Bread and the Circus

Chapter 18, Part 1

Chapter 18

According to my resources on mythical creatures, there are several recurring clades of dragon, all of which are fairly common in the legends and tales of about eighty-percent of the population of the Pan-Galactic Republic.  First and most frequent are the “serpent dragons,” or “worm dragons,” which are essentially just large snakes, though usually with supernatural abilities of some sort.  Sometimes they can fly, though generally without visible means of support.  Aquatic versions, or sea serpents, are about as common.

Another dracoform is to be found in the “lindworm” and the “tatzelwurm,” though there are plenty of variants on those names, depending on who you ask.  The names I use for this dracotype, and all the dragons I’ve researched over the last four Standard minutes, are the Earth-standard terms; other races naturally have their own specific nomenclature, but I’m trying to be more in-tune with my Human companions, and so have deliberately adjusted a fair amount of my inner thoughts to better fit in with them.  The two varieties of dragon in this group are noted for having two limbs, a pair of legs.  Sometimes this is a pair of hind legs, making the creature look something like a cross between a snake and a chicken, while others have a pair of forelegs, and tend to look like a serpent with arms and, often, hands or talons.  In the more detailed depictions, they can even look like truncated classical dragons.

Speaking of which, the most common species in cryptozoological studies of dragons is the six-limbed dragon, or “classical dragon.”  This is a creature with forelegs, hindlegs, and a pair of wings.  Actually, the wings are optional, though they are generally expected to complete the picture, and so are seldom left off.  To see a classical dragon is to know it instantly: a reptilian creature of immense size and obvious power, though whether a given dragon is perceived as benevolent or malevolent depends, once again, on who you ask.

Finally in my brief study of dragons are the wyverns, dracoforms with four limbs, two of them a pair of legs akin to the lindworm, and a pair of wings with which it can fly.  Some are noted for breathing fire, while others have a venomous stinger, and still others are simply swift-moving aerial predators.  Like all dragons, size and strength are common denominators, and most cultures that report such a creature typically ascribe to it a state of general malice toward all other living beings.

This is my impression also as I dive to the ground, the three of us scattering with all possible speed to avoid the sizzling spray of the wyvern’s lethal breath, which scours the ground where we’d all just been standing moments before.

“I’m not up for this,” Mac says with a fierce growl as we hastily reconnoiter and crouch in the lee of one of the still-intact tents (though I imagine that this state will be corrected by our new assailant in the all-too-near future), her dark-skinned face shockingly pale with pain.  “Maybe if I was a hundred percent, and we got to choose the battlefield, I’d be willing to give it a shot, but right now,” she shook her head, “uh-uh.  How’re you two feeling on the subject?”

“I’m almost out of ammunition,” I reported dutifully.  “With this new situation, I don’t think I’ll have any opportunity to recover sufficient arrows to give the wyvern attacking us any credible opposition: I’m afraid that it’s much too fast and agile for me to be certain of my aim while it’s in the air, and so I would almost certainly require a full quiver before I would feel any degree of confidence in such an attempt.  I might put some holes in its wing membranes, but even then, I have no idea how sturdy its hide is; my flint-tipped arrows might bounce off, or even shatter, depending on what materials went into this monster’s construction.”

“Construction?” Neph picked up on my implications right away, and I saw Mac frowning as the same realization occurred to her as well (so fascinating, actually, learning to read thoughts from facial expressions).  “You mean this thing is…?”

“A cyborg, yes,” I informed them both, craning my head around the edge of the tent (though it required some slight extension from my primary chassis to accomplish) to keep an eye on the wyvern as it circled, taking its time to build up height for another diving run, seeming quite confident we couldn’t reach it at its present range (and most likely being quite correct, considering the extent of our ranged weaponry; even the force blasters were painfully short-range).  “Reviewing the stills I saved from its first run on us, I can detect numerous points that are almost certainly composed of plastics, ceramics, and metal.  There are enough parts made of flesh that it still technically qualifies as a monster rather than a robot, but I would not be at all surprised if it made its lair up in a dungeon somewhere in those mountains.”

“Like the dragon Fafnir,” said Neph.

“Or Smaug,” added Mac.

“Or Vermithrax Pejorative,” I tacked on, instantly getting Looks from both of my friends.  “What?  I liked that film.  A little dark for my usual tastes, and of course not an animated feature, but all the same…”

“That leaves you, Neph,” Mac continued, shifting back to the original topic.  “How are you holding up?”

“Playing the role of Siegfried sounds great in an old Norse saga,” Neph answered, his expression pensive, “at least until you realize that everybody dies at the end.  Given that reality, I think I’d rather not enter combat solo unless there’s no other option.  But if this wyvern is like the other creatures we’ve faced, it’s probably got some preprogrammed limits on its range of attack.  If we can just get out of that area, then we should be safe.”

“Then we’re agreed,” Mac said in that authoritative way that made it hard not to listen to her, especially since she was probably going to say something I’d think was a good idea.  “We’re not up to fighting this dragon.  That means we’re in full retreat now.”  Her eyes flicked around the campsite, and she nodded, before facing us once more in our little group huddle.  “There’s plenty of paths leading down the hill.  We’ll all pick a different one and run for our lives.  Just play it smart, don’t panic, and we all meet back at our base camp at the end.  Al, can you locate us as well as communicate with us?  And if you can, over how long a distance?”

“Yes, as long as you’re not under a good deal of rock,” I answered without hesitation, “and almost anywhere on the surface of the planet.  Each dungeon is likely to be unique, as we previously discussed, and so I can’t give exact specifics for them, but anywhere that you can see the sky, I’m sure I can piggypack my communication signal to your suits through the Circus satellite.  I’d rather not put up your locations on our minimaps, though, since that would alert the Circus computers to your exact whereabouts.”

Seeing both of my friends wince made it quite clear to me that they fully understood and agreed with my reticence.

“Seconds left,” Mac reminded us, and I watched her and Neph rise, their bodies tensing visibly, their stat suits showing off their youthful physiques to best advantage (as I imagine they were intended to do; fashion designers are just one of the many artistic professions that regularly pass through the Arena on the road to success).  “Pick your paths of escape.  Run back home as fast as you can.  We’ll know we’re out of its range when it stops chasing us.  If we need minimap confirmation, Al, we’ll tell you.  Until then, everybody get ready to bolt on my word…no, on Al’s word,” she quickly amended.  “She’s got the best vision and timing of us.”

No further words were said, then, as Neph and Mac each turned toward a different direction, then crouched like racers at their starting blocks.  I, however, didn’t select an immediate route of egress, but simply extended my neck a little more, to better observe our opponent.  It was actually a rather graceful creature, beautiful even, with shimmering purple and blue scales that I somehow just knew would be as hard as tempered steel.  That is, if they weren’t made out of something even stronger!  Watching its gold-tinged wings catching the sun, creating a mother-of-pearl effect, I actually…well, if I’d had breath to catch, I would have.

Then it turned, and my eyes zeroed in on its head, and I had to admit: I was frightened.  The look of focused, concentrated hate in those eyes, the steaming fumes from its nostrils, the heat haze from its mouth, they all hit something inside of me, something that I know hadn’t been put there by my programmers.  I was designed to have self-preservation routines, not fight-or-flight instincts!

No, I would focus.  My friends were depending on me.  Just focus on range, on trajectory, on velocity, on all the “hard” data: there’s plenty that I can do with numbers.  Numbers are safe, controlled.  Or at least they are when they’re confined to a sheet of paper, or the screen of a calculator.  In the real world, numbers can kill as surely as any missile!  As a highly practical example, in Earth measurements, my outer “skin” starts to melt at slightly above one-thousand five-hundred degrees Celsius, while my onboard sensors estimate that the dragon’s chemical flame has a flash point almost three times that.  If it didn’t burn out so quickly, those flames could carve out trenches in the solid rock up here!

Forcing myself not to be distracted by the mathematics of annihilation my sensors fed to me from every movement of the wheeling wyvern, I held my head and upper body steady to keep my view clear, while coiling my lower body to the point where I started to lose some of my humanoid shape, all the better to quite literally spring away from danger when it finally struck.

And strike it did!  One moment, the wyvern was circling, and the next…the next my sensors almost couldn’t follow the movement, it came streaking down so fast, so very, very fast.

Don’t panic.  Don’t get distracted.  My friends need me.  They need me to tell them when it’s time to run.  The perfect time, not the time that my desire to live is telling me, which is right now.  That selfish urge is a liar, and it will only get all of us killed, and I know this intellectually, and put all my will into quashing it.  But the impulse remains all the same.

Another moment.  Just another.  And another after that.  Not a second: a second is a specific unit for measuring time.  A moment, however, is more abstract, expanding or contracting to the precise needs of the user.  And so I need only a moment, or perhaps two.  Just enough time to see the moment when we need to…

“Run!”

Off they go, each in their own chosen direction, while the wyvern’s terrible breath splatters the tent with the searing acid of its gullet, which soon catches flame when exposed to open air.  I, however, don’t run.  Instead, I roll, staying out of the splash of acid and fire, but no more.  There’s no need, or so my rational mind tells me.  After all, I’m only a robot, not really a contestant, whatever my legal status might be in the paperwork up on the Circus satellite.  That hardly matters compared to my designation by the Circus computers; to them, I’m an object, a piece of equipment, of ‘loot.’  If I’m assisting my competitor companions, then I’m fair game for targeting, just like them.  But with both of them gone…

The problem with a logical conclusion like the one I’d drawn about my designated status to the Circus computers is that it’s almost impossible to determine its validity without a test.  Rising to my feet (after reforming them, of course), standing right by what remained of the central fire after the rush of the wyvern’s passing had nearly snuffed it out, I didn’t know that what I’d reasoned out was actually true until I saw the great beast swoop past, then rise once more, beating its powerful wings to gain more altitude as it visibly struggled to decide its new course of action.  It turned its head to the right, and then to the left, tracking the paths of the two fleeing Humans.  Its eyes never swung back to focus on me, however.

Another successful experiment.

Phew!

Mac’s tactic, it seemed, had indeed overwhelmed the small degree of autonomy the wyvern had been allowed, and now it had to call on the additional assistance of the Circus computers to work out a suitable response to two separate escape paths.  The beast was almost certainly near the edge of its range, too, or else we’d have almost certainly seen it before now.  I, of course, was an easy and obvious target, my silversheen body gleaming in the bright sun of that beautiful day now that I’d reformed myself properly, but as I’d hoped, the wyvern didn’t spare me more than a glance; I was a mere object lacking any strategic interest as far as it was concerned, and so long as I did nothing to change that status, I should remain safe enough to return to our home base on the Scratch Plains without further incident, save for those naturally incumbent upon travel in rough terrain.

I couldn’t help but realize, however, something that had eluded me in the terror of the moment in which we were waiting for the stoop of the wyvern: Mac and Neph had taken paths different from the one we’d cleared coming up.  That meant that there was a very real possibility that there would be more foes waiting for them on their paths of retreat, even if the wyvern decided…

Ah, good.  If I had the ability, I would have sighed in relief as I saw the wyvern wheel and wing its way back toward the mountains.  Focusing on those mountains, I saw the title “Knife Ridge” appear above it on my own internal minimap, which I’d downloaded from among a suite of useful software the Circus had lying around in its computers, ready for installation on demand into the stat suits of contestants.  That made three named locations that we’d encountered thus far: Scratch Plains, where Mac and Neph had their home base, and where we were likely to be picked up at the end of our first ten day stint; Ginchis Deep, with its deep and winding gulleys and numerous foothills that we’d only just begun to explore; and the mountains of Knife Ridge, which we’d seen, but hadn’t even come close enough to explore.  Thankfully, this last datum seemed to mean that we were off-limits to creatures, like the wyvern, that made their homes in that area.  If this sort of enemy compartmentalization continued true, then we might indeed have made our little home region fairly safe as a point for falling back from our jaunts into the morlock lair.

Not completely safe, though: nowhere on the Arena was ever completely safe.  Not ever.

All the same, right then, I was safe, and the feeling was…really, I don’t know how to properly describe it.  Ever since I’d been roused from my treasure box, I’d been speeding from one lethal situation to the next, never knowing when I might lose the life that I’d only just gained.  Even our “down time” after the dungeon where I’d been found by my new friends was broken up periodically by random attacks by scattered groups of the little terrors on this hill, and we’d had to be constantly on-guard against attacks day and night.  Now, quite suddenly, I wasn’t existing in the limbo of terror that had occupied my every moment outside of my sleep state.

Feeling light, freer than I’d ever imagined possible, I turned toward the path that we’d already cleared while coming up, and started the trek back to our safe little grove.  Soon enough I’d start to feel anxiety for my friends, to worry and fret over their fates.  Right now, though, in this brief instant, I was in a state of perfect equilibrium.  Finally, I could savor the sensation that most people considered normal, without having to be on constant lookout for something awful hunting me.

*