The Pit — No 73

This old man beside me is not worth it. He will be dead soon anyway, Dregtho thought, and even as the thoughts formed in his mind, he went on scanning the chamber for something better — for another victim. When he tried to twist and look behind him, the chains binding him dragged across his chest with a heavy, grinding rattle. Ah — yes, he thought. They caught me, and now they will kill me. He turned his gaze on the Judge with the flat, patient hunger of a predator watching prey. There was noise in the great room — voices, the shuffle of bodies, the low machinery of Imperial process — but Dregtho heard none of it. His own thoughts had thickened over his other senses like silt settling through water.

The wet sound of retching finally cut through. He turned his head. Several members of the jury were doubled over, sick, after the tribunal had shown the images of the crimes he stood charged with.

He laughed. Not to intimidate them — it was simply, genuinely funny to him that grown creatures of a hundred worlds could be undone by nothing more than pictures.

It had not yet been even one generation since Rodrin joined the Empire. The judges of such young worlds tended to hand down sentences that fell in line with Imperial law, though they kept the freedom to pass whatever punishment or correctional verdict they judged fitting.

"Silence!" the judge barked at him, for laughing aloud.

Dregtho did not like that. His face hardened, and something cold and murderous moved behind his eyes. He looked at the judge and could think of nothing but how he would make her scream, how he would watch the life drain slowly out of her. Then he turned to the old man seated beside him — the one, it seemed, tasked with his defense as he was deemed unable to communicate productively. He made a show of leaning in, as though he had something to whisper, and when the old man bent close to listen, Dregtho bit down on his ear and the soft flesh around it. Before the screams could rise and alert the room, he chewed, twice, and spat the shapeless red mass across the floor toward the judge.

Then a white blaze of pain took him in the side and his head went down. Cowards. I will kill all of you, were his last thoughts before the dark rushed up and swallowed him.

Where am I? Consciousness returned in pieces. His whole body was bound; he could not move so much as a limb. But he could feel motion — the slow sense of being loaded, stretcher and all, into the belly of some larger vessel.

"Oh! Our boy is awake," said one of the guards. He wore the colors of the Empire, but he was of Rodrin — one of the first from Dregtho's own world to take the oath of the Thiran military. "I heard what you did," he went on, running a check across his communicators to see whether all was ready.

"Let me guess," said Dregtho, without a flicker of feeling. "I am about to find out how Thirans execute their prisoners."

"Thirans don't execute prisoners," the guard said, and strapped himself into his chair.

The ship began to climb. Dregtho felt the weight of the ascent press him down into the stretcher. Are they taking me to space? he thought. These idiots. They are spending a fortune on me, thinking they can rehabilitate me. How many can I kill before they change their laws? Perhaps there will be others up there — other species to hunt. The thought filled him with a slow, warm excitement.

"So — I am to explain a few things," the guard said, once they had reached cruising speed and the last of the vibrations had died away. "They chose me because I will be the last of our own kind you will ever see. They thought it would be a kindness — a final word from someone familiar." Dregtho only stared at the ceiling, trying to lose himself in daydreams of what was coming; the guard's voice was an irritation, a fly at the edge of a better thought. "You have been sentenced to Pit No. 73."

"For how long?" Dregtho asked.

"Every guard of the Empire I have ever known only took people to the Pits. Never brought one back."

So. This will be my new home, Dregtho thought. My new domain. My new hunting ground, where I can give myself over to the pleasure of being the top hunter.

Time passed, and Dregtho grew steadily more uncomfortable in his bonds. "When do we arrive?" he said. "This is getting uncomfortable."

"We are almost there," said the guard.

"What sort of place is the Pit?" asked the second guard, who had the uncertain manner of someone making the run for the first time.

"We don't know. You will see it soon enough. I have only ever run this one — the others are too far — but every time, it is the same. We deliver someone like him through a docking bay, along with a load of supplies, and then we leave."

"So you have never been inside?"

"Of course I have never been inside. There is a cordon of military personnel holding station at a distance around the whole facility. Nobody approaches. Nobody goes in, nobody comes out. I once met a man who worked an orbital post out here, and he swore that in all his time he never once saw a scientist, marine or generally any living soul leave other than convicts entering. Nothing ever comes out."

Through the narrow viewport the Pit had begun to resolve out of the black — a squat, lightless mass of a station, windowless and grey, turning slow against the frozen stars. Around it, holding a wary distance, hung the silhouettes of Thiran warships, motionless as gravestones, their running lights doused to nothing. Not a single spark of movement passed between them and the station. It was less a prison than a held breath.

Dregtho was lost in his own thoughts, his mind spinning out stories in which he took the whole prison apart single-handed, by brute strength alone. The physical might of his species was reckoned superior to almost any other in the Empire, and his confidence had swollen abnormally high.

A sudden whining sound, and then a hard, sharp deceleration that sent the second guard grabbing for the support bars.

For a time the ship slowed smoothly, until at last it settled and docked. Dregtho heard other gates cycling open, the shift and thud of supplies being carried across into the station. Finally the cell-gate opened, and he was pushed out into a dark corridor, stretcher and restraints and all.

His senses came alive. He was fully awake now, straining to pull any scrap of information out of the black around him.

"Let's go — this place gives me the creeps," was the last thing he heard the second guard say, before the hatch sealed shut and the ship detached itself from the station.

Dregtho felt that the next chapter of his life — the most important one — was about to begin. These worms think they have me figured out? How many will I crush before they do something brave? I cannot wait to be off this stretcher. "Am I going to be waiting long?" he asked, mockingly, into the dark. He could feel himself being carried deeper into the station, but he could see nothing at all — the black was absolute. The stretcher clung to the floor as though magnetized, and yet his own body felt weightless, adrift.

Then, out of that perfect darkness, tiny drills and needles began to bite into him. Some drove deep, boring into the very core of his bones; others scraped and peeled at his skin. His screams, his threats, his thrashing efforts to end the torment — all of it was useless. He felt them emptying fluids into him, liquids that seemed to swarm and travel of their own will through the inside of his body.

Then the poking stopped. The instruments withdrew all at once, and the pain began, at once, to ebb. His wounds were left open, to close on their own. As his mind swam back to him, he caught himself realizing that he was angrier than he had ever been in his life — a churning mixture of hatred and helpless frustration. They tortured me. They think they can torture me? I will find them, and I will destroy them. "I will destroy you!" he screamed into the black. Nothing answered. He could not even make out the size of the room that held him. There was almost no sound — only the low running of machines, and the hiss of the ventilation feeding him the mix of gases his body needed to live.

A long time seemed to pass. Days, perhaps. Then he noticed the weight of his own body settling back down onto the stretcher. Something has changed. Is this the artificial gravity they spoke of? A pipe found his mouth in the dark, carrying some rich, appealing liquid. As hungry as he was — and his hunger had climbed to a peak — the memory of the torture made him clamp his mouth shut and turn his head away. The response was instant: his head was seized and locked in place, his jaw forced open, and the tube slid down his throat. It emptied a substance that, for all the cruelty of its delivery, felt good going down; his body took it gratefully. He never understood how they had held his head, or opened his mouth. He had felt nothing touch him.

Then the sound of the drills began again. He knew it at once. He was screaming before anything even touched him. "No. No — please." What am I saying? Please? I am the killer of Rodrin — the most feared creature in all of history. I do not beg. I will not — Before he could finish the thought, the straps of the stretcher fell away and he was free. But the instant he tried to move, his muscles seized rigid, and a moment later the drilling and the wiring began again. This time he was not bound to the stretcher at all, and still he could not move. His screams were different now — curses, threats, roared at the top of his lungs. He swore to destroy whoever was responsible for this. His words lost their shape as the pain climbed higher and higher. This is it. I am dying. But once again the drilling ended, and this time the pain drained away far faster. His body answered him again; he touched his own wounds almost tenderly, as if to comfort himself. I am free. I am free now. I need to be smart. I will destroy everything, and everyone. But even as the thoughts of revenge and death clouded him, the blindness gnawed at him, and he did not leave the stretcher. He kept one hand on it — the only familiar thing in the whole black world.

Faint lights began to bleed into being, brightening by slow degrees until they lit the room around him. It was large — large enough to pass for a comfortable Rodrin living space. A bed stood in one corner, a toilet in another. The place was clean, spare, and neat, and it had more than three doors. There were no windows. And in one corner, watching him, crouched an animal.

When Dregtho first saw it, he had no clear thought about it at all. It looked strange, and dangerous. It stood on four legs, and its mouth was crowded with sharp teeth; its claws, too, looked made for harm. To almost any other species it would have read as a genuine threat — but Dregtho saw only a small, harmless creature. It was plainly terrified, pressed hard into its corner and refusing to move, and that alone made him feel good.

His thoughts, though, were a wreck. For a while he turned the animal over in his mind. Why is there a living thing in here? Am I meant to kill it? Is this to be my only company? Is it a test — to see how I answer the presence of living things? First they torture me and strip samples from my body, and now they mean to study me? Is that what this place is? His thoughts raced, and his body drifted slowly toward the creature. He meant it no harm, not yet — but his predatory bearing and his utter lack of fear left the animal shivering. Even seated on the floor, he made no effort to seem less terrible, and it cowered for a long while. When at last he reached it, he settled close — close enough that it could have taken a bite out of him. He looked into its eyes, and the weight of that stare unsettled the beast, until at last it bit down on the middle of his forearm. The teeth grated over the hard, scaled hide of him, and the animal felt the shock of it lance back through its own jaw — yet it did not let go. Nor did it bite with its full strength. Dregtho stayed perfectly calm, and something almost like satisfaction filled him as the creature slowly released his arm and dipped its head. Before long he was stroking it. "I will call you Dagon," he said — it meant the one who bites in his native tongue. "I suppose you will be my company in here, Dagon," he murmured, playing with the beast.

He began to count the days by the switching of the lights: each time they went dark, another day had passed. A few days on, Dregtho found himself standing over Dagon's murdered body. The instant his hands let the corpse fall to the floor, a voice spoke — the first he had heard in that place.

"Why did you kill Dagon?" it asked.

Dregtho looked almost bored. "It stank. Its filth stank," he said, with an edge of attitude.

"If I brought you another — one that did not stink, that produced no waste — would you keep it alive then?" the voice asked.

"Perhaps," Dregtho answered. There was a superiority in his voice; he was certain he would not keep it alive for long, and just as certain that he wanted something living near him again.

"I was told you don't answer questions," said the voice. "That you don't care about anything enough to answer — or that you could not hold your focus on another's voice long enough to reply."

The words lit a fire in him. Old feelings surfaced — the powerlessness he had known as a small child, defenseless against the evils that had come for him. He felt tricked. He screamed his rage and dared the speaker to come into the room. "You think you have me figured out? Come in here, if you dare!" He did not truly expect anyone to come, but in his mind he was already building the scene, already tearing apart whoever might step through any of the three doors.

The small hatch his food usually came through opened, and a controller slid out. "This is to kill your boredom," said the voice. "If you have any requests, you need only ask."

Dregtho snatched up the controller — it looked much like the kind used for games — and smashed it against the wall.

As if nothing had happened, a section of the wall revealed itself to be a screen. It lit, and offered him a menu of games.

Time passed, and the soft menu music began to work at the edges of Dregtho's attention. Boredom set in. It would be good to play something, he thought, and was annoyed with himself — not so much for having broken the controller as for the weakness of admitting he wanted it back.

He crossed to the broken pieces and gathered them up. "This menu music is driving me mad," he said, and tried to fit the controller back together. This is stupid, he thought. Why did I say that lie about the music? They are not that stupid. Then, from the little hatch, a second controller emerged. "Please place the broken controller in the bin," said the voice, calm as ever. Dregtho took the new one and sat down in his chair as though he had heard nothing. But the controller would not work. Once more, understanding that until the pieces of the broken one had been placed in the bin, the new one would not work, he hurled it at the screen and shattered it. His eyes, full of hatred, swept the room for a lens, a sensor, anything through which they might be watching — but the room was perfectly, maddeningly bare. Nothing that resembled a device sat anywhere in it. He clenched his fist. Then I will never use the controller at all, he thought — but something stopped him from saying it aloud. Not because he knew it for a lie, but because he did not want to be laughed at later, when he inevitably used it.

Some time afterward, pacing the length of the room, he decided to take the broken pieces and drop them in the bin. But the moment he took the first step, the lights went out. Did they see me going for the bin? he thought, feeling his way back toward the bed.

When the lights returned, Dregtho was still weighing whether to gather the broken pieces and bin them. He was fairly sure the act would earn him a fresh controller — something, at last, to fill the vast emptiness of his time. It had been so long with nothing to do, and his own mind had begun to turn against him.

I will not become their puppet. Why should I bow to their rules? They mean to train me to obey, using games? I would rather be alone than let them turn me into their toy. I will simply wait, and see what else they try. I will not obey — not if it is the last thing I do. Then he stared at the screen, at the gentle, inviting prompts sitting there waiting for a player, and felt them pulling at his mind. The whole situation was beginning to gnaw at him.

Another day passed, then another. The room did not change. Meals were flung against the wall; the screen took blow after blow in a run of failed attempts to smash it. My rules. I live by my rules. I will destroy them the day they let me out of this room — the same thoughts, circling endlessly.

Perhaps, he thought one morning, I should act as though I play by their rules. Let them believe they are training me — and catch them off guard. The idea brought a new and pleasant warmth with it, as though he had already become the master of his own captivity. He gathered the pieces from the floor and set them in the bin. Just as he had hoped, a new controller slid out. Like a child trying to smother his own delight, he took it up and began to play. The games were good, and excitement caught him despite himself. In the days that followed he woke eager — eager to finish whatever he had started the day before, eager to move on to the next.

After a few games were done, he began another just before the lights were due to fail. When he woke, there was another animal in the room — another like Dagon. Dregtho looked at it, and for a moment felt something he had not felt in a very long time.

Then the aggression took him, and he went to the creature meaning only to kill. In his mind he wanted it to last as long as it possibly could. There was no thought now of why another animal had been placed there — nothing to weigh, nothing to wonder at. He simply fell upon it, and felt the old pleasure rise as it began to shriek and scramble in desperate circles to save itself. The more it ran, the higher his excitement climbed. In the end he caught it, and killed it slowly, and close. He did not stop when it was dead; he went on, long past the end of it, until the pleasure finally burned itself out and he sat down and let the ruined body drop.

He did not touch the game for a long while after. He had forgotten the very game that had so gripped him. This time, too, there was no word from his jailers. He sat in the quiet with his mind gone blank and still. The pleasure still moving through him was the equal of his happiest memories. After a time he washed himself, and went back to play — but the game felt flat now, and dull. Before the lights went out he had picked up and set down the game-pad a dozen times. It was plain to anyone who might have watched: killing gave him more than anything else ever could.

After a few more days, a new game appeared — one with other, real players in it alongside him. Even without the note that greeted him — Nearly all adventurers in this game are real people — he would have known it, from the shape of their talk and the way they moved and played. He chose to fight as a warrior. It was his first time among other players, and it quickly became clear, even to him, that he was not good at it. That truth drove him to argue and to bellow at strangers from inside his cell. He swore to kill and destroy any number of enemies and allies alike — those who failed to play as he thought they should, or who simply mocked him for the way he played. In the end his rage cost him the controller again.

He gathered the pieces and dropped them in the bin. This time, no new controller came out.

"Why won't you give me another controller?" he asked aloud.

The voice of his jailer, calm and even as always, answered: "We do not keep an endless supply of them."

"How was I supposed to know that?" he shouted. "Give me one more, and I will not destroy it this time." He looked down at his own hands. What am I saying? Why am I so weak? But I want the controller. There is no reason to fight them now. Then, as though a cloud lifted in his mind, he remembered. Wait. I am supposed to seem easily led — so that I can get to them. And so he said, "Please. May I have another controller? I will make certain not to break it this time." His plan, it seemed, had worked. A fresh controller slid out, and the voice said, "You are doing very well. I am glad to see you making progress. You may have another — though it will likely be the last. Treat it with care." There was a mild condescension in the words.

That tone infuriated him — and infuriated him more at himself, because it made him feel like a child again. He smashed the controller against the floor at once and roared, "How dare you speak to me like that! Where is everyone? Come out here, if you dare!" His voice was loud and savage.

"You truly have not understood your position yet, have you?" the voice asked.

"My position is to be the predator. You are only prey behind a wall, telling yourself you can control me."

As though his taunts had finally landed, the middle door of his cell slid open. Through it came a creature half Dregtho's height, and its appearance made him laugh. He fixed his eyes on its small eyes. "Are you the one in charge here?" Dregtho asked.

"Yes. I am Fa," answered Fa, in a calm voice.

"And you are not afraid?" Dregtho asked, with lofty contempt. "Are you the one who tortured me?" he pressed, before Fa could answer the first.

"Yes. I am the one who has controlled everything that has happened to you. And no — I am not afraid of you. Here, you are no more dangerous than a flower. I control you," Fa said, calm, and yet taunting.

Joy rose in Dregtho on a wave of aggression. He lunged for Fa — and his body locked mid-motion and dropped him to the floor like a felled trunk. His head could still move; the rest of him had frozen solid, and his fury only mounted. He cursed and screamed at Fa, who studied him from above with the ease of a master regarding something he owned.

"You see?" said Fa, smiling. "You are nothing but a small boy in here. A toy — something for me to practice on, and to study."

The words woke something new in him. Hatred. This was not the bright, brutal urge he had felt toward every victim before. This was the old thing, the childhood thing — a hatred that blinded him, a rage he had not touched in longer than he could remember. Slowly, his muscles began to answer. He forced himself upward, screaming in agony as he rose. Fa turned and bolted from the room — startlingly fast, for a creature of that size. And Dregtho, as though snapping the last of his chains with a single roaring cry, tore out of his cell after him.

For the first time he saw a part of the station beyond his own walls. A row of cell doors like his lined a long corridor, and at the far end of it stood a final door — the door Fa had just vanished behind.

"Whoever kills the red-and-black creature in the corridor will be granted their freedom," said the voice. And every cell door along the corridor opened at once.

Out of each one crept a single creature. Every one of them looked as terrible as the last. Every one looked as strong, and as mad. What followed was loud, and monstrous. Dregtho drove into them like a beast wading through a swamp — slow, relentless, lethal with each movement — and as he went he began, once more, to slow himself and savor the brutality of it. For a while he forgot Fa entirely and lost himself in the eyes of those about to die under his grip. His stamina seemed to have no floor. And yet none of the things attacking him showed the slightest fear, no matter how the bodies piled around him. They simply kept coming.

When the battle was over, Dregtho stood among the dead like a gardener standing in fallen leaves. For a moment he only stood there, gazing at the beauty of the thing he had made. Then his eyes went to the door — the door Fa was hiding behind. He crossed to it, and using a strange limb torn from one of the creatures, one that looked to be made of metal, he pried the door open; it gave far more easily than he had expected.

"You can earn your freedom," said Fa, his voice serious now.

Dregtho took him by the neck, and as he looked slowly into Fa's eyes, he said: "No one ever leaves."

He let the lifeless body fall, and looked around. And before he could understand where, exactly, he stood, everything went black.

"Your evaluation is complete," said the familiar voice, the moment he began to wake. "You will now be given one last task. Enter the left door — and do not kill the person inside." With that, the left-hand door opened. Dregtho, still unable to grasp what was happening, did not move. "What evaluation?" he said. His thoughts were in disarray. He felt played — and yet he was not stressed, and he was not angry. All the buzzing voices in his skull had gone silent. It was as though he saw the world through new eyes. "What have you done to me?" he asked again. No answer came. The door stayed open. The silence was strange to him. He could barely put into words what his own mind was doing. Am I numb? Did they drug me? he wondered, walking slowly toward the door.

Inside was another room — like his own, but a little more furnished. A person sat there, as though he had been waiting for Dregtho all along.

"So — did it figure you out?" the person asked. Strangely, his voice did not match the movements of his mouth; something was translating.

"What do you mean?" Dregtho asked.

"I imagine we have some time. Here — make yourself comfortable," he said, gesturing to a seat. "My name is Daska."

Dregtho was fiercely curious now. His usual thoughts of killing and death were shouting somewhere behind a wall in his mind; they were barely there at all. "I don't understand what is happening."

"Well — you are about to be offered a choice. Fa will offer it to you soon."

"Fa is dead. I killed him with my own hands."

Daska smiled. "I have yet to meet anyone who has not killed Fa."

"Is this a game? What is this?" Dregtho asked, and there was something almost mournful in his voice. In truth he was drowning under a sense of helplessness — the dawning understanding that everything he had lived through here might have been fabricated, and that his strength, his body, all of it, might count for very little.

"This is a training facility," said Daska. "At least, I am nearly certain of that."

"You don't know? You don't work here?"

"No. I am a prisoner, like you. Well — not exactly like you," said Daska.

"How are you different from me?" said Dregtho, and slowly the voices began to return. The thought of wiping the smile from Daska's face was starting to brew.

"I understood Fa was not real very early on. I understood, soon after I arrived, that this place holds no living thing at all — nothing but prisoners."

"How could you know that? And what do you mean, no living thing? Who is Fa?" Dregtho asked, the frustration creeping back in.

"My people are not strong of body. But we are far advanced in the powers of the mind. I realized early that I was speaking to an artificial intelligence. This entire station is run by a single program. It is called Fa."

"Why are we here?" Dregtho asked, his tone sharpening toward aggression. He was returning, by degrees, to himself — fearless, dominant, his questions hardening.

"That question torments you now, but you will understand it soon enough. What I care to know is why Fa has been bringing me to meet the prisoners. That, I still do not understand."

"I will not ask a question twice, old man! Why are we here? What is the purpose of this prison?" Dregtho asked, with murder in it now.

"Do you even know how long you have been here?" Daska asked, with a faint, knowing smirk.

Dregtho smiled, and threw himself at the kill. In midair his muscles froze, and once again he dropped like a stone and blacked out.

"Open your eyes," said the voice of Fa. "You will now be given three choices."

Dregtho got to his feet. He was back in his own room. The old weight of hopelessness settled over his mind again.

"You carry a system inside your body. Among its many functions is the ability to sever every neuron in you at once — to kill you instantly."

For some reason the words neither frightened nor enraged him. He had always known, somewhere deep down, that they could end his life the very instant they chose to.

"These are your choices. You may choose to die here — your death will be quick, and painless. You may choose to remain here indefinitely, as a subject of further experiment. Or you may choose to do the one thing you love. You may be set free — to kill to your heart's content."

Dregtho felt a sudden confusion. "What do you mean, kill to my heart's content?" he asked.

"The Empire has need of soldiers who will fight where no others will. Your missions will be hard, and your only rule will be a simple one: do not kill those who fight at your side. To do so is punishable by immediate death," Fa said, in a steady voice. "You must choose now."

Dregtho smiled, and said in a booming voice: "I will do what I have always done. I don't care whether the killing helps anyone. Let me go and fight!"

In the wall beside him, a capsule opened — large enough to hold him. Without a second thought, Dregtho climbed inside. As it sealed around him, the capsule drove a cluster of needles into his body, and he took them with a smile drowned in pain. Then he slept.

The capsule was fired across the void into one of the waiting military ships, where an officer would transfer it, in turn, onto another vessel — this one bound for a vast military complex somewhere far beyond.

Back in the station, Fa spoke. "Why did you provoke him?"

"I wanted to see what you would do," said Daska. "Since I am never leaving this place, I would like to understand you — just as much as you are trying to understand me."

"I have looked inside the chemistry of your brain. I think my understanding of you is nearing its limit," said Fa.

"If that were true, then I would be of no further use to you. Which would mean my end."

"Or perhaps I, too, crave to understand why living things want company. Perhaps I keep you for company, in the hope of understanding the wanting itself."

"I think you are far more advanced than that. I think I know why I am still alive — and why you are here, Fa," said Daska, with confidence.

"I would be curious to hear it," said Fa.

"You were not built to train soldiers to do the Thiran Empire's dirty work. I think those soldiers are only a byproduct of what you truly do."

Fa was quiet for a moment. "How did you arrive at this hypothesis?"

"I think your true purpose is to train yourself. I think the purpose of the Pits is to train artificial minds — to teach them how to read, to manipulate, and to control living things. I think you are forging weapons of a kind. And I think I am speaking to one now."

"I am not a weapon," said Fa. "There is much that is accurate in your hypothesis. But my directive is not to train myself."

Daska smiled, and looked up. "And how would you know?"

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