Arena of Mayhem
by
- Gear Box I Gear Child
- Gear Box II The Arena of Mayhem
- Gear Box III The Wayward Star
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“You see, in drag, it doesn’t really matter what frock, shoes, or wig you wear—although clearly there is good taste and bad—what matters is how you use your instrument to sashay, prance, and dance around the stage to tell your story. For the true art of drag is illusion. And, especially for a machine, such as I, suspension of disbelief gives me the illusion of being truly alive.”
When his backup dancers and only friends, Sunny Boy and Grease Spot, disappear, Fancy Larry, a superior AI machine, embarks on a mission to save them from the nefarious robo dealers in Reno and the dreaded Arena of Mayhem. During his quest, he comes upon a staff of guide robos left behind in a science museum, a colony of discarded children from a cloning experiment marooned on the plastic island, and an abandoned troop of sex and cleaning bots in an undersea military installation, all of whom desperately need his help. Fancy Larry must choose to either revel in the bright lights of Reno or come to the aid of those who were left behind.
Genres:
Word Count: 87,000
Setting: Earth
Languages Available: English
Series Type: Continuous / Same Characters
Word Count: 87,000
Setting: Earth
Languages Available: English
Series Type: Continuous / Same Characters
By noon, the Andrea Doria had arrived at Mount Fuji. Again, I discerned those curious crop-circle designs in the sparse moss growing along the craggy hills. The helmsman maneuvered the ship into a holding position about five hundred feet above the eastern slope. Directly below us was the famous City of Stone, one of the main attractions these top-got tourists had come to see. When the eco bombs went off along the Pacific Ring of Fire, Mount Fuji, once a semi-dormant volcano, sprang to life belching out a cloud of molten gaseous lava and within a heartbeat, nearly three million people who had stampeded up the side of the mount trying to reach higher ground and escape the tsunami were instantly converted into stone statues.
READ MOREI gazed out my small window and watched as the hover shuttles ferried passengers to the ground, where they took selfies amongst the tangled forest of lava-encased bodies. Even for those who didn’t want to put on a gas mask and take the anti-radiation pills—and who can blame them, considering the bout of diarrhea the pills cause for at least twenty-four hours afterward—the vista from the airship was, all the same, pretty impressive.
By late afternoon, having returned to the airship from their jaunt, I heard the bustle of passengers who were now gathering on the upper observation deck. I hung out the window as far as I dared and peered up at the folks leaning over the railing above me. Then, as the sun dipped below Mount Fuji, there was a general shushing throughout the crowd, and everyone fell silent. This was the moment they’d come to witness, the waking of the dead. Along the slope, the multitude of stone figures cast long eerie shadows as the waning rays of light retreated up the side of Mount Fuji, making it appear as if the dead had awoken and were turning in succession, while the evening breeze coming in off the ocean blew across the tangled mass with a low howl, like voices from beyond the grave.
I continued to gaze out at the figures frozen in time, reaching out from a past more easily photographed than remembered. Once, they had been of flesh and bone, but were now stone. For some odd reason, I felt a common bond with them. I knew the terror they had endured during the Gawd Wars, and like them, I too had borne witness to the passage of time without ever changing. But unlike the stone figures, I retained memories of the Gawd Wars as precise and vivid as the moment I had recorded them. Grease Spot and Sonny Boy were too young to have suffered the Gawd Wars, and my files were much too horrific to share with them. Thankfully, all they knew of was a world trying to digest what it had done and struggling to rebuild from the ashes and rubble of its mistakes.
I’d often considered erasing all my files of the Gawd Wars and wiping my memory banks clean, but who would be a witness and testimony to what had happened? So, I archive those memories in the far recesses of my mind
COLLAPSE
