The pipe had burst at a welded join in the U, and acid was gushing from the tear in the metal as the vast basin above emptied, splashing the metal plates below and spreading rapidly outward in every direction. Once past the plates, the acid ate into the concrete floor itself, making it look like Styrofoam being melted by fire. The waves of acid chased the drones as they tried to flee, but their legs began to dissolve right under them and they went down, their bodies disintegrating altogether as they were swept along.
The acid slapped up against the nearby walls, making Vee advance a few rungs higher. Where it lapped the walls, the concrete there became deeply pocked as it was eaten into, also. She saw with amazement that the glass of the giant window, too, was rapidly liquefying, looking like a great melting sheet of ice. Before the rising fumes became too much to bear, forcing Vee upward toward the small metal hatch, she saw that even the volcanic rock outside the window, outside the Construct, was being eaten into by the acid that splashed up against it from the force of the cascade.
She hoped that as the acid continued to spread across this level, thinned and eventually evaporated, it would leave behind the human traces it carried in places where they could reconstitute fully. At any rate, she had given those prisoners as much of a chance as she could, and even without Jay prompting her, knew that she could do no more. Especially with the frantic running she heard on the platform above her, the frenzied activity as the drones up there scrambled to investigate the damage that was draining the tank of acid.
Vee climbed the last rungs to the hatch positioned halfway to the ceiling, and almost said a prayer under her breath as she put her hand to its latch, fearing it would be locked. But the hatch opened easily, and she ducked into a low-ceilinged narrow passageway between formal levels, so long it trailed away into darkness. Walls, floor and ceiling had been formed from sheets of brass but were now crusted a vivid aqua color with verdigris, maybe brought about by long proximity to the acid. Vee plunged forward down this weirdly beautiful tunnel, onward and away.
26: THE UNBORN
Byno means did Vee make the journey upward in a straight line.
The Construct—formerly a Demonic megacity—however towering its greatest structures, was wider than it was tall. When Vee couldn’t find a more direct route to a higher level, she was often obliged to cover a great deal of ground laterally before finally discovering a viable means of ascent. Thus, she crisscrossed back and forth between the many former buildings of Tartarus, sometimes merely connected by bridge-like walkways, other times the buildings expanded so that they lay flank to flank with each other, or with their separating walls removed altogether.
She occasionally encountered single rooms so immense that their far walls lay beyond the extent of her vision, misted with distance, rooms that themselves might contain a small town.
On the 83rd level, Vee encountered a building that she had never been inside before, and which seemed to lie on what would have been the furthermost border of the city. She entered it through a tube-like corridor of black metal, lit by fluorescents, which finally gave ingress into a large round chamber. But it wasn’t a mere chamber; Vee stood on a circular mesh platform, and leaned over its railing to gaze below. A circular shaft, burrowing its way downward in a straight shot, a well into darkness. She tipped her head back to look upwards and saw a mirrored effect there, realized she was in the center of a great circular building, inside its hollow core. A metal spiral staircase twined around the inner surface. It wasn’t this that gripped Vee’s attention, however, but the building’s inner surface itself. Apparently, an unbroken tube of thick glass. And beyond the glass?
She stepped up to a section of the curving glass, and furrowed her brow in confusion. Water or some other fluid, certainly, was trapped between the outer and inner walls of this cylindrical tower, and lights spaced along the framework of the spiral staircase cast glaring illumination across the glass. But Vee cupped her hands around her eyes, and pressed her forehead against the cool surface to peer into the murky interior.
It seemed to be a gigantic aquarium, full of weightless organisms, drifting slowly throughout. Countless thousands of organisms. But when she realized what these creatures were, she gasped, and thought that the tower was less an aquarium than it was a titanic specimen bottle.
The constellations of suspended organisms were human embryos and fetuses, of every stage of development; everything from tadpole-like forms to full term babies. They were not connected by umbilical cords, but floated freely in their greenish amniotic solution.
“Jesus,” she breathed, wanting to pull away but unable to. “Jesus Christ, Jay, what are these? Tell me they’re Demons being grown, human-type Demons…”
“No,” he told her. Tucked through the straps of her pouch, he too gazed into the great aquarium. “These are the children of the Damned, who were never born. The Creator felt pity for them, since they never had the opportunity to be baptized, but being the children of sinners or those who themselves were not baptized, they could not be delivered into Paradise. And so, they were confined in these Limbo Towers, spread throughout Hades. Again, it was deemed unfair for pregnant Damned women to carry them eternally—unfair to the children, not the mothers, given the violent hazards and punishments of those mothers in Hades.”
“No…you’ve got to be kidding me. No, Jay, this is too terrible…this is just too terrible!”
“I understand your concern for them, but before you begin thinking about using another grenade to liberate them, madam, you should consider their situation. These creatures will never grow any older than they are, will never grow to adulthood. Where else are they to go? Are they to flop and flounder on the ground like suffocating fish? Here they float through eternity in absolute ignorance and innocence. Could human beings ever attain anything closer to bliss? This is an eternal womb they never need to leave. It’s rather like being in the Mesh, I suppose, but they dream of nothing, forever. They’re the lucky ones.”
“Lucky?”
“I’m not trying to justify their condition…only reassure you in your anxiety.”
“Reassure me? Reassure me? ” Vee sobbed these words, realized that tears had filled her eyes. She thumped the heels of her fists against the glass in weak, helpless blows. “Fuck, Jay! Fuck this! Fuck all of this!
What kind of sick monster would create something like this and still consider Himself the Father of humankind?”
“A conflicted being, madam. So tormented that He ended His own existence. A being rather like you, I might think.”
Vee stepped back from the wall at last, and shifted the gun so they could look at each other directly. “What do you mean, like me?” she demanded.
“You both lost your sense of yourselves. You both grew disgusted with yourselves. You both set about destroying who you were. The Creator, through his self-immolation. And you…through your forgetting.
Except that you have been reborn as a new being, in a sense. Whereas He will never do so. Or so it would seem.”
“Maybe I am the Creator, huh?” Vee snapped sarcastically. “Maybe that’s who I really am, huh?”
“If in a way He dwelt within each human being, then I suppose in that sense and to that degree, you are.”
“Now isn’t the time to fuck with me, Jay.”
“I’m not doing that, madam. Again, I am only trying to comfort you, while engaging in a stimulating conversation.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’ll try to be helpful in another manner, then,” Jay said, coolly unfazed. “We can obviously proceed upward from here.”
Vee glanced up again, then moved to the spiral staircase and started to ascend. Around and around the interior of the cylinder, and eventually she saw a huge number 84 deeply etched into the glass itself. She climbed further, at level 85 came to another platform and connecting corridor that obviously bored its way straight through the aquarium from outside.
Resting a moment, she couldn’t resist another look insid
e the tank. A full term baby floated disconcertingly close to her face, though she was sure the glass must actually be over a foot thick.
She asked Jay, “What about the unborn in Heaven, then?”
“Well, there is a choice given. If the mother would prefer it, she can keep her child inside her body forever, so as to retain her maternal bond, but later if she changes her mind she can do what most mothers choose, which is to have their child externalized. But again, since the child can mature no further, its soul remains at the stage of life it had advanced to at the time of its death. Thus, these mothers keep their child in an individual tank, in much the same state these creatures are in, rather like a pet they can talk to, even handle if they care to remove it from its tank for a time.”
“Fuck, man,” Vee said, her tears drying on her face, replaced with seething disgust, “I think maybe that’s even worse than this. Keeping your baby like a pet lizard.”
She was about to withdraw from the glass again when she saw the baby by her face open its mouth several times, like a fish. Like it was trying to say something to her. She flinched back in horror. Almost broke into sobs again.
Level 86, engraved into the glass. 87. Another platform. And then, at level 88, the staircase abruptly ended, though the cylinder continued upward. No more lights spaced up there, though, the cylinder’s uppermost level now uncertain. Was the ceiling not far above, or did the tower go on for many levels more? Was this the end of the staircase as designed, or had it been cut away by some group above, to prevent others from entering their territory by this means?
Vee descended again to the platform for level 87, and entered the corridor there, leaving the heart of the tubular glass Limbo Tower—and hoping never to have to enter it again.
27: THE POWER OUTSOURCE
Atlevel 90, Vee came upon another large community, this one consisting of the Damned, but at their border the security forces were polite with her and she took the chance of trusting them with her weapons, curious to find out more about them. And also, it appeared she would need to pass through their district if she meant to continue her ascent of the Construct.
The colonists of this city, dubbed Naraka, were almost entirely of Indian descent, most of them having died in the Big Bang, and committed to Hades for being Hindus. When Vee explained she was an Angel her hosts seemed a little dubious about her, and she felt like apologizing to them for their unfair damnation, but they treated her no less politely, and gave her a tour of their domain.
The point at which Vee had entered Naraka had once been a barracks structure for the Damned laborers forced to work in Tartarus. It had a biotic feel, as if the whole former building had been a single growth of glossy gray bone, translucent where it was thinnest. The countless original chambers on this entire floor had been further subdivided by the colonists, though some of these spaces remained immense. Vee’s guide, a soft-spoken man named Harvinder, who had explained he was a lead tech and technical instructor, guided her into the largest of the colony’s chambers, and her mouth opened in awe as she took it in.
The gray bone walls, from the floor up to the soaring ceiling, were honeycombed with rows of organic-looking recesses, hundreds of tiny apartments more like shelves where the laborers had once rested. Now, each hollow had become a work cubicle, housing a desk and computer. These devices, Harvinder announced proudly, were the colonists’ own design, constructed from materials and circuitry that had once served others purposes, linked into servers adapted from Demonic computer systems. Men and women typed diligently, their combined tapping creating an incredible chattering noise like that of the giant insects one might imagine swarming through this hive. Harvinder had to raise his soft voice above the din. Many of the workers wore headphones against it, and to communicate with others she saw that some spoke into microphones. Other workers, though, sat over their keyboards with their hands motionless and eyes vacant, as if dazed, or even slumped back in their chairs as if dozing. A cable ran from the computer terminal of each of these curiously inactive people and plugged into a hole in their right temple. Vee had already noted that Harvinder, and indeed every colonist she had seen, right down to the children, had one of these input jacks grafted into their right temple. The jacked-in workers she saw now, she knew, were interfaced directly with the Mesh.
“What is it you do, here, all of you?” Vee asked, still feeling wonderment at the immensity of the operation. “I mean, I always figured telemarketers were from Hell, but…”
Harvinder smiled. “Basically, it is through us that the Construct continues to function. Many of the people who live in it never realize this, so it is largely a thankless task, but one that must be done. We see to it that the electricity is maintained, the lights, the ventilation systems, the climate controls—indeed, the Mesh itself would not be possible but through our support and maintenance. Nothing would run at all, or at least not for long, and only in isolated sectors.”
“Wow. Like you said, I had no idea. Doesn’t anyone at all pay you, or trade with you, or something?”
“Well, it is not done entirely for the sake of altruism…mostly we do it to maintain these systems and comforts for our own sakes, but we feel that as long as we’re doing it we might as well benefit others, too. But if an enemy were ever to threaten us, we could then shut down the systems in their region, unless they used their own systems to block us. I doubt any other colony in the Construct could challenge us in that way, though—no one else has anything nearly as sophisticated as our network.”
“Not even the Enmeshed?”
“No, I would say not even them,” Harvinder boasted. He might be quiet and polite, but he was exceedingly proud of his people. “It is because of our benefits to all, and our ability to shut down the life support and power facilities on other levels, that Naraka is almost never threatened by hostile individuals…and never by hostile colonies.”
“Wow. That’s pretty impressive, Harry.” Harvinder had told her he preferred this nickname. He seemed a bit flirty toward her, in his own shy way.
They strolled closer to one of the walls of cubicles, and some of the workers looked down at Vee to smile or nod. They seemed a pleasant and mellow people, and she felt self-conscious about her bullet-riddled and torn body suit and unkempt hair.
“You should stay with us,” Harvinder told her. “There are a small number of non-Indians here. You would be comfortable.”
“It looks comfortable enough. But I’ve already got it in my head to see Freetown. Do you know about them?”
“Oh yes. We interact with them through the Mesh—they’re a friendly colony. But we never go up to visit them in person, because of the Mujahideen, only a few floors above us. And the Freetowners try to keep away from the Mujahideen, as well.”
“Who are they?”
Harvinder told her. And then advised her, “So that’s why I wouldn’t try to reach Freetown, if I were you.”
“There’s got to be a way for a single person to sneak past them.”
“I really don’t think it’s a good idea,” Harvinder reiterated. “They leave us alone, too, but we don’t push them. They can’t be reasoned with.”
“I appreciate the warning. And I will stay here for a while, at least, if you’ll have me. Because there’s something I want from you, Harry.”
“Oh?” he said, smiling with nervous anticipation.
She tapped his right temple with her finger. “I want you to hook me up.”
28: THE MESH
Harvinder took Vee to his own, more private and much less noisy office for her first immersion into the Mesh. In its heavy brass casing, thoroughly stained green with verdigris, his computer looked like it could survive a drop off a roof, though it sprouted cables and tubes gurgling fluid like a terminal patient on life support—a Frankenstein monster resembling something cobbled together by high school students in metal shop, or maybe in art class. However suspect its appearance, though, it responded quickly to his deft keystrokes. He sat Vee in his wo
rk chair, pulled another chair up beside her. She resisted a smile as he plugged the computer’s interface cable into the fresh orifice, like a tiny bullet hole, in her temple, wondering if he found the procedure erotic. She felt no discomfort.
“What am I supposed to do first, in there?”
“I’ve made an avatar for you, scanned from your own body,” he told her. “Try to move about as if you were using your physical body. Explore your environment, but remember that you can also control your environment. It may start out as little more than a void until you call into that space whatever information it is you seek. In order to better focus that information, try to envision some physical medium upon which to project it. A TV screen, a blackboard, the wall of a room familiar to you, or what have you. The Mesh is a very fluid medium, not as structured or predictable as our old Internet, which can make it frustrating and difficult but also very free and exciting in other ways. Don’t worry—I will stay right here beside you, and pull you out if I see you’re having difficulty.”
“Difficulty?”
“Not to worry. I only mean confusion, nervousness, agitation. I will be monitoring your experience out here, on the screen, seeing through your avatar’s eyes. I want to let you get a feel for it yourself, so I won’t go with you to hold your hand, and I won’t speak to you inside the Mesh unless I absolutely need to guide or prompt or reassure you.”
“Um, okay. Whatever. I guess I’ll see when I get there.”
“Do you have any idea what you might like to start out looking for?
Some bit of information you’d like to research, that might have been stored in there by someone from Naraka or Freetown, or by the Enmeshed?”
“Well, hm. Actually, Jay…that is, my gun…showed me some memories he found recorded and stored inside the Mesh, from a Damned man named Adam. Maybe I could see if I can retrieve those same memories on my own, if I concentrate on them.”
The Fall of Hades Page 14