Bread and the Circus

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

“Neph,” Mac said, her voice so calm; how could she be calm when she was bleeding to death!?  “Neph, calm down.  If you stay calm, we can figure this out.  We just have to be smarter than the opposition.  And the opposition here’s just brain-dead zombies, so it’s not like it should be hard.”

“I…”

I blink, and glance toward Mac’s face as she lowers herself carefully – gingerly, even – into a lying down position on her front, though I still kept up my pressure on the wound on her calf, her blood oozing all over my hands as I adjusted my grip.

“All right,” I finally said.  Then I looked at Aleph, forcing myself to blink slowly, to focus on my breathing and get it under control.  “Aleph, is there anything you can do?  I mean, I guess this would be spraying blood if there was an artery hit.  So that means we’ve only got to worry about tissue damage and shock.”

“And I’m about as calm as I’m going to get,” Mac said, and sounded like it.  “Might be the sudden blood loss making all the red stuff leave my head, or an aftereffect of wound-shock and adrenaline.  Either way, I’m not doing so bad, at least mentally.  Physically,” she gave a snort of derision.  “This dungeoneering stuff takes a lot out of a body.”

“There is something I can do,” Aleph suddenly declared, her eyes lighting up with the realization, while she went to one of the nearest “dead” zombies and grabbed its chest with her hands.  I saw her fingertips turn to sharp little claws, and heard a cr-c***k noise as she gave the spot under the zombie’s armpits a good, hard wrench.  Really, I should have turned away, but I didn’t really want to stare at Mac’s injury right then, not with my hands stuck right in the middle of all that gore, so I just watched as Aleph peeled open the chest cavity of the robot.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t all that bad.  Now that I was paying attention, I could actually see that none of the wrecked zombies were actually like a real corpse would have been.  For one, there weren’t any oozing juices, just fairly dry flesh, pre-drained of most liquid (though not all, to let it stay relatively lifelike).  For another, everything immediately under the flesh was plastic and ceramic.  Even their mashed-in heads, while not a pleasant sight, just showed bits of crystal where their eyes had been, not real eyes with nasty squishy parts, and certainly no brains.  Just like Aleph had said, now that the hood was popped, to turn an old phrase, it was obvious that all they were was robots with cloned flesh slapped on for body armor and cosmetic purposes.

Inside the chest cavity of the zombie Aleph had opened up was one really major feature: a big blue ovoid, somewhat like the ball used in the game of rugby, which pulsed slightly as she grabbed it in her hands.  While she might not have an organic system, it was interesting watching how her body’s “muscles” tensed, before she yanked out the ball – it was the size of a rugby ball as well as the shape, and it “squished” a little in her hands, revealing itself to be slightly flexible – and held it in both hands as she hurried over to where I was crouching next to Mac.

“Brace yourself, Neph,” she warned me, placing one hand on my shoulder.  “I’m going to use you to complete this circuit.”

Complete…?

Naturally I didn’t get to finish the thought, let alone vocalize it as an actual question, before I felt a real rush through my whole  body.  Wow!  Caffeine didn’t compare to how that felt!  I could see a network of fibers suddenly spring to life, outlined in light, all over my stat suit, the channels for the power that made it functional suddenly visible to my n***d eyes.  That power dappled its way down my arms, into my hands, and I felt the skin there tingle, saw the hair stand up sharply.  Were…were my eyes glowing?  I think they were, because I could see the light shining on my hands and on the bloodstained places where I was applying pressure to the wound where Mac had been bleeding…

…the wound was closing.  I mean, I could see it closing right in front of me!  First a few little strands of the stat suit lashed their way across the open injury, and then all of a sudden the flesh, all pinkish and new, just sort of curled up together, like watching an orange being peeled in reverse, and then swiftly darkened until it was the same color as the rest of Mac’s skin.

Then the moment passed, and I sat back hard on my haunches, breathing hard and blinking like a sunblind owl.

“What…how…what…I just…you just…”

“Really articulate there, Neph,” Mac chuckled as she rolled with astonishing smoothness up to a crosslegged sitting position, letting her put her legs in front where she could look them over.  As we watched, the stat suit started to knit more completely over the injury, slowly at first – there was an awful big gap that had been torn away, after all – but soon gaining in speed after the first strands managed to connect in a criss-cross over the bare skin, forming an underlying framework for the rest of the suit to finish its self-repair with incredible speed.  “Pretty neat trick there, Al.  How’d you do that?”

“I used this robot’s power core to give Neph’s suit an overcharge,” she explained, looking down at the ovoid, which had turned to a lifeless, dull, slightly dusty-looking grey.  “Then I interfaced with his suit to feed the power into yours, Mac, enhancing your suit’s regenerative properties by creating a temporary bioelectric field over the damaged area.  Very temporary, I’m afraid,” she added as the ball crumbled in her hands despite the delicateness of her touch, turning into a fine powder that was suspiciously like a lot of the dust we’d already encountered in this faux-tomb.  “The Circus computers monitor these power cores for the functionality of their owners on a fairly regular cycle, and turn them off when they find a robot has ‘died.’  Since much of their structure is made of a biodegradable, cellulose-based plastic, they’re mostly kept in one piece by the charge of the electromagnetic field they produce while they’re active, and don’t hold together long once the power is shut off.  Not really very suitable for combat conditions, I’m afraid, but perfect for robots that were specifically designed to be expendable.”

“Also perfect for our needs,” I added with an understanding nod.  “A pity we can’t use them for more than a short burst, then, or store them up for later.  But it’s definitely something we’ll have to keep in mind for future use.”

“Speaking of stuff to think about,” Mac broke in, drawing my and Aleph’s attentions with a movement of her hand, “take a look at that wall.”  Her head followed her hand, tilting upward.  “And the ceiling too, it looks like.”

There on the wall were drawings, rather than just the decorative sigils and runes we’d seen before.  Of course the rune language continued alongside the pictures, but finally we had something that we could start to piece together.  The pictures were of creatures that looked remarkably like the Squamous slayers that had driven us into this dark and dangerous place, except this time they looked like they were a lot more than a semi-intelligent monstrous encounter in a glorified game show.  The pictures showed them gathered around pyramids, city plazas, and farms, the style a lot like some old Mesoamerican drawings I’d seen in textbooks during my home schooling.

“I saw this while I was trying to keep my mind off my injury,” Mac explained.  “When I was still worried about if I’d been hamstrung,” she added, flexing her foot and then pressing down on it, nodding as she discovered that it was all back in working order, even if she did still wince a bit.  “It looks kinda important to me.”

“Kind of important” indeed!  There was definitely something going on with these drawings, but the art was too extensive for me to easily translate its meaning as it crawled up the ceiling and sprawled out above us.  That, and we still couldn’t understand a word of that intricate, cursive-looking rune writing.

“Are those space ships?” I couldn’t help but ask, pointing to one of the clusters of pictures on the ceiling.  “They’re kind of high up, and I’m having a hard time making out details in this light.”

“I think I can help there,” Aleph offered, stepping up beside me and tilting her head slowly, beams of flickering blue-white light flashing out of her eyes.  “Here, just give me a chance to scan the images…and now,” she grabbed the single zombie head that we hadn’t damaged too extensively in the fight, and gave it a quick double-twist, first one way and then the other, the “crick-c***k” sound definitely not one of the most pleasant I’d ever heard, before the head popped off in her hands, apparently not too strongly connected, especially now that its owner was deceased.  “Just let me feed my scan of the murals through the optic sensors of this zombie, and we can look at the whole thing on the floor instead, in much smaller form.”

“Can’t you shoot out some image through your own eyes?” asked Mac, turning to watch Aleph tinkering with the zombie head, then sliding several of her extended, tentacle-like fingertips beneath its false skin.

“Yes,” admitted Aleph, just moments before the eyes of the zombie lit up with blue-white light.  “But then I couldn’t see the image myself.  You see, all the mechanical eyes presently available on the open market can either send or receive, so if I used my own eyes to present the adjusted image for you and Neph…”

“Then that would be ‘output mode,’” Mac concluded with a slight nod.  “This way you’ve got a projector, however gooey it might be, so you can just enjoy the show with us.”

“You understand the situation well,” Aleph praised Mac, here blue eyes glowing a little brighter.  “And…ah, there we go.”

Up above, on the upper walls and the ceiling, the light wasn’t all that great, making for the perfect ambience that could be expected of a dusty old tomb.  But down at floor level, the light was far better, and as the image sprayed out of the glittering glass eyes of the reptilian zombie, etching itself out in gradually-building detail on the floor, its size compressed from the original above us, we had no trouble at all inspecting the art in detail.

“Those are spaceships,” I declared, pointing.  “This is definitely a story being told.”

“Scanning the linguistic databases of the Circus computers now,” Aleph reported, and I couldn’t resist turning my head to watch her slitted, glowing cat’s eyes move; I just found those eyes fascinating for some reason.  “They’ve got some pretty incredible security, but…yes, I thought so: I’m allowed access to the low-end data networks.  The same sort of stuff any contestant would be allowed to access while they were between sorties onto the Arena, in fact.  As long as I don’t a***e the privilege too much, I should be able to get us all sorts of information when we need it.  Right now…yes, there it is.  I’m downloading a module to let me read the language all over these ruins.  Just give me a little time.”

As Aleph’s eyes flicked back and forth over the various scrawls of glyphs and runes that dotted the spaces between the many pictures, the zombie head unwavering in her hands, Mac and (eventually) I looked over the parts we could understand, vis-à-vis, the pictures themselves.

“It comes from one of the border planets,” Aleph spoke up after a few minutes of silence passed, all of us focused on this little puzzle in our own ways.  “Discovered less than a decade ago, and while there has been some covert study of the indigenous lifeforms, including their language, they haven’t been invited to join the Pan-Galactic Republic yet.  They apparently aren’t considered culturally prepared for the experience just yet.”

“That explains a lot,” Mac chimed in.  “The lizard-things, their robo-zombie lookalikes, how real these ruins look: I’ll bet they’re all based on stuff swiped from that other world.  I’d even bet that these ruins are a carbon copy of a design lifted straight off the planet during one of the studies you mentioned, then adjusted a bit to make it more lethal.”

“And hence more fun for the viewers at home,” I added, picking up the thread of thought.  “All they’d really have to do is gather some genetic data, like blood samples and other tissue samples, modify the bodies grown so they’d be more monstrous, replace the brain with something cybernetic to ensure the product in question never became a person by mistake, and hey presto: instant monsters for the masses.”

“I…am not so sure it is that simple,” Aleph added, her voice a little hesitant as she looked between Mac and me, and then pointed to the spaceship I’d seen before.  “The text is in a poetic form, and the grammar is almost nonexistent – I swear, it’s almost as bad as you Humans’ English – but I can make out some meaning.  And I don’t think you’ll like it.”

The story Aleph shared, translated roughly from the text on the ceiling, was indeed grim.  It told the chronicle of an ancient people, great in their might, who had fought many wars in times past, but had finally achieved peace.  Now they could build their great cities, and trade between towns, and worship the gods that lived under the earth of their planet.  But this golden age came to an end with abrupt horror, as demons from the sky tore through the clouds, riding on a vast dragon, spewing fire and poison.  The demons belched out of the guts of the dragon, and began to carry off the greatest of the reptile people as prisoners, their most handsome males and beautiful females, to feed them to the dragon from the sky.  When the reptiles fought back, they were slaughtered, or worse, taken alive and made to join the other prisoners.

“It ends with a prayer to their gods for deliverance from the demons from the sky, and for a great hero to be sent that will slay the dragon and return peace to their world,” Aleph concluded, her eyes dimming in concern.  “I…am not happy to read something like this.”  She lifted her eyes, looking directly at me.  “The PGR is based on principles of equality, of cooperation, and of peace between races.  The same principles the people spoken of in these runes believed in.  The people of the PGR are supposed to be the…the ‘good guys,’ for lack of a better term.”  Her pupils widened, showing dismay and rising horror.  “If word of an event like this were to become common knowledge, it would shake the Pan-Galactic Republic to its core: knowing that its society has become so dependent on entertainment that those in power would violate the rights of other sapients, even if they aren’t part of the PGR themselves, just to acquire new sources of inspiration and genetic building material for the Arena.  If the PGR would do something like this to a people on the edge of their civilization, what would they do with me?  I am not a citizen either, not really, not yet.  Should I become unprofitable, my disappearance could be affected down here on the Arena without much difficulty at all, and all record of my existence excised from official records with some careful video editing.”

“Don’t worry, Aleph,” I reassured her, and meant it as I put out a hand and placed it on her shoulder, my eyes meeting hers.  “We won’t ever forget you.  And we won’t ever let you just vanish like that.  As long as we’re alive, we’ll do everything we can to make sure everybody remembers you.”

That heartened Aleph for a few moments, but then she raised her head, and I knew what she would say before it even came out of her speech generators: Mac and me could be just as easily erased, after all, if we proved inconvenient to the society that had sent us into the perils of this deadly artificial planet.  If we had stumbled on a truth too troublesome to be shared, then we would have to be silenced as well, and on the Arena life was certainly cheap enough.

Before either of us could say anything, though, Mac broke into both our thoughts.

“You’re forgetting something kind of important,” she quipped, brushing her hand through the beams of light being projected out of the zombie head’s eyes.  “Who put this here in the first place?  I mean, seriously, there’s no way this kind of thing just gets slapped out by accident.”

“It could have been,” I countered, turning to look at Mac, my tone more querulous than I’d really meant it to be.  “If the Arena designers had simply decided to copy it all verbatim, then adjust the details for lethality.  That would have saved them a lot of time and effort, after all.  Isn’t that what Hanlon’s Razor teaches?  ‘Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity?’”

“‘At least not the first time,’” Mac returned with a smirk.  “Finagle’s Clause to Hanlon’s Razor.”

“They could simply have not counted on someone actually willing to spend the time and effort in a lethal environment to decipher the message in the dungeon decorations,” Aleph added, stepping beside me, pulling one hand out of the zombie’s head (and deactivating it in the process) to rest it reassuringly on my shoulder.  “Too lazy to consider the possibility that there might be the observant, even the obsessive, among their contestants.”

“Right back atcha,” Mac countered with an arched eyebrow.  “We’ve seen the level of detail these Circus people put into everything, the sheer level of effort they’re always expending.  I mean, I believe in this place, and I know it’s just a construct!  So they’re not lazy, and us being here’s the proof of that.  Same with us getting here at all: if we weren’t observant, we’d have never made it past the traps.”  She shook her head, frowning thoughtfully as she looked up at the now-dimmed ceiling.  “No, there’s something else going on.  Something weird.  I think somebody meant for us to find and figure out those wall pictures.  I mean, they’d probably end up on the video feed anyway, and then all it’d take is somebody using the same deciphering software Al just used to figure out their meaning.  And even if those bits get edited out, unless we’re killed down here, we’ll talk.  And even if we do get disappeared or something like that, what about other contestants?  Too many of those just end up dead or vanished, and eventually viewers will start to get bothered at seeing their heroes slaughtered.”

“Hmm,” I couldn’t help but muse, scratching my head.  “Yeah, you’re right: there’s something we’re missing here.  As I think about it, the Circus wouldn’t need to actually kidnap members of another sapient race anyway: it would be expensive to keep them, and overwhelmingly cheaper just to clone the bits of them they wanted while making monsters, and far too potentially damaging politically and culturally and legally if their acts were discovered.”

“Risks outweigh rewards,” Aleph admitted, though I could tell she was still reluctant to let go of the sighted danger she’d stumbled upon.  “Yes, you are right: something does not add up here.  But…but what?  What are we missing?  And why is this,” she motioned to the wall, and then up to the ceiling, “here at all?”

“I think all we can do right now is keep our eyes open for more clues,” I answered, taking Aleph’s hand in mine, my eyes meeting hers.  “I promise you, Aleph: we’re on your side.  If you want to find out what’s going on, we’ll get to the bottom of this mystery, whatever it takes.”

“As long as it doesn’t take going into too many more dungeons to find all the clues,” Mac added with a light snort, the knowing smirk on her face as she glanced between me and Aleph making my cheeks burn (though I didn’t let go of Aleph’s hand…and she didn’t let go of mine).  “I mean, these places are lethal: I’ve already been carved up twice, and me’n Neph both almost got our third dimension revoked just a room before we met you.  I don’t think Agatha Christie had this kind of stuff in mind when she was writing her drawing room murder mysteries.  This stuff’s more like John Grisham, all conspiracies and wheels within wheels.”  Then she got that thoughtful look again.  “Or maybe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Study in Scarlet.’  That’s a story all about conspiracies, and the revenge someone wanted on other members of the conspiracy, which would make for a great motive for somebody to slip this kind of thing into the Arena…except Doyle based all the information in that story on false sources, but he couldn’t pass up the chance to tell an exciting yarn based on what everybody thought was real life at the time.”

“And maybe we’re doing the same thing,” I had to admit.  “Jumping to conclusions because they make for a shocking story, just the sort that the people who watch our antics in the Arena would love.”

“About right,” agreed Mac, before she tilted her head to one side, then the other, cracking out the kinks in her neck, and then bouncing on the balls of her feet, wincing only a little as she did so.  “Ngh, yeah, that’s still a little tender.  But I’m functional, and we’re all just getting hungrier the longer we stay here.  Right now, I think we should shelve our speculations and pull them out again when we’ve got more information and more time.  Oh, and here,” she quickly peeled off the bone breastplate she’d been wearing and tossed it to me, before heading over to the zombie Aleph had popped open for the power core that had healed her.  “I think I wanna get myself an upgrade.”

“An upgrade?” I asked, unthinkingly slipping the dangling armor over my head as I watched Mac crouch by the fallen zombie and then reach out to grab hold of its splayed-open robotic innards.  “Mac, what are you…?”

Oh yuck!

While Aleph gently secured the knots of the breastplate, paying Mac no mind (not that it would have bothered her much: she probably hadn’t had a squick button programmed in), Mac, meanwhile, paid me no mind as she shoved the narrow handle of one of her shillelagh’s into the gap around the zombie’s spine.  A heave, a wrench, some grunting, and a truly disgusting squelch-crunch sound, and all of a sudden most of the zombie’s torso came away in her grip.

“An upgrade,” Mac confirmed with a grin, slipping her head through what had just been the clavicles of the shambling horror, and letting its ribcage fall into place over her torso.  “C’mon, help me cinch some of these wires around the edges so it doesn’t leave any gaps.”

“You’re wearing a slab of meat, Mac,” I explained to her, trying desperately to let my horrified expression convey what words seemed simply inadequate to describe; there were just too many things wrong with this situation for me to even begin!  “A slab of zombie meat.”

“And how thick and sturdy they are is making it hard for me to reach the sides on my own,” she countered, apparently completely unconcerned.  “Now are you gonna help me out here or not?”

I paused as Aleph finished cinching the ties of my own new breastplate, and looked the new “armor” up and down.  The zombie had indeed been a little bigger than Mac, and she was fairly slender anyway, and so its ribcage fit pretty nicely over her own chest and upper torso.  Covering her lower torso, of course, was a bit of dangling meat, the leathery abdominal muscles of the defunct zombie.  And those tissues…leaked.  Just a little bit, but all the same…

“There aren’t any scavengers or other natural creatures on this planet that clean up messes like this,” Aleph told me calmly as she walked over to Mac, taking some of the sturdy-looking wires she’d ripped out of the zombie’s guts and starting to wrap them around the key connective points on one side of the new meat-breastplate.  “Not even arthropodal ‘cleaners,’ like Earth’s ants.  Though the tissues will eventually break down of their own accord, they were made to be resistant to microorganisms, so they should last for quite a while.  As armor goes, I have to admit: it fills the needs of the moment quite nicely.”

I blinked, twice.  Then I stepped forward with a sigh, and took the rest of the wires out of Mac’s outstretched hand.

“Needs must,” I said with resignation.  “But for the record: this is gross.”

“Duly noted,” Mac replied with another grin.  “So let the record show.”