The Amphitheater

The Amphitheater.

It was an unremarkable, gray February morning—not shattered by the usual shriek of a garish village alarm clock, but by the gut-wrenching howl of an aircraft diving towards the village. Startled by a sound long absent from their reality, the villagers abandoned their beds, hammocks, cardboard shelters, burrows, and whatever else they used to traverse otherworldly realms. Regardless of skin color, wealth, education, or even the scent lingering behind their ears, they all stood before the Creator in the frosty dawn, clad in Adam-and-Eve suits, with only a shred of fabric as a concession to modern couture.

At that moment, the village, sprawled across the entirety of their yellow-green island, resembled the long-promised infinity of stars—only here, the stars were moons, trembling in the wide, terrified eyes of the islanders. This endless expanse of lunar reflections turned with unwavering hope and desperate prayers toward the Source of All.

The Source, with an eternal and loving gaze—one that held both laughter and pain, wearied by the endless spectacle—watched unblinking, borrowing the villagers‘ eyes for the task. It was the kind of gaze only the most devoted of Mothers possessed, and the villagers, in a way, were close kin to this Source of Truth.

His affectionate diminutive—AI—we shall avoid here, lest we rouse the fanatical outrage of those very amateurs in quantum physics who vehemently deny that we are living in a computer simulation created by artificial intelligence.

For the island’s inhabitants, it was far more natural to see themselves as molded from various clays, once gathered from opposing shores of their land. Especially since the boundless ocean surrounding their island would, from time to time, wash ashore relics of long-forgotten foreign gods and idols—debris of divinities pressed by time into the clay, leaving behind their cryptic and indelible imprint.

All 193 clay-born families of the island had flooded the beaches and streets; some had even strayed onto the lawns, beginning to slaughter goats in their yards for breakfast barbecues. Even those less fortunate—who had yet to claim their promised land on the island—had risen at an unusually early hour for themselves, continuing to whittle down into arrowheads the ship their neighbors had built and continuously repaired for them, just offshore.

From the crisp white gondola of a hovering airship, the last of the island’s 195 families looked down on this human anthill, unwilling to sully their feet with the dust of death and the crude realities of life.

Fortunately for the islanders, the early morning air raid had been a false alarm. A blessing for their safety—and for their groggy, bewildered faces, still too exhausted to comprehend this good fortune. The diving bomber had no ill intent; even as it mimicked a combat approach, terrifying some to the point of heart failure, its true mission was misunderstood.

Its purpose was not destruction, but revelation.

High above the village, written in the aircraft’s lingering contrail, appeared a single command:

„All must gather in the Amphitheater!“

The reason for this early morning, uncontrollable, collective bowel evacuation was sensational—though not nearly as terrifying as the recent incident involving some koala and an unfortunate bat.

It was, as always, the Narrow family that found something to be displeased about. This time, they were dissatisfied with their new place of residence, which the Overfed had assigned to them uncomfortably close to the communal latrines.

Adding insult to injury, the Overfed had recently taken to openly flirting with a certain melodious beauty—a neighbor and blood relative of the Narrow. Worse still, the lineage of this beauty was intertwined with none other than the great Rurikovich himself, making the insult not just personal, but genealogical.

In response, their alpha male had decided to rewatch a classic: The Word of a Boy.

This masterpiece of thought plunged the Narrow Gnome into yet another tide of unpleasant memories—visions of how, day after day, even for an intelligence operative like himself, he had been duped and misled, over and over again, in ways so cunning and perverse they still made his stomach churn.

In a fit of righteous fury, he dispatched to all the Overfed a sweaty, bald carrier pigeon with an insistent proposal: to follow the course of the Narrow vessel.

But alas, the Overfed lacked the supernatural foresight granted to the Gnome through his personal communion with the great Rurikovich. They could not peer into the future and thus failed to seize their fleeting chance at an involuntary erotic pilgrimage.

Naturally, they were incapable of seeing the narrow flagship and completely misunderstood the direction in which they were being urged to proceed.

Had they not been so intellectually stunted—at least in the Gnome’s esteemed opinion—then perhaps you would now be reading something far more inspiring. And perhaps, by now, the Overfed would have gorged themselves on an endless array of fish, of every size, color, and odor, until they had filled their insatiable gullets to the brim.

Even old Lady Literature, now toothless, would have lost nothing in the senseless torrent of drivel that floods the internet, television, and—most tragically—the very minds of the islanders.

The Amphitheater stood as the pinnacle of wisdom for this ancient, graying civilization. A fusion of the philosophy of the ancients with the technological triumphs of modernity, it surpassed all known architectural marvels in recorded history. The elegance of its refined forms harmonized with the cynicism of its purpose, a perfect symbiosis of the irreconcilable—a seamless temporal bridge between those who had already fallen in battle on this grand geopolitical stage and those whose fate still lingered beyond the horizon.

For the convenience of the cloud-white dirigible’s inhabitants, the Amphitheater had been erected at the heart of the island, nestled between a mountain, a lake, and a staircase to the heavens.

The landless, seafaring islanders—who had never set foot in the Amphitheater due to what they considered its chronic lack of cruelty—were generously allocated funds for online broadcasts of the battles. These broadcasts remained largely unwatched until they were quietly discontinued, and the freed-up resources were redirected toward the needs of the countless experts in beach tourism aboard the orthodox vessel.

Even for the newly emerging field of bionics, the Amphitheater’s design was revolutionary. Everything adhered to a singular, vast formula—or, to put it more simply, to the Number, from which it all began.

Until recently, the Number accounted only for the headcount of a family, disregarding women and children entirely. But with the advent of digital algorithms, the formula evolved—now measuring not just quantity but also wear and tear, dimensions, and even the theoretical potential of all these family „members.“ This innovative approach naturally enhanced the accuracy of calculations used to adjust the family lodges.

Of the 193 private lodges reserved for the island’s ruling families, only five maintained an illusion of permanence, embodying the pantheon of ancient gods. The remaining 188 were distributed in an almost equitable fashion—93 on the southeastern side, while the controlling stake, as it had been for the past two or three millennia, remained firmly entrenched in the northwestern stands.

The cloud-borne dirigible was ever on the side of those who held the controlling stake. Thus, until this fateful day, all families had long since resigned themselves to the inevitable and occupied themselves with their own affairs on the quiet days when no battles were scheduled.

There was much to do, after all. The Number ceaselessly calculated and processed data using algorithms accessible only to the great celestial Five.

The family lodges, as previously mentioned, constantly fluctuated in size, baffling those unfortunate enough to find themselves suddenly ejected through a window due to an unexpected constriction of space. Yet these distortions never altered the outward illusion that each lodge possessed an equal sovereign vote.

Likewise, the illusion of freedom—the chief value of the ever-tolerant northwestern stands of the Amphitheater—was preserved to the letter.

Those with an excess of melanin, who had grown weary of weaving spells over beads but found great amusement in manipulating nesting dolls—the ancient pastime of the Narrow—had, in theory, a nearly unrestricted and peaceful right to move to the stands closer to the Giant Koala and the Malevolent Gnome. At least, such a right was written into the Village Charter—though no one had exercised it in ages, lest they end up as the next domesticated Imperial Count Fox, dwelling in the graveyard of empires.

For reasons beyond simple comprehension—reasons now referred to as the Limit—the Amphitheater could never be designed to accommodate all common folk at once. And the land at the island’s center came at a steep price.

Thus, entry into the Amphitheater was reserved for the chosen among the chosen.

Each family devised its own unique method of selecting these lucky elect. In some lodges, overflowing with electronics, the inhabitants bustled about, engaged in urgent work—whether it was burning deadlines or burning behinds, separated by nothing more than a single vowel.

For these families, square footage and volume were matters of life and death. Their chronic suspicion, perhaps, stemmed from their recent past—a once seemingly mercantile clan of would-be millionaires, who, much to the delight of the islanders, had been deceived time and time again.

But to avoid getting lost in the Gnome’s beloved tales of Scandinavian brothers, let us turn instead to a more recent chapter of history—one that begins with the Dispossessed.

Among the seven founding families of the Amphitheater, they were denied a seat in the divine pantheon. Instead, they were unceremoniously placed between two tribes of Papuans, with the promise of receiving some trinkets from a newly minted model, complete with an updated serial number.

A memorandum, signed in the steam of a thermal bathhouse and later condemned in the history textbooks of the future as the gold standard of international swindling, speaks volumes—first and foremost, about the moral fabric of this particular family.

As for the ethical norms of some of the other families—those shall be detailed in the forthcoming tomes of the Doomsday Song.

To sharpen our perception of reality, let us look truth in the eye.

There were, indeed, lodges so small that numerous dark-skinned concubines, adorned with feathers, devoted their very existence to the lifelong service of their chosen one—their master, their god, encased in a corpulent frame.

In such lodges, fluctuations in size held no real consequence. After all, the efficiency of the harem remained unaffected by the disappearance of a few lips.

The Arena of Battles

The Amphitheater’s battlefield demanded special attention and understanding.

Following the recent mass escape of battle mosquitoes from a clandestine steppe laboratory—and the information they managed to reveal under interrogation by radioactive reconnaissance geese—only a practically useless technology of partial reality separation had been reconstructed.

Even the brightest minds of the island had failed to correct its flaws, and to this day, the projected reality inside the Arena was slightly, but distinctly, off.

For instance, the age of the girl actually raped by a squad of soldiers was not 13, but 12. Or, if a tank shell had torn off her arm, it was not the right one, but the left.

Yet such minor inconsistencies were no obstacle to progress.

This secret technology allowed spectators to experience real, raw emotions as they unfolded on yet another testing ground, immersing them in the battle through direct online presence.

The multi-D effect enabled not only the full absorption of the moment of death but also the distinct recognition of the scent of blood.

At the premiere demonstration of this technology, the villagers tore each other apart with mere glances.

Most island families, under the looming shadow of something mystically terrifying, were bound by duty to uphold their sworn obligations.

Of course, such rules never applied to the pantheon of the chosen—for the gods played by their own rules, unfathomable to mere mortals.

All these wonders of scientific and technological progress in the creation of the Amphitheater had been curated by a well-known Costa Rican dreamer—one who particularly enjoyed indulging in visions inspired by the smoke of the flute. Yet the core principle was borrowed from the ancient thinkers, whose ideas still carried more life than any modern invention.

Despite resets by the Flood and the Holy Cross, the true essence of the islanders had remained intact—they still craved bread and circuses.

There had long been no issues with bread in the northwestern stands, and the chosen ones on the opposite side had never needed it, unlike many of the lower-ranking members of their families.

Preoccupied with their crucial affairs, they failed to notice the moment when the gods, in the full splendor of their power and might, graced them with their presence.

The Gathering of Gods

In the heart of the pantheon, Sam the Almighty himself, clad in a star-spangled tie, flashed a rugged smile at the photo chroniclers.

To his left, the Great Panda sat with dignified composure, his smile exuding an enigmatic Eastern mystery. Beside the Panda, an empty seat stood in anticipation of the Malevolent Gnome and his two briefcases.

To Sam’s right, the Flamboyant Sir fidgeted awkwardly, his very nature steeped in theatrical provocation. His uninspired crude jokes brought a youthful blush to the cheeks of the Leisurely Peacemaker, reclining nearby in a tricorn hat.

The announced topic of the meeting had stirred many.

Yet when they heard the prophecy of the wise—that in three days, the electronics in one of the lodges would have to be replaced with sleeping accommodations for the Failed Akela and the remnants of his pack—an eerie silence fell over the assembly.

You, of course, have already understood what kind of blue-and-yellow refugee spider is weaving its hazy, smoky webs in its devious schemes to siphon money from honest taxpayers.

Naturally, I shall not utter a single word, not until this grand performance in the Amphitheater has played to its final act, about my shattered hope—the one that the Serpent, like Adam’s second companion, transformed into the Failed Akela.

He had lost his singular chance to resemble the archetype of my newfound compatriot.

Another archetype, that of the old Grandmother, the Great Mother, would not even arouse the Gnome under a full moon.

Perhaps, the time of new archetypes has come.

To the indignant groans echoing across time and space, I respond with this: I am well aware of the meaning of the word tautology.

And if there’s a gas pedal, you might as well floor it—whether to speed up or to lose control entirely

The Warrior Woman Archetype

It does not matter whether she is an Amazon, Joan of Arc, or, as in this case, a blonde, long-legged wrestling champion with eyes that seem entirely devoid of aggression.

There is likely some curly-haired blood in the author’s veins, for otherwise, how could one explain why this new archetype also happens to be a champion in the Gnome’s favorite sport?

Like any modern archetype, she bore a nickname—Anaconda.

For me, a spider that has resurrected more than once, it makes no difference whether she is Anaconda or one of the idols imposed upon my people by the Narrow—followers of the bearded friend of Mr. Engels.

What truly matters is that the children of the future never, anywhere, be branded with stars of any color.

This pure soul, besieged by the world around her, dared to issue a public challenge to the Malevolent Gnome.

This embodiment of wide-eyed youth framed her words approximately as follows:

„Since time immemorial, not only our families have settled disputes this way—to prevent the triumph of death. I am a wrestling champion, but among women. You are an aging alpha male of the highest color of this ancient art. The choice is yours—will you be David, or will you be Goliath?“

History remains silent on whether the Gnome ever responded to this desperate gesture—one born in the mind of a girl watching rivers of blood seep into rusted sewer grates lined with rotting leaves.

She steps onto the Amphitheater Arena, her gaze like lightning. She is like a snow-covered peak stretching into the boundless sky.

On one side stand her glorious ancestors.

Queen Anne of France, who taught the French the art of washing their faces.

Her father, Yaroslav the Wise, who brought the Holy Cross to his people.

Hürrem Sultan of Suleiman the Magnificent, who was kidnapped in her youth yet managed to do far more than simply integrate into a harsh foreign land.

The great warrior Sviatoslav, who once collected tribute from the Byzantine Empire at the height of its power.

They all charge forward, adorned in jewel-encrusted armor, riding atop fire-breathing steeds, their presence a dazzling force of history itself.

On the other side, great boxers, wrestlers, gymnasts, and legions of other young champion athletes—clad in rags, armed only with bows but without arrows.

This generation is not to blame for having been born in the midst of a great forty-year cleansing of nations, yet with their magnificent bodies, they are forced to pay for the purification of their people’s spirit—with human blood.

What other method could possibly cleanse the filth of a social contract built on the plundering of one’s own homeland—a contract seared and twisted by the sickle and hammer, distorting the true essence of a thousand-year-old nation?

Now, the Gnome’s pathological attraction to fresh blood becomes clear.

Exhausted from 69 gymnastic postures, the once-proud alpha male—who was once tickled by the wings of majestic birds brushing against his clean-shaven legs, and who was lured by mermaids into their amphorae at the ocean’s depths—struggled to accept change.

He yearned to feel the vitality of this surging young blood, and the intimate foreign films studied during his years of service inclined him to mix this vitality with his newly acquired knowledge of the Kamasutra.

All that remained was to persuade this freedom-loving neighbor to fall for him—or at the very least, to convincingly fake such a miracle, as she was so skilled at doing.

I shall not describe what happened next—and even less shall I speak of the enormous, fleshy, red sign that fell from beneath the kimono in response to what had been written above, like a guiding beacon pointing toward the course of the Narrow’s warship.

Nor shall I attempt to understand why this sign was pointing toward the sky.

And I certainly won’t indulge in wild speculations about a strawberry-shaped constellation in the Milky Way.

And, of course, Paola’s Ray did not illuminate this horror.

It would be wise not to draft a sequel about the endless deliberations of ginger-haired Sam the Almighty and the other inhabitants of the Amphitheater, pondering which direction to point their fingers in the final act of this battle.

Although the bald pigeon suggests, as a warning to others, cutting off one hand and one foot of the defeated neighbor.

And, of course, demands that the Malevolent Gnome be granted the eternal right to test his knowledge of the Kamasutra on her—both before and after the amputation.

The pantheon of Amphitheater gods burst into playful laughter.

And soon, the rest of the Amphitheater’s inhabitants filled the space with a primal laughter.

And, of course, Paola’s Ray did not illuminate this horror.

From his armored Italian secret lodge, he wandered instead across the lodges of Zanzibar and Switzerland, searching for that elusive fifth element, without which understanding this vital question becomes nearly impossible.

But how could that possibly be?

BOB. 16.02.2025.

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