“You’re the new bot.”

  Before I could reach Pompeii’s workshop, I was stopped in the hallway that surrounded the arena by a stranger. Judging from her weathered appearance and the armour brackets attached to her frame she was also a competitor like me.

  “I am.”

  “London, is that right? I’m Ostia. I was wondering where you wandered off to.”

  “The impression I received upon arrival was that I wasn’t going to be given a friendly welcome.”

  “Depends on who finds you first. There are two types of bots down here, the ones who know it’s all a stupid game for the crowd, and the ones who take it too seriously and try to politic their way to the top. The house always wins – remember that. Being ‘on top’ only happens when the bots in charge allow it.”

  “I have no intention of doing that.”

  She got closer and inspected me with a scrutinizing eye. She hummed and rounded me several times, poking and prodding with no regard for my personal space. I remained still as a statue, and wondered why she was so interested in the way I looked.

  “Did they bring anyone else from Waterway here?”

  “I don’t think so. You’ve got quite a few wounds here. Were you a fighter back there?”

  “No. I was a scavenger.”

  “Ah. That explains some of these scratches and dents. A hard worker. I’m sure you’ll be popular with Pompeii and the other handlers. I like those big ears too! You’re an early-model bot, right? You don’t see antennas like those that often anymore.”

  Ostia had a big mouth and a lot to say. The impression I got from her was that she loved to talk, and didn’t mince her words. She was going to try and spark up a discussion no matter how much the other side didn’t want to. She was cattish and coy, and she always had a spring in her step. Those legs were a lot more flexible than mine. It was the last personality one might expect from an arena where bots turned each other into scrap for amusement.

  But that was my ignorance speaking. They were all acclimatized to the state of things down here. It was the same way when I was in Waterway. All of it was confusing and strange – but I adapted over time until it became normal. Not that I wanted to stay here for long enough for it to happen again.

  “Pompeii didn’t say much to me. Only that I have to fight.”

  “Oh. You’re walking around without knowing about the power allowance?”

  “Allowance?”

  “They don’t spare any extra energy for us gladiators. You win, or do a good job entertaining the crowd, and you get more time to stay awake. Didn’t Pompeii tell you that before? Or I guess he’s giving you some of his banked energy as a show of good will…”

  “He did not tell me that. But it makes sense. Our purpose here is to fight, and they don’t want us wasting energy.”

  “Sure – but the same reason motivates us. We don’t want to be a bunch of bots who exist just to fight. There’s a lot more to do out there that we don’t have a chance to try. Don’t expect anyone in the arena to give you an easy time, even if they know how the rules work.”

  “Or else we’ll be as good as finished.”

  Ostia laughed.

  “That’s the point. They want us to know that they have their finger on the trigger, our lives in their hands, that they can just leave us offline forever. It’s no different to having our Braincases destroyed. You start to lose track of time. Going to sleep and waking up immediately afterwards, but knowing that your internal clock has been ticking over. Sometimes it’s a few days, sometimes it’s weeks. Everything moves on without you – and you have to play catch-up all over again. It’s another way of keeping us walled in.”

  >> She really likes to talk.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You’re the silent type, huh? Alright. I’ll leave you alone for now. Make sure to ask Pompeii all those burning questions while you have the chance, because otherwise you’ll be too busy fighting to speak with him.”

  She waved and walked away, disappearing around the long bend and out of sight. I waited for a moment before continuing on my way. Pompeii was still working on a set of parts when I pushed through the curtain and walked to the wall where the charging cable was. He jolted back to alertness when I asked him a sudden question.

  “Do you like doing this?”

  He stared at me for several seconds.

  “No. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be down here. There’s a small number who enjoy this – but they’ve all lost their damn minds. I used to be out there in the city with the rest of them. I fell in with a bad crowd and got in over my head. They sold me to the Bossman and I was assigned to be a handler for the gladiators.”

  I chewed on his response and sat down on a nearby stool. Pompeii went back to work, hammering a piece of old iron into shape so that it could be used as armour. Another look at the workshop made it even more obvious that this place was his home now. The longer I looked the easier it was to pick out the various personal items left amongst the chaos and scrap. Of particular note was a red banner hanging from the back wall, fringed with gold and featuring a leaf-like design.

  “Don’t stare at that,” he snapped.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like it. But they’ll have my head if I throw it in the garbage like I want to.”

  >> It’s some kind of reward, maybe the type of thing they give out to the winners?

  “Let me make myself perfectly clear. Don’t get any thoughts about being the big bot in your head. You’re going to do the bare minimum to get us the power we need to keep the lights on and nothing more.”

  “You’re telling me to put less effort into this?”

  “There’s no benefit to it, and I’ll be damned to hell if I give those slack-jawed spectators a good show using one of my gladiators. You become a big draw and they’ll never let you go. That’s how it works. They trick the new bots into thinking that putting on a show will get them more perks, make them fight hard, and then keep them around forever because they’re the most entertaining fighters.”

  >> Do the minimum. What a ‘human’ approach to the job.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  “And don’t ask. You can learn anything about how this place works, but don’t ask where I got that stupid thing from.”

  “What if I share something equally personal with you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Not that it matters. I don’t have a history worth sharing.”

  Pompeii grumbled, “But you sure seem to have developed a sense of humour.”

  “I’ll turn myself off. Wake me up when you need me.”

  “You don’t have to-”

  “The first lesson they teach us in Waterway is to only accept what we work for. There’s no point staying awake and wasting your energy supply.”

  Pompeii nodded, “Alright. That’s as good a sign of trust as any. It’ll make it easier to install these new parts too.”

  I backed up into the standing-frame and initiated the shutdown sequence. It was only when the stream of commands ran through my mind that I started to feel a seed of doubt. I was going to leave myself at Pompeii’s mercy – but it wasn’t as if I hadn’t already been in that position before when they brought me here.

  >> System: Shutting down…

  Just another roll of the dice.

  “How are those new limbs?”

  I stretched them out to their full extent and experimented with the velocity that they could reach at full power. They were still worse than the set I had back in Waterway, but they were a huge improvement from the half-broken junk they attached to me as a placeholder once I arrived here. Those things were two seconds away from snapping clean in the middle and leaving me on the floor.

  “Adequate. Do the other competitors use limbs like these?”

  “Depends on the handler. Some prefer to risk a lot more in terms of the gear they use. I find that a conservative strategy works best. There’s not much point bringing out the fancy stuff when you have no experience in the ring anyway.”

  >> How ‘fancy’ can it really get? Every discarded part we’ve seen so far has been consumer-grade at best.

  “I assume there’s a reason I’m awake?”

  It had been a few days. My internal clock said it was Saturday evening.

  “It’s fight night. I have to get you acclimatized to the process before your first bracket. You’ll be out there tomorrow.”

  Right. I almost forgot that they expected me to fight too. Pompeii didn’t waste any time. That was all he wanted to hear from me before he escorted me out of the workshop and into the circular hallway. In contrast to my previous visit, now it was abuzz with activity. Dozens of bots hurried in every direction, grabbing extra parts from the piles and pushing their competitors to the right entrance on either side of the arena.

  We weren’t allowed to sit in the stands with the crowd. Instead the gladiators and mechanics were confined to the backstage area. Several empty boxes had been piled up close to the perforated sheet of metal that looked out into the dirt. Pompeii dragged me to the entrance where the competitors were getting ready so that I could familiarize myself with the process.

  “This is the staging point. Everybot who goes out there moves through this entrance or the matching one on the opposite side.”

  A large group of around fifteen bots were gathered there, half of them were going to fight, with the other half fixing them up and installing the parts they needed. It was all very low-cost. The parts were as cheap as they came, balancing the risk between losing something expensive and finding parts powerful enough to give them a leg up over the competition.

  The pit leader stood next to the entrance and rang a bell to get everyone’s attention.

  “Arezzo! You’re up!”

  Arezzo took a small buckler and a makeshift sword from one of the tables and headed out. The crowd roared as he entered the arena proper, so loud that it caused my meters to spike into the red.

  Pompeii whispered, “Arezzo’s a veteran. One to keep an eye on.”

  “Entering the arena from the red corner. Boston!”

  “Boston?” I repeated, “You said their name was Arezzo.”

  “He’s a veteran, and that means he’s been through two-dozen different identities since he started. Arezzo is his real designation. You get banged up enough in a match and stop drawing an interested crowd? They repaint you and give you a new name to try all over again.”

  The announcer continued unabated; “And in the blue corner. Anaheim!”

  The crowd cheered their introductions. I leaned closer to the grate and kept my eyes locked on the middle of the dirt ring. They sized each other up before the horn sounded, at which point they charged at one another with reckless abandon. They clashed with no regard for their own safety, sending pieces of chipped paint and metal in every direction when they collided. Arezzo used his buckler to keep Anaheim at an arm’s length, alternating between defence and using it as a blunt weapon.

  “Very impressive defence from Boston! He’s keeping Anaheim boxed out.”

  >> How convenient. They even have running commentary.

  The first stages of the fight were aggressive. Both competitors sought to measure their foe with a series of probing attacks. Periods of relative stillness would be shattered by a sudden leap and a widely-arcing blow, but they were usually deflected by the heavy metal armour that was attached to their frames by struts.

  It did raise the question of how they could ever hope to cause enough damage to win. The weapons they used were crude at best, and as poor as the armour plates were in terms of quality and condition – they were still pieces of spaced metal that would block any attempts at hitting the inner core with a melee attack. In fights involving multiple bots it was easier to flank and reach exposed areas, but this was a one-on-one duel.

  “Come on Arezzo! They’re wide open!” his mechanic yelled.

  “It’s not just the audience who get invested in the outcome,” Pompeii commented.

  The fight dragged on and on. Arezzo was consistently in a position to push the attack, but couldn’t find an easy way of breaking through Anaheim’s armour to deal real damage. I scrutinized every move they made and felt some frustration starting to seep through the cracks. Had they forgotten how to most effectively disable their foe? Or were they doing this on purpose to prolong the fight and sucker in more bettors?

  Even if they were trying to drag this out, there were some openings that Arezzo couldn’t leave without shattering the illusion. Anaheim overextended by reaching out with one of their arms, and Arezzo had no choice but to come down on top of it with the edge of his blade and sever it. The impasse was finally broken. Anaheim’s forearm fell to the ground, dropping his weapon with it.

  “Anaheim is in trouble! He’s lost his weapon!”

  The crowd roared in excitement at the carnage. Sparks and oil flew from the open wound and into the dirt. Anaheim dropped his buckler and tried to retrieve the blade from the ground, but Arezzo wasn’t going to let him have an easy time. He zealously guarded that spot and dealt even more wounds to him in the process, battering him with blunt shield bashes and precise slashes from his sword.

  A flash of three yellow lights came from the opposite side.

  “And Anaheim’s corner has thrown in the towel! Boston has taken the win!”

  Arezzo let up, backing away from ‘Anaheim’s’ battered body and hoisting his weapon into the air as a show of dominance. The crowd cheered. Three other bots emerged from the other entrance and recovered the loser, bringing them backstage for repairs while Arezzo took their victory lap around the ring.

  “No point in keeping going like that,” Pompeii explained, “No weapon? No chance of winning. Better to save the rest of your parts before they get damaged too severely.”

  The commentator offered their take; “A precise attack from Boston was all it took to wrap that fight up. A clean cut! One of the best we’ve seen in a long time.”

  I shook my head, “Wasteful. Inefficient.”

  “What do you mean?” Pompeii asked, approaching me from behind.

  “Their movements, the way they attacked ineffectual areas of the body. They wasted a lot of energy and missed many more opportunities.”

  “Don’t say that to Arezzo. He’ll start another fight.”

  >> They really can’t see the way that they move from an outside perspective. Perhaps they’ve been disconnected from the Braincloud for too long.

  >> They’re moving like humans.

  >> But we do the same, sometimes.

  It was an interesting question, but not one they were likely to answer if I asked them face-to-face. To them it was natural like a human found breathing. Arezzo completed his laps of the arena and returned through the curtains. Several of the bots politely applauded his victory. I joined them. One of the organizers by the door struck Boston from the list of participants.

  “Why bother writing it down?” I asked. It wasn’t too difficult for them to remember.

  “To make sure there’s a paper trail. They might embellish the fights from time to time, but the Bossman doesn’t like it when someone rigs the outcome. It’s set in stone once the fight’s over.”

  We watched six more fights after that to make sure I understood the process and what was expected from me. After that we returned to the workshop. Pompeii pulled the charging cords down from the wall and plugged one of them into his back, handing the other to me.

  “Next time you wake up, it’ll be your turn. Are you ready?”

  >> No.

  “Yes. I don’t have a choice.”

  He grunted, “Yeah. None of us have a choice.”

  >> System: Shutting down…