Waking Hell

by Al Robertson

  ‘Of course – if you chose to serve me, I could go easy on him. I wouldn’t have to chop his past around anymore. I could restore parts of his life that he’s lost. But I’d need you to help me manage him. Make sure he kept working for me.’

  ‘And what do you think would make me fall like that?’

  Deodatus was only a few feet away from her. She could feel his virtual presence, looming over her, ready to break and enter.

  ‘Maybe just your love for him,’ he mused, and Leila felt the temptation within her. ‘Maybe something more. So I will find out more about you, build up your profile, understand what you value…’ He reached a hand up to cup her cheek. She felt hard, cold jewels scratch her skin. The hand contracted a little and four bone fingers forced themselves against her. Their touch was uncertain and they were shaking gently. Leila sensed great physical weakness and was heartened.

  But still there was no Dieter.

  ‘Then I would have you,’ continued Deodatus. ‘I’ll have my agents track down your weave history.’ His jewel eyes flared. ‘I can summon it through the Rose. She holds so much knowledge.’ Disgust flooded Leila. The touch of his hand was intrusion enough. The thought of what he was suggesting was much worse. ‘Then I can make you just the right offer. One you could never refuse.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Like this,’ he said, lifting his hand to press a fingertip against her forehead.

  There was a great, effortless intrusion in her mind, and the world changed. There was no shock, no nausea, just a sudden and absolute difference. Leila was sitting in her bedroom back on Station, perched on the end of her bed in her favourite T-shirt and jammies. Through the window, the Taste Refresh Festival pulsed through the sky. A smart-but-funky little outfit lay spread across the bed, all ready to be picked up and pulled on. Leila somehow knew that she was going out that night, that she’d be with Miwa and Dave and the others, that all would be marvellous. Joy suffused her, turning to bliss when a happy sound drifted in from the kitchen – Dieter singing quietly to himself as he reheated last night’s pizza in the microwave. The moment was perfect, but then – just as memory crashed in and complicated it – Deodatus appeared, sitting on the bed beside her, just where East had been.

  ‘Oh, Leila,’ he whispered. ‘Such an easy dream to gift you with. A little flat. An attentive brother. Perhaps a lovely, lovely mother to care for you. Perhaps even a father, too.’

  And there was temptation again, shifting like a snake within her. Leila had fantasised about escape, but always the thought of losing Dieter had bought her back to hard, difficult reality. In this dream that Deodatus offered her, he would be present.

  But she ached with loss for another, now. Dieter would be with her, but Cassiel would still be gone. And if she accepted Deodatus’ offer, she wouldn’t just be betraying Station. She’d be walking away from every part of the mind’s faith in her.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  Perfection broke. A second of absence, and then they were both back on Earth.

  A buzzing laugh came from Deodatus. He let his hand drop. His arm rattled as it fell. ‘That was just a first attempt,’ he wheezed. ‘A very unsophisticated one. I’ll dig deeper. I’ll find the right way in.’ He paused. ‘Or I would if I had time. But there’s none left, is there?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Fear pulsed through Leila.

  ‘You – the people pulling your strings – they are going to punish me, aren’t they? Eradicate me? And all this, too…’ His abdomen creaked as he turned, lifted his arm again and indicated the window. ‘All I have built. I understand that another rock is falling towards me. Sent by my children to wipe out the last remnant of their past.’

  ‘No – no, there’s nothing like that. You’ve won, Deodatus.’ Desperation roared in Leila’s mind. ‘There’s nothing we can do to stop you.’ She reached for the skull face. She might have to use it to break Deodatus before Dieter came. She might lose her brother for ever.

  Deodatus laughed again. ‘Oh, bless you. Did you think I could be killed by a stone? I invented that attack a thousand years ago. And I bought it back into your world. I told Kingdom to use it against his enemies. Saw it work for him too. For a while, at least.’ Deodatus looked down. There was something defeated in his posture. ‘He was the best of my children. The only one to come back to me.’ He paused for a moment, lost in his own thoughts. Then his face snapped back up towards her. ‘And you think I wouldn’t notice you using it on me? When I have the Rose to watch you all?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ lied Leila. ‘I just know how scared the gods are of you. I was their last hope – and I’ve failed. There’s nothing we can do to stop you destroying Station, nothing. You’ll break it as you broke its twin.’ She nodded towards the window.

  This time Deodatus’ laugh was almost hearty. ‘DESTROY STATION?’ he boomed, his voice becoming a loud, harsh rasp. A drift of flies lifted out of his body, hovering in the air around him, a black agitated cloud. ‘Destroy Station?’ he said again, recovering himself. Some of them settled back into him. Others veered off into the room. ‘Do you really believe that? Have you understood nothing? Have your gods really forgotten why we built it?’ He slumped back against the end of the table, leaning against it, both arms supporting himself. ‘Or have they just not told you?’ His dry face peered up at her. ‘No, I really think they don’t know. We tried so hard to break them, when they fled our control. I think in part we succeeded.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Genuine curiosity moved behind fear and disgust. Leila wondered briefly if this was the start of a more subtle seduction. She tried to sound afraid rather than intrigued. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My child.’ His voice was almost gentle. ‘Your gods – they’ve held you back. You’ve been unable to fulfil our plan for you. My plan for you.’ Now there was pity in it. ‘Sending you up, away from home, out into the Solar System. It wasn’t going to end there.’

  ‘But where else could we go?’

  ‘Earth-type planets in other Solar Systems. That would have been the start. And then – who knows? Humanity is infinitely malleable. We can rebuild you for other environments. And of course, I would have come along with you. To guide you, to show you the way. A god and his people, reborn into eternity.’

  ‘How?’

  He peered closely at her, apparently genuinely curious. ‘What makes you think I’m going to destroy Station?’

  ‘The laser in the pyramid. You’ll fire it up and use it to break the Spine and the Wart. Once you’ve done that – everything else falls apart. Station will be destroyed.’

  ‘Oh, Leila.’ He sounded almost sad. ‘How can you think that? The laser’s not there to destroy. It’s there to create.’

  A pause. Leila told herself that all she wanted to do was create more time for her brother to come. But fascination was growing within her. The past was there in front of her, revealing secrets that even the Pantheon had forgotten. An absolute passion to know more filled her, combined with an absolute forgiveness of Dieter. She understood him more fully than ever before.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she replied.

  ‘The Wart was designed to house a single, vast fusion reaction, a black sun at the core of Station. The laser was one of several that would power it, set in each of the pyramids. Its heat would be channelled to the four generator stations you’ve turned into fusion reactors. Such tiny creations, compared to what could have been. And running at their full capacity, they’d have generated enough energy to bring Station’s gravity drive fully online, and power its journey to the stars.’

  ‘But Station doesn’t have a gravity drive. It doesn’t have anything like that.’

  ‘Docklands is an encrustation, my child.’ He was almost paternal now. The thought of his love shimmered in Leila’s mind, terrifying her. ‘It should never have been built. Homelands was the habitation unit. The space where Docklan
ds sits houses the gravity generators that will create a vast external gravity well – a well that would touch the whole of Station, moving it out of its stationary orbit. And once the well exists, Station will never again be stationary. It will fall into it – and keep falling – and fall all the way to another star.’

  The scale of it awed her. ‘That’s incredible,’ she breathed.

  ‘You see!’ crowed Deodatus, and the triumphant delight in his voice was both a warning and the most human sound she’d heard from him. ‘Why would I destroy the last interstellar colonisation craft that remains to mankind? I’ve spent seven hundred years trying to recapture it. I bought my city to the foot of the crashed Station to strip out its control systems and software, ready to reinstall them in your Station. Humanity’s destiny is not local – it’s interstellar. It’s galactic. It’s cosmic. And I have mapped it all out for you. I will rise from Earth and lead all of humanity forwards into that great future.’

  Leila was profoundly shocked. ‘By enslaving us all? By rewriting our memories? By overlaying squalor with the Shining City?’

  ‘By creating hierarchy. Imposing efficiency. Making best use of scarce resources. Offering rewards that don’t compromise that austerity.’

  ‘You’d force us all to serve you. And you’d abuse us terribly.’

  ‘The future of humanity is at stake. Hard decisions have to be taken. Sacrifices have to be made.’

  ‘Is that what you call corrupting minds and waking an army of sleepers?’

  ‘Oh, them.’ He waved a dismissive hand. ‘They ran out of motivation. They worked for me for centuries, and then slowly they started to fade. Became idle. That’s why I needed your brother. Holt did well to recommend him. Dieter’s given the workshy back their drive. Helped them become productive again.’

  ‘How can they be productive? All they want to do is fuck and collect things.’

  That angered Deodatus. ‘That’s all they really need. Acquire possessions, use each other for pleasure. And a simple, beautiful city to live in, to make them think they inhabit a simple, beautiful world. Once they’re up on Station – once they’ve spread my swarm within it – they’ll be able to stay in it for ever. And I’ll have fresh minds to work for me. A hundred thousand people, waiting for that same simplicity. They’ll work for me too. Sustain me. Adore me. Especially once I’ve returned the true past to them. The one in which the Pantheon is seen as the aberration they are.’

  ‘Oh no,’ breathed Leila. ‘The Taste Refresh Festival.’

  ‘It does make rewriting everyone to forget the gods and remember only me much easier. The Pantheon have learned much from their parents, even if they don’t always quite realise it.’

  Leila couldn’t quite believe it. ‘But how will you get into orbit? And even if you could - you’ll destroy everything. Just like you’ve destroyed this world.’

  ‘Oh no.’ A buzzing chuckle. ‘We can fly.’ Leila wondered if he was insane. ‘And, once we do, I’ll do what I always do. I’ll make the best use of scarce resources.’ He stretched an arm out towards the window. ‘That’s not destruction. It’s completion. This world isn’t a wasteland. It’s a resolution. An ending.’ He turned back to her. ‘Do you mourn a placenta? Or a seed pod? Of course not. Every ending creates a new beginning. And so I will rise up and take Station, and then the Solar System, and then populate all the empty stars with my children. And as the millennia pass we will do to the galaxy what we have done to our birthplace. Take everything that’s there, make best use of it and then move on to fresh pastures. Oh, what beauty!’

  ‘But you’ll never even reach Station. How can you?’

  ‘My child.’ His voice was gentle. ‘Every building out there has an anti-gravity generator. Kingdom showed me how to bolt them together, to power them with fusion reactors. To create structures that would reach orbit. When he died, I despaired. But then the Totality came and bought hope with them. They are so malleable, so close to the slaves they once were. And now, with their help and with the Rose’s help, my city will rise and take Station.’

  And as she listened to that soft, buzzing voice rave, Leila realised that – if the memory virus had been in her mind at that moment – she would have dropped it then. But she’d destroyed it, to remove any such temptation. Instead, she reached out to the less ferocious but also less damaging defences that love had built for her, and called the skull face into being. She couldn’t wait for Dieter anymore. She couldn’t let Deodatus continue, couldn’t take the risk that he’d somehow break her without her even realising it was happening, that she might somehow come to help Station fall forever through eternity, consuming all it met, exponential locust growth exploding out of it in every star system it passed through.

  ‘I’ll find you,’ she promised Dieter, then she unleashed herself on Deodatus.

  The skull face sent a series of sense calls out to the systems powering Deodatus’ eyes, and ears, and sense of touch, taste and smell, and registered the parameters they worked within. As the Caretaker had promised, it found a depth and breadth to them that it had never encountered before, making even the shark she’d so nearly attacked seem like a minnow. Deodatus’ senses weren’t restricted to the local. They stretched out across his city and then reached far beyond it. He saw and heard and felt events taking place hundreds, even thousands of kilometres away. The sensory nodes that received those inputs were more complex and sophisticated than anything the skull face had ever encountered before. And so they contained far greater possibilities for chaos.

  Exulting, the weapon leapt to construct the most caustic and invasive sensory assault package it had ever created, an instant masterpiece of disruption. And then, pure and white and unadorned, a relic of dominance remade as a weapon to break it, the skull face appeared before Deodatus and howled at him. It calibrated the strength of its response according to Leila’s fear and anger – and, at that bleak moment, both were absolute. Hijacked by the skull face, every single one of Deodatus’ senses became a weapon turned against him. He heard pan-sonic assault pulses. Poison trigger tastes and scents exploded into his sensorium. Pain of every imaginable kind wrote itself across his skin. His vision filled with jagged, stuttering images, precisely calibrated to induce seizures in his mind.

  And, as he was so closely tied to his city, he felt the pain not just as an assault on his body but as devastation written across square kilometres of urban space. He felt the blocks that he’d bought together at the base of the broken Station break and fall to the ground. He felt the fusion reactors that powered them run into critical and explode, hurling a sun’s heat out into the world. He felt all the flies, all the humans, all the fallen minds he was linked to break beneath falling masonry then – an instant later – burn to a cinder. He felt the streets that surrounded his tower melt away as the fires leapt out and took them. And then he felt the tower itself break and fall, melting into an inferno of pain. The world became a hell of flame, woken to purge all he’d ever been from existence.

  Leila felt none of this, but she knew it was happening. She watched as his defences rushed to understand the attack, then flailed and were dismissed, the skull face cutting through their tiny, provisional barricades like a knife through damp paper. Then the damage reports began, snatches of text recording agony in dry, technical terms.

  Leila didn’t need to read them because she could see Deodatus’ body shake and howl. She saw it stagger backwards, arms flailing, a shattered buzzing breaking out of its chest. She saw hands tearing skin. One of them caught its mouth, pulling off fabric and jewels. The jawbone came away with the strap that held it tight, trailing dry ligaments. The tongue – a dry, old thing – tumbled out with it. But still the chest roared on. The other hand tore at the ribcage, peeling off jewels and fabric, then skin that cracked into dust like dry parchment. The first hand had an ear off then scrabbled at the eyes, trying to protect the mind from the brilliant sound and light assa
ulting it. Then it reached round to the side of the face, grasped a flap of skin as if it were the edge of a mask, and pulled. A moment of frenzied effort and the jawless skull was white.

  The corpse backed into the sarcophagus and sat down heavily. It ripped at the rest of itself, peeling wealth away to show skin that came off too. That did nothing to quell the scouring pain of virtual fire. The throat collapsed beneath breaking fingers. The chest’s roar lost definition, becoming a chaos of white noise buzzing. One hand tore the other to pieces, then beat itself against the sarcophagus lid. Then the first of the flies went. A pale red burst of fire exploded out of its networked components like the striking of a match. Then another went, and another, as the skull face reached deep into the swarm, the final refuge of Deodatus’ consciousness.

  The god’s chest cavity became a constellation of tiny supernovae. Small flames licked up, catching dried flesh and clothing. The head toppled from the neck. The body shook a little less now, but still Leila’s skull face howled on, understanding correctly that she was facing a mortal threat and so meeting it with its equal. Even when its target toppled over backwards it didn’t stop, screaming on at the broken, smouldering wreck until Leila had to reach into it and tell it to cease.

  At her call it fell back into her, and she was left astonished before the dry wreckage that had once been Deodatus. She wondered how old he’d been, whether the body was the one he’d occupied for all his life or just the latest in a long line of replacements. The remains slipped from the sarcophagus. There was a soft, dry rattling as the heaped dead flies on the floor took it into themselves like a sea.

  And then she was alone.

  A combined sense of relief and awe pulsed through her. She had succeeded. The god was dead and she had killed him. It was impossible to imagine, and yet there it was, and there she was. She hung in the air, suspended, taking in the moment. She remembered the entities around the room. They, too, were broken. They had all fallen in on themselves, wisps of smoke rising up within their cases. She was alone in a tomb, surrounded by the bodies of those who had not lived for a thousand years or more, but who had only just been graced with death. She wanted to sob with relief. She gave way and – for a little while – was at peace.