Soul Cycle

by Erik Hyrkas

  “God is all-knowing,” Marcy said. “And you enkeli, you can’t have a soul. You were made by Jumala, sort of like a biologically engineered robot.”

  Avrox looked like Marcy had punched him.

  Brit cleared her throat. “An army will be swarming over the city soon! Focus!”

  “Brit is right,” Jax said. “Now is not the time to discuss religion. We need to check-in with the others.”

  “What others?” Brit asked.

  “The fallen who are crazy enough to fight with us,” Hunter said.

  “You asked them to help,” Avrox said to her. Then he said to the others, “They weren’t crazy. They were compelled by Brit’s messages.”

  “No offense, but risking eternal torture to save one human who intentionally landed herself in that room is pretty fucking crazy,” Hunter said.

  “Point taken,” Avrox said.

  “Come on,” Brit said. “Let’s go.”

  Jax carried her forward, deeper into the mine; and then they went down in the elevator to the abandoned passage that led to the cave. Hunter and Marcy each carried half-lit globes to illuminate the corridors. The passage she had carved was taller and wider than she remembered, and she began to wonder if others had expanded it. It was tall enough that Jax could walk without ducking, but Avrox had to hunch and walk slightly sideways. Jax had to shuffle sideways while carrying her because it was only slightly wider than his shoulders.

  “The others will meet us at the underground river,” Jax said. His breath was slightly labored.

  “I think I can walk,” Brit said.

  “We’re almost there,” Jax said. “You can try your legs at the river.”

  There were many voices echoing through the cave, and the air felt warmer than she had ever remembered it being. A light odor of burning wood permeated the air, but there was no haze of smoke. Brit couldn’t see much or distinguish any of the sounds as they moved through the cave’s twists and turns at a brisk pace.

  True to his word, when they entered the large cavern with the river flowing past Jax set her down on the X that Avrox had carved when she first met him. The cavern was lit by many small torches, and for the first time, Brit realized that the cavern ceiling was dozens of feet above.

  There were around forty slaves there, each busy with different tasks. Some were stacking wood along one wall while others were carving shelves into the wall. Yet others were working with small tools and vaalia around a flat stone table that had been carved by lowering the floor all around it.

  “There are so many people here,” Brit said. “How did they all get here? And why is he here?” She pointed at Peter.

  “We had to bring Peter,” he said. “He’s one of the few people who might know how to get back to Earth. The others have come because of your message,” Jax said. “They want to help.”

  Brit frowned. “Help? Help do what?”

  “Your messages inspired a lot of slaves,” Hunter said. “You’re kind of famous.”

  “Don’t feel too good about it,” Peter said. “The guards will probably torture you for eternity for this.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Hunter said.

  “Hunter,” Marcy said in exasperation. “For heaven’s sake, can you form a sentence without cursing?”

  “Fuck no,” Hunter said.

  “Nobody is going to be tortured,” Jax said. “That’s the point. We’re fighting back. Taking freedom.”

  “I didn’t mean for people to fight with weapons,” Brit said. “There are legions of enkelis, and they will come here and destroy everybody.”

  “I doubt they’ll destroy anybody, if they can help it,” Peter said. “Only the few lucky enough to die in the fighting will not be tortured.”

  “There will be huge drain on the power web when the legion arrives. They don’t have enough power to sustain that many enkelis in addition to the facilities,” Avrox said. “After a day or two, they’ll be hungry for the first time ever and most of their weapons won’t work reliably. That should give us a chance to make a good last battle worth remembering. If they can subdue all of the fallen without killing them, there aren’t enough cells to hold everybody and the power shortage will almost certainly ensure that they’ll have to kill most of us.”

  “That’s not comforting,” Brit said.

  “Death should be comforting,” Peter said. “That’s about the most any of us can hope for at this point.”

  “How did you survive in solitary so long?” Hunter asked. “You seem to see and talk just fine.”

  Peter revealed a dark vest under his shirt. “This armor, when it’s powered, can sustain me pretty much in any environment.”

  “That’s not standard issue,” Avrox said.

  “I used to deliver goods to Kauppias, and eventually I escaped to her realm. I earned this vest there,” Peter said.

  “Kauppias,” Brit said absently. “Isn’t she another lord?”

  “She is, and she’s very powerful and the kindest lord that I’ve met,” Peter said.

  Marcy frowned and shook her head.

  “Would she help us?” Jax asked.

  “Jumala is so much more powerful than she is,” Peter said.

  “Even if she could, no lord would ever fight Jumala,” Avrox added.

  “Why not?” Brit asked.

  “He’s the last fertile male lord,” Peter said. “And Kauppias is the last fertile female. No new lord can be born without them.”

  “They made the enkelis,” Brit said. “Surely they could genetically engineer more of their species.”

  “That would be immoral,” Avrox said. “They would never do that.”

  “You aren’t making any sense,” Hunter said.

  “It’s one thing to genetically engineer servants, but one does not create lords that way,” Peter said. “It is simply wrong. It breaks one of the few laws they have.”

  “Two fertile creatures cannot repopulate an entire species,” Brit said. “If they don’t find an artificial way, there won’t be enough genetic diversity.”

  “Lords are immortal,” Peter said. “They only die if they kill each other, which is pretty rare these days since most of them have claimed their own galaxies. As the only two remaining fertile lords, if they made one child every few hundred millennia the universe would eventually be overpopulated. Not quickly, of course, but eventually because they never die.”

  “Is there a way we could beg her for sanctuary?” Brit asked.

  “Kauppias hates Jumala and everybody knows it,” Avrox said. “She might allow us refuge as she did Peter, if we were able to ask. She’s one of Jumala’s best customers, and there’s a chance that Jumala might not destroy her for helping us.”

  “As the only one to have ever talked to the Lord, I am sure she would offer sanctuary to a few, but only if Jumala didn’t know it,” Peter said. “She wouldn’t openly steal slaves from him.”

  “How do we contact her?” Jax asked.

  “Do you remember my ilo?” Peter asked. “You know, the one you threw off a cliff?”

  Hunter nodded. “The one that brought us to this shit hole?”

  “Yeah, well, that was a gift from Kauppias, and pretty much our only way out of this place,” Peter said.

  Brit thought back to their first day. “Are there any other ilos we could use?”

  “Yeah,” Peter said. “Raguel had one, but I don’t know where he is and he probably wouldn’t lend it to us willingly.”

  “Raguel is dead,” Brit said. “I saw him die.”

  “If we can get your ilo,” Jax said, “will we be able to transport all of the slaves away?”

  “Kauppias might take a few of us, but there’s no way she’ll take a few thousand slaves,” Peter said.

  “Then that’s not a solution to our current problem,” Jax said.

  “The hell it isn’t,” Hunter said. “That’s our ticket home.”

  “We don’t belong here,” Marcy said.

  “In case you have forgo
tten, there are hundreds of enkelis here who will die or be tortured if we leave them,” Jax said. “They came to our aid and we can’t just leave them in a mess that we made.”

  “Jax is right,” Brit said.

  “We should at least ask,” Peter said. “We don’t have a better option at this time.”

  “Fine,” Jax said. “We’ll send two people to look for it.”

  “I’ll go,” said Peter.

  “You’ll fucking stay,” said Jax. “If you found it there’s no guarantee that you wouldn’t just disappear. Brit and Hunter can go.”

  “Come with us,” Brit begged Jax.

  “Sending two people is two more than we should,” Jax said. “You two should be able to find it as well as anybody, and since both of you have seen it and neither of you know how to operate it, that shouldn’t make anybody uncomfortable, including Peter.”

  Strictly speaking, this wasn’t true, she knew. Brit had activated it to escape Peter.

  “Be careful with it,” Peter said. “It’s more than a gateway between Earth and here. You could bring some pretty nasty stuff through a portal.” Peter pulled his necklace off and put it over Brit’s head. “This will guide you. Follow the red arrow to it.”

  Hanging on the necklace was a flat diamond-shaped vaalia plate. When she tilted it nearly flat, one of the four corners glowed red. As she turned it, the corner that glowed changed.

  “You can’t tell how far away the ilo is, but this glows when you are tilting it at the right angle toward the ilo. So, if it glows red while vertical, then it is above or below you,” Peter said. “It isn’t terribly useful when somebody is constantly moving with the ilo, but when it is stationary, you should be able to track it down. It doesn’t use much energy, so it should continue to work for at least twelve hours away from the power web.”

  Jax handed Brit his halo and a half-globe light.

  “What is this for?” she asked, holding his halo out.

  “My halo is fully charged,” he said.

  Brit had spent years dreaming of being back together with Jax, and they had barely been together a few hours and he was sending her away. She felt a mixture of hurt and terror. Logically, she knew that he didn’t want to designate himself to find the ilo computer because that would look biased. Nobody would believe that Hunter would know what to do with it, and despite the fact that he was an asshole, Brit trusted him. Jax must have, too. Avrox had never seen the device, and Marcy, well, she was afraid of her own shadow. This was the way it had to be.

  She hugged Jax as tight as she could. He kissed the top of her head and she looked up. Their lips met in a salty kiss. She tried to pour all the emotion she could into that kiss, like it was her last. She wanted him to know that she had missed him and that she would be back for him.

  Hunter cleared his throat.

  Brit tucked her head against Jax’s chest for a moment longer. She let a long slow breath, to make sure her voice was steady, then let go. She gave her halo to Jax, and their hands touched much longer than necessary.

  “Grab two power chisels and an armilon,” Jax said to Hunter.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Brit saw Hunter jog over to the table. He returned with an extra power chisel that he held out to her. She took it, but her eyes remained on Jax.

  “Let’s get the fucking show on the road,” Hunter said. “I need to find out if the Patriots won. I have two hundred dollars on that game.”

  “I love you,” Jax said, his eyes looking into hers.

  She smiled. “I know.” She held his eyes for a moment longer, then turned to Hunter, who gave them both an exasperated sigh.

  “Let’s get out of here before things get more disgusting,” Hunter said.

  “I’ll pray for you,” Marcy said.

  “Um, thanks,” Brit said, unsure how to reply.

  “We have hours, maybe less, before an army shows up,” Avrox said. “You really should go now.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Hunter led the way from the cavern even though Brit carried the light. They followed the familiar passages to the mine, and then they followed the mine corridors to the surface. Two slaves wielding armilons sat with their backs against the rocky entrance.

  “Put your halo on your power chisel, then hold each end. Be careful not to let it slide too far in either direction. If it touches your skin and you are in the exclusion zone, the bitch’ll knock you out cold,” Hunter said. “When you get far enough away, it won’t zap the shit out of you and will keep working for a little bit.”

  From her experience with the deep cave, Brit knew that the halos only worked about twelve hours when away from the power web.

  “Why bother taking them if they might zap us?” she asked.

  “A few extra hours of food and lower fatigue is worthwhile,” Hunter said.

  She turned off the light Jax had given her and tucked it into her only functional pocket, and then the two of them arranged their halos on their power chisels the way Hunter had described.

  “We should walk quickly, in case any enkeli come along. They’ll be on us like flies on shit—they are really fast in those suits,” he said.

  They walked as quickly as they could over the uneven terrain. Brit kept most of her attention on the halo that slid easily on the power chisel, worried that it might accidentally slip to one side and knock her out. When they were roughly twenty-five yards from the mine entrance, she heard a shout and glanced back.

  An enkeli had arrived on the platform from the city. He leapt into the air, and golden wings spread from his back. This was the first time Brit had seen an enkeli’s wings, and she paused to admire them.

  “Keep moving,” Hunter said. “We’re almost to the trees.”

  The two slaves at the entrance to the mine whipped their armilon at the enkeli and he was blasted sideways. The enkeli tumbled to the ground, and before he could raise his own armilon, the two slaves were on him. Brit stood there watching the savage beating.

  “Keep moving!” Hunter shouted. “More will be here soon.”

  Brit turned away and followed Hunter to the tree line.

  “At least they’ll have another armilon,” Hunter said.

  “They looked like they were going to kill him,” Brit said.

  “Definitely,” Hunter said. “That dude was going to get shit on.”

  “This isn’t a video game,” Brit said. “These are beings who think and feel like we do. They are very similar to humans genetically.”

  “They’re robots,” he said. “They were made to do a job, and if they aren’t doing that one job well, they are sent to do an easier job.”

  “They are alive,” Brit said. “Robots aren’t living things.”

  “Our bodies are pretty much machines,” he said. “The only difference is that we came from monkeys and they were made in a petri dish.”

  “That’s not exactly how evolution works,” Brit said. “We had a common ancestor, and we’re more closely related to apes than monkeys.”

  “My point is that we weren’t made and they were,” he said. “Humans are always trying to make super smart computers and machines to do the shit jobs for humans. This guy, Jumala, just made super strong and fast humans to do the shit jobs. He still uses computers and machines for jobs that they aren’t good at, but he uses enkeli wherever he needs flexible workers. From what I can tell, he doesn’t waste resources either. When they don’t do one thing well, he has them do the job they are best suited for, even if that job is boring as fuck.”

  “He tortures them,” she said. “Robots aren’t motivated by negative reinforcement.”

  “That’s the price of having machines that think for themselves,” Hunter said. “You have to motivate them to do their job sometimes, and he seems to have a pretty effective system.”

  “Except that none of his machines feel rewarded by their job,” she said. “You’d think that, if he was going to genetically engineer slaves, he’d make them feel rewarded for doing their wor
k.”

  “When I was in solitary, I had a lot of time to think about why they use punishments like that. I think he gets off on it,” Hunter said. “I think he likes knowing that they hate their job but have to do it. He’s a sick bastard.”

  The trees around them were tall and closely packed together. Brit looked back and realized she couldn’t see the mines or the grassy hills between them.

  “How are we going to find our way back?” she asked.

  “Listen,” Hunter ordered.

  She stopped walking for a moment and listened. She heard the rustle of leaves and the faint gurgling of a nearby stream.

  “There is a stream off to our left that comes out by our mineshaft. If we keep it on our left, we can follow it back by keeping it on our right,” he said. “We’re far enough away from the mine now that we should be able to put our halos in our pockets.”

  He tipped his power chisel, and the halo slid down the length of the rod and into his open palm. When he wasn’t knocked out, Brit did the same thing. Though the half-globe light was small, there was barely room in her pocket for the halo.

  Brit looked at the necklace Peter had given her, tilting it until it glowed. “It looks like it is somewhere that way,” she said. “It’s definitely higher up than we are.”

  “That should bring us closer to the river,” he said. “We should keep our eyes open for anything that might eat us.”

  He held the armilon in one hand and the power chisel in the other. The reminder that there might be creatures in the forest that would eat them was enough to stifle any desire Brit felt to talk.

  The way forward was difficult, and they had to scramble over fallen trees that were nearly as thick as she was tall, push through thickets of underbrush that cut and tore at her skin, and trudge up steep inclines. Most of her shirt had been destroyed years ago, but the few strands of it that were left were beyond repair, leaving only her sports bra covering her chest. Her jeans were covered in tears but still offered some small protection. Being barefoot was the worst part of the excursion. She wished for the millionth time that she had worn tennis shoes rather than her favorite red flats that hadn’t managed to survive her first day in this world. Years of walking through the mines had given her tough, callused feet, but not so tough that they were impervious to damage. The ground was covered with fallen branches, vines, and debris that jabbed her soles. The bottoms of her feet bled and hurt.