by Martin Kee
“They’re preparing a demonstration of the facility, so naturally I had to come,” he said. “It’s a big day. Now maybe you should tell me why you’re here. How are you not dead?”
“Should I be?”
“Well, yes, you should,” the archbishop said. “John, you were last seen being kidnapped from the city by some madman from The Wilds.”
“I wasn’t kidnapped,” said John. “I was—” He stopped short.
“You were what?” Christopher asked.
John took a breath. “I was looking for Skyla.”
The archbishop glared at him for what seemed like a full minute. He flushed, then said, “I thought we discussed that, John.”
“I know we did, but… well, I came into some information that led me to believe that she might have headed here.”
Christopher laughed. “John, why didn’t you just ask? I would have arranged a visit. Didn’t I tell you myself to come see this place?”
“I know, I know,” John said. “But… well it was more than that. There was a girl murdered.”
Christopher’s face became sullen. “The Montegut girl.”
John nodded.
“Yes, a tragedy that one,” he said. “It’s a shame her murderer got away.”
John looked at the archbishop coldly. “Chris, I think she was killed through inquisition.”
Something shifted in the archbishop’s eyes. “So you saw the corpse? When was this?”
“On my way here,” John said. “The man I was with discovered the corpse. We wanted to make sure it wasn’t Skyla, but then we realized that the way she had been tortured—”
“John,” the archbishop leaned forward. “How do you know that the murderer wasn’t that very man who showed you the body? You could have been killed.”
“I… I just knew okay?” John said, somewhat embarrassed. “Look, I know it was rash. But listen… the marks on her. It was like an illustration from the Dark Ages. She was killed by an inquisitor. I saw the marks myself.”
“And what if she was?” the archbishop said.
John blinked. “What if—Chris, what are you saying?”
“If the Pope himself required it, would you not do what had to be done? A mandate from the Lord, John. Consider that.”
“A mandate—Chris, it’s murder,” John’s hand had begun to tremble. “In this day and age?”
Christopher stood and cleared his throat. It was the sort of thing John had seen him do when preparing to lead a sermon. He stared at the door.
“Skyla was living for a decade right under our noses. She attended school, went home, lived with her mother. Nobody could touch her. Have you ever asked yourself why that was?”
“I…” John stopped. He hadn’t really ever considered that. “I’d spoken to her. I’m sure other people had as well. She was bullied.”
“But nobody ever captured her,” said Christopher. “Why do you think that is?”
John slumped into his couch. “Lucky I guess?”
“Or would you say, ‘protected’?”
“Sure… I suppose. What are you getting at? Protected by what?”
“John,” Christopher said. “It is not our place to question the Reverend Summers and his tactics. He has been mandated by the Pope himself. Not you or I can question him. But understand that it is because only he can see through them. Only he knows ways to trick their kind into betraying the trust of one another. The rest of us are simply tools in God’s hands.”
“I don’t understand,” said John.
“The only way that girl could have allowed anything to happen to her was to invite the trouble herself. She could have lived in plain view and nobody would have even looked at her.”
“I refuse to believe that she wanted to get beaten up at school, Chris. She’s eleven.”
Christopher held his hands out. “Maybe she was testing her limits. Her mother made her go to school. Maybe they wanted to feel normal.”
“But they weren’t,” said John. “Nobody let them forget that.”
“John,” said the archbishop. “The only way that anyone could have seen that house was through an invitation. The only way anyone could have put a hand on that girl was through an invitation.”
“So, you’re saying she invited The Reverend to burn her house?”
“No, John,” the archbishop said. “Not her.”
“Well, then what are you saying, Chris?”
“All I’m saying is that maybe the Montegut girl wasn’t as innocent as you think.”
John’s mouth hung open as if he had been slapped. “She was twelve. I don’t understand how you can justify this.”
“Under the city-state edicts regarding unethical and heretical texts, she was guilty enough that The Church would have sanctioned it anyway. The fact that we had an opportunity to gain valuable information—”
“What information?” asked John. “What texts?”
Christopher waved away the questions, but not before John’s eye’s grew wide.
“She was friends with Skyla,” said John. “She was friends with her and knew where she lived. She could see the house. You tortured her to get at that house.”
“We are all tools of God’s Divine Will, John,” said Christopher. “We do what He asks of us unquestioningly.”
“Yeah,” said John, his mouth set. “I’m sure Melissa was unquestioning throughout the whole thing.”
Chris was about to respond when the door opened. A woman in a white Tinkerer’s coat entered. She held a glass of water which she immediately offered to John. He took it, still glaring at the archbishop spitefully.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, looking between the two men. “I must have come at a bad time.”
“Not at all,” the archbishop said, glad to be able to change subjects. “Laura Stintwell, this is Father John Thomas from the Bollingbrook archdiocese. It seems there’s been a bit of a mix-up with the detainee registration.” He raised an eyebrow.
“Yes,” she said. “There must be.”
“I don’t need to tell you what a tragedy it could have been—”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I apologize for the misunderstanding.”
The archbishop smiled. “Well, at least no harm was done. What do you say we show Father Thomas the gallery?”
They walked down the white hallway past other Tinkerers who gave John curious and sometimes concerned looks. He scratched at his beard and wondered just how often they received guests who weren’t prisoners.
“Are you sure you don’t want a coat?” asked Stintwell, with a sideways glance of concern.
“I guess the lost-in-the-wilderness look isn’t in fashion anymore,” he said.
“Father Thomas has been working in the field,” said the archbishop. “The Wilds are in need of serious assessment and culling. His research has been invaluable.”
John shot a stunned glance at the archbishop, who continued to stare straight ahead as the Tinkeress led them through the twisting white corridor. The lack of any straight corners or flat walls gave John the feeling of being unanchored from his own reality. He wondered if that was the point.
“Oh,” said Stintwell, looking interested in him for the first time. “I didn’t even realize people were ready to study so deeply inside the Flux. We would have sent someone to assist.”
“Not necessary,” said Christopher. He was deliberately not looking at John. “Father Thomas has done remarkably well in identifying the demonic presence there. The Church has been very happy with his progress.”
The hallway rounded a corner and terminated at a pair of double doors, barely visible against the whitewashed walls. Stintwell stopped and faced them.
“Well, then I’m sure the visitor’s center won’t be anything strange to you,” she said, eyes sparkling behind her glasses. “What’s your opinion of the distance variation of Flux destinations leading between the city-states? I was thinking that the previous breakdown in the sin engine’s reciprocator
had possibly overloaded…”
“Ms. Stintwell—” the archbishop interrupted.
“Dr. Stintwell, please,” she said.
“—Doctor Stintwell,” said Christopher, with a sigh. “I’m sure he’s still tired from his last romp in The Wilds. Let’s get him oriented and then we should be ready for a demonstration. Exciting times, John, exciting times indeed.”
The Tinkeress opened the double doors into an equally sterile white room. “Please follow me,” she said.
There were several rows of chairs and a table at the far wall, on which rested a large scrapbook. The walls were covered with small grainy black and white photographs.
“The gallery is just ahead,” said Stintwell. “Normally we do a quick orientation for new arrivals, but I’m sure you are familiar with the process.”
“Father Thomas doesn’t—” Christopher began, but was cut off.
“Father Thomas would like to know why confessionals are being used to hold people prisoner,” said John. “Father Thomas would like very much to know as much as possible.” He glared at the archbishop, no longer really caring if he was ignoring hierarchical protocol. Christopher returned the stare, but said nothing. John forced a smile at Stintwell.
“I’d like to see the presentation,” said John. “I think it would do me good after being out of touch for so long in The Wilds.” He gave Christopher a direct look.
Stintwell, taken aback somewhat, glanced at her watch. “Oh, well...” She walked over to a white section of wall. She pressed a button. “I take it you are versed in quantum theory?” She said.
“I uh… took some physics in seminary,” John said. “But I’m not sure where you are going with this.”
“But you know what atoms are, or has The Church banned that?” She smiled at the archbishop bitterly.
“No, I know what you mean,” said John. “They make up matter, molecules. They look like tiny solar systems.”
A section of the wall lit up, revealing a diagram with several concentric circles orbiting a central point, like planets circling around a sun. ”This is what you have in mind, I imagine,” she said.
John nodded.
“This is a model of a simple atom, but this is an oversimplification,” Stintwell explained. “The scale is much larger, but it isn’t the particles we are really interested in.”
John listened attentively. The image zoomed out until the nucleus of the atom was nothing but a speck. The circling electrons were only visible by the illustration of their paths.
“If you were to magnify an atom to the scale where we could see its parts,” she said, “the electrons would be a speck somewhere near the city of Arist.”
“That’s pretty far,” said John, watching the picture zoom out.
She nodded. “Does anything strike you as peculiar about that, Father Thomas?”
John thought for a moment, staring at the image. “Well, I’d be curious why they didn’t just fly away. Gravity I suppose?”
“That’s just the thing,” she said. “You see, these particles have no gravity, Father. How could they? They in of themselves don’t even have enough mass. What do you think keeps them together?”
John shrugged. “Maybe a charge… magnetism, I suppose. Maybe they just want to be.”
Stintwell considered this. “I’ve certainly heard stranger explanations.” She smiled. “But if that were the case, it would be like saying that the particles had a will of their own. But what I think you’re missing, Father, what we are really looking for is this…”
The image inverted, and John was now looking at a series of white rings over a black wall. He blinked as if finally seeing the forest instead of just the trees.
“The space in between the rings… the dark area.”
“Right.” Laura pointed to the darkened wall that made up most of the image now. “This space here isn’t actually vacuum. Dark energy and matter were once believed to make up ninety percent of all matter. By slowly eliminating this dark matter in the center, we think we might be able to measure and better understand it, understand how particles interact, what they really are.”
“But with nothing in the center, the negative space… or whatever you call it,” John said, “wouldn’t the particles just fly out into nothing?”
In response, she pressed a button and a new image appeared; it was a cartoon representation of a frowning figure, a glowing gingerbread man. The body of the man was composed of tiny red dots. A line slowly passed across the figure from left to right like a wiper blade, painting the dots blue as it went. The dots shifted behind the moving line then rearranged themselves again, like motes resting in a pool. A comically happy smile appeared on the man’s face.
“They actually collapse inward as the dark matter is removed,” Stintwell said. “But if it is done smoothly enough—like you see here, using a trained operator—there is little to no damage. Most of our inmates return to a fairly normal life.”
“The confessional?” John said, suddenly alarmed. “You use the prisoners?”
“They aren’t harmed in any way,” the Tinkeress said.
The archbishop interrupted. “The Clerics who work here help to rehabilitate the released convicts. It’s far more humane than hanging and much more efficient than jailing. The average inmate is only admitted here for a few days, then released back into the city as a productive citizen.”
“Not to mention,” Stintwell added, “we’ve been able to produce a remarkable amount of power this way. Rhinewall may very well be the most powerful city in the Western Archdiocese by the end of the year.”
Stintwell pressed another switch, and the wall returned to normal. She led them through a door and into the vast gallery. John stared wide-eyed at the size of it. A fifty-foot wall stretched upward, lined from edge to edge with photographs. The pictures were all no more than several inches wide, each one a grainy representation of a landscape or structure; people populated every photograph. There was something peculiar about them that John couldn’t quite place.
“One theory supported by the Vatican,” she said, glancing at the archbishop, “is that the soul is not in the mind or the body, but exists in the spaces not only between the atoms, but in between the particles themselves that make up matter.”
“Sounds like a tight fit,” said John.
“Not at all,” said Stintwell. “If you think back to the images I showed you before there is actually more space than atom. You could say that we are, in essence, souls wearing a thin sheet of body, not the other way around.”
“So we’re made up of nothing,” said John.
“Not so,” she said. “Obviously we’re here aren’t we? But what makes us real?”
“Faith,” the archbishop interjected.
“That’s one theory,” Stintwell said, frowning slightly. “Or will alone? What the machine here does is measure the amount of negative space between the particles, extracts it, then produces power. It stores the overflow and the person is free of ‘sin’ for lack of a better word.”
“What does Skyla have to do with all of this then?” he asked.
“What I believe… what makes Skyla so remarkable,” Laura said, “is that Skyla, just like her mother and aunt before her, is able to see this space in between the atoms, in between the particles. She is seeing the dark space, not just what the light bounces off of.”
“She can see people’s sins, John,” the archbishop said. “And maybe even more than that.”
“So what makes her so dangerous, then?” asked John. He had begun to browse the photographs on the wall. “I mean, all she does is see things, right?”
“I believe that she can do more than just see them,” Stintwell said. “Not that that makes her dangerous.” She shot a glance at the archbishop.
“She’s begun to manipulate them, hasn’t she?” the archbishop said to Stintwell.
“I don’t think it means what you—”
The archbishop waved her away and continued to stare at th
e photographs. “Born in sin,” he grumbled. “I’m not surprised. Her ilk plays with the sins of humanity like a child plays with clay.”
John heard all this, but was more interested in an image fixed to the wall. It was a Roman style building with pillars and a courtyard. Several people were frozen, strolling about.
“Where were these pictures taken?” he asked.
Stintwell smiled excitedly again. “They were developed here on this wall. They are actually residual images that seem to originate from the stored, negative energy cells. The illusion of photography was completely unexpected.”
“Why do they look so much like photographs then?” John couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“That’s where quantum theory comes into play,” Stintwell said. “The very observation of the stored dark energy changes its form and shape. Those images only exist once you actually look at them.”
John looked back at the picture. Something seemed off and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The figure walked near a fountain, with other people further back. The sun must have just been rising, or setting, judging from the shadow—but the other figures—
“Their shadows,” he said. “Their shadows are wrong.”
He retraced his steps looking at all the previous pictures. In every one, the figure’s shadow didn’t actually conform to their body. Some shadows simply went the wrong way compared to the surrounding structures. But in other pictures the shadows were wildly off. They bent out across the ground in strange patterns that looked nothing like the person they were attached to.
“That’s pretty good,” said Stintwell. “Most people go through the entire gallery and don’t notice that. It’s psychological mostly. People don’t like to see things they can’t understand. Also, with the fixing agent used—”
“How did you do this?”
John was staring intently at a particular photograph of a man whose shadow spread out behind him like a claw. It was mesmerizing. He turned around and looked at Stintwell. He asked again.
“How did you do this?”
“What you are seeing—” she began.