skonen_blades

“She can’t have children, you see,” said the coliseum owner, “She’s barren.”

He reached for another salamander tail and popped it into his mouth. The aircars outside the restaurant burbled past in their layered traffic, missing each other by inches in the daily miracle of the traffic AI. It was a beautiful day outside. This sun glinted down through controlled clouds, predictably great weather providing all the people with great vacations.

I was interviewing the owner of one of the most famous arenas on the planet about his star attraction; The Alien Hive Queen.

“Please continue,” I said.

“She was captured in a cave system. No light on that planet. That’s why she’s an albino, you see. The only white hive queen in existence that we know of. No pigments. That in itself would make her an attraction,” he continued. “Of course I leapt at the chance to pay top credit for her.”

He shook his head wistfully, chewing and looking out the window at the passing arteries of vehicle traffic.

“I thought I’d breed a whole batch of white aliens. Sell them off. Ah well.” He wiped his hands on a napkin.

“What happened?” I asked

“Well, we put male drones in there to mate with her. They did their job as they are genetically programmed to do, like any old wasp or bee, I suppose. But it was the eggs, you see? The eggs were just filled with half-formed larvae in barren slime. Useless. No viable children at all.” He paused in thought. A scowl crossed his face and his eyes glittered.

“She killed those drones. Quite viciously. And any others we put in there from that point forward. That was that. Not a breeder. So I had to make money. That’s where the billboard idea came from.” He said.

“The advertisements on her crown carapace, you mean?” I clarified “The stenciled animated logos for Coca Cola, 3M, Semtex, and the like?”

“Yes, those. I mean, she’s basically a blank canvas, right? A giant expanse of white. A wall waiting for graffiti. I figured I could rent it out as ad space. And I was right!” he smiled, triumph in his eyes. But it quickly turned dispirited again. “I still have years to go until I make my money back.”

“Tell me about the handlers.” I said.

“Oh right. Well, see that’s the interesting part. She just huddles there with what’s left of her eggs, keening. It sounds like, crying? Crooning? She strokes the calcified shells of her failed brood. Twenty years now. Sometimes she’ll go quiet and stop for an hour or two. I assume that’s what passes for sleep for her. But other than that, her life is just eating the food we throw into the dark cage and crying over her never-were babies.”

“Anyone or anything alive we put in there is torn to shreds. Just like in the arena during her fights. You saw the fight with the grizzlies from Earth? Sixteen of them! No contest. The T-rexes? The first two were dead inside of a second and the third actually rolled onto its back like a dog and surrendered before she tore its head off. The dragons? The rhinocs? Nothing. Nothing defeats her. It’s dynamic. But where was I?” he asked.

“The handlers. The women who change the ads and clean her. And the ones who ride her in the arena when riders are required for the fight.” I prompted.

“Ah yes. They’re barren, too, you see?” he said, reaching for another tail. “Something about pheromones, I guess. A fertile woman or a man walks in there? Boom. They get turned into juice. But a barren woman? The queen barely even notices them. Sometimes she even she’ll reach out a claw to touch them and stop crying for a few seconds. Other than that, the women can climb all over her, scrub here, and change the pigmapaint on her forehead and she doesn’t care.”

“That’s really impressive.” I said.

“And quite sad.” He responded. “I mean, I’m glad she has friends. And I’m glad I’m making money. But I wish it had turned out different.”



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The fight goes great for almost fifteen seconds.

The clank and thud of metal on plastic echoes around the cage studio. Small dents. A few scorch marks. This is the part of the fight that we can still both walk away from. Parries. Searching for weak sides, design flaws in the shell, testing peripheral vision.

I’m quick. He’s strong. Usually, quick wins. This guy, though, has training that plays to his enormous strength. His armour takes the hits as I look for a crack in the façade.

I find the crack and jam a needlepaw in there just before I realize that the crack is too big, too obvious. It’s a fake. It’s a trap. Quick also means too eager.

My tips hit a charge-vein. With my reflexes amped up like this, I can see the electrical charge crawl up my arm. Inchworms of blue light snake up and around my wrist. All of my servos lock up as the electricity slowly washes over my elbow and overloads them.

I get up my feet up and plant them on the big guy’s chest and push off just as it hits my shoulder. I land in an efficient roll but now my right arm might as well be a feather boa for all the good it’ll do.

This guy. Big, round, shapes of impact liquid armour coat all of his joints. He’s a new model, no sharp edges. Like a bunch of pillows with a video camera on top. Pillows that turn to carbon-fibre steel at a punch.

Ever since these fights started being targeted towards families a few months ago, the chassis designs have gotten friendlier. Designs that two-year olds won’t poke themselves in the eye with. Designs that can be mass-produced as toys for more profit.

I am mirror shards, guitar wire, and kitchen-knife puzzle pieces wrapped around razors and open-air tendongears. Suddenly, I get it.

The fight is fixed. I’m not going to win. Corporate won’t have it.

The big guy lunges, taking my moment of realization as a weak moment of fear. He’s wrong. I have no fear now. I'm going to lose even if I win.

My reflexes are hard to control. I shudder a little as his fist closes around my other shoulder. I hear it crush with a squeal of metal that sounds alive. We both go down, him on top.

He’s staring at me with his big red HAL eye above the bulbous armour.

Slow. Move slow. Slowly. I move one of my feet up. Slow. I snuggle my foot under one of the big guy’s pillowy armour pads near his hip. If I’m quick at all, it’ll harden to concrete.

I scream and whine to distract him. It works. His red eye is focused on my construct’s sensor array, feeding the view to the paying audience.

My toes are close to his spine now. I’ll only get one shot. I slowly make a fist with my foot as he puts a hand over my lenses. There's a crunch and my eye-feeds stutter and fail.

I open my foot quickly, pushing out my claws. The armour around his waist fluffs up and goes rock solid. My foot is destroyed. I heard that spine spit sparks, though.

He falls to the ground, paralyzed from the waist down, spine severed. My leg is ripped off, trapped in the folds of his activated armour.

Both of my arms are dead and I’m blind. Only one of my legs works. That’s okay. All I have to do is stand. Last one standing wins the bout.

I hop around the ring as the automated referee counts to ten. I win.


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The rules were simple. No time manipulation, no transmutation, and no spell could be used twice.

Morden the Uneasy entered from the west quadrant of the arena on a massive floating bed attended by golem slaves made from flower petals. The metal caps on the stumps of her legs glimmered with diamonds in the sunlight.

I sat high up in the private viewing box with my client and tried to pay attention to the match. The arena floor was projected real-time on the table between my client and I in hard light. Whatever section of the fight I was paying attention to would come up picture-in-picture on a baseball card floating to the left of the action.

It was an expensive AV setup in the most expensive seat in the house. If this gross display of wealth was meant to impress me and keep me off-balance during the wage negotiations, it was working.

Khallista of the Red Flame entered from the east quadrant of the arena, wreathed in the red fire of her clan and already whimpering from the recent focal drugs that had turned her eyes completely black.

There were better skilled people on the craftlist above me that could have done the job that my client was asking me to do. I wasn’t cheap but this client could afford the best. I figured if he wanted a fall guy to use as bait for a trap, he would have sought out the cheapest loser he could find so I was curious why he picked me. Not the bottom and not the top and not a particularly fast riser.

I warily accepted his offer of more details over dinner at a Magic Pit Fight in the hopes of allaying my suspicion.

Rowst the Unbelieving staggered in from the ‘blue’ north quarter. He was blindfolded and dressed in nothing but a small toga, stained by the sores covering his body. A perfectly circular halo of small glowing fairies crowned his bald head.

My client sat across from me in the shadows. Whatever air of mystery he was trying to create for me was also working very well. I was very curious about his identity. Courtesy wouldn’t let me ask until he offered to talk to about it so I sat back in silence and continued to watch the players enter the arena.

Shorelocke the Dread Shadow entered from the south to complete the roster. He was cut from darkness. There was an absence of light around him. He was like a person-shaped hole cut in the fabric of reality. His glowing eyes stabbed out in twin beams of white, eager ferocity.

These fights were not to the death. They were for rights and rankings. This was a championship round, though, and sometimes accidents happened.

My client leaned forward into the light above the projection on the table. I looked up to meet his eyes and froze with the words I was planning to say dying in my throat.

A Fixer was staring back at me. I’d only heard legends. His pale face and dark eyes marked him out as a rare purebred human but that wasn’t the giveaway. He’d released the glamour for me to see in this moment so that I would be suitably awed.

He flickered with possibility.

He was staying close to the dimensions surrounding this one so his changes weren’t extreme. The different versions of himself were very similar to one in this quantum thread. His hair length varied a little from second to second. A scar would sometimes pop up on a cheek and then vanish. His eyes would go through a gradient of the colours he was born with as the moments went by. It made me slightly nauseous to look at, like I had motion sickness.

Very occasionally, a woman would flash through his features or he’d disappear for a millisecond as he passed through a universe where he’d died already.

He leaned back in the shadows.

I composed myself and asked him the question I’d been wanting to ask him since I’d been contacted.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because”, The Fixer responded, “you are unique. You know what you’re talking to, yes? You realize what I mean?”

I nodded. As someone that could extend their sense of self across an almost infinite number of dimensions as easily as a bird could extend its wings, The Fixer had a very special definition of unique.

We all have a double in almost every other universe. However, if you picture all possible realities as a spectrum, the differences between our universe and the other possible universes get more and more pronounced the further away you get from your universe of origin.

There are universes where I have a different haircut and a different job. There are universes where I am married.

Go further and there are universes where I was hit by car when I was six, for example, or choked on a chicken bone when I was seven. There are universes where my parents never met and I never came to be.

What The Fixer meant by ‘unique’ was that he had spread his dimensional-self wings and hadn’t found me. What he meant was that there was only one of me. Here. Only in this space-time continuum and only on this Earth.

I reeled. This was the end of one life and the beginning of another.

“You realize how valuable that makes you to my kind, of course. I only offered you a job to get you here.” He said. Languidly, he motioned with his index finger and I heard the doors lock.

“You are going to be added to The Zoo.” He said.

On the table between us, the Magic Pit Fight began to the crowd’s deafening cheer.



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The Queen came out of the entrance on the far side of the arena floor like some sort of ravenous stick figure scarecrow on stilts, her blind deathrap of a mouth slavering thick deadly mucous. Her muzzle snuffled the air obscenely from underneath the rock hard carapace of her massive head as acid like hair gel dripped down and lubricated her jaws. It hung off of her in playful long wet strands. They flailed in the wind and sizzled in the dirt where they landed. Her second set of jaws lanced out, stretching in the dazzling sun. Her four arms clutched at the air like dancers as the giant misshapen top-heavy body found balance and settled back into a squat on her huge back legs. Her thick long serrated tail whipped around and stabbed impatiently at the walls. The spear-shaped one ton shovel head on the end of it lashed the dirt, sending fantails of soil up against the safety screens of the front row to their delight. The stalks on her back tasted the air for prey. For viable baby food. To give you an idea of the sensitivity of these stalks, it was like they were studded in bear noses. They soaked up cubic miles of surrounding scent. They blasted out long chemical scent paragraphs in response to what they smelled but no one ever understood those paragraphs.

No one ever understood because she was one of a kind.

She was three stories tall, six tons of fun, and a dyed-in-the-wool intelligent killer. Would have been top of the food chain if she wasn’t a sterile albino. She had gestated inside the body cavity of some subterranean pigment-free mammal that was like a cross between a white bat and a polar wolverine. The reformers that found her out there on that distant planet broadcast their find back to New Terra before being torn to ribbons. She’d turned out sterile and had eaten nearly every other living thing on the planet. She’d been in a lot of fights and was nearly insane with the need to have eggs but unable to do so. She was a queen of an empty kingdom. She was a queen without subjects.

Until now.

The white carapace on her head was emblazoned with garish squared off logos from Skemtex, 3M, Macinsoft, Coke and Sheen. Other logos took up space on her long arms and thick back legs. Like a living billboard of death, she paced around the perimeter of the arena, ravenous for the flesh of the crowd but unable to penetrate the energy screen to satisfy her endless need for fuel to make her heavy non-functional eggs. Deep under the arena, every morning, they’d shock her to sleep and take the next batch of eggs that she’d spent the night trying to nuzzle into sudden life. Every single one of them held sterile barren slime. Her screams echoed down the corridors, haunting them.

But here in the sun she had no need to restrain her rage.

She triumphed over whatever they found to put in the arena with her. The cloned Tyrannosaurus Rex just pissed on the ground when the lights came up and offered the queen his throat in a pathetic wolfish display of non violent submission. The queen was only too happy to tear his car sized head off with a stoccato four beat swipe of her claws.

Lions, tigers and bears. Armoured cats. Beasts from other planets. Her ferocity and cunning had outdone them all. She played with them before the kill. She was always fun to watch. She was exhibition only. She was a never fail warm up act for the events that people bet on.
She was alone in the universe. She was the best at what she did. She was a captive. She couldn’t have children. She was angry all the time.

Her virtual rider hit the left shockbit to make her scream and turn her towards the opponent door in preparation.
The portcullis on the other side went up and in walked a black hive queen.

It was to be another Chess Match.

There was never any doubt as to who would win in these. The black queens were entirely too predictable and just the fact of their fertility seemed to send the White Queen into a rage that had no equal or end until the opponent lay in pieces scattered around the ring. They had not had the years of combat that the white queen had. The black queens had soldiers to do their bidding in the hives and although ferocious, the black queens were not used to fighting a) their own kind and b) for the sheer pleasure of it.

It was always something to see, I’ll tell you that.

They set three black queens on her once. After the White Queen had killed them all in the most exciting half hour metrovision had ever seen, she’d thrown herself against the energy screens until she shorted out one of the quadrants and launched herself into the fleeing crowd. She took out sixty eight people before they shocked her to sleep.

The arena owners didn’t do that again.

Someone had hung a silver star on the thick acid proof door of her lair underneath the arena. Her screams were constant when she wasn't pleading mutely with her stillborn children to live. If she cried there were no tears.

She padded silently tiger like towards the other queen, baring her crystal teeth in a terrible rictus promising nightmarish death.


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