What Death Leaves Behind
Part 1 of 3
Author’s Note: I wrote a trio of AI stories after ChatGPT released OpenAI way back in November 2022. They bounced around the big SFF mags, then the little SFF mags, and I collected several handfuls of form rejections. Forgive me, my 8 subscribers, for the self-indulgence of publishing them here, but I’d like them to live somewhere beyond my Google Drive.
This is Part 1 of a 3 part short story. Part 2 can be found here. Part 3 can be found here. It’s slightly over 10,000 words long and is about a man, Gideon, who’s helped resurrect one of humanity’s oldest sports: Gladitorial Combat.
T-MINUS SIXTY HOURS
“At any point in the past six months, have you wished you were dead?”
“Of course not.” Gideon said. A lie, but a white one. It had come and gone in a flash, after their biggest sponsor got cold feet. He’d talked them down from the ledge—that was what he did—but, for a second, the relief of oblivion had seemed an attractive alternative to facing Mesman’s wrath.
He was surprised he remembered it at all. Once resolved, it blurred into one of the countless rotations in the spinning hamster wheel powering the forward motion, a millimeter at a time, of the greatest sporting event in human history. Mortal combat on a scale the Romans could never have imagined. In a few days, it would all be over. In a few days, he’d be retired.
“Can you describe—” the psychiatrist began, but she was interrupted as a drone whirred in for a reaction shot. Assembled from sausage-shaped chunks of plastic and painted a color that shifted between purple and green, it looked like a radioactive fusion between a house fly and a balloon animal. Officially, they were collecting footage for a documentary, but Gideon knew their true purpose. Just like he was the Triumvirate’s physical interface for human manipulation, they were its tool for collecting sensory inputs. He was the mouth. They were the eyes and ears.
“You don’t have to consent to being recorded,” she said. “This session is confidential. Regardless of what your contract stipulates.”
“I couldn’t tell you what my contract says about anything. I do what I’m told. The rest takes care of itself,” Gideon replied.
“I assume you don’t have any difficulty falling asleep?” she asked.
“Not at all,” he said with a shake of his head.
“Your career suits you. This entire spectacle is disgusting.”
“There’s no need for antagonism, Dr. Winthrop. You agreed to the fee, the same as I did. We’re both just worker bees.”
The Triumvirate had booked Gideon’s evaluation at his hotel, a new build off the strip. Dr. Winthrop sat across from him, the two of them at the seam of an enormous polished table whose elongated segments pressed together into the shape of a coffin.
They were on the seventieth floor. To the east, the obsidian glint of steeply angled solar panels concealed the luxurious grounds of Caesar’s Palace. To the west, bereft of vegetation, as barren as the surface of Mars, were the sandstone peaks of Red Rock. The ruins of Chinatown filled the space between, dilapidated and darkened, the relentless whipping of sand scraping the roofing down to timber frames.
Vegas, baby! What was desired could be procured, even a view of mankind’s retrenchment in defiance of a dying planet.
He zipped through the other questions while drone circled around them, in constant motion. Yes, he felt life was worth living. No, he didn’t have fantasies of harming himself or others. Yes, he possessed the mental capacity to understand the consequences of his actions. No, he didn’t think he was the target of organized surveillance or stalking. He doubted her rubric could account for the drones.
Dr. Winthrop passed her tablet for him to sign, affirming the answers were truthful and made without duress. The interview had no direct bearing on his work. He’d been chosen as the exemplar of organizational sanity; his results would be used as a benchmark. The ritual did nothing, legally, to reduce their liability, but the pantomiming of responsible stewardship soothed gun-shy advertising execs.
Next on his schedule: a meeting with their merchandising partners. They were waiting for him in the lobby. After a review of their individual psychological profiles and a group dynamic analysis, the Triumvirate had determined he could, with a high probability, browbeat them into giving up an additional eight percent. The band for additional expected profits made it an efficient use of his time, even at this late hour.
Mesman, however, had sent a car. He wanted a one-on-one. Pronto. And nothing mattered more than keeping the talent happy. The t-shirt merchants could wait.
“I’ve gotta run,” Gideon announced. “Are you in town for a while? We should get dinner.”
“I’m engaged.”
“So bring him along,” Gideon said. He left without waiting for her response.
A new drone, surfboard-shaped and hot pink, was waiting by the elevator. It rode down with him, blowing his cover before he was outside.
“Hey Gideon, buddy!” One of a gang of men in sharp suits called out.
“Something urgent’s come up, sorry,” he shouted. He slid into the back seat of an unmarked sedan and slammed the door behind him. The window lowered and the drone swooped in beside him.
The car’s original interior had been scooped out, replaced with four seats situated around a steel table, on which had been left a bottle of water and a paper bag filled with unshelled peanuts. The drone contracted along hidden joints into a compact square and latched into a charging port embedded in the ceiling. Its rotors stopped, but the twin mounted cameras continued their swiveling.
The car raced along the highway, parallel to the siloed fortresses of Las Vegas Boulevard. Solar panels, numbering in the millions, traced the contours of the casinos, their towers and courtyards, a rolling bank of glittering black clouds, frozen in time. Small strips of glass, viewing decks, broke through like bits of reality peeling away.
Gideon tackled his inbox, eating the peanuts with practiced ease. He crushed the tip of the shell between his finger and thumb, dug out the nut, then pressed along the unbroken seam, which popped open like a dead oyster. Bits of shell and skin fell to the floor.
The pop star performing before the main event had been caught lip syncing. Her manager wanted a statement of support. A colossal statue, imported from Italy, was held up in customs. Gideon had an entire folder of accommodation requests from Senatus-class ticket holders. It was all pressing; none of it was vital. The conclusion was preordained, beyond his control, or Mesman’s. Probably not even the Triumvirate could stop it now. The behemoth lumbered on of its own inertia, powered by the fifth fundamental force of nature: payday.
Gideon had another folder, a collection of property listings curated by the best real estate agents in the country. When this was over he was moving to Manhattan, to an apartment over a Michelin star restaurant. He would take midnight strolls through deserted streets. He would have time to read again, for pleasure. He might even meet someone, you never knew. A life of modest luxury didn’t seem too much to ask of the universe in return for three years of his life. He could stomach being a meat drone for a few days more.
Mesman made his headquarters on the city’s outskirts, in a sprawling, palatial estate that rose from abandoned homes and strip malls like a mirage. Four elevated parking decks loomed like guard towers. Their roofs doubled as helipads, with private elevators so those shelling out not-insignificant sums could avoid mingling with the hoi polloi. Its centerpiece was the stadium, an open-air marble construction equipped with the next generation’s next generation climate control system. The audience within experienced the blistering sun as a pleasant summer day. It cost a fortune to maintain, but the Triumvirate, in its infinite wisdom, had calculated that the earned media generated by the design far surpassed the energy savings of a more conventional construction over any relevant timeline.
Gideon called it the Cryptorium.
The police had cordoned off the block in front of the main doors. Several protesters had set fire to a truckload of promotional materials, filling the air with burnt ash. A minor disruption, the action of humans thinking on a human scale. The car navigated to a subterranean entrance, winding through tunnels toward the heart of the complex. He’d never come this way before. No lights existed down here for the purpose of enabling human sight, only the blinking red and green pinpoints of the security apparatus and the sudden flash of brake lights as the autonomous semis—the native inhabitants of these cramped confines, bearing the mountains of treats necessary for the good boys and girls to enjoy their very special day—pulled over for him like the parting of the Red Sea.
His phone lost its signal. The only networks available were long alphanumeric strings locked behind passwords unknown. The computers had what they needed; this underworld had not been built for his kind.
Ahead, parallel strips of vertical lights snapped on to reveal a translucent tube the size of a bathroom stall. The car rolled to a stop beside it and opened its doors. Gideon got out–the drone stayed put–and the car sped away in reverse.
He approached the vein of glass. It extended down into the floor and up into the ceiling, continuing in both directions as far as he could see. Faint creases etched into the tube hinted at the existence of a door. Surprising that the elevator’s arrival hadn’t coincided with his.
Some number of seconds passed, then a minute. Maybe two. He started a timer on his watch. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been truly alone, without even a wifi connection for company.
The digital numbers ticked over from 1:59 to 2:00. Into the void of a mind newly freed of distraction crept thoughts unorganized by the subconscious hierarchy that allowed him to navigate his professional life with a facsimile of competence. Had he been abandoned? The lost souls of suppressed anxiety broke out into a phantasmal call and response.
Would retirement make him happy? (yes, no // a meaningless concept)
When was the last time he’d gotten laid? (almost five years ago // he didn’t remember their name)
How had he ended up here? (where was here? // stumbling back asswards)
What was the point of it all?
The elevator opened with the chiming of electronic bells. Startled, Gideon shouted and ducked into a defensive crouch. A quadcopter with flame detailing flew out to greet him. The hum of its motors dissolved his mental shades in a phase inverted wave.
Feeling sheepish that the Triumvirate had recorded this moment of vulnerability, he tossed a handful of peanuts onto the concrete before stepping inside, in the vain hope of attracting vermin to this lifeless place.
****
Dr. Winthrop chastised herself for allowing this shadowy fixer to get under her skin, but she had enough self-awareness to recognize her unprofessional reaction for what it was. Projection. She didn’t see herself as a worker bee. The casual sexual harassment, she supposed, was her just desserts. Shrugging off her moment of weakness, she filed the report. The subject was certifiably sane. One evaluation down, two more to go.
T-MINUS FIFTY-SIX HOURS
Gideon followed a line of flashing LEDs through a labyrinth of corridors until he reached Mesman’s office. The sign read, “Floor Lemon Cream Pie, Meeting Room Flirty Fishers.” The Triumvirate’s naming convention, combining food and the sexual energy that occasionally flared up from the repressive depths of human religion, was intended to give the Cryptorium a human touch.
He entered the waiting room, an undecorated cube of beige lit by hard fluorescence. Two cans of grapefruit-essenced sparkling water, a hummus sandwich wrapped in plastic, and more peanuts had been left for him. Also too, a pink highlighter and a printed copy of a prestige magazine’s profile of Mesman’s opponent in the upcoming match.
“Standing a slight five foot five inches, the same height as your correspondent, Miguel Ángel Robinson-Santiago greets me with dos besos. I dodge his kiss to the lips and he takes a seat in a red plastic chair, reclining with the nonchalance of a jaguar lounging in a sunbeam that’s broken through dense Amazonian foliage. As a child, he tells me, he dreamed of being an astronaut. Now, after a decade in prison, his face is adorned with crude tattoos of superheroes shaded blue and black with ink drained from ballpoint pens and injected subcutaneously using the straightened, sharpened spring coil of a lighter.
“He speaks in a stream of thieves’ cant interspersed with the wild imagery of tent revival evangelism, but when I ask him what inspired him to exhibit his comic fandom in such dramatic fashion, he replies with unadorned simplicity: ‘Cause that’s what the guy could draw.’”
The piece cast Robinson-Santiago as a figure both ferocious and tragic, a digital Achilles, a modern day Montezuma. What a joke. The man had been spared the gas chamber because he was never the one who pulled the trigger during a string of armed robberies that had left seven dead.
The Triumvirate’s purpose for setting this out for him was inscrutable, but a printout folded into the magazine had a more obvious significance. It was a police report. A woman, Elena Santiago, had expired two days after being struck by a car while crossing the street. A figure insignificant to the public, but the lynchpin of their scheme.
Express instructions were typed in large boldface across the top of the page:
Under no circumstance should our companion become aware of this information.
After an exhaustive analysis of the US populations, the Triumvirate had identified Robinson-Santiago as Mesman’s ideal foil. They’d originally enticed him with the promise of amnesty, but the combined efforts of Mesman and the Triumvirate had failed to persuade the state to overturn his sentence. Gideon, however, had succeeded in tracking down his mother to a San Francisco exurb, where she was living in a hovel at the foot of a mountain range of discarded electronics, surviving on the charity lunches provided by a nearby masjid and the pittance obtained from sifting through garbage for salvageable Samarium-Cobalt magnets and the other materials newly scarce in a hyper-digital age. Santiago-Robinson had thought she was dead, and their reunion secured his cooperation. Along with a promised annuity for her culled from a small percentage of the event’s profits.
The entrance to Mesman’s office opened and a drone constructed from concentric chrome rings and decorated with yellow and black nuclear hazard stickers floated through. It approached him, then tracked back through the door.
“Are you actually radioactive?” he mused.
Mesman’s office, or more accurately his training facility, was a large circular room with a vaulted ceiling. At the far end, a bank of monitors displayed: cable news coverage of an earthquake; a corporate earnings report slideshow; traffic CCTVs; a Taiwanese basketball game; the delta of the Cryptorium’s solar power output; a computer generated sitcom; a Hitler documentary; and more. The video feeds, unmuted, amalgamated into the undifferentiated din of a busy restaurant.
An ant farm curved along the wall’s contours. As thick as one of his fingers, it housed tens of thousands of the industrious insects, the sum total of their labor necessary to sustain the colony’s continued existence.
Or not. It was all artificial. Should Mesman neglect to replenish their food supply, they would all perish. But they worked with purpose regardless, unaware their eventual fate lay outside their control. Of course, their eventual fate was to die, the same as all living creatures.
Gideon was searching—without luck—for the queen, when a hand grasped his shoulder. Mesman, all six and a half feet of him, stooped to greet him. His wild grin broke through a matted red beard, its ends twisted into greasy braids and adorned with wooden beads. He was shirtless, the flesh stretched taut against his abdomen accentuating each swollen muscle. A thatching of scars across his chest came, not from single combat, but emergency open heart surgery after a bespoke hormone therapy had proved incompatible with life. His appearance—and it was no accident—was that of a barbarian from antiquity stepping out of virgin forests to challenge the encroachment of civilization.
“You came? Of your own volition?” He paused for a microsecond, thinking. “It doesn’t matter. Who cares about some lousy bugs?” he waved dismissively at the hive. The short sentences came at too rapid a clip for Gideon to respond.
“I want to show you something,” Mesman said.
In the room’s center, encased in a human-sized bell jar, stood a mannequin holding a long, curved knife and wearing metallic shin guards and a broad-brimmed helmet with holes punched into a solid metal visor. The pieces were polished to a gleaming perfection, but roughly made. The surface of the shin guards were rough and uneven. The helmet looked like a repurposed fragment of an industrial machine. None of it hinted at the acrobatic elegance at the core of their marketing campaign.
“A brutal assemblage, don’t you think? Pure practicality,” Mesman said. He gave Gideon a powerful shake. “The gladiator would have a quilted sleeve for additional protection, but I acquired the set at great expense and it seemed dishonest to recreate the organic accompaniments long since rotted to dust. Imagine, two thousand years ago, the Thraex fighting, dying, equipped with what we gaze upon now.”
“Impressive,” muttered Gideon.
“Unfortunate that humanity allowed this fine art to fall into neglect. We’ve worked, in some small way, to rectify that.” Mesman sauntered back to the ant farm and snapped his fingers. Two separate colonies, deceivingly pressed together, separated to reveal a hidden alcove with racks of weapons and armor.
“A new kit for a new age,” Mesman proclaimed. “With it I will inaugurate a new style of combat… Germanorum!” He picked up a sword. One side had a regular edge. The other was lined with chainsaw teeth. Their tips sparkled cruelly. The blade bulged slightly along its spine. Irregular holes that ranged in width from a pinky to that of a thumb dotted the surface. A short spike jutted from the pommel.
“The blade itself is tempered steel, smelted in a vacuum to minimize impurities. Sharp enough to slice through flesh like soft cheese, but possessing a rebounding quality that prevents it from becoming lodged in bone. These,” Mesman said, pointing at the teeth, “are coated in a diamond lacquer. They shatter with a single blow, but their effect on metal is similar to me taking a sledgehammer to your phone.”
Mesman proceeded through his exposition, one piece of gear at a time. Greaves woven out of aromatic polyamides, with a matching protective sleeve for his sword arm. His helmet: a giant fishbowl cast from a transparent alloy, atomically spherical and, he boasted, impenetrable. A small, circular shield was see-through as well, except for a metal ball that rolled loosely in a hollow cavity at the center that served the dual purpose of imparting additional momentum on the attack and absorbing the kinetic force of a direct blow.
He returned to the sword, resting the blade in the flat of his palm. “I’m surprised you didn’t ask about the tip. It’s titanium carbide, a brittle material, but a straight thrust is capable of piercing plate armor. A piece of research I commissioned discovered a novel chemical process for fusing it to steel. Specially for this purpose, although I believe the industrial applications will quickly recoup the project’s enormous cost.” Mesman swung the sword in a wide arc, inches from Gideon’s face.
Mesman placed the sword back on the rack and grabbed two plain metal rods. “Have you seen the Triumvirate’s gambling positions?”
“It’s not really relevant to my duties.”
“Bullshit. The probabilities dictate the marketing strategy. I may be unable to integrate this particular derivative, but its existence is plain as day,” He tossed the rod to Gideon, who caught it clumsily. “Simple blackened titanium. En garde!”
Mesman advanced with a series of blows aimed at Gideon’s rod. He dropped it on the second strike and Mesman smacked him once against the chest. Gideon collapsed. His lungs heaved, but the air wouldn’t come through.
“Get up,” Mesman said calmly. When his command went unheeded, he snarled, “Get up, Triumvirate meat puppet. You haven’t been neglecting your martial training have you? It’s in your contract!”
Gideon had gone to his first lesson, but found it a waste of minutes already stretched to gossamer inadequacy. A fat bribe for filled-out paperwork had freed him from that particular duty.
He struggled to his feet, grasping the rod with both hands. Scrambling backwards, he avoided one, two, three of Mesman’s frenzied overhead strikes. Beads of sweat rolled down his face and caught in his beard, the glistening web of hydrogen and oxygen a barbaric adornment framing the raw glee of an imagined atavistic bond.
A horizontal swing slammed into Gideon’s hand with the crunch of heavy boots on broken glass. He dropped the rod again. Mesman stopped. “Are. The. Triumvirate. Betting. Against. Me?”
“What, can’t control your own creation?”
Mesman struck Gideon’s injured hand. The pain was explosive. Bright lines streaked across his vision.
“I don’t know! I yield. Please. Please stop,” he howled. He looked at his fingers, expecting to find them splayed at unnatural angles like the limbs of week-old roadkill. They appeared unblemished except for the blue mottling of a fresh bruise.
“It pleads. Typical reaction of a degenerate bloodline. Feminized, parasitic, propelled into the present by technology too awesome to comprehend. I accept your surrender.”
A pulsing soreness radiated from Gideon’s fingers and up his arm. His legs were trembling. Wincing with every breath, he wanted to ralph all over Mesman’s immaculate marble floors. He resisted, not wanting to probe what jibe he’d receive in return.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gideon said. “In a few days I’ll be free.”
“Driven by the promise of blood money,” Mesman retorted. “Enjoy your return to insignificance. How unsurprising. How pathetic.”
****
Emma Winthrop, MD, dictated into her tablet. “Mesman possesses full control over his faculties, although, in line with his public persona, a more thorough examination would at the very least reveal narcissistic personality disorder. He has no moral core to speak of—at least none that aligns substantially with those beliefs accepted by society at large. However, he fully understands the consequences of his actions. In this way he is no different than other extreme sports enthusiasts. The risk to his life is about the same as a free space marathoner, and the potential rewards dwarf those available to the practitioners of that fringe sport.”
End of Part 1