Arena

by Logan Jacobs

  “Hello, Grizz,” she said to the scowling hologram. “It is a pleasure to see you as well.”

  “I was literally here ten minutes ago,” Grizz answered, his voice a touch exasperated. “We discussed the results of the calibration trial. Did you download correctly? Are you having memory issues?”

  “Grizz!” she yelled through clenched teeth as her eyes darted in my direction. “I’m fine, my programming is just getting used to all the chemicals flowing through my human brain.”

  “We have no time for you to indulge in human hormonal tomfoolery!” Grizz yelled. “We have wasted enough time as it is. We must begin at once to prepare his weak, slovenly frame properly for the hell that is to come.”

  “You are one-hundred percent correct, Grizz,” Artemis said, her voice suddenly stern and business-like. “Running subroutine to circumvent hormonal interference in cognitive abilities.” Her eyes closed and did an angry bee REM sleep dance under her the lids. As I watched her, I started to not feel so hot. I felt like we were on a ship in the middle of a very stormy sea.

  “Is the room moving?” I managed to say as my legs went wobbly and I leaned against Artemis for support. Suddenly, I was exhausted, my last bit of adrenal reserves gone.

  Artemis clicked into business mode, she put my arm around her shoulder and leaned into my armpit as she lifted me up. I realized she was crazy strong, like supporting my two-hundred and something pound frame was no big deal as she moved me toward the large computer bank.

  “Initial scan shows extreme dehydration,” Artemis barked at Grizz who followed not far behind, and she guided me to a comfortable looking gurney near the tower of gadgets. It had the same kind of amazing body contouring foam as Phil’s ship, and I let out a big sigh as my head hit the pillow. “And he received a claw wound from one of the demons!”

  Artemis reached her keyboard and typed super-humanly fast into it. Two robotic arms came from a console above the gurney. One pushed me into an upright position while the other used some type of cutting device to remove both the vest and my shirt. I then heard the sound of something spraying like a can of shaving cream, and I felt a cold, soothing foam cover the wound in my back. The arms then let me lay back down.

  The first arm had replaced the cutting utensil with a brightly colored rubber-like band about an inch and a half thick that it wrapped around the middle of my right bicep. The veins in my arm popped out in stark contrast to the rest of my skin as the circulation was cut off, and they swelled with blood. For a guy that hardly ever worked out, I was surprisingly vascular, as I had been told by more than one nurse practitioner who’d had to draw my blood.

  Artemis pulled a decent sized needle down from the console above the gurney where the arms originated from.

  “We need to get you hydrated stat!” she yelled as if this were the season premiere of Gray’s Anatomy.

  “Actually, if you had, like, a sports drink or something that would be fine,” I tried to tell her. I really did not want to have a large-gauge needle stuck into my arm.

  “Shh,” she whispered urgently as she put her finger over my lips, “you’re clearly delirious from overexertion. This will fix you right up.” And with that, she shoved the large-gauge needle into my vein. The pain was acute, immediate, and very aggravating.

  “Ow!” I yelled angrily. “Christmas!”

  “Ha!” Grizz guffawed with gusto. “Is that pinprick enough to make you caterwaul like a Pandalorian He-Male in heat?”

  “Maybe?” I retorted righteously. “I don’t know what that is! It sounds very tough!”

  “It is not, human,” Grizz laughed.

  “Maybe it is!” It wasn’t much of an argument, and it made no sense, but it was all I had so I was sticking to it.

  “But, it is not,” Grizz said hesitantly. “It has no bones and weeps continuously.”

  “Tough as nails,” I fake sneered to hide the fact that it still throbbed.

  “But… that’s… just not true,” Grizz stammered. “Never mind! This is stupid!”

  “My point exactly, thank you,” I said with finality, “and yes Artemis is an excellent doctor.”

  It looked like my plan of utter confusion worked.

  “You really think so?” she gushed as she taped the needle and IV catheter to my forearm. A blue liquid began to flow slowly from the tube into my arm. It stung a little at first as it entered my vein, but then a warmth spread over my whole body.

  “Of course,” I said as all the bruises, bumps, cuts, and abrasions faded into the background. I also felt my head clear quite a bit, the heavy fog of exhaustion that had settled over me since I got back blew away like dust. Maybe I had been dangerously dehydrated and overheated.

  Come to think of it, I hadn’t had anything much to eat or drink since lunch earlier in the day. Which day? I had no freaking idea. According to my internal clock, it would have been about eleven P.M., but it also felt like it had been three weeks since I’d been rushed into the helicopter and told I needed to save the world.

  “Feeling better?” Artemis asked, her voice calm and concerned.

  “Yes, much,” I answered with what I hoped was a grateful smile, “Thank you, Artemis. I didn’t realize just how bad I felt.”

  “You are most welcome, Marc Havak,” she said proudly, and her cheeks tinged pink with pride. “According to your vitals, you burned close to two thousand calories during the calibration and expelled close to a gallon of sweat.”

  “Freaky demon killin’ is thirsty business, ma’am,” I drawled in my best Matthew McConaughey impression again, “I’m doing alright, alright, alright.”

  Both Grizz and Artemis just stared at me with blank faces.

  “Did he suffer brain damage?” Grizz asked deadpan. “Or did the pressure of combat break his tiny human psyche.”

  “I do not know,” Artemis answered with a combination of concern and curiosity. “I shall have to run more tests.”

  “Guys,” I said in my normal voice, “I’m fine, I was just joking. I do that when I’m stressed out.”

  They didn’t look convinced.

  “Seriously, I’m all good,” I placated, “this stuff is just helping take the edge off.”

  “Ah, yes,” Artemis said, a bit more relaxed, “It’s a combination of electrolytes, amino acids, mood stabilizers, and pain relievers.”

  “Champions call it Blue Betty,” Grizz said as he moved closer to me, “because it is blue and the person who invented it was named Betty.”

  “Very creative,” I said as I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  “Artemis, while you have the human immobilized, we should fit him with his upgrades.” Grizz said while rubbing his chin thoughtfully as if he’d just had the greatest idea since sliced bread.

  “Oh, yay!” Artemis exclaimed and started typing again.

  I heard the robot arms start to whir to life again.

  “Um, what kind of upgrades are we talking about guys?” I asked, more than just a bit nervous. Upgrades sounded cool, but who knew what that actually meant. For all I knew, they were gonna fuse my bones with adamantium and from everything I knew given my exhaustive study of the subject, that was likely to hurt. A lot.

  “Miraculously you did not die during the calibration round,” Grizz said, almost as if he still couldn’t believe it, “therefore you get a few minor upgrades as a bonus.”

  “Yeah,” Artemis chimed in, “you get optical enhancers and a C.N.I. chip.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad,” I hedged.

  A robotic arm with a pair of goggles positioned itself in front of my face. The eye ports glowed with fluorescent green light that flickered and danced from within the elaborate headset device. It moved up to my eyes as tiny beams of light shot into my pupils. It didn’t hurt, so I kept my head still, and I felt a slight aching at the back of my eye as if I’d been on the computer for too long.

  The light cut off, spots and tracers danced across my vision, and the goggles moved to cover my eye
s, the cushioning around the eye port formed a tight seal around the top half of my face. Tiny clips gently grabbed my eyelids and held them open, I didn’t flinch or really even feel it as more than a slight irritation. The light beams must have acted as some kind of local anesthetic.

  “This isn’t going to ruin Beethoven for me or anything, is it?” I asked with a very nervous laugh.

  All I got for an answer was a mechanical whirring sound as thin contact lenses floated toward my eyes. They were impossibly delicate with monofilament circuitry spiraling from the inside of the lenses out to the edges like impossibly complicated high-tech crop circles. I had no choice but to watch as the lenses got closer and closer, finally kissing each eye ever so gently.

  A jolt of electricity flickered through the lenses, so far the only pain I’d felt through the entire process. A cold fog-like mist filled the goggles and washed over my eyeballs. After a moment, the clamps holding my eyelids retreated, the headset broke the seal on my face with a hiss, and the whole apparatus withdrew.

  I blinked a few times as tears welled up and spilled over my eyelids and ran down my face.

  Suddenly, the lenses came to life showing a well-designed UX interface that bordered my normal vision. In the bottom left corner, there was a HUD style map of what I assumed to be the facility we were in, with various different colored blips on it. As I turned my head, the HUD would spin in conjunction, and the blips would follow to hold their respective placement. In the bottom right corner was what looked like an ammo counter, weapon inventory, and health and armor damage bars. The top corners were both blank at the moment but looked like they could hold anything from achievement badges to power-ups.

  “Tap your right thumb and forefinger together twice in rapid succession,” Artemis said as she monitored some readouts on her computer.

  “Okay,” I replied and double tapped my thumb and forefinger together. My vision zoomed in, and I could see things closer.

  “Again, please,” she requested. I did and my vision zoomed even further. “And one more,” she said. I did, and once more I could see even farther across the room in greater detail.

  “Now tap your middle finger and thumb together,” Artemis said.

  Again, I did, and the image got farther away. Without being asked, I tapped again, and my vision was back to normal. Artemis checked one last thing on her screen then smiled at me.

  “You can follow directions and extrapolate data from them.” Grizz said and nodded his head in approval. “That is a good start.”

  “The lenses now biometrically fused to your eyes are Occuhancers, they provide real-time information when you are in a Trial,” Artemis rattled off as if I had just purchased a new computer. “As you saw, they also have minor zoom capabilities, which is pretty sweet. They can be upgraded if you have available credit, or experience level.”

  “Cool,” I said, “this is a kind of like a live action video game. That’s fucking ...”

  Grizz glared at me with his now patented one eyebrow raised look.

  “... incredibly handy given the seriousness of the Trials,” I said in the gravest tone I could manage. Inner me was completely freaking out that I had a freaking HUD UI display in real life.

  “I gotta tell, my old Call of Duty squad would be totally jealous of me right now,” I said, feeling pretty damn satisfied. That’s when another robotic arm palmed my forehead like a basketball and held it down.

  “I’m so sorry, Marc Havak,” Artemis apologized. “This next part might hurt.”

  I didn’t even have time to utter a ‘huh’ before I felt something thin and delicate enter my left ear. It got about as far as a person should put a Q-tip, then went back out. I felt a slight tickling sensation as whatever it was that got put in my ear scrambled around then I felt a sharp sting in my inner ear. Warmth spread out from my ear around the entire back of my skull. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  Then I screamed in agony as what felt like white-hot pinchers grabbed my spinal column at the base of my skull.

  The pain was brilliant and instantly intense, and I thought I was going to pass out. Then the pincers let go, and the pain receded like the tide leaving a hurricane-battered beach. Once it passed, the slightest tingling sensation lingered throughout my nerves. I had pressure in my eardrums as if I had been in a plane that had to descend too quickly. I reached up, pinched my nose shut, and tried to blow air out of my nose gently. The pressure in my ears built steadily until it finally equalized with a loud pop. I opened my mouth wide, almost yawning, forcing the last bit of air out of my sinuses.

  The robot arm on my skull let go, and I sat up.

  “Okay,” I began as I rubbed my ear, “not cool, guys. What the hell was that?”

  “That was your C.N.I.,” Artemis began, still incredibly apologetic, “which is short for Cerebral Nano Interface. It’s a complex synaptic mesh that has attached to your cerebral cortex. Through it we can upload all kinds of cool stuff into your brain.”

  “Can it teach me kung-fu?” I joked in not a half-bad Keanu voice.

  “Yes.” Artemis answered as she nodded her head.

  “For real?” I asked excitedly.

  “It certainly would not be for fake, human, that would be a waste of time,” Grizz grumbled. “While we are able to inject various kinds of learned information into your brain, it does not mean you are going to be Bruce Lee immediately.”

  “Bummer,” I muttered as I rubbed my still stinging ear, “wait, how do you know who Bruce Lee is?”

  “I have studied all of Earth’s great warriors,” he said proudly, “I found him to be particularly engaging.

  “Right!” I said incredulously, “That fight in Fist of Fury is awesome.”

  “Ha! Indeed!” Grizz bellowed and smiled. Then he realized what he’d done and contorted his face back into its normal scowl. “As I was saying, just because your mind knows to tell your body how to do a flying roundhouse kick does not mean your body will be able to do a flying roundhouse kick. We must train the body to listen to the mind.”

  “You really got into the whole Jeet Kun Do thing, didn’t ya, big guy?” I threw out as nicely as I could.

  “Yes, yes I did,” Grizz nodded. “He was quite the warrior.”

  Just then the console gave a chirp, and Artemis looked at the display screen.

  “Oh, good,” she said, “your calibration results are in.”

  “Huzzah!” Grizz yelled, pounding his right fist into his left palm, “Now we can see how much training the human is going to need and if he stands a chance of staying alive in the arena.”

  Artemis tapped the screen a few times and a long scroll of information rolled by.

  “Well, it looks like…” she trailed for a beat, as her eyes flicked over the information. “You have well above average initiative, ingenuity, and intelligence according to the metrics.”

  “Cool,” I said as nonchalantly as I could.

  “Strength, speed, and stamina are,” she said with a barely hidden wince, “not so hot.”

  “They are abysmal, human,” Grizz said matter-of-factly. “You should be dead. Very, very dead. It is a miracle that you are not. We have our work cut out for us.”

  “Yes,” Artemis said with determination, “but we will do it. I will modify our existing training program with the knowledge of this calibration. We should extend our sessions from my original five-hour per day plan to ten hours.”

  “Excellent.” Grizz said with a smile, “I live for extended training hours! I shall accelerate my lesson plan.”

  “Yay,” I half-heartedly cheered, more than a touch bummed out that I had come halfway across the universe through a wormhole only to have to work another sixty hour a week job.

  “Now, I do believe it is the human’s birth moment celebration day, is it not?” Grizz asked with an air of wanting to wrap things up.

  “Yes, it is,” Artemis answered immediately, instantly full of newfound excitement. “He is thirty revolutions around his p
lanet’s sun today. It marks the beginning of middle-age in his society.”

  “Why don’t you take him out for a quick celebration of both his birth and not death?” Grizz suggested. “Then please show him to his accommodations, will you Artemis? He will need a full night’s rest for tomorrow, we start the excruciating crucible of training needed to forge him into a true champion.”

  And with that, Grizz dematerialized and left Artemis and me by ourselves.

  “Thanks for the pep talk, coach,” I threw after the now-gone 3D image. I didn’t know why, but all I wanted was a ‘good job, human’ or ‘that will do, Earthling, that will do’ from Grizz. It may not have been pretty, but I thought I did a damn good job considering I didn’t know there was intelligent life out in the universe before six hours ago.

  “What is wrong, Marc Havak?”Artemis asked with genuine concern and a bit of confusion. “You survived your first trial. That is an accomplishment, especially for a being with as many natural weaknesses as yours. Comparable sentient life forms have a sixty-seven percent mortality rate in the calibration level, so you are a buttock of the match.”

  It took me a second to realize what she was trying to say, and then I burst out laughing, all the self-pity gone in an instant. Artemis looked at me for a beat with a what-did-I-say-that-was-so-funny expression on her face.

  “Ahead of the game,” I corrected her while I was still laughing, “the term is ‘ahead of the game.’”

  “Oh,” she replied, still unsure, then the light bulb went on, and she started to laugh as well. “Ha! Yes, I can see why that is funny.”

  Just then the monitor on the console started beeping. Artemis checked my vital signs and tapped a few buttons.

  “Wonderful,” she said as she absently bit her lower lip in what was quite possibly the most unintentionally alluring thing I had ever seen in my life, “your vital signs are all back to normal levels. How do you feel?”

  “Actually,” I answered as I did a mental pat down of my body, “I feel pretty damn great, all things considered.”

  “Fantastic,” Artemis said urgently, “I’m starving. I have never been starving before and would like to eat dinner with you immediately. There is a fresh jumpsuit in the locker over there. I will be waiting for you in the hallway.”