Deadwire

by A K Blake

  ***

  Luca couldn’t believe his luck. Not three nights later, he stood on the bottom row of the colosseum in his new work uniform, watching sweat drip down Artemon’s brow. The wet stream was magnified a thousand times by the massive screens at either end the colosseum, but from where Luca was standing he could see it even without the cameras. He was so close it was almost as if he could reach out his fingers and touch him. Perhaps the best-known gladiator alive, Artemon cut a terrifying figure at nearly seven feet tall, clad in his trademark red and navy armor. His hoverboard had to be made extra long to accommodate the weight of his muscled frame.

  Yet his weight could be a disadvantage as well. His opponent, Xipilli, was slighter and quicker. and he was currently suspended upside down in the air over Artemon’s head. Xipilli’s hoverboard arched across empty space, only the forces of physics keeping him aloft as he sailed above Artemon before nailing the landing.

  The crowd roared, a seething, conjoined mass of voices, as if the sound came from the throat of a single, giant beast. Luca felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as he too joined in the throng.

  “Artemon!”

  But Xipilli had not taken the risk without reason. As he sped away, it became clear that his mark has struck home. Artemon’s left arm went limp, his oversized reflexor shield falling into a useless state. The specialized armour dulled some of the effects of the shockswords, but there were regulations regarding thickness and construction that ensured each blow still landed with considerable force. Artemon bellowed with rage, fangs exposed to their full extent, as Xipilli spun into a quick victory pirouette at the opposite end of the bowl-shaped rink. He raised both arms in the air. The response from those wearing his signature colors of black and silver was deafening.

  The loudspeaker boomed.

  “And the judges award eight points to Xipilli for his daring but effective strike.”

  “Boo!”

  “Vorbith! A little help here?”

  Luca turned guiltily toward Phek, the boy who’d been made his unofficial trainer.

  “Yeah, I’m coming! One sec.”

  He knew this wasn’t exactly what most would consider a dream job—hard labor, heavy lifting, and basic janitorial work—but he couldn’t believe his luck. He’d grown up watching the games with his father, and now to be right in the thick of it, with a better view than the VIPs, made it hardly even feel like work.

  “Vorbith! Seriously, these pumps aren’t going to prime themselves.”

  Phek pulled upward on what looked like a large plunger as he spoke, allowing a sealed off chamber to fill with water. The system was old school, relying on pressure and gravity. Thirty such pumps lined the arena, all of which had to be manually primed before they would be ready to fill the rink with water for the cyan games.

  Nodding to let Phek know he understood, Luca took off at a jog, heading for the opposite side of the colosseum. In the uppermost rows, the building was almost a mile around, but down at rim level it was slightly less than a half mile. He reached the other side quickly, though a bit winded. Groaning, he pulled at the first plunger. His arms burned, still sore from working the last round of games, though this would be the first of the cyans he’d seen. Despite this, he relished the fire. He was certainly getting in shape doing this job. Not to mention it provided a welcome distraction from the infuriating and all-consuming project that the contents of the sphere had become.

  He’d tried everything. Each night he searched for a new symbol, always without a single useable result. He had poured through page after page on the FreeNet of obscure and even dead languages, sometimes finding what he thought frantically was a match, only to continue reading and find it was a coincidence and not a match at all. He had even tried the ancient New Gamen central library, braving the basilisk stares of the old vampire librarians who never let him out of their sight, as if the cameras everywhere weren’t enough. The gloves he was forced to wear to protect the brittle pages from the acids in his skin made his hands smell musty even after he washed them, and some of the fonts were nearly impossible to read. It was all for nothing, though, as he hadn’t a single clue to show for all his efforts.

  “Vorbith! You done over there?”

  “Last one!”

  “Alright, I’ll let the animal handlers know.” Phek spoke into his collar mic, and Luca heard him say, “Prep for zoo travel.”

  The round had ended while they worked. Disappointed, Luca realized Artemon had come back from behind to win the match, and he had missed it. Classic Artemon. His action figures sold like crazy.

  Most arena competitors trained their entire lives in hopes of going pro. They took expensive classes and worked their way up in school or club sports. They had parents who pushed them until they cried and then pushed them some more. When they made it big, they were treated to corporate sponsorships and incredible mansions. Most of them married holovid stars. Some competitors had been known to suffer career ending injuries in the arena, but this was rare, and a death during a match was nearly unheard of with modern rules and equipment. It was an occupation where the greatest fear was growing old.

  The cyan games, however, were different. Like something from an ancient, cruder time, they were dangerous games, meant for convicts and condemned criminals. Competitors chose to gamble for their freedom with their lives rather than spend what was left of them in jail. And a gamble it was; the odds of surviving were dismal. Though the Munificent Party was always campaigning to end the cyan games, everyone knew it would never happen. True game lovers scorned them as base, bloodsport to content the masses, but they were very popular in certain demographics.

  The prisoners were housed in the basement levels of the colosseum, underneath the arena, so as to prevent audience members or would-be jail-springers from getting access to them. Luca had spent only a cursory minute there on the tour he’d been given his first night, though he understood that he would graduate to feeding the prisoners and cleaning up after them when he had “proven himself.” He was not in a rush.

  The hollow of the arena was almost filled by now, creating a good sized pool. Luca and Phek ran around again to shut off the pumps as a large gate under the east screen began to retract. Luca finished shutting off the last one and backed away from the edge of the water in haste. What emerged from the dark tunnel into the light was primeval in a way that was fitting for such a barbaric sport. They were serpentine, if a snake could be twelve feet long, with massive heads that whipped back and forth on slender necks. The cyans had jaw bones as long as a human arm, with a gleaming second row of teeth that pointed outward like barbed wire. They sidled awkwardly over the edge of the rink, their finlike legs unaccustomed to land. One of them raised its head and screamed, blood red frills exploding from either side of its skull. The noise cut through the murmur of the crowd, a high pitched rasp that made Luca back away further, though he was already well out of harm’s way. The crowd went wild.

  At the opposite end of the arena, the western gate opened to a sadder showing. Handlers unlocked the cuffs of the prisoners, all human except one vampire, herding them in groups onto floating platforms. The platforms were then pushed into the water and steered remotely to the center of the pool. Headshots of the participants flashed across the big screens, along with their names, ages, height and weight, and crimes committed. They were mostly brutal crimes, assault and robbery at gunpoint, domestic abuse and manslaughter. Seeing their raps was no doubt intended to harden the audience against them.

  The onlookers began to quiet. It hit Luca that he was about to watch someone die. He had seen it on his spore before, but now he was only yards away. Close enough to smell the blood maybe, to feel the fear. This bubbled to the surface of his mind as a sort of afterthought, spreading across his consciousness until he felt very still.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! Let the cyan games begin!”

  A bell rang shrilly, and the arena became a blur of action. The dais containing the single vampire spun
like a tornado of flesh, as she immediately dispatched the four humans on her platform, plunging them into the water. One particularly large man she bit fiercely in the neck before dropping, no doubt considering him to have the greatest chance of climbing back on. Luca watched him fall, his face wide-eyed and blank. He seemed peaceful, slipping beneath the surface with barely a noticeable ripple, the rest of the cyans distracted by his compatriots. The pool around the platform began to boil, the writhing bodies of the beasts chopping at the water, churning up the flailing limbs of their victims. Even from this close, the screams of their prey were indiscernible from the roar of the audience. The water bubbled pink.

  The remaining two daises were a more even contest. On one, two pairs were locked in battle, and the fifth woman managed to push all four off the edge in their distraction. Yet her efforts were for nought. One of the men grabbed her ankle on the way down, his face bared to hate and fear, teeth and fingernails as deadly as those of the beasts that lay in wait. Soon the platform was empty, a blank circle pushed to and fro by the waves.

  On the last dais, a burly man proved victorious and huddled in the center on his hands and knees. A bell sounded to mark the end of the round, and the platforms were driven back to the east gate by remote control. The remaining two survivors were forced onto a single platform without being allowed to touch land. Dieda know how impossible it would be to get them back in the water if they were allowed any possibility of escape.

  The crowd was in a lull during this time, many checking their spores or choosing this moment to wait in line for the toilet as the arena was reset for the final round. Everyone knew the outcome of this match. Vampires never died in the games. There were far fewer vampires convicted of the truly base crimes, meaning those who opted into the games were never forced to fight one another. All a human could hope for in this situation was a swift end.

  But this was not just any game. When the bell rang again, the vampire leapt, launching herself toward the man on the other side of the dais. She was swift, but he was expecting it and had gambled correctly. It was a fifty-fifty shot, and he had gone right while she hurtled toward his left. The vampire caught herself, transitioning into a slide, her back foot inches from the edge. Repositioning, she made to hurl at him again, when the jaws of a cyan latched around her ankle. The beast snapped backward, throwing her body into the air like a doll and catching her in its mouth on the way down. She managed to hit it in the eye once before its cousins tore her to bits.

  The human could not comprehend his luck. Once again huddled on his hands and knees, the truth seemed to dawn on him, and he raised his arms from the awkward position, a terrified grin spreading across his face. But this the crowd could not abide.

  “Boo!”

  “Rigged match!”

  “Kill the blood bag!”

  The audience rose up, louder than before. Thousand of vampires were on their feet, the chords in their necks strained to their fullest, fangs bared outright in public, throwing anything they could find with enough force to maim anything too slow to dodge. This was not the natural order. This would not stand. The survivor appeared oblivious, but his jailors were not.

  Luca looked up at the box over the eastern screen where Aquesh always watched the games, worrying over money and irritating potential donors in his attempts to butter them up. He was a tall, thin vampire whose skittering fingers always reminded Luca of a spider. Luca saw him mutter into his collar. The handler who directed the platforms leaned left, as if listening to a remote command, and then began to move his hands over the controller surreptitiously.

  Suddenly the platform began to tip. It rocked back and forth, as if unstable, before suddenly careening to the side, shaking its passenger like a flea. The survivor’s smile disappeared so completely, it was like it had never existed, as his body went without resistance into the pink, frothing sea.

  The mood lifted immediately. The vampires cheered as the animal handlers came out with nooses and hooks to take the cyans back to their tanks. A retractable ceiling was engaged to cover the arena from view as it was cleaned, plunging everything under it into semi darkness. Everything underneath was bathed in red as the service lights flickered on. Luca watched the water recede, leaving behind the pale humps of mangled bodies. Men in airtight suits brushed past him as they entered the arena. He squinted to see as the they carried the corpses away, heaving them by their arms and legs into massive rolling bins so they could be taken below for disposal. They left behind the crushed limbs and bits of gore for Luca to clean up.

  He hadn’t really been thinking of this when he’d applied for the job, had been more focused on the perks—the front row seats and the chance to meet a gladiator—than on what exactly he would be required to do behind the scenes. He now wished he had given it a bit more thought. Yet here he was, and he couldn’t afford to be unemployed again so soon after being fired from the casino. The ARGAS machines would ensure such records were attached to his UPI forever, and no respectable employer would hire him. Steeling himself, he began to walk out onto the dank concrete.

  The smell was overwhelming, a heavy fishy stink that choked him up, mixed with something foul he couldn’t describe, except that it smelled inescapably of death. Trying not to breathe, he hurriedly began to squeegee the wet ground, doing his best not to look at the soft clumping of human fodder that accumulated on the other side of the rubber. He shoved as fast as he could toward the gaping drain that had opened in the center. Don’t think. Don’t breathe. Just do. Above, he heard them play back the man’s death in slow motion on the big screens, a distraction during the waiting period while the arena was reset. There was sudden thunderous noise that Luca realized was laughter.

  He almost made it to the toilet. Halfway there, he turned and vomited behind the nearest column. He knew the job wasn’t done, but when he tried to force himself to take a step back toward the pit, instead he suddenly emptied the contents of his stomach again. Then he emptied them for a third time, and a fourth, until all that came up was bile. He stayed like that, bent over double, putrid spit dripping from face as he tried not to heave up any more stomach acid, until Phek arrived. Phek sighed.

  “Just go home. I’ll take it from here.”

  So he did.

  Chapter 6

  Luca felt ill the entire way home from the arena. He was cold and unsteady. He thought he should eat, but every time he thought of biting into something, his stomach revolted. Finally, he managed to choke down a bag of dried out carrots from the back of his fridge.

  “Her Majesty will be delivering remarks tomorrow night regarding pending legislation in Assembly put forward by the Progressive Party that, among other things, seeks to repeal laws banning the attempted conversion of humans to vampires. These laws form some of the oldest addendums to the Proclamation of Sovereignty and have existed nearly since the creation of Laemia itself. The Queen appears to be ramping up opposition to their proposal in order to, quote, ‘Prevent dangerous and unethical experimentation on our human citizens.’ While this may sound far fetched to some, it is gaining momentum among the Progressive base. Just this week…”

  Luca exited the news and put on music instead, hoping to calm his nerves, but it was something high pitched and fast, and he could only stand a few seconds of the piercing melody before turning it off. The resulting silence was worse.

  Chugging his last two beers, he turned on a fan to drown out the quiet and buried his head under his covers, but sleep was elusive. He had strange dreams, that he was constantly on the verge of waking up from. Sometimes he thought he was awake, but he saw visions of maniacal things. A slow wave of blood gathered momentum as a ring of cyans chased each other in a never ending circle. Phek laughed and cracked a whip over their heads. His father called and told him to stop being a child, his tongue slithering through the screen and tickling Luca’s ear. His mother danced a jig on the other end, the tapping of her feet making his head pound. The Queen stopped by and pronounced him a coward of the high
est order, condemning him to three rounds in the cyan games.

  Only when his dreams had finally exhausted him did Luca sleep, the black, silent sleep of the dead.

  ***

  The vibrating of Luca’s spore woke him. He seemed to have had a battle with his comforter, and his left foot was twisted at an angle that was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Every cell in his body rebelled at the idea of motion, but he couldn’t stand to lie still any longer. He got up.

  Phek had messaged him, as well as his father, and, surprisingly, Mykal.

  Don’t worry about work tonight. Just show up tomorrow night, and we’ll call it fair.

  Luca, it’s Dad. Your mother said to tell you she thinks she saw you on the holovid at the games. Love you.

  Dude, what are you up to? Wanna hang out? I’ve got stuff if you want to get high...

  He hadn’t thought he and Mykal were that kind of friends.

  There was another message, from a handle he didn’t recognize. It contained a link that, when he clicked on it, was broken, as well as a screenshot.

  Luca looked closer, then motioned with his fingers to zoom in. The screenshot was of a paragraph posted to some kind of message board on the FreeNet, with a timestamp in the corner from over ten years earlier. Yet what caught his attention, set his brain buzzing, was that the post contained numerous symbols that looked like the ones on his sphere, along with, so far as he could tell, the corresponding definition for each one.

  It was the first breakthrough he’d had so far in what had begun to seem like a pointless crusade. If the symbols in the screenshot matched the ones in the sphere, then here was proof that he was right that it contained some sort of language. Then again, without context, it was all but meaningless. He’d already gathered that it was some kind of dictionary. The real question was to what?