Soul Cycle

by Erik Hyrkas

  “Was his name Jax?” Brit asked. She dreaded the answer. Peter had said Jax was on Earth, hadn’t he? Maybe he lied.

  “That might have been it,” he said with a nod.

  “What was he doing?” Brit pressed.

  “The same thing you are,” he said. “The same thing we all are. Working.”

  She thought back to what Peter had said again. She realized he hadn’t actually said Jax was on Earth. He said that she would see Jax again if they returned to Earth. The lie was in the subtly. Now she was sure that Jax must be here and somehow Peter had hidden him in this world and probably never intended to return him. Maybe he even sold Jax to these people for a profit.

  “If you see him again, can you tell him that Brit is here and looking for him?”

  The man nodded, then looked back to his bin, which was nearly empty. “Have you done this station before?”

  “We arrived today,” she said. “All we’ve done is haul this bucket here.”

  “Today,” the man said the word absently, then laughed. “As humans, you might find that will be a confusing word to use here. The days here on Aeternum last a century in Earth time, and right now dawn is upon us. You’ve arrived for the best fifty years of the cycle. The warmth will give way to the cold and deep dark, but we don’t need to think of that now.”

  He placed the last of his disks in the larger bin and clapped his hands. “This station is fairly easy. You will sort your bin by holding each soul up to the idol, and it will be judged. If it glows gold, it has been chosen and you will put it in this bin,” he said, indicating a small bin, “and the others will go in this bin.” He indicated the larger bucket.

  “What do you mean ‘soul’?” Brit asked.

  “Well, these,” he said, and he held up a disk, “are not souls. They are what captured the soul, but it is in there. Every human is given one at birth.” He smirked. “Wait until you are given that task for a few centuries—most of the infants cry when you attach it and that means that you’ll effectively be listening to babies crying for hundreds of years non-stop. That’s when most people go mad.”

  “I don’t have one of those,” Brit said. “I’ve never seen a single baby or person with one.”

  “Well, the disk remains on an alternate plane for the entirety of that human’s life and won’t come back to this plane to be picked up until after the person is dead. Put your basket here and start sorting,” he said. “You haven’t seen yours because it isn’t here, not yet. If you do see it, well, it will probably be in the last few beats of your heart. Sometimes bounty collectors will snatch them before the heart stops to sell them on the black market, but most souls aren’t worth much. They have to die in a pretty traumatic way to be valuable.”

  Brit thought of Aiden’s death, and she knew now what Peter was doing that night. She thought of Raguel and wondered what he was doing there. Was he a bounty collector as well?

  “Why does the death have to be traumatic to be valuable?” Brit asked.

  “Nobody wants to watch a boring life,” the slave said, and he shrugged. “They’ll try to sell the souls in groups that tell a good story, and most buyers want a tragic ending.”

  “What happens to them?” Brit asked with a nod toward the disks.

  “These,” he said with a gesture to the bigger bin, “will go to storage. They aren’t asked for right now. The others have been asked for and they get sent on.”

  “To where?” Brit pressed.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The gold ones will be packaged into entertainment bundles and sold.”

  Brit held up a disk to the idol, which looked like the angry face of a Greek god. The disk didn’t glow, and so she put it in the bigger bin.

  “You have it,” he said.

  “I will carry away this bin to the next station,” he said with a gesture to the small bin. “Your quiet friend will follow me and carry that bin to the next station,” he said with a gesture to the nearly full large bin. “And you’ll take a small bin from over there,” he said with a gesture at a stack of bins near the wall, “and replace the small one we’ve taken. My empty bin will become the large bin.”

  Marcy grunted in frustration and probably a considerable amount of anger, Brit assumed.

  “Ah,” he said. “I see that you are being punished for talking too much. How many days do you have to be quiet?”

  Marcy grunted again.

  “He said a day,” Brit said, now wondering if that meant a full century of human time.

  The man shook his head sadly. “Most people silenced for even a half day never talk again afterwards. You’ll find that it is fairly common. I don’t know if it is that they forget how or they simply don’t remember that they can. Maybe their vocal cords become too weak to do so.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Brit was now alone, sorting disks into bins based on the color they glowed when placed in front of an angry Greek god. Neither she nor Marcy had objected to splitting up, but as she watched Marcy turn a corner, she thought that maybe she should have. Now that they were separated, how would she ever find Marcy again? She realized that there was no knowing the next place you’d be sent after finishing a task, and with no promise of sleep or even bathroom breaks, there was no common area that they might ever meet. The fatigue of centuries weighed on her despite it having been merely two or three Earth days since their arrival.

  Brit thought that neither she nor Marcy wanted something worse to happen to them than Marcy’s loss of speech, and with nothing to be really gained by objecting, they had been easily split up. Her best hope was that, when the next load came, she would catch up to Marcy and they would be able to continue together.

  So Brit sorted. And sorted. The whole time, she avoided looking at the digital screen with images of tortured people. A long time passed before a pair of large men in napkin-sized loin cloths set a fresh load of disks next to her nearly empty bin. One man grabbed a small empty bin from the wall, replaced the bin she had been filling, then carried the nearly full small bin away. The other man looked at her nearly empty bin that she had been working on for a long time and shook his head with disapproval.

  “If you are late to the next station. They may punish both of us,” he said. “Please, hurry.”

  Brit nodded and scanned the remainder quickly while the man watched. “What do I do next?”

  “Carry this bin to the next station,” he said, and he pointed at the mostly full bin of disks that had not glowed gold.

  Brit looked down the hall that Marcy had departed down and sighed. She and Marcy had carried a bin together here that had nearly as many disks, and by the time they had arrived, they were both exhausted.

  She sighed, hefted the bin, and started walking down the hall. She didn’t have far to go, however, and after the second bend, the self-lit white hall transitioned to a roughly hewn rock passage with torches lining the walls. She followed the rock passage down a set of stairs where a man waited for her.

  She had expected to see Marcy or the same man who had given her directions at the previous station, but this man she had never seen before. He was standing at the edge of a cliff, and when Brit was close enough to the drop, she realized there was an active lava flow at the bottom of the deep underground ravine. The heat rising up from the lava was staggering.

  “You are late,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Brit answered. “It took a long time to sort that many disks.”

  “Disks?” he asked.

  “Souls,” she said.

  The man took the bin from her easily, then tossed the contents over the edge into the lava and began to walk away.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I must fill the bin,” he said, as if it should be obvious.

  “I’m new,” Brit said. “What do I do?”

  He shrugged. “Wait for another bin, dump it into the lava, then choose one of these paths that will take you to a regurgitation chamber where you will gather more d
isks until your bin is full. A word of warning: your bin needs to be full before you go to the station after that or you will be punished.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He gave her a genuine smile. “No thanks necessary.”

  She waited in the sweltering heat for an hour before the next person arrived. Her skin was dry and her lips were cracked and bleeding by the time she was walking away with the next bin. Waiting with nothing to do and nowhere to go should have been easy, but after standing in the sweltering heat with nothing to contemplate but the hopelessness of the situation, she was glad to move to the next station.

  Brit descended one of the five torch-lit hallways away from the cliff without any particular preference or scrutiny. After walking downward for twenty minutes and feeling relieved that it was easier than climbing stairs, she pondered that, at some point, she’d probably have to carry something heavy up the same number of stairs that she’d walked down. This revelation did nothing to lift her emotions. Whoever had designed the stations had made the work tedious and painful, and she hated them.

  When she reached a dim, smelly room at the bottom of the long flight of stairs, there was a door across from her and to her right was a large trough the size of three king-sized beds side-by-side. In that trough was slime and muck and, to her dismay, floating disks. The words “regurgitation chamber” came back to her. She studied the slime, and it occurred to her that this was likely the vomit of some creature. The odor of the trough caused her to gag, and she was afraid that, if she started vomiting, she may never stop.

  She scanned the room and found a wooden paddle roughly twice as long as she was tall lying in a form-fit dip within the rim of the trough. She was thankful that she wouldn’t have to wade through the muck.

  Brit tentatively lifted the paddle, which came out of the recess with a sucking sound and long strings of slime still clinging to it. It was both heavy and unwieldy. She then slipped the paddle into the viscous, snot-green pool to fish out a glass disk floating along the surface. Much like fishing the last noodle from a bowl of soup, the disk glided away with each attempt to scoop it up.

  Brit looked to her large empty bin and knew that, based on the other stations, she’d be expected to fill it by the time the next person arrived. She also knew that each station seemed to be offset by roughly an hour. She was uncertain of the consequences for failure, but this station seemed nearly impossible.

  She took to skimming the surface of the pool to try to pull disks toward her. Many would slip under the paddle and resurface further away than they had begun, but some of the disks made progress in her direction.

  When a few were at the edge of the pool next to her, she gritted her teeth and reached in to grab one. She instantly regretted it. The slime made her skin itch, and moments later the skin on her fingers that had barely brushed the slime turned red and raw. She cursed and swore, feeling stupid for taking the risk.

  Using the paddle, she managed to trap a few disks against the rim of the pool and scoop them out. The task was smelly, gross, and tedious; and now her hand burned furiously. But she was starting to make progress. She lost track of time, but it felt like it might have been hours since she entered the room when a clicking and scraping sound startled her. Across the pool was a small platform that led off into darkness. The sound came from there. Brit held up the paddle like one inexperienced in the lost art of paddle dueling might, and she waited.

  Valuable moments passed that she didn’t work at filling her bin, but the potential risk of some unknown punishment for being slow at filling the bucket was less scary than the scraping sound from the dark.

  An azure head glistened in the dim light as a creature scurried toward the pool and toward Brit. To attack her, it would have to swim through the pool of slime, but she wasn’t comforted by the idea. It stopped at the edge, gave out an echoing scream, then vomited slime into the pool.

  Behind the creature, a pile of glowing blue pellets cascaded to the floor. The creature then pounced on the pellets and devoured them. As it ate, Brit realized that the creature had clearly been trained to vomit in the pool for a food reward and that the creature had been eating some of the glass disks.

  Brit stood watching the creature eating, forgetting her own task and frozen in a mixture of fear, disgust, and fascination. When the creature finished eating, it slipped back into the darkness and out of sight.

  “Why aren’t you done?” a man asked from behind her.

  Brit turned with a start. “What?”

  “Your bin should be full of souls,” the man said.

  Brit glanced back at the place the creature had disappeared, and then back to the man, who was dressed like every other man she had met in this place. He wore the napkin-sized white loin cloth that the other slaves wore and nothing else. Like every other man she had seen here, he was muscular and massive. This man’s brown hair was long and flowed smoothly over his shoulders and down to his waist.

  “They aren’t easy to scoop up,” she said. “They slip out of the paddle.”

  He sighed. “The masters will not care,” he said. “You will be punished severely if you don’t have a bucket full soon.”

  Her bucket was nearly three quarters full. “Will you help me?”

  He eyed her. “Sure,” he said. “I will give you this valuable advice: go faster or they will flay your skin off.”

  “What kind of monsters would do such a thing? This is my first time,” she said.

  “It’ll be your last time if you don’t start scooping faster,” he said.

  She began to cry as she scooped. Frustration, injustice, and irritation all welled up in her. Two days ago she was at home and her biggest worry was whether she’d get a promotion at work. Now she was sifting through vomit, looking for glass disks at the risk of having her skin flayed off for not doing it fast enough. The burning in her hand was more powerful than before, and she noticed that it was now bleeding in spots.

  She scooped more furiously, even getting into a rhythm, and minutes later her bin was full.

  “Done,” she said with a little pride.

  “You had better run to the next station,” the man said as he took the paddle from her and began to skillfully scoop out disks.

  He was right, she realized, that running might allow her to make up the time. She ran three times per week normally, but this would be different because she had to run with a smelly full bin; and if she spilled the slimy disks, she wasn’t sure she could pick them up by hand without damaging her skin further.

  The idea of having her skin flayed off was enough motivation to run, and with even paces, she began to run down the hall before coming to steps leading up.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” she said as she trotted up the stairs two at a time. “Bastards couldn’t put an elevator here?"

  Despite being a veteran runner, she didn’t typically spend her time running up stairs, and her legs began to cramp with the effort. She knew if she stopped running she may not be able to restart running again, and so she pressed on with her heart beating in her ears, her legs screaming at her, and her mind imagining the pain of having her skin removed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  At the top of the stairs, Brit collapsed. She had a stitch in her side that hurt beyond any she had previously had in her years of jogging, and her legs were jelly, her thighs cramping. Beyond being winded and in pain from running, the skin on her acid-burned hand was raw and screaming at the contact with the glass bin.

  “You are late,” a male voice said.

  She looked up, still panting and clutching her side with her good hand. This man was wearing a black and gold wetsuit, similar to the uniform worn by Raguel and Adriel. Only one word came to mind: crap.

  She scrambled to her feet and carried the bin the remaining few feet to a table along the wall. Along the edge of the table was a two-inch tall metal lip, presumably to keep the disks from falling to the floor. The table had water gently flowing along it and into a chute in the wall
.

  “Gently dump the souls into the chute,” the man said.

  She realized that he was standing next to an open door and that beyond it was daylight. She could see the street and other buildings. There were men walking briskly in both the black and gold uniforms of masters and the white napkins of slaves. She pondered why there seemed to be no women at all in this city besides herself and Marcy.

  Brit did as she was told. The disks were still covered in acidic stomach-slime, and the odor was terrible, but in a few moments they had all slipped from view into the chute.

  “Take the bin to the next room,” he said with a gesture toward a doorway. “Wash it, stack it, and then proceed to the manufacturing line for your next task.”

  She walked out of the room with the bin, wondering when she would see daylight next and feeling relieved that the guard hadn’t hurt her for being late. She wondered if there was always a guard there, or did he have some special purpose today? There seemed to be no doors in this place, but some of the technology she had seen was so advanced that it could pass for magic. So she assumed they probably had ways of preventing people from passing through doorways if they wanted to.

  The next room was as white and pristine as the previous room. Along the wall to her left was a deep basin with running water, and next to that basin was a stack of glass bins.

  She placed the bin in the basin. The water was warm but not uncomfortable to the touch. She let it wash over her injured hand for a moment as the bin filled. On the wall was a black tube made of a material similar to plastic. When she pulled on it, it stretched out much like an extendable vacuum hose. She imagined that it might have some role in cleaning the bin, so she touched the end of the hose to the water and instantly she heard a powerful sucking noise. With little effort the slime was sucked away, and in moments the bin looked perfectly clean. She returned the hose to the wall and set the bin in the clean pile. She marveled momentarily that the bin was instantly dry after leaving the water.