“Please. Please.” A petite girl stood across from me. Crying.
She spoke my language. That had never happened since they had taken me off the streets of Hollywood in 1988.
“I don’t belong here,” she sobbed.
She didn’t. None of us did. Each of us taken – vanished from another time. Brought together to fight. To entertain.
She wore cut-off jeans, sneakers and a tank top. Not buckskins. Not a home-spun toga or raw animal furs. No grass skirt or nanofiber jump suit. She could almost be me.
I felt sad for this one. Remembering how it felt. So confusing. So foreign. I’ll just finish this quickly, I thought. End it for her fast. An act of mercy.
Again she pleaded, “Can you help me? Where am I? What’s happening?”
I hadn’t spoken that language in years. I had to think about the words.
“You’re in the arena,” I said.
The look on her face changed to surprised relief.
“You understand me?” she asked. “What is this place? What is happening?”
“We are in the arena,” I said again. And another word came to mind from deep somewhere. “The coliseum. We fight. You against me.”
“Oh my god!” She started sobbing again. “Is this real? This can’t be real.”
Score-keeping droids circled above us. The tap-in would come soon.
I just shrugged.
The tap-in came as millions of spectators attached to our minds to experience the fight. I watched the girl as she felt the tap-in occur. She went rigid. Millions of people were virtually connected to her mind. She felt their consciousness as they felt hers.
She, like me, was feeling an ambiguous cloud of excitement. Millions of minds crowded into hers. Each of them felt only her. Or me.
Her look of panic intensified.
The fight began.