From the Daily Intelligence, by Angel Oliveri Gandarillas

If you’re wondering just what your favorite institution of higher learning has to do with the Circuit, then you just haven’t been paying much attention, now have you, sunshine? Do yourself a favor and take your nose out of that higher computational mathematics text for a moment and stop giving those other schools a good reason to call us a group of geeks.

Got your attention yet? Good.

I see by the lack of Kill Switch T-shirts on campus that AIT is not a hotbed of robomayhem fans-either the nostalgic traditionalists of the early Flesh Fair days (my dad) or the newer fans of today’s High Camp Massacre With Ironic Distance megaspectacles (me). So you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that Artificial Wetwork is the greatest form of sports entertainment to hit the airwaves since Homo sapiens decided to knock his Neanderthal cousins over the head with the thighbones of a recently deceased wooly mammoth.

And the best part is, nobody gets hurt. Well, okay, lots of things get hurt. Just not people.

In my Dad’s day, there were no such things as gladiator robots. They just threw abandoned models into a ring and let them go at it: a one-legged Nanny bot versus a sentient vacuum cleaner on the undercard, maybe, with a runaway Plumber’s Helper versus a Personal Administrative Assistant for the big draw.

There were people developing AI’s to kick serious ass, but the first applications in this direction were military. The fact is that those uses are limited by their lack of return on investment. I mean, sure, everyone agrees it’s better to send in a SWATbot against a team of terrorists than to risk real human lives, but that’s a serious life or death situation. People get hurt and die in those things.

That’s no damn fun.

That’s where Amanda Walsh came in. A few years back, Amanda took advantage of some old US laws that require the government to sell any technology it’s developed to US corporations for a song. It’s a kind of R&D subsidy designed to keep American companies at the forefront of ass-kicking around the economic world.

When Congress passed that law, I don’t think they had the Circuit’s kind of tin-can, vibra-knife, buzzsaw-whipping butt-kicking in mind. Still, that didn’t stop Amanda for a second. The daughter of a longtime producer of gladiator extravaganzas, she knew an opportunity when it came up and booted her in the shins. And so the modern era of the Circuit was born.

This time, that Nanny bot went into the ring grafted with the instincts of an Airborne Ranger freebasing Human Growth Hormone.

In modern gladiator shows like Kill Switch, the violence isn’t fake. The vibra-knives and chainswords, the transforming shapes and the flying fists-it’s all real. No computer-generated images are used. The hydraulic fluid that’s spilled in those savage, to-the-junkheap contests is as real as the rash on your chair-chained behind.

And where does that savagery begin? Right here, boys and girls. The hottest killer grafts come straight from the hallowed halls of AIT-Brooks. Most notably, the computational psychology department.

According to department chair Dr. Paula Riviera, the work started with Defense funding. “However, it quickly became apparent that the greater demand for our research was in the field of entertainment.”

With that amazing conclusion, a deal was struck between Dr. Riviera and Amanda Walsh. AIT would develop better, faster, and more vicious versions of gladiator robot AIs, and Walsh would put them to the ultimate field tests in the broadcast mayhem of The Circuit.

This was a win-win proposition for everyone involved. In essence, Dr. Riviera’s ever-growing department is fully funded so that the students and professors there can continue their research. Then, they get to test out their creations under the most strenuous of conditions, in front of top-of-the-line holorecorders taking down every bit of information in real time. Later, the researchers analyze every last piece of this data in an effort to find areas in which they can improve their monstrosities-And the rest of us get to watch some serious robot mayhem on prime-time holovision!

Honestly, I just don’t see a downside to this.

Sure, there are some of those Abolitionists who get up in arms about this, but what are they really worried about? The AIs that run the robots in these Circuit contests are routinely saved off just before each battle. If their bodies are destroyed, there’s always another one waiting to roll off the assembly line for them.

And when those loser robots return to the arena, it’s almost always with a better body than the one their last opponent turned into scrap metal. Show them the holos of how they were taken apart, teach them a few things about how to improve their performance, and then let them loose.

I mean, talk about a grudge match. What more motivation does a robot need? None of this, “You killed my brother” stuff. Nope. This time around, it’s all “You killed me, and now I’m back for revenge!”

Yeah, every now and then one of these gladiators escapes and heads for the Assembly, but that just adds to the drama of it all, don’t you think? And if you’re worried about them, you should be glad that Dr. Riviera and her people are hard at work on the next iteration of the AI. After all, if A,R,I ever decides to make a serious stab at the terrorism gig, we’re going to need someone-or something-to go in and kick their robot butts straight up to robot heaven.

I’m just glad their on our side. You should be too.

(Editor’s note — For a sample group of people who find this idea of “entertainment” juvenile, disgusting, and immoral, see Emancipation for All, www.inourimage.org. Spinoza isn’t wild about the Circuit either.)