by Mark Teppo
Somewhere over the Tropic of Capricorn, I went Stockholm on Santa. I figured there had been enough pop psychology in the movies and TV shows that he’d be familiar with the basic bonding between hostage and kidnapper that is known as the Stockholm Syndrome. I hadn’t gotten anywhere with logical arguments and rational reasoning. Santa wasn’t going to be deterred from his mission and all the noise I was making to the contrary was just giving him a headache, and the first thing I do to get rid of a headache is to remove the object or sound that is causing me pain. By going friendly, I’d decrease the chance of getting dropped out the chute like an express delivery toy and I might even keep him out of trouble.
Besides, he was bigger than me, and he was packing hardware. I could cite either one as an excuse on my report and no elf would fault me on the decision to play nice.
Santa was napping. Ultra-sonic flight didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. Once we passed the equator without any trouble, he started getting comfortable in the chair and, when we crossed the wide mouth of the Amazon, he started snoring.
I didn’t bother with the controls. The autopilot was on and I knew the reindeer were monitoring the flight status. There were redundant controls in their pods and any attempt on my part to alter the path of the sled would alert them.
I amused myself with checking email back at the North Pole.
There were seventy-four unread messages in my inbox, and only half of those looked to be from the office of EOD. I figured the Network Jockies in the labs had flagged my account to sing like a fat canary the moment I touched the network so there was no point in pretending that I hadn’t seen the mail. Since I could probably count on the content in each of those thirty-seven messages being about the same, I replied to the most recent one. “Am Fine. Stop. Gone holiday shopping with Fat Boy. Stop. Be back in time for Zero Hour. Stop. He’s not holding a gun to my head. Stop. But he does have one.” I had seen the shoulder holster earlier. “Not sure where he got it. Stop. Not even sure that is my jurisdiction. Stop.”
In addition to all the other amenities that the Mark V sled packed, it also contained a great deal of surveillance countermeasures. If Santa wanted to not show up on radar, he wouldn’t. The NPC usually tracked the sled during Zero Hour through a network of satellite signals—relayed GPS coordinates that the Sled’s navigational system uploaded to the high orbit network—but that relay was something that could very easily be disengaged. The NJs would probably do a packet trace on the reply I just sent back to the mail server at the North Pole, but all they would get would be the address of the satellite that the sled had tapped to send the email. There was something like fifty-two of these little communication and positioning satellites parked in geo-synchronous orbits over the Earth, each scanning approximately 1/50 of the Earth’s surface at any given time for incoming signals. That’s a lot of square kilometers and, at the rate we were moving, they’d never get enough of a fix to be sure where we were heading.
Not that I was all that sure either. Santa and the reindeer were on a course for Purgatory—or what they thought was the entrance to Purgatory. In the last five hours, Santa hadn’t done a whole lot to assuage my concerns about our destination. Sure, I had found a computer address on the Internet. Sure, it indicated that there was a physical machine out there that contained some data and had some of interface running on it. But you couldn’t make the jump from there to the positive existence of life after death.
David Anderson had been involved in a car accident on November 27th of this year. The funeral had been held on December 7th. There was a plot of land in the local cemetery in Troutdale that contained a box and stone, one with him in it and the other with his name on it. Now, if I believed those two details—and since they were true, why shouldn’t I?—then there weren’t a whole lot of options.
(1) Little Suzy had a fascination with dead things that couldn’t be certified by any psychology as “healthy” and what she wanted for Christmas was for us to dig up Daddy’s head, slap a red bow on it, and roll it under the Christmas tree.
(2) Little Suzy’s fascination with biology and botany and Wade Davis meant that she was hoping that we’d dig Daddy up in time for the zombie powder that must have been sprinkled on him before they had put him in the ground.
(3) Life did persist after death and we were going to knock on the gates of Heaven and ask God to give us David Anderson back.
Okay. Now for the rebuttals.
(1) Too weird, even for this elf.
(2) Nobody noticed Daddy wasn’t really dead when they embalmed him? Filling Daddy full of formaldehyde would probably constitute a money-back situation with the funeral home, but certainly wouldn’t make his resurrection from a Voodoo-inspired medicated state any easier. Flag it as highly doubtful.
(3) Well, as a famous detective once said that when you eliminate the possible solutions, what remains—however unlikely—must be acknowledged as a very likely solution. And a couple hundred years prior to that fellow, another wise man once said: “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate.” Keep it simple, stupid.
The simple answer was that we were heading for the hole in the ozone over the Antarctic. There, Santa and the reindeer believed, we would find the entrance to Purgatory.
VI.
Santa had turned off the autopilot when we had crossed the Ross Ice Shelf and he toggled a few switches to adjust the vertical movement of the sled as we rose up from the Earth, moving on a directly perpendicular line from the South Pole. The sun, perpetually parked overhead at this time of year, filled the cockpit with its orange glow. The material of the cockpit blister filtered just about every sort of wavelength but the visible spectrum and, even under that radiant bombardment, it polarized sharply to cut the glare. The presence of the sun screen enabled Santa to point out the tunnel of light rising up through the hole in the ozone layer. “There,” he said.
“Yeah, I see it,” I replied. It was just like you would expect, a round cylinder of white light rising up from the surface of the planet. It didn’t disappear into infinity; in fact, it didn’t look much longer than the car wash at the local Texaco. As Santa piloted the sled into line with the glittering mouth of the tunnel, there was a wrenching sense of vertigo as I looked up the shaft of light. It certainly looked like it went on to forever.
Santa put the sled right on course and pushed forward on the stick. The sled rumbled beneath us and we shot into the mouth of the light tunnel. Everything went black for an instant as the intensity of the light increased and the polarization sensors in the cockpit tried to compensate by blacking out the cockpit glass. There was an awkward sensation of weightlessness coupled with a momentary panic by the individual cells in my body and then the ride became smooth again.
Transparency returned to the cockpit overhead. We weren’t in the sky over the South Pole any longer. There was no sky, no cloud cover below us, no hot sun sizzling in space over head. Everything was white. There was no horizon because there was no sense of ground beneath us to give the edge a place of demarcation. It was all just white.
Expect for a small patch of green and brown off to our left.
Santa had seen it as well and he quickly turned the sled towards the splash of color. I found the controls for the camera systems and pulled up the nose camera, dialing in the magnification. There was a small field of green grass and sitting primly in the center of this seemingly unsupported green field was a small brown house. Large windows looked back at us and there was a wide set of double doors. Illumination spilled out from the interior of the building and it looked like the inside was filled with comfortable chairs. A couple of the seats near the windows were filled with people in white robes.
Santa adroitly piloted the sled next to the lawn, and there was a tiny rumble beneath me as the landing gear stretched out and made contact with the ground. “Well,” he said, pushing the sequence of buttons that locked the sled in place. “It looks like we’re here.”
“Here being a relative term,
” I pointed out as he cycled the hatch. The air was cool and it smelled like the halls in the Residence do after Mrs. C has been by. Santa waited for me to go first and I went carefully, not quite sure what I was going to step on. It looked like grass and seemed to be supporting the weight of the sled, but part of my brain still thought I was going to fall right through the illusion as soon as my foot touched ground.
The grass was firm but spongy, kind of like the surface of a well-groomed chia pet. I took a couple of hesitant steps, wondering if the sensation in my knees was what Neil Armstrong felt when he first cavorted about on the surface of the moon.
“Seems familiar,” someone said.
Rudolph was big, even by reindeer standards, and his dark body was completely hairless. His horns were bone white and sprouted out of his head like awkward tree branches caught naked in the midst of winter. Back in ’52, there had been an accident with the old Clock—the nuclear powered one—and we lost the entire reindeer team. Santa had been down in a house at the time or he would have been baked into Santa Strips. Rudolph should have died with the rest of the team, but he had been far enough away from the Clock when it had malfunctioned that the dose of radiation he absorbed hadn’t been enough to kill him. It was just enough to irradiate him for life. He stopped clocks when he passed, delicate machinery broke down if it spent too much time in close proximity to his hairless skin, and you could never get decent reception on a TV with him in the roomeven with a DSS hookup. He could—if he wanted—make his nose glow, just like the kids expected. Of course, he usually set the drapes on fire and made the dog sterile when he lit up, but hey, everything’s got a side-effect these days, so why should being bathed in the ruby glow of a reindeer’s nose be any different?
He was, like the rest of Santa’s reindeer, a complete pain in the ass. And usually grouchy too. He wasn’t our favorite reindeer.
I ignored him and stumped towards the pair of doors. Santa wasn’t bothering to smother his chuckle as he closed up the sled and followed me. The doors opened rather easily for their size and I stood on the threshold as the warmth and smell of the shop washed over me.
“Smells just like—” Rudolph began.
A robed figure with sandals and close-cropped white hair swooped up to meet us. He looked like he was fifty going on seventeen and his teeth were even and whiter than his robe. Pinned over his left breast was a tiny brooch in the shape of a sword against a ridged orange background. On his right pectoral was a tiny stick-on nametag. It read: Mike. “Hello,” he gushed. “Welcome to Café Perkatory.”
“—coffee,” Rudolph finished.
“Are you here for a beverage?” the old young man asked. “I don’t mean to brag, but our coffee is simply the most divine blend.”
“Shade grown on the hills of Oaxaca?” Rudolph asked.
The greeter wrinkled his nose at the hairless reindeer. “Good guess, but no. We carry GOB, exclusively.” He waved a hand over towards the counter. “Right over there. Just tell the barista what you want. Latté, mocha, cappuccino, brevé, whatever you desire, they can make it for you.”
“GOB?” Santa whispered to me out of the corner of his mouth.
“God’s Own Bean,” I whispered back, somewhat appalled that I could translate the TLA as readily as I could. That said something about how long I had been in the corporate world. Talk about Purgatory.
Our host was still chatting with Rudolph. “If I had to guess,” Mike said, “I’d peg you as a quad grande skinny extra whip caramel mocha.”
Rudolph barked like a little girl. “Oh, you can see right through me, can’t you?” he tittered in that voice that made most of us fear for our lives.
Santa laid a hand on the reindeer’s tense flank. “Do you offer other services?” he asked. “Is this café wired for the Internet?”
The greeter flashed his pearly whites again. “Absolutely. The terminal has a full T-3 connection hooked up right to it. No firewall filtering, anonymous remailer services, no cookie presets, no popup advertising, and—” he winked at Santa “—no site or download restrictions.” He turned to his left and pointed towards the far wall where a computer monitor sat on a walnut desk. “It seems that someone is always using the computer, but look! no one is using it right now.”
He smiled down at me. “And you, young man, what about you? Are you here for Passage?” There was almost a hint of sorrow in his eyes as he asked the question.
“No,” I stammered. “No, I’m not.” I jerked a thumb at Santa. “I’m with him.”
Confusion blossomed for an instant in his face. He looked past us at the spoon-shaped sled parked on the lawn. “No one is here for Passage? Someone still in your conveyance, perhaps?”
Rudolph shook his head. “Nope. Just us. Well, we do have some friends along but they wanted to wait in the car.”
Santa’s hand moved to my shoulder and his grip pushed me towards the monitor in the back of the room. Rudolph stayed behind to torment the greeter. “It’s the craziest thing,” I hear him saying, “none of us are dead. I don’t know where we took the wrong turn, and I’m really surprised you don’t recognize me . . . ”
Santa kept me on course through the maze of plush chairs. A large fireplace was quietly chewing through a pile of logs. The people who were scattered about in the chairs all had a nearly full beverage at their elbows and were contentedly thumbing through the latest glossy magazines. None of them appeared to be too concerned with the large red “Now Servicing” number displayed on the wall (it appeared to be showing a rather large number in scientific notation), nor did anyone appear to be interested in the white door set into the back wall just beside the counter. The trio of individuals behind the counter were dressed just like the host—just as androgynous and just as perfectly formed. In addition to offering espresso drinks, they also seemed to a fully stocked bakery and ice cream parlor.
Santa pushed me into the chair in front of the computer and stood behind me, his hands resting on my shoulders. “Okay,” he said. “This is what we came here for.”
The screen saver was the floating logo of the coffee house—a flat-rimmed espresso cup with wings—and it vanished when I touched the mouse. I clicked a couple of things and checked out a few menus. I felt Santa’s hands tighten on my shoulders when my movements faltered. “What is it?” he hissed.
“It’s a dummy terminal,” I said. I pointed to where a single thick cable from the keyboard disappeared into the wall. “There’s no computer here. It is just a keyboard and monitor that do I/O for a larger system that’s somewhere else.” I lifted the keyboard and showed him the clean and blank top of the desk. “No sticky note.”
“But what about the computer that this is connected to?” Santa asked.
I poked around a bit more. “This is just a glorified Internet browser, Santa. There isn’t much else here.”
He bent over and his voice was tense in my ear. “Can you get a terminal window?” His hand was a claw digging into my collar bone.
I opened one up and took my hand off the mouse to point at the screen.
“That’s all you need,” he hissed. “Come on, Bernie. I know that’s all the opening you need. I’ve heard about the code that you’ve written for the NPC before you came over to Organization. I know you can do this.”
I looked up at him, looked up at the glittering light reflected in his eyes, and felt the tension in his fingers. This was one of those defining moments: one of those instances where everything you’ve done before or would do after matters naught. You either played or paid.
I took a deep breath and put my fingers on the keyboard.
VII.
It only took me a little over an hour to break into Purgatory.
Rudolph tired of playing with Mike and had joined us at the terminal. With both he and Santa blocking the view for the rest of the room, I felt pretty secure in doing serious hacks without anyone asking what I was doing.
Santa and the reindeer had been right. This terminal did connect
to the Purgatory mainframe. Even though most of the interface delivered up to the station was just an Internet browser, I could get a terminal window and, like Santa said, a man with a window is halfway there. The rest of it is just being smarter than the machinery between you and the data. Elves may not be the top of the intellectual food chain, but we know how to play dirty and, sometimes, that is enough.
“Okay,” I told Santa, scanning the information being displayed on the screen. “It looks like Purgatory contains a data warehouse which holds all the records of every being that has ever received what I think Mike was referring to as ‘Passage.’”
“It’s a waiting room,” Santa said.
“Looks like it. Tunnel of light, waiting area while your life is being weighed and considered, and then you take passage to your final destination.” I tapped a few keys. “It looks like the waiting room here is just for processing—you only spend a few days here while all of your data is collated and ordered.”
“What happens after that?” Santa asked, leaning forward to examine the screen.
“Then you enter the system.”
Rudolph snorted. “One express elevator to Hell coming up.”
Santa ignored him. “How long, Bernie? How long do you stay in the system?”
I didn’t want to read him what I read on the screen. But, he could probably figure it out himself. “Thirty days,” I said. “It takes thirty days before you complete Passage.”