This story came together gradually, over the course of most of a year, and as a result I think it produced a more polished result, something more meaningful to me than many of my other stories. I didn’t notice it at the time, but now I realize that, for some reason, I’ve written several stories fitting the archetype of “young guy encounters a man in a suit who tries to sell him something.” It must be rattling around in the back of my brain for some reason.
Yet another Olympiad. Every week, it feels like, there is another Olympiad, featuring those strange people who barely look like people, those strange behaviors that barely feel human. The warriors are never quite identical, although they follow general trends, as do their behaviors. For one, they’re all robots, their chrome-plated skin shining some color halfway between beige and gray. For another, they always speak in the same barely-coherent voice, one of cymbal crashes and steel drum hits rather than what they used to call “proper human language.”
Well, of course the nice thing about the Olympiad is that it’s rarely all that crowded. It’s never deserted, there are plenty of people in the stadium to the point that probably most of the seats are occupied, but it’s a relatively small stadium in a kind of obscure part of town because robot fighting isn’t really that interesting to most people. I think they’re aware of it, and maybe they accept it (or maybe they see it as another piece of evidence that degenerate machines have taken over sports, or whatever the latest moral panic they want to paint it with) but either way the fact that I’m here and not at the stadium downtown is more or less a matter of coincidence. I don’t know anyone else here, I mean. It’s just that it’s a lot easier to get to from my apartment, and they don’t force you to carry all of your stuff in clear plastic bags here like they do down at the big stadium. I’m sure I could get a clear plastic bag, no problem, they sell them everywhere, but there’s something in the principle that bothers me. Besides, robot fighting is fighting at the top of its game, and it’s always available.
Perhaps it’s too available, I guess. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with coming here, it’s not doing me any harm, but it’s six minutes past midnight on a Monday evening – I guess it’s a Tuesday morning now – and I’ve got to get to work by six in the morning tomorrow. I’m glad they do night shows here, because my work schedule is so nonsensical the only time I know I’ll ever have to myself is the eight-hour window they give me to sleep, but at the same time the night shows are costing me some of that. Oh well. I’d rather watch a real fight than dream about one anyway.
I guess it’s not a real fight, not a “real” real fight. But again, robot fighting is fighting at the top of its game. These guys know what they’re doing. They take a beating for hours on end, then they get off stage, let the next warrior begin his fight while they get their paint job redone and recharge their battery, and then get ready to jump back into the next fight. No rest. They only need maybe four fighters, although for the sake of variety of course there are dozens of them. Fighters are generally pretty cheap to hire, after all, and it’s the entertainment industry – you need a colorful cast of characters or else nobody’s showing up to your stadium.
Well, anyway, I’m watching an Olympiad, which is unique, or would be if they didn’t do it every Monday night (or Tuesday morning). They’ve got O’Brian up there going against Heiffen, and O’Brian is crushing the poor guy, absolutely pulverizing him. I knew going into this that this was exactly the way it was going to be, the only way it could have been – Heiffen is half a foot foot shorter than O’Brian and only wound up in the same weight class because it has a huge battery pack. He’s doing his best, but it’s not enough. Per the rules of the Olympiad, Heiffen will be kicked off the middleweight bracket in maybe another minute, and O’Brian will advance to the semis where he’ll play Wright (who will probably crush him).
“Hardly much of a game, is it?”
I don’t know who says it, and it’s not common to talk to strangers in the middle of the game. I mumble a little bit, and then, deciding that he’ll probably go away or at least be satisfied if I give him a real answer, say, “Yeah, not the kind of stuff I’m here for.” When people do talk at these games (usually with their friends, not with whoever this guy is) the typical conversation is one of complaint, or at least that’s what I tend to overhear most often. It’s a safe bet, I guess, but it makes you wonder if anybody really enjoys watching this. Maybe it feels too perfect, mechanical, lacking any of that “human essence” people are always going on about. Me, I think human essence is crap. I haven’t got anything that a chimpanzee or a computer doesn’t have as well. (Hell, when I watch these fights I’m not sure I’m much more than a chimpanzee at all.) But I get the feeling this stranger thinks there’s something unique about humanity and is trying to sell me on the premise again.
Sure enough, hardly a minute’s passed before he asks me why I don’t come to the human shows. Finally, the man is visible. I almost recognize him from somewhere. He’s probably in his early thirties, but he’s got a receding hairline and his face is unnaturally sweaty. Other than that, though, he’s a clean-shaven businessman, wearing a suit in this hot indoor stadium surrounded by men and women (well, mostly men – robot fighting hasn’t quite figured out that crossover appeal) wearing ripped backwards t-shirts and black denim shorts. His outfit would, in any other situation, convey power and wealth and esteem, but here he just looks idiotic, like a Greek bronze statue in a pixart museum. What use is a bowtie to a beatnik? If he’s here to advertise, he doesn’t know the first thing about marketing. So I conclude that he’s not here to advertise, and so I decide it might as well be worth talking to him. Or maybe that was his plan all along, but by now it’s eight minutes past midnight and my brain’s logical half is shutting down for the day so that I can enjoy the fights with the other, the half devoted to primitive rage and twisted grins, and so I’m not going to try to trap myself in a cycle of thinking one step ahead of my own mind.
“They’re way better, you know,” I attempt. “I mean, the robots are. They’re built for it.”
“People are built for fighting, wouldn’t you say?” Every sentence the man says seems to end in some sort of question, constantly seeking my approval or at least wanting to seem like he is. He isn’t actually interested, of course, in hearing me say “yes,” but he’s smart enough to know he can’t tell me what to think, he can just make suggestions and I’ll absentmindedly agree. These days it’s so hard to find anything to agree with, so I take the deal in a heartbeat, just like he suspects I would. But his question also implies I’ll fight back, which of course I do:
“Well, as much as we’re built for climbing. Or seeing faces in random objects. I don’t think we’re built for anything beyond survival, I guess, and anything else is our choice.” It’s at this point I call his attention to my eye, hoping to drive home my point but still, surely, hopelessly caught up in his four-dimensional game. This man is either impossibly intelligent or impossibly stupid – maybe, after all, I’ve been outsmarting him this whole time, and anything he’s done to advance his arguments has been merely coincidental. But that’s just what a decent mentalist would want me to think. No doubt every flash of light in this room, every drum hit is perfectly synchronized to make me answer the way he wants me to. “I chose to be built for seeing, I guess.”
“Well, you didn’t choose that, did you?” Again with the question-statements. I nod as he continues, “You could say destiny – God, if you’d prefer – chose to have you lose your eye. These robots didn’t choose to be built for fighting any more than we can choose the number of limbs we’re born with. But ignoring all that for a second, these robots – aren’t they ever too good?”
He’s gone with a formulaic enough question that I have a boilerplate response lined up. “I never got that. I think too good is a phrase used by people who have only had mediocre experiences, trying to justify that mediocrity. If your best argument against robot fighting is that it’s too good, what you’re telling me is I need to go see something worse.”
The man smiles as I say all of this. No doubt he’s heard it before. There’s an obvious move for him to take now, to suggest that robots aren’t perfect after all, and humans are better for their unpredictability, but that would undermine what he said earlier. Still, he’s not totally trapped here. I’m sure he could figure out a way to –
“I never said you ought to see a real fight. I’m sure you’ve seen them before.” He pronounces the words very carefully, doing his best to imitate my accent that I’m confident he doesn’t actually share. He’s not doing a very good job of pretending to fit in. But I mean, this isn’t a clique or anything. He’s free to watch, just as long as he doesn’t advertise. But maybe he isn’t advertising, judging by that last statement. What the hell is he doing, then? He knows I’m about to ask that, so he answers it first. “How would you like to be a real fleshblood fighter?”
I’ve never liked people calling non-robots “fleshbloods,” especially given I’ve got plenty of myself that’s not flesh and blood. There’s my copper eye, of course, but also about two-thirds of my heart has been replaced with a machine I don’t really understand. All I know is that it pumps blood so regularly, when this man just asked me to become a warrior, I had no fight-or-flight response. It felt as though he asked me if I wanted a glass of water. Sure, he’s a manipulative man, and I don’t feel capable of declining him, at least not totally, but the effect is all mental. I’m not shivering or sweating, my pace isn’t faster, I’m not doing anything like the stuff stage actors try to pull so you can tell they’re nervous from a hundred feet away. In fact, I wouldn’t even say my current emotion is nervousness. It’s more like indifference, I think, but when the typical reaction to being asked to put on a fighting show is excitement, anything other than that reads as fear.
“You’re offering me the chance to be a warrior?”
“Have you done it before?” The way he asks it, he makes me seem strange for answering “no.” Everybody, in his mind at least, wanted to be a warrior when they grew up, and everybody’s fought a little bit, at least in high school or college when the authorities tend to turn a blind eye to that kind of recreational violence. Looking at this man, he seems distinctly unathletic, even more so than me, and it strikes me as odd that he could have ever been a warrior. People change, I guess. In body and in mind. Probably someday I’ll remember this conversation and curse myself for refusing the one good chance I had at a fight. It’s not going to kill me if I accept. I’ll probably even enjoy it. Everyone else does.
“I’m sure you know people who have, either way, and I’m sure they look back on it fondly.” Fondly? This man talks like he’s a hundred years old. “There’s going to be an Olympiad – I mean, a real Olympiad, not the kind of weekly sideshow you’ve got here – on Thursday. We’re having a round for total amateurs. Sort of an exhibition kind of thing. A spectator sport, if you will.”
Thursday? He’s awfully glib about not having enough contendors for some fight that’s two days away. Alternately, and surely more likely, he’s scamming me, what I’d figured from the beginning. I don’t know why he keeps trying to sound like me otherwise. He slurs his speech, sure, but he doesn’t do it right – I say the word exhibition like “expition,” not “egzbizhun.” It’s almost like he’s drunk, although he seems perfectly sober otherwise, in his body and his face. Again, somehow, it’s impossible to tell if this man is a bumbling idiot or a manipulative genius. I could usually get a decent read on a guy like him by now, but I keep coming up with nothing. So I stay at my present level of wariness and ask him more questions, maybe in the hope that he’ll stop asking them of me.
“Is there decent pay?” I’ve got a job, but it’s crap, and I’d probably have to take the day off, unpaid, to do anything like this.
“What!” He’s furrowing his brow at me, like it’s somehow unreasonable to want to get paid for putting my physical health at risk signing up for one of his fights. “You know, a lot of people would pay me to be in a fight like this. You’ll be before a huge audience. Great exposure,” he says, knowing I don’t remotely care about exposure but still in his businessman mode. “I’m offering you a seat for free.”
It’s obvious he’s lying, of course. If a lot of people would pay him to fight, than he’d be a hell of a lot more successful if he started bothering them rather than me. Plus, he’s brought up the audience. Why would I want to get beat up on camera? He’s counting on me to have a lot more confidence in myself than I really do. He’s counting on me for a lot of things, actually, and the more I think about them the more it seems ridiculous that he’s still here talking to me. He’s desperate, I can tell, even though he does his best to hide it with that absurd suit and bowtie. Meaning I, for once in my oh-so-brief and unfree life, am finally in a position to negotiate. There’s something special about me, the way he fixates on my speech patterns, ignores my disinterest. Or maybe he’s just genuinely surprised that a man like myself, youngish and in perfect shape discounting my various mechanized bits, has never once found the time to fight someone. It’s hard to believe anything he says is genuine, of course; he’s like a caricature of himself, or perhaps of me. But, as with so many things, the specifics don’t matter as much as the result. Whatever his reason for wanting me to fight, it’s something good, something I can hang him by.
“How long, then?” I finally ask him, after shifting my gaze back to the fight for a moment. Wright’s getting up on the stage now to face off O’Brian, but something looks wrong with him, like he’s being shot in slow motion. Doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve got business, as much as I’d rather not.
“The fight, you mean? You’ll only be up there for ten minutes a bout. You win a bout, you stay on, after three wins we clear you out to make room for some new guys. Only so long one fighter can be interesting, you know?” I nod along absentmindedly, even though I really am listening now to every word out of his mouth. “Plus, it helps with the insurance. We used to wait until five wins, but half the guys who made it that long wound up with a broken jaw.”
There’s an unexpected crash – not the typical metallic tone of the robot fighters, something more piercing. I turn around for a second. Wright’s faceplanted on stage. Sounds like something’s broken, there’s some sort of whirring, but just as suddenly as the noise started it stops. I hope he’s not dead. I didn’t have any money on this fight, I can’t afford that kind of thing and even if I could I wouldn’t want to risk it, but Wright was always one of the better middleweights, for entertainment value and for fighting style alike. A life of fighting caught up to him, that’s probably what they’ll say in the tabloids, on slide twenty-five because they get angry spams every time there’s a robot on the front cover. Surely someone’s going to launch another crusade against robot fighting, complain to the government that it’s too dangerous, and of course nothing’s going to happen but it depresses me that we have to keep battling over this.
The man in the suit is staring at me. For the first time, he seems unintentionally silent, like he would rather either of us be saying something right now but he can’t control me and he’s almost to the end of his script. “Uh, half an hour fight time, then, in total. Add in a couple minutes for the breaks in between the fights, but in total you’ll be out there for no more than forty minutes.” Half an hour sounds brutal. I don’t do much of anything for half an hour. If a meal takes me more than half an hour I call it quits and figure I’ve eaten enough. I’m lucky my work keeps me multitasking, or I would’ve surely been fired by now. But a fight, I figure, is much the same. You’re not doing one repetitive motion, at least, right? You’ve got to adjust. Respond.
I can’t believe I’m really planning the logistics of this. I take a step back and start again.
“I want money.” There’s no use skirting around it.
“Yeah, I want cold fusion and a wife from the Azores.” There’s something impossibly antiquated about this man. He’s probably referencing something, but he’s also probably the only one who remembers it. “I’ll give you this – whatever you pay for transport, we’ll cover. We’ll cover any work you’ve got to skip. I’ll throw in twenty-five more, from my own account.”
“Twenty-five hundred?” I can’t act too surprised, or he’ll realize I could go for less, but I wasn’t acting him to capitulate so easily.
“I said twenty-five, twenty-five dollars. Buy yourself a nice dinner. I don’t have twenty-five hundred dollars just lying around to give you.” See, I’m just like you, that’s what he wants me to think. Painting himself as some underpaid lackey of the tournament organizers, just another rusting cog in the machine, an honest man hit hard by deflation like anyone else. He thinks he’s putting it in terms I can understand; I’m just not sure whether to take that as a courtesy or an insult. “I don’t negotiate much,” he says, which is another lie because I’ve managed to negotiate him up from zero to twenty-five dollars already by saying more or less three words, “so either you take the twenty-five or you don’t fight this week.”
He says it as though I’m missing out on something. Ah, what the hell. He’s probably right. I don’t want to fight – what the hell is that? Cowardice? Naïveté? I mean, I’m here watching the fights, so it’s not like I hate recreational fighting in general, like all those religious groups and regressivists seem to. It’s worth a shot. I mean, really, why not? If I get hurt, it won’t be the end of the world, they’ll take care of my treatment. And maybe I’ll enjoy it. Maybe I’ll even be good at it, so good that I can quit my dayjob and just fight all the time. Maybe I’ll fight someone and then later on we’ll meet up again and laugh about it and go out for drinks. They’ve always said that the story of a life well-lived is the story of going out and finally doing the things you’re afraid of. Well, they’ve said it since Snake Girl 2 came out, at least.
“I’ll take it,” I say, and shake his hand. I’ll worry about the consequences later.