Arena

by Logan Jacobs

  She spun on her heel, walked across the room, and went out a sliding door.

  I watched her walk out of the room, transfixed at the purposeful sway of her hips, her tight jumpsuit accentuated every stride, so unconsciously sexy that it hurt.

  I went to get up and realized that I still had the IV in. I was just about to call out to Artemis when the robotic hands appeared again, slid the needle out, slapped a Band-Aid made out of something that replicated my skin, helped me up, and pointed toward the locker.

  “Thanks, Jeeves,” I said to the arms who seemed to bow in return before disappearing back into the console.

  “Don’t mention it,” the machine replied, which, I’ll admit, was somewhat surprising since I hadn’t known it could talk, but when in Rome...

  I found my new jumpsuit and changed as fast as I could. Not wanting to leave a mess, I looked around for a hamper or dirty clothes bin or something. As if it read my mind, a tiny cylindrical robot shot out of a door in the wall, zoomed over to me, and opened its top. I tossed my smoke-stained and tattered jumpsuit into the robot who closed the lid immediately. The robot sat for a second, shot flames out of tiny exhaust ports in its side, beeped as if to say thank you, and zoomed back to where it came from.

  Happy that I didn’t have to wash any dirty clothes, I glanced at myself as I passed a mirror. The image I saw stopped me in my tracks. My face was covered in black smudges, I had some kind of green slime dried on my right cheek, and my hair looked like I’d been shot out of a cannon.

  “Ah, shit,” I cursed at my reflection, “you need a shower.”

  Again, as if it heard me, which it probably did, my jumpsuit started to light up, and four flat buttons on the left breast blinked eagerly. I pressed the first one, and it promptly exploded in purple foam.

  I looked like I had on one of those inflatable sumo wrestling outfits that were all the rage at yuppy bars for a hot second. Purple foam oozed from my ankles, wrists, and neck as I star-fished and fell over with a squish. The foam covered my head and just as I got concerned that I was about to die a very embarrassing purple death, high-pressure water blasted from inside the suit. It washed the foam away but left me soaking wet. I looked like a cat caught in the rain as I got to my feet, not sure what was going to happen next, and saw the third button blinking.

  I pressed it and high-pressure air shot from inside the suit with enough force to make my cheeks flap until I was completely dry. In for a penny in for a pound, I pressed the fourth button, and the collar of the suit unzipped and a form-fitting hoodie snaked up and over my head. It shook like a wet dog for a few seconds then went back into the collar and zipped up.

  I stared at the new me in the mirror who looked like he’d spent forty-five minutes getting ready. I didn’t look too shabby. My face was clean and moisturized, the only blemish a scratch across my forehead, but it was healing really fast and looked kinda rugged and cool, and my hair looked like I was about to walk the red carpet at the Oscars.

  I slicked a few hairs back and had just started to make some sexy poses in the mirror when Artemis stuck her head in the door.

  “Marc Havak!” she yelled impatiently. “I am so hungry I am sure my stomach is eating itself!”

  Not wanting to keep the lady waiting any longer, I winked at myself in the mirror and jogged off to have a wonderful meal with a very pretty girl.

  Chapter Seven

  Valiance city was a huge metropolitan city, like New York, Shanghai, Dubai, and Paris all rolled up in a big intergalactic blanket, amid hundreds of different alien species, with technology not even dreamt of by humans all around us, and yet all I could stare at was Artemis as she licked what I called a space ice cream cone. It was made from some frozen alien dairy-like substance mixed with fruit and served in a waffle cone.

  She attacked it with the enthusiasm of someone who had never had ice cream, which I couldn’t blame her for because I did the same. It was a silky, sugary, creamy taste explosion of ice-cold deliciousness. Artemis’ tongue would start at the bottom of the cone and round up the outside, narrowing to a point as she curled her tongue into her mouth, moaned in culinary pleasure, and started the whole process over again.

  We were laughing hysterically about my being propositioned by Poda earlier in the day. It seemed like just five minutes and a hundred years ago.

  “So, I wasn’t hallucinating, was I?” I asked between licks. “I was asked on a date by a ten-foot long millipede, right?”

  “Sacred bovine!” She exclaimed. “I completely forgot all about that. That was what, three weeks ago?”

  “Actually, it was only, like, four or five hours ago.”

  Artemis stopped dead in her tracks, the ice cream forgotten for the moment.

  “That cannot be right,” she murmured, her brows furrowed in thought, “can it? Part of me thinks it was only a few hours ago, but another part of me feels like it was a month ago. Is part of me time dilated? Wait? Why are there two of me?”

  “Artemis, slow down, it’s okay,” I assured her. “There aren’t two of you. Sometimes things just feel that way. It’s how our memory works.”

  “The human brain is very strange,” she said as she actively thought over what my words could mean. “It must be difficult to experience linear time with such a relatively short lifespan.”

  “Eh,” I said nonchalantly, “it’s all relative.”

  We kept walking for a few beats before my awful joke hit her. She exploded in laughter.

  “Ha ha ha! Very good joke.” She managed to get out between guffaws. “I like laughing. Laughing is a very fun biological response mechanism.”

  “One of my top three for sure.” I agreed, more than just a little proud that my silly joke had gotten such a big response.”

  “Oh,” Artemis yelped in remembrance. “Back to what you said a few minutes ago about Poda. Phil mistranslated the word. It was not a date that she wanted.”

  “Hmm,” I said not really knowing what she mean. “What do you --” then it hit me. “Oh man, I was propositioned by a giant bug?”

  “That would have been quite difficult, Marc Havak,” Artemis said as she wiped some errant cream from the corner of her mouth, “Poda is an Ithtaklotinchitari. Her sex organ is covered by a thick layer of armor covered in spikes.”

  Now it was my turn to almost-spit out my dessert. “Look,” I said with a touch of put on swagger, “I’m good, but I’m not ‘armor covered in spikes’ good.”

  “Marc Havak, I would bet you are better than good,” she said as she shot me a sexy wink that nearly knocked me off my feet.

  “Artemis,” my voice almost cracked, trying to break the tension, “you can just call me Marc. We don’t use last names for anything other than doctor’s appointments and taxes.”

  “Will do, Marc” she replied as she popped the last bit of her cone into her mouth.

  We continued to walk through the busy city streets even though I guessed it was close to two or three in the morning. The architecture was haphazard, and a blend of many alien styles. There were impossibly tall skyscrapers made of red metal, low-slung hut type buildings on stilts made from palm fronds the size of Buicks, hovering walkways that connected buildings together a hundred stories up, as well as every type of storefront, hotel, or apartment façade you could think of.

  It made Coruscant look like Smallville.

  The attitude of the city’s alien inhabitants was New York with a touch of Hong Kong, based on my knowledge of those cities from the Travel Network. If NYC was the Big Apple, this city was the State Fair Blue-Ribbon Prize-Winning Giant Pumpkin. I could hear what must have been twenty different alien dialects spoken in the last block alone.

  “How do all these different beings get along?” I asked. It was hard enough to get humans to get along with each other, I couldn’t imagine what it was like when you weren’t even the same species. “The language barrier must be the size of the Grand Canyon.”

  “Can you not understand everyone, Marc Ha-”
she sputtered as she caught herself, “Marc?”

  “Um, no.” I answered with arched, you-must-be-kidding-me eyebrows. “Can you?”

  “I can, yes,” she replied as she pulled up a screen on the sleeve of her jumpsuit, “but I was programmed to. Here, this should fix that.”

  She pressed a few buttons and all of a sudden I noticed that I could understand every shout, bark, yell, haggle, and conversation that was going on around me. I heard an angry customer come unglued as he told a nonplussed shop owner that his flamethrower had failed in the middle of a bug invasion, two friends laughing over the one’s failure the night before at the bar, and the quiet whispers of two lovers sneaking an intimate moment amid the chaos of the public street. No matter the size, shape, color, height, or race, from short gecko aliens to tall, graceful elf-looking creatures, I could understand every single word coming from them.

  “Whoa!” I yelled, “What the heck did you just do?”

  “I forgot to activate the linguistic protocol in your C.N.I. during all the excitement earlier tonight,” she said more than a little chagrined. “It allows you to not only understand, but also speak over three thousand alien tongues.”

  “Well,” I said with a smile, “this would have come in very handy during Spanish two my sophomore year of high school, but better late than never.”

  “De Nada, Señor Havak,” Artemis said with perfect pronunciation.

  “Now you’re just rubbing it in,” I joked as I bumped her playfully with my shoulder. “So, tell me more about the city.”

  “It would be my pleasure," she chimed, her voice playful and light. “Before I was given the assignment to be your personal attaché, my main purpose was to act as a history crawler. My primary objective was to comb the vast interconnected network of information systems throughout the planet and compile, verify, and collate any bits of history concerning the Forge of Heroes, Crucible of Carnage, and the Aetheron Oszusti.”

  “Gesundheit,” I barked. “I know your body is only like, three hours old, but how long did you do that before now?”

  “Hmm, that is an excellent question,” she said thoughtfully. “My core algorithm was executed one hundred and sixty Earth years ago.”

  I let what she said sink in for a second.

  “Good thing I like older women,” I said as I teased her with my best impish smile. “So, you just compiled information for a hundred and sixty years? That sounds boring.”

  “Oh, no, it was quite fascinating,” Artemis assured me. “As the years went on, more and more programming was added to my initial algorithm until about twenty-three Earth years ago, when I evolved to a fully functional artificial intelligence construct.”

  “As long as you are fully functional,” I joked. “I wouldn’t be seen dead in public with a partially functional construct.”

  “No,” Artemis said, very perplexed. “That is a statistical impossibility. A similar program simply does not exist at this time.”

  “Artemis,” I said as earnestly as I could, “I can say, with all honesty, you are indeed one of a kind.”

  Artemis smiled, and her eyes sparkled from the compliment.

  “Thank you, Marc,” she said, almost embarrassed.

  “You’re welcome,” I said quietly as I tried not to get lost in the depths of her amazing eyes. “So, the Aileron Oreganos? They built this place?”

  “Yes, sort of,” Artemis answered as her brows knitted together as she collected her thoughts. “So, the entire planet is the creation of a powerful and ancient alien race known as the Aetheron Oszusti. They are as mysterious as they are wise. Elusive as they are omnipotent. Frightening as they are compassionate.”

  She glanced over at me as if to make sure I was keeping up.

  “Old, powerful, dichotomous,” I said to reassure her that I was indeed following along. “Got it.”

  “Yes, good,” she continued. “So, the Aetheron Oszusti, as legend has it, were descended from whatever existed before the universe exploded into being. They watched as galaxies rose, solar systems were born, and life crawled out of the primordial ooze.”

  We meandered our way through a busy market street with store fronts and kiosks selling all kinds of interesting alien merchandise. It was getting later in the day, and the crowds were starting to thin. I enjoyed the more intimate feel of this street with its stylized, squat brick buildings that reminded me of colonial New England.

  “Are they like, I don’t know, gods?” I asked, not sure if I really wanted to hear the answer to that particular question.

  “No one knows for sure,” she answered, and her brow knitted together in thought. “Some over the centuries have worshipped them as such, building temples in their honor, while others have flat out ignored their existence altogether, deriding them as a myth. There is a preponderance of evidence from nearly every known star system in the megaverse, and I’ve personally seen artifacts that prove they are real.”

  A cool, faraway look stole over her face that I couldn’t read.

  “Artemis,” I said concerned, “you okay?”

  “Oh, yes,” she uttered as she came back out of wherever her mind had taken her. “Where was I? Right, the Aetheron Ozsuzti witnessed civilizations rise and fall, societies thrive and fall prey to their own consumption, destroying themselves and their planets. The one thing they saw more than any other, from one end of the cosmos to the other, was war. Driven by fear, anger, greed, necessity, people would try to destroy their neighbor and take what they had.”

  The market gave way to a gorgeous little park with dark green grass, tree-lined paths, and a pond that took up the last third of the tiny little rectangle of lushness amid the concrete and rebar. We walked into the park nonchalantly, just meandering here and there, and I got the vibe that we really didn’t have a destination. We let the ebb and flow that was the city’s heartbeat carry us down its veins until we ended up exactly where we needed to be at that moment.

  “After a million years, the Aetherons had enough.” She sighed. “At first, they tried subjugating the star systems they watched over. That only ended with more killing and destruction as they learned that most sentient beings did not like to be told what to do. Next, they thought that if they freely shared technology from one world to another, that this would help restore peace. Again, they were disappointed, as some planets used the advances to further their own power-hungry agendas.”

  We’d reached the edge of the pond, and I could now see that the water was reddish and rocks that looked like large jewels glittered from beneath the water. Artemis absently picked up a few small, flat stones and began skipping them across the surface of the pond. Her form was perfect, and the stones flew flat and had at least three or four good hops. Concentric circles rippled from where they touched down before sinking.

  “Finally, the Aetheron Ozsuzti attempted to balance the universe,” Artemis said. “They took from worlds that had plenty and gave to those that had little in a hope that if the inhabitants didn’t have to worry about necessities, they would forgo their violent nature. It seemed to work for a time--”

  “Let me guess,” I interjected, “cosmic communism crashed and burned?”

  “Yes.” Artemis nodded. “They found that no matter the culture, race, species, or being, those in power always craved more. Soon the rich planets banded together against the poor planets--”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “they should have just asked my Great Uncle Joe, ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ was one of his favorite sayings.

  “Oh, yes,” she said with a bit of excitement, “I like that very much. Your Great Uncle was a wise man. Yes, the worlds embraced violence like never before, and the Aetherons were distraught at their failure. They even considered an Armageddon Paradox.”

  “Um, that is either the best band name ever,” I joked, “or something really, really bad.”

  “It was bad,” Artemis confirmed. “the Armageddon Paradox was a device that would wipe out all life in the known universe.
Send it all back to the beginning to start again. Trillions upon trillions of lives would have been lost with no guarantee that life would fare any better the next time around.”

  We were done with the rocks and started walking around the pond. Artemis took a path that cut through a dark shade of trees. Once through the trees, I found that we were on a walkway that led to the residential part of the city.

  “That sounds a bit extreme,” I said as we came through the trees, “kind of a baby with the bathwater solution.”

  “Do human babies have some cataclysmic life ending power when they are in bathwater?” she asked as her face scrunched up in confusion.

  “No,” I laughed, “it’s just an expression. It means an answer that solves the problem by getting rid of the good thing with the bad thing.”

  “Oh,” Artemis thought for a second, “I get it. Yes. Exactly. It was just as they were about to trigger the Armageddon Paradox that they had a vision of cosmic providence, the Crucible of Carnage.”

  The sky had darkened, and the streets were almost empty. We walked past rows and rows of four-story domiciles that looked cheap and dingy. I got the feeling that we were not in the best part of town.

  “That is, quite the moniker,” I remarked sarcastically. “Fantastic branding though. I know someone on Earth who would love it.”

  “There was no branding yet,” Artemis replied in all seriousness. “The branding of flesh did not become a trial until much later.”

  “No,” I began to correct her and then let it go. “Never mind, please continue.”

  “They took representatives from the planets and had them battle to see which worlds would win and which would lose. Yes, there was still violence, but it was controlled and contained. The Crucible of Carnage added balance and order. From it arose this whole planet, nicknamed ‘The Forge of Heroes’.”