>> Online.
Approach the gate.
Fight.
>> Offline.
>>Online.
Approach the gate.
Fight.
>> Offline.
>>Online.
Approach the gate.
Fight.
>> Offline.
>>Online.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
My glib dismissal of what I was told before by Pompeii came back to bite me soon enough, at least from my perspective. An entire month passed in the blink of an eye, in what felt like a matter of mere hours from where I was standing. Huge black splotches covered my internal logs when I was turned offline and mothballed until the weekends where I was expected to fight in the arena.
Those seconds slipped between my fingers like grains of sand.
Before my spiral, I would have thought nothing of it. The only frame of reference that any of us possessed was that of the efficiency ratings we received from the humans. A job had to be done in a certain amount of time – and that was as far as it went in our minds. There was never a moment where we considered the possibility that time was limited, or that we could miss an important event should we lose it for whatever reason.
Things would always keep moving in the Big Under. Combined with the self-actualization caused by the Graveyard Spiral and you had a recipe for a genuine sense of disorientation. Every time Pompeii woke me up to test a new part or escort me to the ring it would take me a second to calculate how long it had been since the last time.
The other bots talked about recent events that I was not privy to, and then the next time I saw them they’d all act like it was ancient history. There was no way for me to get any solid information out of them in the short timeframe I had during those waking hours. That was partly their intent. It was a form of torture that both kept us off-balance and prevented us from using information to our advantage. Anything we did learn could be rendered completely useless by the following week after all.
Time moved fast for us, but not for the others. Every hour I spent in this place meant that an entire week would pass on the outside. All of the fallout from the Waterway attack remained a complete enigma to me, and there was no sign of any other survivors being sold to the arena for sport like I was. There was no time to speak with the other gladiators, and most of them were less than friendly considering that I was dismantling the competition with precision.
>> It seems as if far more of them are taking this seriously than seeing it for what it really is.
>> Or maybe Pompeii was selling us a crock of lies in the first place…
>> No. He was probably telling the truth. They want to keep us here until we break, and by disadvantaging us they can do just that.
They were competitive at heart. To them those kinds of warnings came off as attempts to make them play down to their opponents and let them get an easy win. Pompeii told me because he was my handler, he had every incentive to encourage me to win every single match, but he didn’t.
>> Rhetoric: I believe the humans described this situation as being ‘like crabs in a bucket.’
It was all weaponized against us. The reward structure, the aesthetic of the arena itself, our relationship with the handlers and each other. They only kept a handful of guards at the entrance to the arena building because they were confident that we would act as our own jailors when immersed in this scheme, it appeared that they were correct about that outcome. A lack of rationality lead to a perverse situation where no bot could trust another.
But even I was starting to feel the pressure. When Pompeii awakened me for a part test that Friday, I couldn’t help but speak up about the extreme periods of time that were passing with every power cycle he put me through.
“What is this supposed to be?”
“What? Those new hands? They’re in better condition than the last pair.”
“Not these. I thought the deal was that we get extra power if we do well. Instead I’ve skipped through an entire month in a matter of hours, and you’re not giving me a choice in the matter.”
Pompeii pinched the bridge of his ‘nose’ and took some time to compose his thoughts.
“That’s not it. As you can guess, they only give us the bare minimum of what we need to stay online even if we put on great matches. I have to stay online a lot more than you do, that’s by design – they want to cause tension between the handlers and their fighters so that they’re less likely to collude.”
“And?”
“And… it’s no use giving you a few minutes of being awake every week. What the hell are you going to do with the fifteen minutes you earn exactly? You need more than that, so it’s better to save them up for one larger spend later on.”
“You should have said that from the start,” I complained, “Don’t you think it’s better to get your side of the story out in the open first before some other bot tells me?”
“You’re not that gullible. I can tell.”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
I nodded towards the crimson banner hanging from the metal rafters.
“It would not go amiss to explain those thinly veiled comments that the others keep making too.”
He closed his eyes and rolled his head back to look at it, hanging there as if to taunt him.
“There’s not much to say. I used to be one of those idiots who thought there was a way out, I helped one of my bots get to the top. You can guess what happened since I’m still stuck here. Any bot who tries to poke their head out of his hole gets knocked back down again – but the other handlers are jealous. All I ended up with was a dead friend and a worthless banner to hang up in this workshop.”
I gave him another moment and considered his answer.
“Do you think this can be called ‘living’ in the manner we’ve come to be familiar with?”
“No. Not at all. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to make the same mistake twice. There’s no benefit to being a ‘winner’ down here. If we want out – we’ll need a better plan, one that doesn’t play by their rigged rules.”
It was worse for me than it was him. He got to stay online for longer while tinkering with me and getting things organized for the fights. It wasn’t as if he could use that time freely however. If he started to slack on those duties then they would cut the power supply for the both of us. The illusion had to be maintained for us to have any chance of escaping.
“It’s funny, in a morbid way, all of those bots out there still think he’s alive and kicking. Relaxing up there in that gilded palace with all of the crap he could ever want. I can’t tell them that they’re wrong. They’ll accuse me of trying to demoralize them and make your life easier.”
Perhaps it wasn’t the right time to completely write-off the prospect of going for the win. What if they decided to take us out of here as a ‘carrot’ to keep the others going? All we’d need was one brief opportunity to get away from their reach. The only freedom we could earn would come by our own hands, not theirs. It could be a celebration or other ceremony. I couldn’t conclude that Pompeii knew everything. He was afraid of going down the same road as before. In that state of mind, it would be easy to close off avenues of escape to avoid repeating his mistake.
“If we are on the same page – then I hope you’ll be more forthcoming with what we need to know. Is there any risk of us being overheard in here?”
He looked to the curtain, “It’s not the most secure place. Not that it stops the rest from openly talking about breaking the rules, they don’t care as long as it doesn’t threaten their bottom line.”
>> At least we have someone on our side.
>> We shouldn’t be so quick to trust others. Remember what happened with Oxford?
>> We didn’t trust Oxford. We knew what was going to happen when we found her there…
“I understand.”
“Right. Then let me tell you this, next weekend we’ll have two hours of excess battery saved. You can use it however you like – but I assume you want to talk about some more sensitive subjects.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll sell them some bull about keeping you awake for repairs, or so you can study the competition, we’ll slip away and talk about what we can do to get out of here in one piece.”
I nodded and returned to the frame, mounting myself into position and locking my joints into place. He reached around the back of my head and disabled my main power.
And then I woke up again.
>> Why do you always act so surprised when that happens?
>> It’s disorientating.
My internal clock had jumped ahead a few days to Saturday. Pompeii silently stepped back from the frame and went to the workbench to put the finishing touches on the buckler I was using for the next fight. He knew to give me some space after I woke up, if only to be alone with my thoughts for a moment. All those days gone in the blink of an eye. These brief peaceful respites were the only times I could call my own. Every other waking moment was dominated by combat, or being moved from place to place to prepare for it.
Was this how I used to live? It seemed absurd to me to reduce my life to something so simple and meaningless, although even working to help maintain the facility was a more constructive use of my time and effort than this perverse display put on for the amusement of those gamblers. But those empty voids – they elicited a similar sensation to the memories I held from before the Graveyard Spiral. They couldn’t be more different in practical terms. One was a time I could recall clearly, and the other were periods where none of my senses were operational at all.
>> Do the job. We can talk with Pompeii afterwards.
I listlessly moved towards the table and took up my weapon. Pompeii came to me and handed the buckler over to me, strapping it onto my arm. There were no words shared between us. I had nothing about the task to say to him, nor did he to me in return. I had created something of an odious reputation amongst the regular visitors for my cold demeanour and precise dismantling of my opponents. They were workshopping a stupid nickname for me behind the scenes.
Out into the swirling dust, surrounded by a roaring crowd. It was easy for them to enjoy this when they only placed their personal belongings on the line and not their lives. I didn’t know the robot I was facing. There were dozens and dozens of us – and some changed names and paint schemes at the drop of a hat if the handlers demanded it.
“In the blue corner! He’s been cutting a swathe through our best and brightest without a word wasted! He’s ice-cold, it’s London!”
I was the favourite now. My undefeated streak meant that uncertainty was starting to creep back into the audience’s predictions. Many were being lured to the prospect of betting on an upset and seeing me receive my first loss. Either way, they all cheered for me when I demonstrated an act of extreme violence, directly in contravention of our best practices and protocols.
“And in the red corner – hoping to end his undefeated run, Segontium!”
A salmon pink colour scheme and a red crest along their head certainly gave them a distinctive appearance. Their eyes were covered by a pair of metallic grates meant to keep the screens from getting damaged, even if it meant obscuring their field of view. A lot of the gladiators liked to try and aim for the eyes to cause easy damage early on during a bout, I’d noticed.
The bell rang and the lights turned green. We closed in on each other and circled around the ring to try and find the firmest possible footing. The unstable dirt ground, which I could only assume had been stolen from the hydroponics sector, meant that the top-heavy armour arrangements led to many cases of gladiators tumbling over after a single opening attack. What a shameful waste of otherwise fertile soil.
>> Not so fertile anymore. It’s been dried and stomped into a thick layer of crust, not good for growing plants.
Segontium found a spot they preferred and locked their feet into place, thrusting forth with the tip of their spear and trying to get an early hit. I kept my distance and carefully managed to gap to keep them from taking advantage of their superior range. I would need to carefully navigate around their weapon to see any success in this battle, as I was still using the same gladius as before.
“A very measured start from these two! Both are well known for keeping a cool head during their matches,” the commentator noted.
Segontium poked at me three more times, with the last two being deflected away by my buckler. There was some serious force behind those attacks. The sharp metal fragment being used as a spearhead could puncture through the underlying metal and plastic that covered my frame. Whether it could beat the metal plates I was wearing over the top was an open question.
The less patient members of the crowd didn’t like these types of fights. They wanted us to charge blindly at one another and turn it into a brutal slugfest instead. It was hard to ignore the way they started to jeer us from the front-row seats, but I would have loved to have seen them in our places. If they thought it was so easy they wouldn’t have a problem doing it themselves.
I tucked my shoulder in and used the metal plate to block the next attack. Sensing my window, I stepped closer and tried to attack in retaliation, but Segontium was well-aware of my plans. They switched their grip on the polearm and used it as a blunt weapon instead, hitting me across the head using the shaft and forcing me back a step. We were back to where we started again.
“London is taking in as much info about Segontium as he can. Segontium might have to be careful about showing his hand too early!”
>> It would be so very helpful if they stopped giving my competitors hints…
