The Scrappers

A journalist in the far future stumbles upon a life-altering secret about the mutant gladiators he's sent to cover.

When I was very young I hardly understood the scrappers. I used to think the scrappers were disgusting. I had variably 49-51% of the Triumvirate with me on that. The very idea that such mutated brutes existed out there in space somewhere was enough to give me nightmares. The Edu-farms tried to sew trust in the scrapper system, but we kids had- invariably and repugnantly- one of three reactions. These three categories were so universal and distinct that the punitive response subroutines of the Edu-farm's surveillance cortex could key in on a student's brainwaves and tell you exactly how they felt about the scrappers based on age, nutritional history and species. We either,

A) Thought the scrappers were rightly terrifying and didn't like having to look at them.

B) Thought the scrappers were the most amazing thing we'd ever seen and couldn't get enough of their vile meat-chunking-blood-geyser of a spectacle.

or, C) Thought the scrappers were misused, enslaved, forced to kill or be killed by a blood-drunk society of cynics and sociopaths.

For some reason psychologists all over the Triumvirate have been unable to determine, no child is capable of feeling nothing about the scrappers. Some very basic instinct forces them to recognize their existence and for good or ill keeps that knowledge in the forefront of their minds at all times.

I fell intermittently into groups A and C, was categorized as such by the Edu-farm's disciplinary computers, and was forced to watch either gorier or more jingoistic films about the scrappers depending on my current alignment. When I graduated into an Advanced Specialization course I decided to get my degree in journalism for some reason I couldn't possibly explain to you now or in the past. I was weirdly pulled towards the discipline by something I probably would have erroneously categorized as a passion for the "truth".

After becoming a full fledged disciple of low-impact largely unimpressive not-terribly-investigative journalism I managed to find placement with a collective of "real greeners" with a broadcast link and a handful of literal talking heads- set to the "strident, but professional" setting- into which we would feed seemingly random data we could find on just about any subject. The heads were actually pretty impressive, if a bit disturbing to watch work.

We could feed in junk mail from credit companies, recruitment numbers for various government agencies and the pricing trends of fast food in a given region of space and the heads would spin a thready yarn about how the local administrators of an entirely different region were manipulating currency exchange to stuff their competitors' lobbies with overweight slobs. Worst of all, the stupid things would- nine times outta ten- turn out to be about 90% correct.

I'd learned about the heads back in Ad-Spec, but they'd always been framed as unreliable devices that were only used by lazy backwater psychos with subspace radio stations. Here were some real greeners with their hydroponics labs and their t-shirts made of cytoplasm and their really good pot, and I thought they were pretty alright guys. But I was just a kid, barely outta my twenties (this was back when the average lifespan was only about two hundred, so I'm sure that seems even younger to you time-spoiled brats) and lookin' for my place in the vasty inky noise-polluted cesspool of the universe.

Of course, then came the Lockjaw. And my land of soy milk and semi-organic honey came down around my gauged ears. Lockjaw was a hypersonic subspace self-reamplifying trash signal, a computer virus to end all viruses that seemed to deftly find its way to all the little not-quite pirate radio stations in the galaxy. It managed to gum up the receivers on the talking heads so badly the damn things couldn't tell xenohumanitarian fluff pieces from hardcore gotcha stories that could summon angry pitchfork-wielding mobs to the front lawns of politicians and line cooks alike. The heads became useless and the playing field was officially leveled again.

This s**t would not stand, said Barber (one of the guys at the greener collective, kind of a d****e-rocket if I'm honest). He claimed Lockjaw had come directly from the Triumvirate, an idea not entirely unsupported by what facts we could dredge up, and that he was gonna send them a message that... whatever. I didn't feel much like listening to him at the time, as I hazily recall I was pretty baked and a pro-xenoform free lovin' semi-humanoid floozy was doing something more interesting to my crotch.

So Barber and the dudes and dudettes he could get to feel any emotion close to outrage over the thing stormed off to their ships on a mission to annoy the hell out of anyone in a position of relative power for as long as was necessary to effect some kind of nonspecific social change (up to, and including, forever). The rest of us lounged around barely conscious of our surroundings for a few months, eating what we could find on the floor as we inch-wormed our way across the greener compound utterly convinced of our own transcendental awareness. Then something happened.

A screen flickered to life in the room I happened to be- corporeally, anyway- inhabiting. It was one of Barber's dudes, his face real close to the recorder. Panic screamed out of his enlarged pores and his reddened eyes bulged.

"They've got us in the pit, man! The got-dammed cheese grater, man!" He shouted, sweat poured down his face and stained his biological vat-grown t-shirt. "You gotta do something! You gotta get us out before-" He turned around, his dirty ponytail bouncing into view as he whipped his head back and forth. "Oh s**t, man. He's here again. He's fukkin' here!" The greener dropped the transmitter on the ground, which I now saw was covered in dusty red sand- "stained with the blood of victories and defeats a millenia hence!", as the Edu-farm's videos had always described it- with sheer white and black blade-like stone formations jutting out of it at odd angles. The whole area was oblong in shape and regulation size (a mile wide at the middle, two from end to end). Barber had pissed off someone good.

For the first time in my life I watched the scrappers do their work and felt satisfied by the result. Not once did I queasily look away or feel even the smallest hint of moral outrage. I found myself remembering how to move my muscles, the adrenaline blasted through the THC like a water cannon through a wall of silt and put my head right where it belonged: smack-dab in the middle of the action. I don't even think I blinked. And I definitely didn't regret it. Still don't. F**k Barber.

I get it!, I thought, I finally get it! This is what the rest of the Triumvirate has always been seeing! Of course, this was a rare form of disciplinary action on the part of the government and not one they'd actually wanted televised. F**k that! , I thought, leaping to my feet to begin recording the communique as quickly as I could. I was gonna show this to everyone some day, and not because I thought it was terrible that the government was liquefying harmless political dissidents with trained attack mutants. I was gonna show people this recording of a priceless scrapper-on-greener massacre because I thought it was god-damned cool.

I had gone from a wishy-washy transient member of the peripheral A's and C's to a hardcore centrist B. I was right in the maelstrom, the eye of the storm, the center of the universe's inward focus. I was a part of the we now, and not that crappy kinda runner up, "sorry you don't have more friends, kid, but here are some rejects not unlike yourself!" lonely we, but a we I could be proud of belonging to. We watched scraps. We loved watching disembodied werewolf heads bite open the femoral arteries of man-crabs and calculating the photo-finish (who died first? It's down to the millisecond!). But most of all, we agreed with one another that those members of A and C groups were p*****s and in desperate need of some kinda splat-o-rama-centric reeducation.

From that moment on I couldn't get enough of the monsters. I learned the names of the biggest stars, got posters of my favorites up around the compound (which I had to change frequently as the average lifespan of a scrapper post-debut is about thirty-nine minutes) and became a blood-crazed scrapper fanatic. The greeners didn't get it, they just didn't. And I didn't care anymore. I'd seen the entrails-strewn, crimson-bathed light, and I wanted God himself to know. I kicked those greeners out on their asses who couldn't share my excitement (eventually, that was all of them) and went on my way to frothy-mouthed paradise every other weeknight at 9 and all day Sunday.

Sooner or later I ran out of things to sell off from the compound and decided that donating plasma was kinda hinky, given that I'd be using the money to sit around and watch blood baths all day. Something about that idea just didn't sit right with me. Cannibalistic somehow... kinda? I dunno, can't rightly explain it, but it just didn't seem right, y'know? Besides, I had an Ad-Spec degree in soft-hitting low-integrity journalism. Who could be the better candidate to join the Gurus of Gore in the abbatoir muckpits of the cheese grater arenas? Where would the Triumvirate find a person less willing to make trouble for them with tough questions like, "why?" or "are you sure this is legal?" Nowhere, that's where.

I put in my application to join the corps of media bootlickers who got to follow around the titans of terrible tidings and waited impatiently day-in-day-out. I watched every scrap as closely as possible, learning what I hadn't already of the details. I mimicked the way the announcers talked when reciting the sample lines the application had detailed, that sort of folksy yokel turned serious statesman accent that just begged you to guess in which sector they'd been born. I licked my lips as blood sprayed and heads flew and beams of coherent energy burned pulsating fleshy mounds to smoldering ash. I waited.

Then the day came. The message was received. I was officially a member of the media corps in charge of scrap coverage. I packed up my things and hightailed it to Taurus Delta II to get in on the ground floor. I couldn't possibly have imagined what the next four years would be for me. Well... I could have, and actively was imagining, actually, but I was wrong.

For the first year I was forbidden from direct contact with the scrappers themselves. I was pretty much fine with this arrangement due to the fact that I had a fairly deep and abiding love of my organs, in particular I loved the idea of them remaining inside my body in round-about the same basic condition. They were caged beasts, humanities darkest ambitions given external forms as rotten and grotesque as our most sinister dreams and desires made the rest of us on the inside.

The scrappers represented something to me then that they never had before. They were our catharsis, our present to ourselves for managing not to exterminate all life in the universe. We got our gory little puppet-show to go with our three course meal of self-satisfaction. When the blood of art or soul or morality dribbled down our collective chin, we would mop at it with the ironic napkin of Sunday Scrapday. The scrappers weren't people, weren't even really machines. They were the grease in the gears, oiling our society with sacrifices of savagery and vitae sacrum.

We were vampires, and the scrappers were the pale pulsating jugular of our own subconscious reality.

Or so I thought.

A year and a half into my tenure as a good little media drone, serving up hot piles of banal not-quite-

commentary as a side dish to the entree that was each scrap, I bumbled. I realize now that the phrase is actually a legitimate industry term for bootlickers in the creature-feature corps of scrapper central. In the biz, to bumble is to trip and fall right into a truth so deeply real and unexpected as for it to have looked like little more than a puddle from the other side. You go from a bootlicker to a bumbler, and are officially recognized by the other bumblers as being a member of their awkward fraternity.

Bumblers, upon first bumbling, spend most of our time contemplating the meaning of our fortunate mishap. Whatever incident it is that opens our eyes to the truth rolls around in our heads like a frightfully overfried squid ball, sputtering and spewing the inky-black residue of insight until we come to the final conclusions that make sense of the accidental epiphany. We emerge from the womb of doubt reborn and coated in a patina of our shaken faith in the three group system.

What caused this bizarre transfiguration of my mind, soul and the entire structure of my thought-space? What was it that I learned about the scrappers which threw this jagged wrench of worry into the smoothly oiled works of my reality matrix? What caused me to go from a bootlicker to a bumbler, almost overnight?

I was in the cleanup room one night, looking at the mangled remains of the evening's kill. It was Cole Train, a three week old scrapper made mostly of carbon. He was a thirteen-foot-tall behemoth who'd been taken down by the Gila Manster, a reptilian titan with a mouth full of acidic saliva and a claw that could rake through concrete like a child splashing water in a pool. The Manster was one of my favorites. He was a lot of peoples' favorite, and he'd managed to survive for about four months. About a year and a half shy of the record, but still pretty damn respectable.

I wasn't supposed to be in the cleanup room that night. No one was except the white coats, the stony-faced men and women who tended to the scrappers and transported them from world to world. The white coats were Triumvirate scientists, I'd heard. No one in the bootlickers corps knew much about them, and they never much cared to talk. About anything. They spooked us. Some of us were more scared of the white coats than the scrappers themselves. I knew I sure as s**t was.

The scrappers were externally terrifying. They were honest from a distance. The white coats didn't even really seem alive half the time. It was hard to tell what one was about to do and impossible to tell what they were thinking. They were like black holes of thought, consciousness swimming around their rims in eddies of cold logic. No one saw their eyes behind their skull clamped goggles. There was no window into which one might look for a soul.

That was my epiphany. The soul. Standing there over Cole Train I saw into his eyes. I'd been feet from scrappers before, mere double-digit inches away, and I'd never even tried to look into their eyes. Some primal fear, the terror of the prey for the predator, kept me from locking eyes. I thought about the white coats, and how my fear of them had only begun once I'd realized that they had no thought behind their goggled lenses. They had nothing for me to reflect upon when looking at them.

The scrappers were different. They had eyes. I'd just been too scared to look into them. I bumbled.

The next day I looked into the eyes of every scrapper I saw, and they recognized that I was doing it. They returned my gaze with looks of sincerely human compassion. They seemed to pity me. Their eyes spoke of sorrow, not just for me, but for the entire universe.

I told some of my friends in the bootlickers about it. They laughed, shrugging the idea off as ridiculous. Paranoid. Even dangerous.

All but one.

Whiskey Jack Tamlin, an old warhorse of the corps who'd been covering the scraps for almost sixty years, wheeled up to me at the bar once the other younger commentators and camera men had left. I had stayed out of habit of loneliness. My nascent understanding of the scrappers had brought me nothing but ridicule from my peers. Whiskey Jack ordered a drink and waited until I'd finished mine before he said a single word.

"Gino." He started, slurring his words a bit as his mouth played with the last bit of his sour drink. "If you want to know about scrappers... want to know what they are. Why they are. What they feel and what they think... you're gonna need to talk to them." He said, sliding his empty glass from hand to hand on the polished shinewood bar.

I asked him how one could get a scrapper away from its white coats long enough to talk to it. Jack showed me.

We would sneak into the scrapper housing facilities after hours using a route through the ventilation ducts that Jack had used for years. Every barracks on every world was a cookie-cutter construction. When an arena was built on a new world, the Triumvirate would drop a big metal box about a mile away that would unfold itself into the local barracks over a period of about four days.

Jack told me that he'd first bumbled when trying to sneak into the scrapper pens before a match. He'd made it into the place and realized it was actually a locker room, complete with showers, benches, painted concrete flooring and even robotic masseuses. Confused and thinking he'd somehow snuck into the bowels of a Persean-rules football stadium by mistake, he took a step back, bumped into someone he hadn't seen and accidentally dropped his recorder and dumped his shoulder bag filled with datablocks all over the gray painted floor. Fumbling with apologies, he realized the person courteously helping him to pick up his things was half of a gorilla and about a third of a stingray, an old school slugger named Kingray (well before my time).

Apparently the two talked a bit after Jack stopped having a series of elaborate heart attacks and some fraction of a seizure, and Kingray gave him the digs on a way into the barracks. Supposedly the scrappers had been using the pathway to sneak out and buy beer for something like a half-dozen centuries.

I was enchanted by every sparkling personality I encountered, every good natured chuckle warmed my heart even if it bellowed from the chitinous barrel-chest of a lobster beast. Jack, the scrappers and I would meet up every week to play cards and smoke cigars. Sometimes one of the scrappers would steal pharmaceuticals-grade psychomutagens in from the labs and we'd all sit around tripping balls and feeling like our heads were explosive mounds of magnetic cat s**t painted purple and let loose on the unsuspecting countryside.

The crowd was always different, what with scrappers dying every day only to be replaced with new ones. But for some reason I always felt like I knew them, and like they knew me. There was no awkwardness, no uncertainty in the way we'd shake hands (or claws, or tentacles, or bone-blades) upon first meeting. We weren't sizing one another up, we were evaluating one another's capacity for rational thought, love, truth and all that other mushy stuff. We were jiving better than the greeners could possibly imagine. I was more in tune with life and the universe around me than even the most enlightened of monastic hermits.

I was almost literally on the bleeding edge of ephemeral existence, spending my free time in the company of those about to die. They knew their place better than I ever did, and best of all they knew why it was their place. They were the hippest cats I'd ever met. They stared down death every second of their lives, and didn't fight it. They didn't fear it and they didn't have any illusions about it. That was their wisdom. They lived, shrugged, and died. Their only regrets in life being that they didn't have the ability to meet people outside of we bumblers.

They weren't sad about this because they wanted to be remembered, or wanted to make some kind of selfish imprint on another being. They were sad because they loved life, loved experience, loved the newness of everything they found. Their wisdom changed me. Just as my whole life had in some way been related to them, just as everyone in the universe is bound to the scrappers, so too was I. The only difference being that I recognized what was really going on.

Blinded by my love of their mindless murderous exteriors, it never once occurred to me that scrappers had any concept of their role in the universe. It especially never occurred to me that this view might differ so vastly from my own understanding. Over three years I came to know hundreds of scrappers, most of them capable of charming your soul right out of your body with little more than a thirty-second conversation.

These interviews and encounters of mine were of course never televised, as humanizing the scrappers was deemed undesirable. Even moreso, what video I recorded of them had been illegally obtained by sneaking into their barracks. I could see why, certainly. In the short time I'd spent as a scrap fan, I never even thought about what a scrapper might see or feel or- god forbid- think. Those kinds of ideas were for people in groups A and C, who statistically had much higher rates of suicide, depression, autoimmune disease and indigestion than those in group B. Group B didn't care about what the scrappers had in their hearts (other than blood), and groups A and C couldn't be trusted with the idea. Only the bumblers, who had come upon the knowledge by ourselves and without any but the slightest nudge from the hiring computers calculating who had the lowest probability of bumbling (without that probability being absolutely 0), could know these existentially enlightened people.

We were a band of spies in a world not our own. The scrappers let us in because they knew they were ephemera. Though it wasn't expressly their wish, it was certainly ours to immortalize them if only for a time. We could let them live on if only for a few more years in hazy memory, their voices and disfigured faces captured in low-energy recording stasis fields in datablocks. The Triumvirate didn't want us to forget what we'd seen and heard, they didn't raid our offices and hack our mainframes to bits with dull axes. They saw us as equals when it came to the scrappers. Why do you think they never changed the barracks layout? Of course they knew that bumblers were making it in, for centuries and on worlds all over the galaxy.

We knew the government's secret, that their freakish monsters weren't enslaved gladiators but rather willing martyrs. They paraded them up in front of our children and the citizens of the galaxy every other weekday at 9 and all day on Sunday because there was no alternative. The government knew that no man who had bumbled his way into it was so heartless as to use such knowledge against them. And really, how would you?

My opinion and understanding of the scrappers had changed several times in my life. I'd shifted between the three groups as often as I'd shifted sociopolitical strata and income brackets. But now I saw why there were only those three groups. A, B and C represented what there was to understand about the scrappers from the outside. Becoming a member of the real scrapper coverage corps was a sacred honor, but you couldn't be told that going into it. You have to bumble. Their hiring computers try to make sure the right people happen to bumble in the right directions, but bumbling is by its very nature imprecise and unpredictable.

You can't stand before the keepers of the truth, ready to accept their teachings, and know what you're about to hear. Then you yourself would be one of those keepers! There are no more groups, no more standardized opinions, once you've drifted out into the thickest part of a secret. Everything else is faded out, everyone who doesn't know what you know is bleach-washed and turned down to the lowest possible volume without being completely muted.

You're- perhaps for the first time in your life- certain of your safety, certain of your invulnerability, but constantly feeling the weight of that secret armor which protects you. Secrets bind you to those who've trusted you with them, but separate you from those who can't know. The scrappers lie on television. They snarl and snap and rev their chain-bladed weapons and launch their hand-held rockets and bring murder and bedlam to every inhabited reach of physical reality. That's the lie. The truth is that they do it for us, not because of us.

We selfishly revel in the idea that our most horrifying mutant offspring could be bent beneath the yolk of society, blades and blasters lashed to their freakish limbs haphazardly. We think we control the scrappers, that we've taken savagery and put it in a box. But the scrappers are the solution. The one we've been collectively looking for for centuries unknowable.

In order to advance, life must evolve. Society stands in the way of change, but all sufficiently evolved beings develop societies. The scrappers are the neutral setting in this binary switch of evolution versus stagnation... and they know it. The Triumvirate knows it, and the bumbling bootlicking media blood-dogs like myself know it. But if anyone else knew it, it wouldn't work. Society would crumble. So the scraps go on.

After covering a match on Pavo III, the victorious scrapper once described to me what a scrapper does:

"Gino." He started with a slight slur through his insectoid mandibles, reforming his humanoid jaw with the snapping pops of reinforced plasticized cartilage. "A scrapper takes hate away from a society. He takes the war and the bigotry and the rage and primal need for bloody vengeance. He focuses all that aggression and negativity, acting as the locus of evil for an entire sector. He takes all that... all that bad and smashes the other guy's face with it.

"He protects the Triumvirate from itself. A scrapper is a sin-eater, a spring brushfire, clearing away the pathos so a new day can dawn. We're here to hate and be hated, so that the rest of the universe can do its own thing."

That scrapper's name was Whiskey. He died about ninety-one seconds after giving me that soundbite, which to this day sits in a datablock on my desk gathering dust. Brutal sport, scrapping. Very Greek.

I put this piece together... not as a primer. I don't want any newbie bootlicker taking a look at this. That would ruin everything. I want this as... a topic of meditation and maybe a record with which you can commiserate. 

When I'm gone, I want others in the corps to know that they're not the only ones who know. Bumblers unite. And don't forget to bring the beer with you when you sneak into the barracks. It's no fun to have to crawl through all that s**t, get in, realize you've forgotten the drinks and have to do it all again twice. It also tends to eat up a fair chunk of your night.

Reviews

[mark slade]

interesting story. i liked it a lot.