“You realize,” Scop says, “that there will be no turning back when we get onto the field, that from that moment forward everything we do can move us in only one direction? We must kill them all, the Blues, we must kill them to the last one because otherwise they will kill us.” Is he reaching them? He cannot tell. “Do you want this to be a Blue world?” he says. “Do you really want to feel that in the generations to come the Greens will have perished from this earth? Is that the legacy that you want to leave?”
They look at him without comprehension. He knows that the concepts are too difficult for them, the words too puzzling but he had hoped that a certain mood could be conveyed, a level of feeling to which they would respond. Sometimes it is not so much meaning as rhythm which can energize them. Also they are not as stupid, he believes, as everyone takes them to be and at a certain level they take in everything. They can be reached. He has to believe that anyway; his presence would be utterly futile otherwise. “All right,” he says to them, a sudden chilling sensation that he is a fool choking himself, “let’s go out then. There is nothing else to say.”
They move away from him pounding their gear, moving toward the corridors in a flourish of movement that does not conceal that they are merely responding to verbal cues. There does not seem to be any feeling in them. There does not seem to be any interaction either; what has been said of them is true, they are not social creatures, know nothing of relationships, may not even be conscious of one another as living beings because of the conditioning that has taught them that they are machines and that their one purpose is to destroy those of other colors. Scop alone in the corner now watches them go, realizes that they are utterly outside of his ability to reach them but that this is no insult to him; they are outside of anyone’s ability. They merely perform their dreadful actions and die but none of it has anything to do with human persuasion.
Well, he thinks, well, it might have something to do with the culture itself. It is a barbarous, mechanistic construct in which he lives; the purposes of the machines are at all times greater or at least clearer than the purposes of the populace who lives entrapped within them and it is pointless to look at the Gamesman as anything extraordinary; he is simply, stripped bare, the final and most typical product of his culture. As he walks down the corridor, following them through the close concrete and into the arena it must be that the thought comes to Scop for the first time: the thought that the entire culture is ruinous, barbarous and insane. It is not just the Games. The Games are merely that point at which the culture asserts itself most clearly, at which it is easiest to see exactly what is going on here. But the Games do not matter except as diversion. The trouble is that he, the Gamesmen, everyone . . . they are living in a culture which is completely mad.
Then he must change it, Scop thinks as he walks slowly up the steps, staggering a little at the simplicity or then again it might be the complexity of his insight, then if this is truly the case then it must be changed and it falls upon him to change it. Ultimately responsibility must descend upon the individual who will take it; it cannot be shirked once acknowledged. If the culture is mad and he has seen it clearly then he cannot let it go by; he must do everything within his power to change it.
Wondering how he can possibly change it Scop walks upon the field hearing as if from a great distance the sound of the shifters roaring as the teams take their places to the side and doffing their superficial gear prepare for death.