NBA Dramatique: I Am The Law

They were punks. No respect for authority. No common sense. No concern for anything or anyone outside of themselves. He was not impressed. Hadn't been for a long time. If you coaxed it out of him with the right combination of beer and conversational collusion, he'd probably admit to hating them.

He was one of the Overlord's Regulators. Had been since before most of the current soldiers had even been born. His job, his purpose in life, was to make sure war remained an honorable and noble method of power transfer. But that task grew harder every year, because these thugs today didn't know what honor was. Wouldn't know noble if it bit them on the ass.

He watched now as two armies fought against one another. The Legend's Legion defended their Fieldhouse from the attacking forces of King James and the Royal Battalion. Crawford blew air out of his mouth and shook his head in ridicule. This guy was no king, he thought. The Legion came from a land with a rich tradition of war. Their mentor and lord was true to his name - a legend. Crawford could respect that guy. This kid, though...

Maybe "King" James wasn't really so bad on his own. If he had come up through the ranks under the watchful eye of the Legend, the kid might really be something. If he had come up on 7th Avenue, or if he had been trained within the stone walls of the Bastion, maybe he'd be alright. But armies these days didn't make soldiers the right way anymore. There were ways to do things right and ways to do things wrong, but somewhere when he wasn't looking, people started to confuse the two. Even the Overlord and some of the other Regulators got it wrong a lot of times.

See, armies are supposed to be human. They're supposed to live by the blood pumping in their veins and the hunger eating at their guts. They're supposed to have instincts. The blood and the hunger and the instincts are the things that should drive men to the Prize, not Machines. But things changed. They let the brainiacs come in and start screwing with things. Now it's planning and strategy. It's calculating. It's not war - it's math and head games. It's damn cyborgs.

(Crawford knew an old story, and he had every reason to believe it was true. He had heard that there was a young fighter, a real smart and powerful kid. That kid was in the hopes of a lot of armies, but every indication was that he was going to the Bastion. Then the kid vanished. Disappeared. But what was really funny about the whole thing, was that right after that, some tycoons started to spread the news that they had developed the perfect warrior. They said that they had trained a young athlete and wired him up, made him both more and less than a man. The Machine was born. The whispered part of the story though was that the Machine's prototype cyborg fighter was in fact the Bastion-destined young warrior, kidnapped and made a guinea pig for science. It made Crawford sick.)

Well, the more the Machine won, the more armies tried to be like the Machine. Now they had little mathematicians and robot-wanna-be advisers spread throughout the warring nations. The One Who Wished He Was King had a few characters in his court that Crawford suspected might be a little too mechanical, if you catch the drift.

Crawford knew that his job was to maintain order and fairness. He also believed that his job was to uphold the honor of the War, and that sometimes meant giving order and fairness a nudge in the right direction. This battle was close. Too close.

*****

It was a dive, and Crawford drank alone. He sat in a dark corner where he would not be recognized and listened to the broadcast tell of the war he had affected last night. A few other people were in the bar, drinking and smoking and shooting pool. The cell phone in his pocket began to buzz. He answered with the push of a button.

"Yeah?"

"Joey, you made a lot of noise last night. King James is not what I'd call 'low-profile.'"

"So, what's the fall-out this time?"

"You got lucky. No fall-out. Vizier Brown was so incensed that he was arrested for inciting a riot. His temper-tantrum effectively took the heat off of you. But you're not always going to be that lucky, and picking such high profile targets is a bad idea."

"Did you make the Vizier pay?"

"Twenty-five K."

"Good." Crawford pressed a button to hang up.

He drank his beer and thought about the War, and felt like a hero.