It should have been a beautiful day. A holiday, a day for the people of Wien to take a walk, or go sailing, or to climb the towers of the whale minds. The weather was perfect, the late-autumn sky filling the gaps between the struts and the pillars at the upper reaches of the stadium with bright blue.
Just at that moment Olam fantasized what it would be like to be able to fly. To lift himself out of this cauldron of terrified, pleading robots and to rise up into the air, past the Artemisian guards who patrolled the terraces that looked down over the stadium floor, their guns at the ready. To just rise out of this nightmare and fly to safety…
But the speakers whistled again, and the fantasy vanished, and Olam was back in the stadium, just one of hundreds of robots who had come here seeking the only apparent opportunity left for survival.
There was yet another whistle, and a voice resolved itself.
‘Good morning, robots.’
Olam followed the turning heads of his fellow captives towards the Royal Box. Only a few days before, Olam had visited the stadium with his brothers to watch the combat: robots in a carnival of customized bodies fighting to the death. Then, the Royal Box had been draped with tungsten alloy foil that flashed iridescent patterns in the wind. Now, it was just another iron box. A nondescript grey robot stood there on the balcony, speaking into a microphone.
‘My name is Eleanor,’ she was saying, ‘second in command to Kavan, leader of the Artemisian troops. Kavan, who was born an outsider and is now part of Artemis. Take him as an example, robots, and remember the words that Nyro spoke. “Artemis is never intended to be a country. Artemis is an ideal.”’
‘I told you,’ murmured the aristocrat. ‘They want us. They need us.’
‘Silence,’ said another robot, but the tall robot was going to have his say.
‘To think there are some fools still hiding out there in the city, just waiting for their brains to be unwound at the end of an awl. They should have come here, to safety. They should have listened to me.. .’
Eleanor was speaking again. Olam strained his vision to get a better look at her. She seemed so nondescript. So grey. So inter-changeable.
‘And now you, too, have come here to serve Artemis. Some of you, no doubt, with a genuine desire to be part of the Artemesian state. But some of you will have come here through fear, or cowardice. Those in the city beyond would call you traitors…’
At her words, Olam felt a lurch in his gyros. He remembered the looks on his brothers’ faces as he had left the shelter of the forge earlier that morning, the foil sheet advertising Artemis’s offer clutched in his hands. He remembered the walk through the clear morning towards the stadium. The city was broken, wreathed in smoke and spattered with droplets of metal, but the tall iron shape of the stadium remained untouched, rising cold and sinister above the streets. For decades, robots had fought to the death in that stadium, the wire of the defeated minds unwound and spooled up and sent off to be melted. Olam had thought little of their fate in the past. Now, maybe, he was going to join them. Perhaps he, too, would meet his death on the stadium floor.
His thoughts were yanked back to the present and Eleanor’s words.
‘… but, no matter what your motives, all of you are welcome here. Now, if you will just bear with me a few moments…’
There was another whistle and the speakers were clicked off. Eleanor turned away from the balcony. Olam had a surge of hope at her words. Maybe it was going to be okay after all.
‘I told you,’ murmured the tall robot, and suddenly Olam had a clear vision of how things were going to be. A vision of the Wiener aristocracy and their hangers-on, slotting easily into place in the Artemisian army, rising quickly through the ranks, while the likes of him were left at the bottom as always, only one step above the slaves and the condemned. Some things never changed.
The aristocrat murmured again. ‘I’ll tell you something else.. .’
There was a harsh rattle of metal and an electronic whine.
‘No talking!’
The infantryrobot had seemingly appeared from nowhere. He had hit the aristocrat across the back of the head with his rifle. The tall robot was rubbing his head, trying to adjust the set of his mind.
And now Olam realized how the crowd had been silently infiltrated by grey Artemisian troops. They were picking their way through the mass of Wiener robots, pulling random people out of the crowd and herding them towards one of the stadium exits. Olam looked closer. Pulling only the women out of the crowd, he realized. The Artemisian soldier that had hit the tall robot over the head was now examining the woman with the damaged leg.
‘Is there any other damage?’ he asked her.
‘No…’ said the woman. ‘No, I’m fine.’
The soldier was unconvinced. ‘Hey, Greta. Come and take a look at this one.’
Another grey soldier came over. Slightly shabby-looking, made of well-worn metal. She examined the damaged leg.
‘Seems localized,’ she decided. ‘But why risk it? We’ve harvested enough. Leave her here.’
The two soldiers vanished into the crowd. Only Olam noticed that one of them had dropped something. An awl. Nonchalantly, he bent down and palmed the glossy black spike.
The aristocrat seemed to be recovering. ‘Best not to speak,’ he said.
The woman looked concerned. ‘What did they mean, why risk it?’ she asked, too nervous to heed the tall robot’s advice. ‘Why did they leave me behind? They’ve taken all the other women away.’
‘Not all,’ said the aristocrat quietly. ‘They’ve left the young ones. Now, let’s stay quiet…’
Olam felt his gyros lurch again. What was going on?
The grey troops were moving back through the crowd, separating them out. Olam found himself being forced off the gravel that covered most of the ground and onto one of the magnetized running surfaces that ran around the perimeter of the stadium. He felt his feet lock onto it as he walked; and he felt a lurch of fear. This is where robots had been run to death, supercharged and sent hurtling around the track, expending their lifeforce in one burst, whilst he and his brothers had watched and cheered. Now it seemed that the roles were about to be reversed.
He looked around to see that the crowd was being spaced out into groups of three. Olam found himself with the tall robot and the damaged woman. More and more, he realized he had made a big mistake in coming here.
‘What’s going on?’ asked the woman again. The tall robot just rubbed his head thoughtfully.
The speakers whistled. Eleanor’s voice sounded.
‘Future Artemisians,’ she said. ‘Artemis was never intended to be a country. Artemis is an ideal. Artemis does not serve you, nor you it. Rather, you are Artemis. Artemis only needs the strong, the clever, the cunning, the artificers.’
Olam’s gyros lurched again. The damaged woman looked at him, fear in her eyes.
‘Prove you have those qualities,’ continued Eleanor. ‘We only need two-thirds of your number.’
There was an uneasy stirring in the crowd. Olam felt removed from the events, he felt as if he were standing in the terraces amongst the grey soldiers, or sitting where he belonged, up there ready to watch the killing, not down here participating in it. Hah, at least if he was up there he would be enjoying this spectacle, not like those grey soldiers above. They didn’t seem concerned by events on the stadium floor; they simply watched it all with bored resignation… A shot rang out, jerking him from his reverie. And another. There was a continuous volley of shots. All around the stadium, robots slumped to the ground, blue wire twisting and uncurling from their heads. Grey soldiers walked away, their guns smoking.
‘Five minutes,’ announced Eleanor, ‘or we reduce the numbers ourselves.’
The aristocrat moved coldly and dispassionately, seizing the damaged woman with his two long arms.
‘I saw you pick up that awl,’ he said to Olam. ‘Use it on her.’