never cared though. Fair play was a fiction they entertained to keep the show going and bring in more suckers. The experienced bettors knew what the real game was – predicting who was going to screw over someone else…

  This was the pit. The sum total of our human experience compacted into a miserable whole. Given our freedom we decided to replicate humanity’s greatest vices. They sought the rush of betting their lives and their comfort on the outcome of a scripted show. They told themselves all kinds of comforting lies to make it go down easier. The warm colours of the lights around me weren’t welcoming. Now more than ever I could only see them as overflowing brimstone.

  I refused to be damned with them.