Shutdown (Glitch)

of the entryway opened up and people fanned out into the wide aisles that surrounded the huge domed stadium on all sides. I was pushed forward and made it through the doorway just as a second horn blasted.
    The crowd around me roared. I pulled away from the crush of bodies, trying to feel around frantically to find Max. But people were moving so quickly, pouring in and then filling their seats. It was impossible to try to determine which moving body among the hundred didn’t have a visual match. I looked around frantically. Hundreds of rows of seats surrounded the oval pit sunk fifty feet below. Layers of balconies hung over each other for even more seating. Lights from the domed top of the arena blazed so brightly it looked like daylight, and huge screens were mounted along the walls.
    I pulled back out of the crowd and stepped onto a raised ledge running along the bottom of the wall outside the entryway. At least this way I could get out of the flow of foot traffic. No one had noticed me, but only because I’d been lucky. I watched for a moment to squeeze back through the entry. But people kept streaming in, and I worried that if I tried to push back against them moving in the other direction, someone would notice something anomalous this time.
    A third horn sounded, and the crowd responded with deafening noise, jumping to their feet, screaming and yelling and whistling. I’d never heard anything so loud in my life and covered my ears. The screens filled with images of Regulators and detailed stats about their hardware additions and kill records. I shuddered. I hadn’t known it would be Regs fighting. It made a twisted sort of sense, I supposed. They wanted to pit the strongest fighters against each other. Who better than their police force of Regulators with their metal exoskeletons and hardware enhancements? They were still human underneath, but years of training and programming had converted them into killing machines.
    Then I thought about Cole, one of the Regulators-in-training I’d rescued when I first escaped the Community. I’d been able to crush his V-chip and sever him from the Link, and he’d fought hard to regain his humanity. It was his personal mission to help other young Regs-in-training we captured do the same. Like the rest of the population, once Regs got the final V-chip installed at eighteen, they were lost to us. The Rez still hadn’t found a way to remove the invasive adult V-chip without killing the person, in spite of countless attempts. Still, if Cole knew the details of this spectacle in front of me, he’d be horrified. These Regs had been programmed to fight for no other reason than for the sick entertainment of a pampered crowd.
    A countdown clock started, and the crowd chanted along. “Ten! Nine! Eight!”
    From the ledge, I could see over everyone’s head down to the oval not far below. When the count got to zero, a large set of doors opened at one end, and a hulking figure walked out to the center.
    I couldn’t help but stop and stare. It was a Reg, that was clear from the metal that glinted in the arena lights. But it wasn’t an ordinary Reg. Metal spikes covered his back. At first I thought he was wearing some kind of armor, but as the large wall screen zoomed in, I could see he wasn’t wearing a shirt at all—the spikes were embedded along his spine. Bits of flesh peeked out from the metal woven into his musculature, but unlike normal Regs, he looked more machine than man.
    I forced myself to look away from him. I had to find Max. I looked at the people streaming through the door, wondering if I should chance pushing through them all anyway.
    Then at the other end of the stadium, a door opened and five more Regs came out, each of them with more strange and terrifying additions. One had a giant steel battering ram for an arm, another had heavy swords instead of hands. The ear-splitting horn sounded again, and the five raced toward the spiked Reg. The ground of the arena was covered in metal plating, and the huge thunk, thunk, thunk of their heavy sprinting footsteps echoed through the arena even above the sound of all the cheering and screaming.
    The Reg with the battering-ram arm reached the spiked Reg first and launched himself forward with his hydraulic-reinforced legs. The spiked one had jumped too, twisting in midair so that his back was turned to his oncoming enemy.
    The Regs met in the air with a giant crash. The spikes sliced through the exposed belly of the