Demonworld

by Kyle B. Stiff

  Sevrik pulled the Rabbit away from Didi, then crushed him in a bear hug and said, “Just make some changes, boy!” and pushed the man into the crowd. The Rabbit ran and plowed into a group of drunks, cheering even as they slid across the floor.

  Korliss and Sevrik laughed. “Even though they didn’t win the prime seat,” said Korliss, “they took nearly half the senate. And since their opponents aren’t unified, that means they control the government. Thanks to our help.”

  “Thanks to your help,” said Sevrik.

  “I spoke to many groups,” said Korliss, “but you two got my foot in the door with the scientists and the Guardians. And now that we’ve helped the rulers come to power, they, too, will help us.”

  The three were silent for a time, then Sevrik said, “We’ve always watched after one another. We’ve never made a move without the counsel of one another, and we’ve never been in a pinch that the others couldn’t help with. That’s... true friendship.”

  “And more importantly,” said Didi, “we’ve never dragged one another down.”

  “That’s what separates us from normal friends,” said Korliss. “We have strong egos; I’ve heard Sevrik say this many times, and it’s true. Our egos don’t need to be supported. They don’t need to be patched up. We’re strong, and we help each other become stronger.”

  Sevrik laughed and put his arm around the two. They watched the politicians dance and sing like children.

  “An alliance,” said Didi.

  “What?” said Korliss.

  “It’s called an alliance. Comparable to friendship. Different from friendship. More than friendship.”

  They looked at one another. Though the revelers danced and the horns and drums of the band blared around them, they seemed to sit within a shell of silent stillness.

  “Let’s make a solemn vow,” said Sevrik. “We’ve done well so far. You two have added more to my life than any other - and I want to do the same for you. Let’s make a vow of brotherhood, a sacred pact. An alliance.”

  “We’ve done a lot to help each other in our search for power and understanding,” said Korliss. “We need something more, though, in order to escape corruption. We need... an ideal. Something to live for, all three of us, as one.”

  “But all three of us are already idealists,” said Didi. “We always speak of our ideals.”

  “And what are they?” said Korliss. Didi and Sevrik knew that he was asking so that they could state them as well as he.

  Sevrik’s eyes hardened, and he said, “Pro-human. Didi advances human mastery of the world. You educate. I defend. We’re pro-human.”

  “But what does it mean, to be ‘pro-human’?”

  “To be strong at your core,” said Sevrik, “and to live as an example of good ideals that will strengthen your species.”

  “Not far from the ideals of the Founding Fathers,” said Didi.

  “And what keeps humans crawling on their knees?” said Korliss. “Why are we here, at all, discussing these things that should be self-evident?”

  “Weak ideals,” said Sevrik. “Weak ideals that lead to bad actions. And, also... the demon.”

  “We would not be hiding here at all,” said Didi, “were it not for the demon. And we would not be talking about this at all, were it not for the weak ideals that surround us.”

  “On this, we all agree,” said Korliss.

  “Let’s do it, then, god dammit!” said Sevrik, and he faced the others. “An alliance! Right here, right now - we think, we do, we speak, we make... pro-human!”

  “Okay,” said Korliss. “An alliance!”

  They both looked to Didi. He nodded once, sharply, and that was vow enough.

  The three allies knew they had stepped off the edge of some precipice. The world was now a blank slate, raw and unfocused, pure potential.

  Didi looked at the crowd once more. “The thing that strikes me as absurd,” said Didi, “is that we needed these undeveloped, buffoonish, power-hungry children in the first place.”

  ***

  At the end of the red hallway, the skull of the goat dominated Wodi’s field of vision. The black, empty eyes grew and grew. The icon of death was overpowering, a warning that endless darkness would take the life of any living creature that set foot near the forbidden place. The warning pulsed in his mind, hateful and evil.

  Wodi wanted to turn back. He knew that he would not have come at all if Saul had not pushed him to do so. But now Saul lay in a heap on the floor, and Wodi knew, beyond the pain and sickness he felt, that the thing before him was not evil. It was a mindless guardian, a protector of some kind of mystery. And on the other side of that mystery, there was…

  Power, Wodi thought.

  Wodi left Saul behind and took one step forward. Broken glass tore upward through his foot. He took another step and the air was full of fire, burning his lungs. He took another step and molten rock dripped from the ceiling, burning the flesh from his back, stinging his nostrils with the stench of burnt hair and meat.

  It’s not real, Wodi thought, closing his eyes to narrow slits. The flowers on the wreath aren’t burning. It’s playing with my nerves, my body… just like the tree up above!

  The mystery gave him power to walk through the gauntlet of fire and glass. When he finally drew near the skull, he saw that it was larger than the head of any living animal. The great horns of the skull stretched on either side of him. He reached forward…

  “Don’t do it!” a tiny voice rasped behind him. “Don’t! We shouldn’t be here! That thing is the king of the dead!”

  He stuck his right hand into the empty eye socket.

  It was cold inside, unnaturally cold. He laid his hand on a round, steel orb, and in that moment an incredible surge of biting power shot into him. He saw stars and smelled ozone. He stumbled back and held his burning hand to his stomach.

  “It’s going to eat your soul!” screamed the tiny voice. “It’s bigger than we are, it’s going to eat us and change us!”

  “Then crawl away and stay the same forever!” said Wodi. Frustrated, he reached in once more and grabbed the steel orb. Cold electricity shot through him; he winced and held tight, forcing the pain into the back of his awareness. As his knees buckled, the need to let go and the inability to give up wrestled in his heart. As if leaping from a great height, he gathered his resolve and jammed his free hand into the other empty eye socket. For one terrible moment he felt something mechanical sucking at his fingers, threatening to jerk the skin free and grind the bones to a pulp. Another orb lay inside and, because his legs gave out completely, he clutched the second orb so that he would not fall.

  The pain lessened as he held the two orbs. His body completed some kind of circuit and, while the orbs still radiated strange forces, they no longer had any wounding power. Soon the pain disappeared completely. Exhausted, Wodi leaned against the skull and breathed deep. Wodi felt as if someone were speaking to him, but he was deaf and felt only the breath of a whisper near his ear.

  Wodi felt the whir of unseen gears and the hidden door behind the skull slowly swung open. Harsh, white light streamed through the crack, and Wodi pulled his hands free to shield his eyes. The door opened onto a chamber of pure white light; there were no shadows and Wodi could not tell if there were any walls or if the door opened onto an infinitely vast chamber. He looked back and saw Saul crawling back the way they had come. Wodi stepped into the room of light.

  Complete silence. He felt the floor under his feet, smooth and solid, but no sound of footsteps ever left its surface. He cast no shadow on any surface. He looked at his hands; the details of dirt, blue veins, and networks of red fiber were jarring on the background of perfect milky nothingness. He moved his mouth to speak, but he had either forgotten speech or the sound was swallowed up by the white.

  Then something shattered. He heard the thunder of brittle steel snapping, and the white turned to darkness, and the silence fell before the howling of something like atoms rent asunder. Wodi tasted
metal on his tongue, felt something rushing into the pores of his skin, and he knew in the depth of his being that evil existed, and replicated itself, and did not change. He saw nightmares. His mind was a screen on which some mad god’s delirium was broadcast directly. He saw something like gears turning, gears of stars, gears of metal, gears of flesh. He heard the march of men armed for war. He saw the process of individuation come to a grinding halt as millions of minds were taken over by a virus, an ideology that unloosed a hatred that had lain pregnant within life for untold aeons. He saw one age come to an end, but there was not enough strength left in the world to begin a new age. He saw a black sun rising. The yellow sun died and fell into a sea of blood. Darkness triumphant. He saw animals born with flawed genes, animals with backwards elbows, animals with no skin and nerves punctured by thorns of bone, animals with painfully large eyes in their mouths, animals born pregnant and with lungs like oatmeal that could not handle air. He saw these animals form into humans, men and women piled on top of one another, writhing in pain and doomed to be erased by death for nothing. He did not know that the horrible cacophony of unnatural moans was the sound of his own voice, screaming and cracking in inhuman notes drawn out by insanity.

  There was thunder, a raging sound that warbled in chaos. There was a pattern in the crushing static. The thunder spoke.

  WAS THE FIRE IN THE PHILOSOPHER’S CAVE

  THE ONLY BRIGHT SPOT IN THE UNIVERSE?

  WAS THE ONLY LIGHT THE WARMTH OF HOPE

  AND THEN A SHIVERING SHADOW

  SOME FOOL MASTURBATING IN THE PALE LIGHT?

  DID OUR FIRST STEP

  CONTAIN THE DOOM OF OUR FINAL STUMBLE?

  HOW MANY LIE IN THE GRAVE ETERNAL?

  HOW MANY CORPSES LIE ABOUT HEAVEN?

  Wodi crawled backwards across the floor, swung an arm back, and it slammed into a wall. He felt about for cracks, for any way to pry open the door that had allowed him entrance. He found nothing.

  NOW YOU STAY AND PAY THE PRICE

  WHETHER YOU CAN AFFORD IT OR NOT

  SHOULD YOU PASS THE FIRST TEST BY WILL

  NO CHOICE BUT TO CONTINUE

  AND ENDURE THE SECOND!

  Wodi sat with his back to the wall and gritted his teeth. For one moment the white room returned but Wodi saw that the walls were made of glistening white snakes intertwined about one another. His stomach lurched, then darkness returned and visions of the world’s death came so mercilessly that he was no longer sure which time and place were a part of his reality. The thunder spoke again.

  I KILL WITH A MIRROR

  I REVEAL SHADOW WITH LIGHT

  I GIVE NIGHTMARES BY OPENING EYES

  I PROPHESY WITH HISTORY’S RECORD

  LOOK AT YOUR WORLD

  INCREDIBLE A MIRACLE WONDERFUL

  FROM GLORIOUS GEARS A THING WAS MADE

  TO SAVE IT

  DERAIL IT

  The thunder shifted into a low rumble. The room brightened once more and Wodi could make out white pillars spaced in a gently curving pattern. Colors flickered within the pillars, moving as a pattern, then fell back into white. Wodi sat and recovered for a long time, heart racing and aching. Within the thunder he could dimly make out a range of quiet voices too numerous and spread out over too many ranges of pitch for any single voice to be understood.

  Finally Wodi said to himself, “Where am I?”

  Immediately one voice in the thunder answered.

  WE MOVE, WE DO NOT KNOW THE RULES

  WE DANCE, WE DO NOT HEAR THE MUSIC

  ARE WE NATURE’S MISTAKE?

  BORN TO FEED THE DEMON?

  ARE WE THE LARVAE OF GOD, THE ANSWER TO WHY?

  “Is this place,” said Wodi, slowly, “the insides... of some sort of god?”

  THE NAME OF GOD

  IS GCTA

  AND THE DARK ONE’S NAME

  IS SPELLED THE SAME

  The pillars flickered and shifting patterns turned into moving images, a record of something that had happened in this very room. Wodi saw a short, bald black man walking. The man hobbled on a metal leg brace, and at once Wodi recognized him. Though he looked young in the record, Wodi knew him as the stooped and wrinkled Head of the Departments of Science and Research. Didi. The man moved and looked about, a different movement from a different angle in every pillar. In one pillar he even shouted in silent terror, then fell onto the floor and covered his face in his arms.

  “Why him?” Wodi shouted. “Why here, in this place?”

  A THOUSAND ROADS

  A THOUSAND WAYS TO WALK

  THE ONE PATH

  The scenes in the pillars changed. Now another man walked about. He wore the black and white jacket of a junior scientist of Haven, his skin was pale and his hair white, and his face was twisted in a hard scowl. Wodi did not recognize the man.

  “Why do you show me this?” said Wodi.

  CARPE DIEM IS A NIHILIST TREADMILL

  THE IDEAL THAT DOES NOT FLOW INTO TOMORROW,

  TOMORROW,

  TOMORROW,

  IS A CLOSED SYSTEM STATIC IN A SHUT GRAVE

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  GOD IS UNBORN

  THERE IS ONLY SEED

  ONE AGE CLOSES, ONE AGE OPENS

  I WAS THERE WHEN SEED WAS MADE

  NOW SEED IS PLANTED

  BUT THE GARDEN IS IN RUIN

  “I still don’t understand.”

  ARE WE THE LARVAE OF GOD, THE ANSWER TO WHY

  Wodi rose and walked among the pillars. He wondered if there were eyes watching him, recording him. He stopped at the far wall. He saw the cracks of another door set within the wall.

  “May I pass?” he asked.

  THE UNIVERSE DOES NOT REWARD POTENTIAL

  Wodi pushed against the door, knocked on it. “Open, please,” he said. “Open, door.”

  The voices in the thunder were only chaotic rumbling.

  “How do I open the door?” said Wodi.

  Now the voices dimmed altogether. Wodi wondered if they still spoke, but so quietly that he could not understand, or if the hushed rumbling was only his memory replaying the sound.

  “Is this the third test?” said Wodi. “To open this door?”

  Silence. Wodi turned away from the door. Then his blood chilled, for he saw that the entrance had reopened without his knowing. The red chamber and the wreathed skull stood before him. It took a long time before he could gather his nerves to step toward the red room. Finally his anger and frustration boiled over, and he said, “The demon take you!”

  The voice of the thunder returned with violent force.

  THE DEMON IS GENETIC BLASPHEMY

  IF EVER ONE ENTERS MY PURITY

  BURN I WILL, AND

  BURN... YOU... TOO!

  Terrified, Wodi shrieked and ran from the flashing white room, through the door of the skull, through the red room, and back into the natural cave. He ended up shuffling on his hands and knees. Back in the darkness, going through the motions of survival, his memory of the chamber in the cave seemed unreal, a nightmare, a side effect of the tree’s drug, and it began to slip away from his conscious awareness. He began the work of forgetting.

  Strangely enough, despite his terrible fear, some small part of him wanted to return. He laughed, and did not understand why he laughed.

  ***

  Thirty Years Ago: The Birth of Project

  “Behold!” said Korliss. “The greatest video game every made!”

  Didi held the controller and stared intently at the monitor. The two watched as a rugged, long-haired young man raced across a frozen wasteland with black, forbidding mountains on the horizon.

  “Don’t try to sway me,” said Didi. “I’m not one of your wide-eyed students that can be bullied with a word.” Didi gasped, then put his character into a defensive posture as a rider on a giant wolf drew near, watching him with red glowing eyes. Korliss wondered what his friend would do next. Gods of Thunder was marketed toward the thirty-to-forty-something
gaming elite, with a deep story and a punishing learning curve that did not reward bravery until the third act, when the player finally unlocked his character’s potential as a reborn god with fantastic powers of creation and destruction at his disposal.

  “I’ll admit, this is fun,” said Didi, cycling through his character’s inventory. “I’m just glad that you were able to balance your University duties alongside your work with the Entertainers on this game.”

  “Boredom is hell,” said Korliss. “For me, it’s a lot easier to stay busy than to relax.”

  “Still,” said Didi, “after a hard day’s work in the lab, it’s nice to relax with about seventeen hours of solid gaming.”

  The door to Korliss’s apartment swung open and Sevrik stomped inside. “What are you boys up to?” he said.

  Korliss glanced at Didi, then said, “Didi’s playing a new game. Come and see.”

  Sevrik watched the hero charge at the wolf-riding fiend. “Graphics look dated, color palette is uninspired,” he said. “Let’s play Dome Cleaver. I’ve just put together a combination that arms the Mad Monk with the philosophy of Amor Fati that I can guarantee will whip the tar out of anything you can throw at it.”

  “You knucklehead!” said Korliss. “This is my game that I’ve been working on for months, and all you can say is ‘the graphics look dated’?”

  Sevrik gritted his teeth and Korliss studied his face intently. Didi’s character staggered under the assault of the wolf rider, then rolled to the side just as the enemy flung his spear out in a killing blow. “Now, you know,” said Sevrik, “that judgment was in my brain only a millisecond before it left my mouth. But, Korliss, why go for the scaled progression model of character development? Games that use that tactic can be really slow, really tedious.”

  “I wanted the player to constantly upgrade his character along multiple lines of power. His body, his items, his status – all increase through hard work. That way he gets the feeling that development comes through overcoming difficulties. Isn’t happiness a result of challenges overcome and the feeling that power is increasing? Not only that, but giving the player a character who’s fairly weak early on can only add to the joy of wielding power later on.”

  Sevrik laughed, then said, “Perhaps, but it could also reinforce the idea that autistic focus along clearly defined paths can result in victory. Shouldn’t the people be reminded that overspecialization and weakness go hand in hand?”