The Gladiator

            I will never forget the day they took me.  It was mid-September, a few months before my twenty-ninth birthday.  I was happy,without a care in the world.  I was at home, in my apartment, enjoying the beginning of my weekend.  I was supposed to go out that night with some friends, to a bar.  Can't remember the name of the place anymore, but you know the kind.  Glaring lights, and pulsing music.  A meat-market.  My friends and I were determined to have a night on the town.  We'd just finished a grueling couple months at work, finishing up a major project for Con-Fed.  Big-ticket stuff.  Our careers were made.  We were going to be the go-to guys from then on.  And we knew it.  We'd just gotten a big bonus, and everyone was happy to go blow some of it on liquor and the chance at getting laid. 

            I would not, however, be joining them.  I was in the bathroom, putting the final touches on a little bit of make-up magic that would make me (in my eyes) irresistible to the female species.  I will never know if my masterpiece would have been successful, because it was then that the front door blew in.  I had just enough time to register the incredible bang coming from my living room when the door to my bathroom blew in.  I was hit with spraying bits of fibre-board and tile, as the door-frame shattered and took small parts of the tile with it.  I saw briefly, the hard, cold eyes of the darkly fatigued man that came through right behind the blast.  A Peacekeeper, gun out in front.  The gun was what arrested my attention and froze me in place.  It was huge.  I'd never seen a gun in real life.  Only in the holo-films, and games I played.  It was so, so much larger than I'd ever believed, and looked much more deadly. 

            Before I'd even begun to realize what was happening the Peacekeeper had let go of his compact instrument of death, and grabbed me.  He wasn't overly rough, but certainly wasn't interested in my comfort.  My arms were up behind my back faster than I believed possible, and then the pain came.  It exploded up my arms, and into my shoulders, and I let out an involuntary yelp.  The Peacekeeper slapped something onto the center of my back, and suddenly my arms couldn't move anymore. He grabbed me and hustled me through the broken remnants of my bathroom door and into a scene out of a bad action flick.  My living room was shattered.  Whatever they'd used to blow the door open, had sent it flying across the room, and left a trail of destruction in its wake.  My couch, my holotank, my desk, all destroyed and scattered around the room.  There were bits of the wall, and paper, everywhere.  It didn't even resemble the room I'd left ten minutes ago.  It was also full to bursting with similarly fatigued Peacekeepers.

            It was at this point that my stunned and thoroughly abused mind began to react.  I didn't know what had just happened, exactly, or why.  But I knew it was not what they thought.   This had to have been some kind of mistake. I had done nothing illegal, nothing to bring the Peacekeepers into my house, guns out ready to shoot, like I was some kind of crazed psychopath.  I began to protest my innocence.  Loudly.  It didn't help matters. In fact, it hurt.  A lot.  The Peacekeeper behind me uttered a warning to be quiet, but I didn't listen.  Fool me.  I uttered another three or four words of protest, and then my universe exploded in pain.  I thought I was going to die.  I was wrong, of course, but I didn't know any better.  I'd never felt anything like real pain before.   The baton that struck me across the back of the head was literally the most painful experience of my life, to date. 

            It was, (thankfully), mercifully short.  Almost immediately I blacked out.  I awakened in the back of a Peacekeeper cruiser.  A big, shiny, metal monstrosity that floated easily through the air like a shark.  I'd always admired their sleek lines, and obviously understated expense.  Had even thought about buying a decommissioned one in a few years when I'd started making real money.  Now I was in the back of one, and it was a very different feeling.  It was dark, and my head was pounding.  The constantly changing motion of the cruiser moving through air-traffic made me physically ill, and caused me to empty the contents of my stomach onto the floor.  I remember looking at my vomit, and thinking that this was still some kind of mistake.  That I'd get to the processing station, and explain everything to the Judge, or a Representer, and get this all cleared up.  That it'd be just a bad memory, and something to tell my friends about in a few weeks.  Maybe get me laid out of pity.

            The cruiser came to a swift halt that sent another sickening lurch through my insides, but, thankfully, I had nothing more to choke up.  The prisoner-compartment door slid open and a Peacekeeper reached in and dragged me out of the vehicle.  We were not at a processing station.  We weren't anywhere I recognized as a government facility.  I was shoved and prodded through a doorway I barely saw, and into a small painfully bright room, with a padded floor and clear walls. It was in that room that I saw my first sign of hope.  On the other side of one of the walls were a Representer, and a Judge.  I lit up, inside, thinking I was saved.  Then the Judge stepped forward. 

            "Steven Howard Samuels, you stand accused of, and convicted in absentia, by a court of the highest authority in the willful act of Treason and Terrorism.  You are hereby stripped of all rights and privileges as a citizen of this nation and are to be sentenced accordingly at a time of our choosing.  The Representer you see here is to witness that all laws according to the situation are followed.  Do you have anything you wish to say in your defense?"

             "What is it that I did?"  I asked.  No protestations of innocence, no outraged cries of injustice.  

            The Judge, apparently, had expected this.  His answer came almost as soon as I had finished.  "You were working on a project for Con-Fed.  A government project.  You sold details of that project to a foreign interest, which then used it to commit an act of terrorism on our great State. For such actions you are guilty of both treason and terrorism.  Acts punishable by the harshest measures the state can mete out.  The State is not without mercy, however.  If you admit to the charges you have been convicted of, and beg forgiveness, we will be lenient in your sentencing.

            "Do you admit to the charges against you?  And do you beg forgiveness of the State that has sheltered you and that you have so heinously wronged?" he asked.

            I think at this point, my mind broke.  It could not take the strain of what just happened. It was at that point that I began to cry.  Most would think it unmanly.  But I tell you that now, to this day, if ever there had been a time to cry, it was then.  My life was over, it was gone.  All that was left to me was the manner of my death.  And I did not want to die.  Praying to the Gods of my ancestors, the ones I'd abandoned to live this life in this wonderful State I thought was a heaven unto itself, I caved.  I gave myself up.  I admitted to everything.  I knew nothing of what they spoke, had never sold anything, but I swore on my mother's life that I had done the things they accused me of, and begged, pleaded for forgiveness.  I still look back on that moment, all these years later, and am disgusted.  Not at myself, but at the bastard of a Judge who sat there, smug and self-righteous, as if this wasn't some horrible tragedy of justice. 

            For nearly three hours, he repeated the numerous bits of evidence they had collected against me, none of it correct, and had me admit to all of it.  Piece by piece.  When it was finished he pronounced my sentence.  "You are to be sent to the Arenas.  There to die, or live out your life in servitude to the people you so brazenly and wantonly betrayed.  May your death be agonizing. That is all the mercy the State will give to traitors and terrorists such as you."

            I lost all control of myself at that point.  I cried, I railed, I screamed.  I beat on the walls, and begged them to let me go.  That it was all a horrible mistake.  But it was too late.  I had admitted to everything, I was guilty.  The Peacekeepers came in, those hard men in their black body-shells and flak-armor, and grabbed me.  I put up a fight, then, a feeble one, and was quickly and mercilessly beaten into submission.  They carried me, limp and crying to the cruiser and threw me into the back.  I was a traitor, I deserved no sympathy. 

            The ride to the Arena was long.  Hours, I think, though I wasn't sure of how long exactly.  I passed in and out of consciousness.  I was awakened by the door sliding open and an armored hand reaching through to grab me roughly and rip me out of the Prisoner-compartment of the cruiser.  I don't remember much of the outside of the arena.  I can tell you now, from later experience that it’s a massive structure, the size of most small towns.  A town of the damned and the dying, it towers over the surrounding landscape like some magnificent shrine to a bloody-minded god.  Imposing, powerful, glorious.   It is anything, but. 

            I was shoved into the care of several waiting guards and pushed through an archway into a long well-lit hallway.  There, I was funneled into a large communal shower.  Still terrified, I barely noticed the thirty or forty other human-beings huddled in the room.  I was pushed roughly to a shower stall and told to strip down.  I didn't resist.  At this point I was beyond resisting.  I had been beaten, and convicted of treason against a country I had loved with every fiber of my being.  I was a shell of a human being.  I was on auto-pilot.  I stripped down, and was promptly blasted with a punishingly powerful jet of cold water mixed with some cleansing agent that burned the moment it touched the open cuts on my face and body.  I think I cried out, but I cannot remember much of that moment clearly.  There was another jet of cold water that scoured the remains of the cleaning solution from my body, and then a rough hand grabbed me and pulled me from the stall. 

            I was handed a rude set of pants and a tunic, and herded with the rest of the human livestock through a door at the opposite end of the row of stalls from where I came in.  We shuffled through a series of interconnecting corridors to a long hall with rooms to either side.  I was ushered into one about a third of the way down, where a uniformed guard stood in the middle of a small room with a raised and padded shelf about three feet wide running along all four walls.  I was instructed to lie down on the shelf at a certain location, and told to sleep.  They were the only words spoken since I'd been pushed through that door.  I lay down on the section of shelf that was mine and fell instantly asleep.  I was far too tired, and hurt, to complain, or even think about complaining.

***                                                                                    

            I awoke the next morning to a universe of pain.  It exploded through me, starting at my arm, and radiating out through my body.  It was at once like the feeling you experience when you slam your elbow against something hard, (that is anything but funny), and like fire running across every nerve in your body.  It was utter agony.  It was at that moment that I died.  The man who I had been, Steven Howard Samuels, ceased to exist.  I didn't know it at the time, but my heart stopped for a full quarter-second as the electro-stave from the guard who'd hit me, (for sleeping through the awakening bell), sent its searing jolt of electrically induced pain through my body.  I would, in fact, not come to the realization that Steven Samuels was dead, and that someone else had been born in his place, for some time.  At that moment, all that I could think about was the pain.

            "Get up you piece of shit!" The guard snarled, and I struggled through my pain to move, but only managed to tumble headlong off the small shelf of a bed and to the floor.  Before I could even rise again, the guard had landed another blow with the electro-stave, and my world exploded again.  My muscles stopped responding and I flopped around on the ground like a dying fish for the few moments he left the stave on my body.  He said something to the others in the room.  A warning most likely about making sure to get up, or following instructions.  I couldn't tell because I was busy dying a second time.  I probably would have died for sure then, had not someone intervened.  I remember seeing a man come through the door, look down at my flopping body, and then grab the electro-stave from the hands of the over-zealous guard.

            "They are not here for your amusement," He said.  “Report to Richen immediately!" Then he yanked me to my feet and shoved me toward some of my fellow inmates.  "Hold him up until he regains control of his senses," he told them.  They did, and I was able to start moving again soon. 

            The man who'd saved my life pointed to the door and we all shuffled out.  We were lead through more corridors and into a mess hall of some sort.  It was huge, easily a hundred meters long, and probably half that wide.  Everything was pristinely clean, antiseptic, and the place was well lit.  A startling contrast to the dim, close corridors, and claustrophobic sleeping quarters.  We were instructed to get in line for food, and moved through with a precision that rivaled the speed and efficiency I was used to seeing on the assembly-room floor of Con-Fed on the occasions that I would go to check on some aspect of the project I'd been designing.   I went to a table that had an open seat and began to eat.  The food was utterly without taste, but it was filling, and I was starving.  I finished it quickly, and then just sat. I was full, but empty of all thought.  I was still operating on auto-pilot.  Just going through the motions and doing as I was told. I was in shock.

            I sat there for another couple moments, and then the man that had saved me came in, and ordered us all to stand.  The rest of my group, some thirty of us, stood and were ushered out another door than the one we'd entered from and into a massive domed atrium.  The floor was covered in sand, and it was warm. Overhead, a massive, glass dome divided into many triangular panes sat, and let in the light of the sun.  All around were men training to fight.  They all wore the same clothes as my group, though about half of them had a belt and bracers made of leather.  They, I would find out very soon, were the seniors.  The gladiators that had lived through more than one fight and knew a thing or two.  They were also to be our teachers.  We were walked to a group of them, roughly the same size as our own, and then the man who'd saved my life earlier spoke.

            "You will now train with the men you see before you.  They will teach you the basics of what you need to know to defend yourself in a fight.  Everything else is up to you."  As he spoke a uniformed guard walked down the line of us, and began handing out wooden dowels.  "These cudgels will be the basic weapon you train with.  If you survive a couple engagements, and show promise, we will start training you with real weapons.  Get to work.

            "And just to make sure you understand there is no use trying to use those to make a break for freedom, I invite you to look up to the automated turrets hanging throughout the training arena," the man said.  "They will cut you down faster than you can think about freeing yourself." I believed him. They were sleek, and deadly, and the little red light that indicated they were armed seemed like malevolent eyes watching us. Waiting for an excuse to be used.

            We were then instructed to pair off with the seniors, and begin our training.  My trainer was a brute of a man, easily twice my size, and full of scars and tattoos.  I was terrified of him, and he took great pleasure in beating me mercilessly for a while before beginning to show me how to block and parry.  I have to say that I learned very little that day.  Or little in the first week of my time spent in the Arena.  Mostly I was that man's punching bag.  It was more a way for the senior gladiators to practice and let out aggression than it was a way to train us.  We learned just enough to die in a manner pleasing to the masses. 

            My life went on like this for about two weeks; I would wake, eat, go out into the practice field and get beaten to within an inch of collapse, then eat again, then be worked over by our Chief Trainer whom I had by the beginning of the second week learned was named Seville.  He would make us do calisthenics till we could barely hold ourselves upright.  He was the man who'd saved my life, but after the first couple days of training I knew that not to be out of any sense of sympathy, but merely a desire not to waste a valuable resource.  We were just money-chits to them.  Each one of us would either die in the first match and net a small profit for the runners of this arena or not, and net even bigger profits.  I was worked to exhaustion each day, and slept like the dead, then awakened early each morning and sent back out to do it all over again.  I was perpetually hungry, and sore, and terribly sad. 

            It was all just so unfair! I had done nothing.  I had no Idea where the State had gotten the evidence of my ‘treason’ but it was mistaken.  I had done nothing!  In the few moments I had to myself I seethed, and boiled inside.  I spoke to no one.  Made no friends, ignored anyone who attempted to speak to me.  I was better than them! I was innocent. I didn't belong here!  But I knew better, it didn't matter what I believed.  I was here.  And I wasn't getting out.  Still, I had my pride; I wouldn't socialize with the criminals around me.  I may have been put here by accident, but I wouldn't sully myself by consorting with real degenerates.  It didn't matter anyway, right?  We'd all be dead at the end of the two-week period.  None of us would survive. This was just a way to torture us and make some money off of cleansing society of all its trash.

            On the last day before our first match in the Arena, we were all ushered into a room with several men, each standing at a stool with a set of rudimentary shears in their hands.  We each were ordered to sit on the stool while the men cut the hair from our heads.  Bald, now, and itching from the numerous hair follicles that had fallen about my body from the rude and nearly barbaric hair-cutting I had received we were then given our 'Last Meal'  the only one with any flavor I'd had since arriving here.  I remember it as if it had happened just yesterday.  It was a hamburger, with one of the cheapest imitation-meat soy patties money could buy, but it had ketchup and mustard, and it was like a small slice of heaven in my mouth.  I savored every bite, knowing in my heart that it would be the last thing I ever tasted beside, possibly, my own blood and bile.  We were then put to bed, and told to sleep.  I did not do so.

            I lay there, as many in my dorm that night, staring at the concrete ceiling above my head, unable to sleep despite my exhaustion, for several hours.  Agonizing over what had brought me here, and what would happen to me tomorrow.  I, like everyone else, had seen the Arena fights.  I knew what awaited me out there.  And knew I had no chance.  I was dead.  Sleep finally overtook me in the late hours of the night, and it was fitful.  I awoke after only a couple hours to the sound of the bell ringing the wakeup call, and stood with the others.  We were men waiting for our death and we knew it.  None of us did anything we weren't ordered to do, as if by some miracle our overseers would forget to send us out to our deaths.

            We were walked through the hallways again, and down a corridor we'd not been to before, then into a vast room nearly half the size of the Arena's massive main stage.  The Armory.  It was one massive room filled with nearly every weapon ever designed by man.  I was, I have to admit, awed by it.  My group and I were ushered to a rack of simple hand to hand weapons, and each handed one.  I received a mace of some kind.  A short haft of some composite material, capped with a simple metal head, with a few well-worn studs on it.  I held it as if it were a totally alien thing.  Which, in all honesty it was.  I'd never held a real weapon in my hands, and all the 'training' I'd received this last two weeks was hardly sufficient to make me familiar with its use. 

            We then waited, for some time, while the thundering roar of the hundred-thousand man crowd outside roared to the sounds and sights of death and murder.  We were to be a brief interlude.  A sideshow to keep the masses entertained while the main event for the day was prepared.  I remember waiting quaking with terror, and listening, not daring even to look around for fear it would bring about my death sooner.  I simply stood staring at the patch of concrete on which I stood, and counting the pores. Praying to the Gods I had forgotten that I would be delivered from this horror, that I would awaken and this would all have been a bad dream.

            It was not to be.  Our overseers ushered us to a lifter and we were all huddled together.  No instructions were given. None were needed.  We knew what would happen.  We would be lifted up into the Arena, and there would be our deaths.  We were to fight whatever it was and die. The lifter rose smoothly, on an anti-grav field into the Arena. We were near the side of it and in front of us was a line of gladiators.  Seasoned killers all, and all of them in armor covered in the blood of whomever or whatever they had just killed.  We were to be the comic-relief for the crowd.  Our pitiful attempts to defend ourselves to be laughed at by the masses as we were cut down by the more powerful and well trained gladiators present. 

            We were given hardly any time to prepare ourselves.  The gladiators charged us immediately. A rushing wave of glinting metal, and terrible purpose.  I tried to stay near the center of our group, away from the first crush of bodies.  It was terrible.  The first poor souls to meet those metal and holograph covered monsters died with barely a chance to muster a defense.  They were simply cut down. Blood, and screams, and limbs and flashing weapons all jumbled together to make a nightmare.  Then the fight began.  It was completely one-sided, but at that point we no longer had any choice. Our backs to a wall, literally, and death in front of us, a few of the group lashed out. They died nearly as quickly as the first men did.  Cut apart by the superior weapons and skill of the men they fought. 

            I saw a man next to me try to parry a swipe at his midsection with his simple short-sword, and fail miserably, completely misjudging the speed and timing of his attacker.  He was disemboweled; his insides spilling onto the sand in a rush of blood and gore that made me want to vomit.  But I had no time.  Already, a monster clad in shining steel, with a wicked short spear-like weapon that ended in a wickedly curved blade that vibrated, almost too fast to see clearly, made a jab at me.  I managed to dodge it, just barely, but took a vicious slice to my ribs for my trouble.  I began to bleed freely from the long gash in my side.  I panicked.  I still don't know how, exactly, but I somehow summoned the courage to dash forward and began beating against my opponent's helmet.  Unwittingly, I had closed inside the range of his weapon. 

            I beat at him, futilely, with my mace, succeeding only in enraging the beast of a man that stood before me.  Faster than I could imagine possible from a human being; a gauntleted fist slammed into my chin and sent me tumbling backwards spitting blood and tooth fragments.  I landed in the sand and started scrambling away as fast as I could. Around me, men were dying in hideous ways,  a plasma-whip cut a man into many little gobbets of flesh. Another was impaled on one of those vibrating spear-like weapons. Yet another had his head staved in by a monster wearing nothing but a loin-cloth and spiked gauntlets.  I was beyond terror, beyond thought.  I simply was trying to get away.  I had lost my weapon going down, and was now scrambling to find anything I could to defend myself. 

            My hand found something, I wasn't sure what, and I turned pulling it up from the sand just in time to barely miss being spit by the gladiator I'd been fighting.  His spear bit into the sand sending a spray of granules into the air and peppering my face.  I rolled away from the spear to my left and began to crabwalk away, trying to regain my footing when an axe that looked like something out of a nightmare came down at me from above.  I rolled right again, and began to crawl as fast as I could.  By this time I was crying freely.  I was terrified beyond all reason.  The two who had been about to kill me were briefly distracted by a crazed member of my group that charged them like a banshee.  Who he was, I will never know, nor why he chose that moment to charge, but I will forever be grateful to him for saving my life.  He gave me enough time to stand before he was run through and cut nearly in half by the weapons of the two gladiators. 

            Standing I became aware that there were only 7 of the original 30 men I had been with.  The others were in so many pieces scattered about the sand.  The crowd was almost deafening.  Roaring its pleasure at our death.  It was at that moment that I realized that Steven Howard Samuels had died.  What had replaced him I didn't know, but it was something hard, and mean, and full of hate.  Where I found the temerity to do what I did next can only be said to be madness.  It had been less than a second since the man who'd charged the two gladiators had died, and I swore not to waste the opportunity.  I charged forward, realizing that I had a small cylindrical dagger in my hand and plunged it into the back of the Axe-wielding gladiator.  He was only lightly armored about the torso, and the little knife slid oh-so-easily into his shoulder, just above the shoulder-blade. 

            It was like stabbing a bear with a pocket-knife.  He went utterly berserk.  He began swinging his axe wildly and spun, throwing me clear and sending me sprawling onto the corpse of one of my fellow neophytes. He paused then, to pull the dagger from his shoulder.  I took that brief moment to wrest the pitiful short sword from the corpse's grasp and then scrambled to try to meet him.  I was not entirely up to the task.  Instead of swinging his axe down onto me, as I'd expected, he reversed the momentum of the head at the last moment, and brought the bottom of the weapon up into my stomach, doubling me over. I nearly lost the short-sword, and would have died, but somehow managed to keep hold of it.  Fury boiled inside me now.  I was going to kill this man.  Whatever else happened. Whether I lived or died, this man would not survive.  Twice more he attacked, the first, a short downward slice meant to cut my face in half, missed by a hairs-breadth as I went limp and fell to the ground.  The second, a looping chop from overhead missed completely and the axe buried itself in the sand.

            It was then my moment. Without even thinking about its effect, I swung wildly at his unprotected midsection and felt the blade bite across his skin.  He recoiled, stung, and gathered himself.  I had a moment to look around and notice that the others were more or less taken care of, with the exception of a few other hardy souls, who, like me, had somehow managed to continue to draw breath.  Then he came at me again whirling the axe above his head for momentum before bringing the blade down in a slanting slice that ripped across my torso and opened a bloody gash from my breastbone to my stomach.  It was his last mistake. Close now, I stabbed forward and felt the blade sink to the hilt into his stomach, the momentum of his charge carrying him forward into me, and bowling me over onto the sand, his corpse on top of me. 

            I was terrified.  Bleeding, weak now that the adrenaline rush had run its course, I could barely move under the muscled bulk of the axe-wielding gladiator.  I was sure that at any moment I would be dead. Another gladiator would exact revenge upon me and kill me while I was helpless.  The spear-wielding gladiator that had attacked me earlier came walking over and I was sure then, that it was the end.  He, most of all would not let me live through this.  I began to struggle, frantically, to free myself from the corpse of the man I'd just killed.  It was then I realized that the corpse collectors were emerging to clear the field.  I had survived.  By some miracle I had survived.    I heard laughter coming from inside the man's helmet, and a voice as if from the grave itself spoke.

            "You just became a gladiator," it said, then burst out into a fit of insane laughter again.  He stooped and pulled the corpse off of me and extended his hand.  "Take it, and get up," the voice said.  I took his hand and was hauled to my feet, then half-carried, half-escorted back to the lifter.  He let me go there and I slumped bonelessly to the ground, too exhausted from blood-loss and combat to hold myself up anymore.  Three more men stood around me, equally beaten and bloody, as the lifter lowered itself back into the Armory.  There, to my utter surprise, medical staff was waiting.  I lapsed into unconsciousness at that point, and woke in what for all intents and purposes looked to be a hospital.

            There was a man sitting by my bed. Seville, the man who'd overseen the group I'd been a part of these last two weeks.  "So, you will live after all.  We were about to put you down and save ourselves the trouble of keeping you alive," he said. “Well, give it a couple days, and we'll start the real training."

            That was how I died.  And came to live this life.