Romance novels!

My God.

He shut off the audiobook and stared at the house. He wondered how long he’d have to wait.

March relaxed, sat back.

What interested him about gladiators, of course, wasn’t the erotic side—hetero or homo—which was a product of Hollywood and, apparently, popular publishing. No, it was the institutionalization of death that was so captivating to March.

History taught, history explained. A man can’t be judged by one day; you have to examine his whole life to see trends, to see who he really is. The great leveling of time.

Mankind in general, the same.

And the world of gladiatorial contests had informed Antioch March’s being. The combat itself was interesting and complicated. It began in a very modest form as a tribute to a deceased relative, called the munus, a fight between two or three professionals, sometimes to the death, sometimes not. Eventually Roman officials combined the munera and noncombative entertainments like sporting events, popular with the citizenry, into gladiatorial (the word referred to “swordsmen”) shows.

A lifelong fan of video games—he still played them regularly to relax—March had decided to create one himself. It would be about gladiatorial contests, a first-person game, where you see the action as if you were participating in it. The enemy comes at you and you must fight for your survival (or, as in some of the games, you sneak up behind your foe and slit his or her throat). Thanks to books like the one he was listening to, and other research, he’d learned all he needed to about the contests themselves. The next step would be learning how to craft video games. He’d played them, many to the end, for nearly twenty years and had a good idea of how they worked but he would have to learn the mechanics of putting one together and finding a computer person to help.

He spent hours fantasizing about the game—and imagining what it would be like to play.

He even had a title: The Blood of All. It was from a poem, perhaps by Catullus, a paean to a particular gladiator, Verus, in first-century Rome. He knew the last stanza by heart:

O Verus, you have fought 40 contests and have

Been offered the wooden Rudis of freedom

Three times and yet declined the chance to retire.

Soon we will gather to see the sword

In your hand pierce the heart of your foes.

Praise to you, who has chosen not to walk through

The Gates of Life but to give us

What we desire most, what we live for:

The blood of all.

He’d worked on the game off and on for years. If it became a hit, of course, he’d have to be careful to remain anonymous. A game designer would get some publicity and he supposed it wasn’t good for someone who spent his days doing, well, what he did, to be too much in the public eye. But then he figured that the project wouldn’t draw a great deal of attention to him—not like a famous author. He’d never have four hundred people at a book signing like Lemme-Outta-Here Richard Stanton Keller had tonight.