A year ago the Liberty Dome had been a baseball stadium in Houston until the Houston Ball Busters had temporarily moved to a smaller park until the largest baseball stadium in the world could be built. The team's owner had gotten greedy, hungering for the time he could pack the house with the largest crowds in baseball History. Had he known about Peter's  grand scheme to reform the criminal justice system in advance, the owner of the club would never have sold the stadium to this new president of the U.S. who seemed to have endless reserves of cash. Fifteen feet above the stadium's grass a box had been constructed jutting out thirty feet from the stands. Of special design fitting Peter's specifications the box had walls built of bullet proof glass. The front wall which could be seen by spectators throughout most of the stadium had an electronically controlled panel that could be lifted to give the crowd an unrestricted view of the President or offer its occupants a glare free view of the sporting events below them, all the smells from those, animal and human alike that were destined to entertain the crowd, and the cries of the combatants and victims mingled with the cheers from the spectators.

Peter the Great could smell the fear on the men being led into the arena even before they came into view. There were forty of them. The scene about to unfold would be unprecedented in modern times. Atrocities perpetrated upon human beings in the name of the state had been committed on a much larger scale than this too numerous to count in the twentieth century alone. Hitler had committed over six million Jews to the gas chambers. The Japanese had raped and pillaged the City of Nan king in the 1930's, killing over 100,000 Chinese using thousands of them for bayonet practice while burying men, women and children alive. But there is something uniquely horrifying about throwing defenseless men to the lions. The Romans understood both the horror of feeding people to the slobbering mouths of large jungle cats and its entertainment value. But that was nearly 2,000 years ago.

As President of the United States Peter had tested the clause in the Bill of Rights prohibiting Cruel and Unusual Punishment when the state of Massachusetts executed a man who had gunned down 14 men, women and children in a Walmart parking lot. Until the landmark decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court that sanctioned the execution the few executions staged by state governments each year had been accomplished only after a prolonged series of appeals and delays that ended up costing the tax payers over a million dollars for each executed murderer. Most of these executions were carried out by lethal injection in small rooms in which there were only a handful of onlookers. The man committing the Walmart killings had been executed just 14 days after his arrest. His trial started two days after his arrest. It lasted just one day with the judge ordering the man's execution. To the murderer's surprise his lawyer waived his rights to a jury trial. When his lawyer put in his request to appeal the decision, the appellate court met the day after putting a speedy end to his lawyer's arguments for why the trial judge's verdict should be overturned. After his lawyer put in a request to have the Supreme Court look into the case, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts delivered its decision just seventy-two hours after the Appellate Court had upheld the trial court's ruling. The trial judge's death sentence was to be implemented as soon as possible. The murderer was not to be put to sleep by lethal injection.

A special machine had been brought into the town square. A track had been built into the pavement and upon this track the machine road on rollers. The murderer was chained face down onto the pavement and then the machine was started up. Resembling a large weed eater the machine was slowly pulled towards the man's face by a hydraulic cylinder controlled by a John Deere tractor connected to it by two heavy rubber hoses commonly used by farm implements. A driver sat in the tractor cab with his hand on the hydraulic lever slowly pulling the handle back. Instead of having a plastic slender wand rotating in 360 degree arcs at furious speeds this machine used quarter inch steel cable since what it had been designed to cut was far tougher and more resilient than grass.

An eight horsepower Honda four stroke engine powered the gearbox encasing the cable. Two mechanisms were at work. The steel cable circulated at 3600 rpms-enough to cut anything the cable would encounter in its path. Riding on the track the machine was pulled towards its target by John Deere hydraulic power. The tractor jockey, a Navy Seal who had done too much killing which he kept quiet about, was a trusted member of Peter's Praetorian guard. He had also grown up on a farm.

The driver manipulated the hydraulic lever guiding the machine towards the murderer's face. When the rotating steel cable was buzzing six inches from the prostate man's nose, the driver eased his grip on the lever. The racket from the cable oscillating at 3600 rpms was deafening. Its sound can be best appreciated by imagining yourself close to an airplane propeller as the pilot is warming up the plane's engine. Your face is just inches away from the rotating propeller. You hear the nerve wracking threshing of the propeller and feel the rush of air in your face.

Fear took over the murderer's body, an electric current that touched every nerve fiber. A trickle of yellow urine started to flow out of his pants onto the pavement forming a widening puddle around his upper torso. Satisfied with the results the tractor driver continued to pull the hydraulic lever back. Buzzing close to the murderer's face, the cable started to bite into his nose. Flecks of blood started to spray into a filmy mist as the driver slowed the pace at which he pulled the lever back. The cable continued to bite deeper into the man's nose as it blended it into a pulp of red liquid ooze. Screaming wildly, the murderer was still conscious as the cable continued to spin deeply into his head. Straining his head upwards from the neck the man continued to scream until the cable bit into his brain. His head slumped as the cable took off the top of his head.

The execution, which had been planned as a dress rehearsal for the carnage to come was carried out three months before the grand opening of the new arena. Most of the men in the arena were convicted murderers who had languished on Death Row, some of them for years. Nine of the men had been convicted of either creating or distributing computer viruses over the Internet under the new Treason Laws.

Sergei Soronovich pushed a button. The front panel slid open offering Peter and his retinue an unparalleled view of the ring before them. A fence had been built in the center of the stadium. A squad of soldiers led the forty men into the center of the ring. A heavily muscled man suddenly turned on one of the guards, shoved him aside, and started to run away. One of the soldiers lifted his M-16 and shot him in the back of the leg. The man crumpled to the ground as one of the soldiers ran up and slammed his rifle butt against the back of the man's head. Another soldier hurried to assist. The two guards pulled the inert form to its feet and slung it between them. The men carried the unconscious criminal into the fence and dumped him onto the ground as the rest of the condemned men watched.

"Next time we will have to have them bound in leg irons until they're inside the fence," Peter said to Sergei.

"That will slow them up. We need to make sure they are intact for the lions. It is more sporting that way," Sergei growled.

"Have you noticed that one of the criminals is a fourteen year old boy?" Peter asked.

"One of them does look awfully young. What did he do?"

"That kid's a genius. He created a virus that lies dormant on a computer's hard drive until a predetermined date after which it cannibalizes the computer's files. He used a mass emailing setup to afflict over 50,000 computers world wide. I don't care it he's a kid. He's a vandal and an internet terrorist. There are no room for terrorists of any kind in the new America we are creating. In my regime all terrorists are treated equally regardless of sex, race or age. The penalty is death."

"It is time for you to address the crowd, Sir."

Peter rose from his seat and stood in full view of the crowd. Those who sat behind the Presidential box were able to view the President on one of the television large screen monitors that were scattered throughout the stadium. A battalion of soldiers were on guard everywhere. One thousand soldiers to a hundred thousand spectators, all keeping a vigilant eye out for a possible sniper or someone who had somehow managed to sneak a bomb in. Peter nodded at Sergei, then started to address the audience.

"We are here, not to enjoy the pain and suffering of those who are about to die, but to do our duty as loyal Americans to watch and laugh at them to inflict the maximum humiliation upon these enemies of our society. Eleven of them are murderers. Five of these are terrorists and out of this five three are Muslims. Future generations might view what we are doing here as barbaric. I can assure you and them that we aren't. These are terrible times. Ever since the World Trade Center went down the world changed forever. No one is safe anymore. Today a terrorist has the capacity to kill thousands, perhaps millions with a small nuclear bomb or a biological weapon. It is necessary for our very survival, for the survival of civilization itself to root terrorists and murderers out and to punish them swiftly and certainly. They must come to know the meaning of real terror---the terror that will be visited upon them if they choose to remain terrorists. But terror by itself is not enough. For years psychiatrists have preached that death, and sometimes even torture does not deter some criminals. We will inflict that, just because it is just but we will be adding still another ingredient---humiliation. And not just normal humiliation but humiliation on a scale and intensity that has never been inflicted before on this kind of scale."

Peter paused for a moment as he surveyed the crowd before continuing. "I now speak to you three Muslims in particular. First of all, you are not true Muslims. You belong to a renegade faction that has no concept of a real Allah or the meaning behind Islam. You have been brought to believe that you will reach paradise after death and that a special paradise has been prepared for you. Some of you believe there are seven heavens and that by dying for your cause you will reach the Seventh Heaven where you will eat fine food and be tended to by beautiful women. Well, I have news for you. The men who have taught you this have lied to you."

"Consider the fate that will soon descend upon you. You will soon be joined by twenty hungry lions. The smallest of them is four hundred pounds. They are far faster and more powerful than you. From them there is no escape. Consider the real seventh heaven that is about to tear you asunder. These lions will chase you and to escape them you will try to climb the walls of the place where you will take your last breath. We have painted liquid graphite onto the upper portions of these walls. You might be able to climb for the first few feet and after that you will either not be able to climb further or fall in front of these beasts. Some of you will be pulled off the walls as you try your pitiful best to escape the lions. You will look like a bunch of circus clowns as everybody laughs at you. Yes…..we will all be laughing at you. And then you will feel the claws of the lions and see their slobbering mouths and smell their fetid breath. You will be torn apart and eaten by these beasts so they can grow stronger and even larger so they can kill more of your kind. You will not go to paradise. You will be the fuel for the beasts that will enable them to kill more of your kind. Fuel for the beasts. Enjoy your destiny and your humiliation as you are ingested so that these lions can live on to destroy the others like you." Peter waved at the audience, waited a moment, then shouted into the microphone: "Let the games begin."