Disability Wars

The charging of Professor Stephen Hawking's former nurse for abuse, pertaining to their time caring for the late physicist, leaves me wondering whether said abuse involved his participation in some kind of gladiatorial contests for the disabled?   Yeah, I know, we're heading back into bad taste territory here, but bear with me.  I've always had this suspicion that such things go on: a sort of cross between Fight Club and Robot Wars, where teams, or more likely families, enter their wheelchair- bound disabled relatives into a knock out contest to find who is the toughest.  Obviously, not all disabilities are equal, so the use of technology is involved to even up the odds.  You know the sort of thing: buzz saws or hydraulically operated axes and machetes attached to the electric wheelchairs.  They'd undoubtedly have to be armoured wheelchairs, other wise the contests could be over pretty quickly.  I mean, imagine if one contestant had a huge electric drill mounted on their chair and their opponent had only a cricket bat, well, it would be no contest, would it?  All over in a couple of turns of that drill.  Anyway, I always thought that Professor Hawking could be a knock out, so to speak, at this sort of thing.  After all, as a scientist, he'd have been able to come up with pretty radical weapons to strp onto his wheelchair.

I could just imagine him deploying stuff like an electromagnetic pulse device, which could knock out all the electrical systems in a rival's chair with one blast, leaving them at the mercy of his laser gun.  Or perhaps he'd have some kind of mini-missile launcher with which to blow opponents to smithereens.  (Obviously, being a scientific genius, he would have designed some sort of inertial compensation system to deal with the recoil).  All of which is why I envisaged his nurse entering him in such contests.  I'm sure that big money rides on these competitions, with Far Eastern betting syndicates placing huge wagers on their outcome.  That nurse could have cleaned up with Hawking as a contestant.  After all, a lot of the competition would be bound to be a bit crap - you know the sort of thing: short fused packages of explosive on the end of long poles, in the hope that they can 'drop the bomb' on an opponent before it goes off, or ineffective spring loaded knife throwing devices.  The more I think about it, the more complicated these contests seem.  If we restrict them to just people in wheelchairs, then there would be accusations of discrimination.  Would the solution be to allow all contestants to use wheelchairs, just so long has they have some kind of physical disability? Because a contest between a guy in an armoured wheelchair and a bloke with a walking frame would be completely unbalanced.  There would also have to be precautions to stop unscrupulous teams from sticking corpses in wheelchairs, then controlling them remotely - with no living person in the seat, they would have infinite endurance, being impervious to damage.  It might be bad taste, but there's no denying that it could be an intriguing prospect.