The Virtual Arena

Once I had rested I went to check on how the virtual prison was doing. To my surprise almost all of the creatures had been transferred into it and they were all accepting the story. Some of them, the slaves in particular were loving the new world so much that it was clear that if they were given the opportunity to leave they wouldn't, choosing instead to live free on this non-violent planet. As for the rest, our ally was doing his best to convince them that this was a good place for them and that they didn't need to continue their pursuit of conquering or destroying other life, it was clear that it would take a long time to fully convince them, but then again, they wouldn't have much choice. Once he had a moment I talked to our ally to figure out what he would need next in order to make this a more permanent home for them, to this he replied that removing violence from them would take quite a bit of time, but if there were a place they could go and fight against each other in a non-lethal way it might relieve the tension. For this I had an idea and I explained to him how gladiator battles were done back on our original home planet, the arena sounded like a good idea and so we got to work designing one of the virtual moons to have this feature for them, in order to get to it we would use a teleport system, that would limit them to traveling between the planet and the moon and not give them hope for escaping completely from this planet.

Setting up the rules probably took the most time, we also added features to keep track of the winner and who was the strongest among them based upon their victories. We added a pad where the loser would be reconstituted, that way there would be no death and an explanation for why none of them could die in this place. We made the rest of the moon simple and without any valuable resource, it would be explained that the aliens long ago stripped it of all these resources when they were developing their technology, however after realizing the destruction they were bringing upon their own planet they had abandoned their quest for further advancement and had used their ships instead to make a satellite station from which they monitored the stars around them, hoping to find other alien races and assist them in not destroying their own world and its resources as well. The structure on the moon would then be explained as an abandoned mining station, but seeing the need for something more than what the planet offered they prepared it for use by the creatures in order that they may not have to give up all they are but have a way to express themselves in the way that they seemed to do it best. Hopefully the ability to fight would be enough to make them believe anything they heard and they would just take it at face value. Once it was ready we opened it up and it was explained to them how it came about, some didn't even wait long enough for the explanation to finish and soon there were plenty of scores on the leader boards and much violent merriment on the moon. Having seen how well the prison could work I left the reality and got to work designing a more sophisticated virtual world for the next prison, this one would take a lot more work to make it convincing to its inhabitants.