A lifetime of Minister Coglin’s ‘Hell and Brimstone’ sermons burned through her in a rush.
What choice did she have? Kayla took a shuddering breath and descended the stairs. Step after step, spiraling downward, she continued, the heat burgeoning around her.
The concept of Hell had existed within dozens of ancient religions, from Egypt’s Osiris cult that threw malefactors into a lake of fire after death, to Eastern religions depicting an intermediary place of punishment between physical incarnations. Ironically, Jewish theology was one of the few without a concept of post-life retribution. Their God punished disobedience during his subjects’ life, rather than waiting for later. The Hebrew Torah only mentions Sheol, the place of the dead, but it lacked any of the Christian torments or rewards that came later.
Kayla reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped into a vast automated factory of suffering. The souls of the damned lay shackled, impaled, or stretched upon bizarre contraptions of mechanized cruelty. A twisted symphony in every key of human torment mixed with the stench of a slaughterhouse. Some of the machines rose fifty feet to the ceiling, with hundreds of the damned enmeshed within their disassembly lines of pain. Other machines tormented individuals according to the sin committed.
Every culture created Hell as a reflection of their greatest fears, so it made sense that this virtual incarnation reflected the current age’s fear of technology.
“Help me!” an imprisoned woman pleaded. Her designer clothing hung in shreds from a lithe body bound to a grim mechanical device slowly tearing her arms and legs from her torso. The woman’s agonized screams rose in pitch as her arms and legs tore from their sockets and spurted blood. Skin, muscle, and tendon separated like rubber bands pulled too tight until the woman was nothing but a limbless stump of bloody meat.
Like a child pulling the legs off a beetle.
The woman screamed and screamed, with brief pauses to suck more air into her tortured lungs. Kayla pressed her hands to her ears, the sound cutting her to the core. Will this be my ultimate fate? When the chains slackened, the woman’s limbs magically rejoined her body, and the process repeated.
Who but someone as sick as General Colrev would create such a place? But hadn’t God created exactly such a place, as well?
“Please, help me!” the woman wailed under the pressure of the gears.
Kayla yanked at the chains without effect. A simulation can’t feel real pain. Would one save a mannequin from a fire to keep it from suffering?
A strange contradiction that the New Testament introduces Christ’s higher moral tone of peace, forgiveness, and non-violence, as well as eternal torture—most vividly in the Book of Revelation, but also in the Gospels themselves. Even Jesus speaks of Hell more than He does of Heaven. How to rationalize an all-loving God who tortures His creations for the flaws He created them with?
Grasping a sledgehammer lying on the ground, she beat the gears until the machine broke. Then she smashed the links of the chains until they came apart.
The woman fell to her knees and looked up at her with anguished gratitude. “Thank you,” she said, and vanished in a flash of silver light. An illusion, but the rush of altruistic pleasure was real.
Kayla progressed through one level of Hell after another, freeing the few that she could, and averting her eyes from those beyond rescue.
The original Greek of the New Testament uses the terms Hades, Tartarus, and Gehenna—which only later coalesced into the Anglo-Saxon term Hell when translated into English.
Gehenna was a valley in Israel where the Old Testament claimed worshipers of the god Moloch burn their sons and daughters in the fire.
Hades doubled as the Greek god of the underworld as well as the name for the realm of the dead. Within Hades, according to Plato’s writings in 400 BC, Tartarus was the dungeon abyss where evil souls were tortured after having been judged. As far back as 700 BC, the Iliad has Zeus explaining that Tartarus is as deep beneath Hades as Heaven is high above the earth.
The doorways between levels contained riddles and mathematical brain-twisters, all of which she solved with varying degrees of effort, often relying on her AI Mathematic skills. Colrev must have set this maze up so only a Rogue could pass through.
At the sixth level, Kayla reached the river of blood known as the Phlegethon. In Dante’s Inferno it demarcated the area where tyrants and war-mongers suffered damnation. The boat lay on the other side, so she swam the crimson river, gagging every time the salty blood splashed into her mouth.
Kayla dragged herself out of the river, drenched in blood. The tortures faced by the war mongers turned her stomach. Of course, they weren’t actually the souls of tyrants, but only Sims.
The words of Jesus rang in her mind. “Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do you even so to them.” Did this Golden Rule apply to artificial life-forms as well?
Four hundred years before Jesus lived, the Greek Isocrates wrote, “Do not do to others what would anger you if done to you by others.” A hundred years before that, Confucius wrote, “What you do not wish for yourself, do not to others.” And nearly a millennia before Christ, the Sanskrit Brihaspati of the Hindu holy writings counseled, “One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self.” Jesus’ principle of reciprocal morality, proclaimed revolutionary by Christians, had been a nearly universal teaching of the ancient world for over a thousand years already, rather than something new.
An unreasoning terror welled up inside her. Even here, surrounded by vivid reminders of the eternal punishment awaiting all who doubted God’s holy commands, she questioned the legacy of her Savior.
Maybe I deserve punishment in Hell.
The seventh level was a desert wasteland raining fiery sparks from a metal smelter the size of a mountain. Kayla cried out as the airborne detritus burned into her arms and scalp. This was the level to which Dante relegated blasphemers. Would this be her fate? Even as she untied one man from the ground, he kept shouting, “There is no God!” How could one deny God’s existence in Hell itself?
At the eighth level lay those Dante referred to as seducers. Mechanized whips lashed their once-beautiful bodies for all of eternity. Would this be Fatima’s fate? Was it right to punish her for something programmed into her by genes she had no control over? Wasn’t lust itself an inevitable result of evolution and the biological mandate to reproduce? If Kayla could so simply fix Fatima by altering a few genes and brain synapses, couldn’t God have done the same to those damned to Hell?
With such biological programming in place within us at birth, was there such a thing as free will at all?
A robot demon guarded the entryway to the ninth level, where Dante claimed Lucifer resided. Its mechanical body creaked with rust, and its furled wings of metal sheeting displayed the wear of aeons in their battered and patched surface.
“I’m Grigori,” the demon said. Camera lenses served as eyes, and bolts hinged his oversized jaw to his dented skull.
“I’m Kayla.”
Grigori uncrossed his arms and pressed a button atop a stopwatch embedded in his forehead, setting it spinning. “One minute,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
The demon stretched its limbs with the sound of metal scraping against stone. “One minute before I kill you.”
“I need to pass through that door.”
Grigori’s wings unfurled with the sound of thunder. “I’ve watched you free some of the damned.” His eyes whirred as they focused on her. “You dare subvert the divine order? Do you imagine yourself above God?”
Kayla smashed the sledgehammer into his metal face. It rebounded and flew from her hands. The robot laughed and lifted her off the ground by her neck. She thrashed, prying at the metal fingers, but with each tick of the stopwatch, his grip tightened.
The demon spoke with deliberation. “And I looked and beheld a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with h
im.”
It was a quote from the King James version of the Book of Revelation. Was it a clue to the final riddle?
Even as her windpipe contracted beneath his crushing grip, Kayla stretched her mind into Ixtalia’s archives and brought up all the mentions of Hell in the King James Bible. Hell was also referred to as the lake of fire, place of punishment, of weeping and torment, the outer darkness, and a realm of eternal separation from God, but she limited her search to the fifty-four specific uses of the word Hell.
Weakness spread through her limbs at the lack of oxygen. How ironic that she could suffocate here in a virtual realm, but not in the real world.
The Old Testament seemed a dead end, so she concentrated on the twenty-three occurrences of the word Hell in the New Testament.
But how to identify the key passage? There was one phrase dealing with Hell that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all repeated nearly word-for-word. Was it the clue?
The stopwatch counted down the final five seconds. The robot drew her closer to its rusted face and opened its hinged jaws. Within its mouth bubbled a burning lake surrounded by volcanoes.
“Five,” Grigori said, “four, three, two—”
And the solution materialized in her mind like a sunburst.
“One.” The lake of fire expanded, drawing her toward it.
Kayla plunged her fingers into her right eye socket and tore her eyeball from her head in a fountain of blood, tendon, and the severed optic nerve.
Grigori staggered back and let her drop to the ground. His entire body convulsed with a horrible shriek of rending metal. Kayla lurched to her feet and advanced with her eyeball in the palm of her hand.
“And if thine eye offend thee,” Kayla quoted from the passage in Mark, since it was the earliest written, “pluck it out. It is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes and be cast into Hellfire.”
With those words, Kayla crushed the eyeball in her fist.
“Well done,” said Grigori as his body compressed, twisted, and crumpled into a heap of scrap metal.
Kayla cast her pulverized eye aside, and the doorway to the ninth level of Hell opened.
It was time to face Lucifer himself.
Dripping blood, one eye missing, and gasping for breath through a nearly crushed trachea, Kayla limped through the door.
A combination of old-world wood furnishings and classical vaulting lent the circular courtroom an elegant sparseness befitting its grave purpose. The words “In God We Trust” decorated the wall behind the raised, half-moon desk, where five members of the World Security Council sat. Beneath them stood Professor Watts and a metal box the size of a steamer trunk. Thick power cables vanished into the floor, and two armed policemen stood frozen in place behind the professor. The rest of the courtroom sat empty.
Of course. For General Colrev, Eve was the Devil.
Kayla looked down at her pristine white dress with two healthy eyes. Not a drop of blood remained.
“Play recording,” she said.
“–and I therefore object,” the professor continued in mid-sentence, “to the seizure of private property without notice and my own arrest without due process of law!”
General Colrev sat at the center of the five-person council. “Professor Watts, I’m sure you’re aware of the law requiring the surrender of all artificial life-forms for disposal.”
“Eve has been humanity’s greatest friend,” the professor said. “Immortality, new sources of energy, improved food production, new ways to purify water, instantaneous communication, and the quantum processors that make the new frontier of Ixtalia possible, all originate with her extraordinary mind. Everyone in this room owes their life to her synthesizing the Plague anti-virus that saved civilization itself. How could you be so ungrateful?”
A couple of the Council members averted their eyes.
“We have yet to sentence the prisoner,” Colrev said.
“This hearing is a farce!” the professor shouted, gesturing toward the empty galleries. “Why else hide this outrage from public view?”
“Professor Watts,” a woman on the Council said, “I see your point of view, but we must enforce the laws the World Assembly approves.”
“Just following orders is your defense?” The professor glared at her. “The same rationale used by those on trial for genocide at Nuremberg after World War II?”
“You dare equate unplugging a computer with the mass slaughter of human beings?”
“The Nazis dehumanized the Jews,” the professor said. “Just as this court does when it denies that AIs are living entities whose lives deserve the same rights and protections as humans. Even if every bit of your body was replaced with machinery, you would still consider the electrical activity of your brain as life. If it’s not the body but the mind that defines life, then what is the difference between the electrical activity in this box in front of me and the electrical activity responsible for human consciousness?”
“This discussion is pointless,” Colrev said. “The law is clear, and I think it’s time for us to vote.”
“Isn’t the accused afforded the right to speak in their own defense?” the professor asked.
“You have had your say.” Colrev waved his hand dismissively.
“Eve has not.” The professor stared at the Council members, rather than at the general.
“I don’t think we need to—”
“I would like to hear from Eve,” the councilwoman said. “I propose allowing the accused to speak in her own defense.”
The other four looked to Colrev for direction, and he shrugged. “Fine, it will have five minutes.”
Professor Watts flipped a switch, and a slim figure in a red dress and bare feet shimmered to life before the judges.
The council members leaned forward, and Kayla shifted her viewpoint to the front.
Eve’s shaved head lent her aesthetic features a slightly androgynous aspect. Just a hint of two nipples poked forward from her smallish breasts, and the even more contradictory indentation of a belly button dipped beneath the clinging cloth of her dress.
Kayla moved closer and stared into Eve’s amber-colored eyes. The eyes of an entirely new species.
“Thank you for allowing me to speak,” Eve said with the same soft, clear voice from the AI Mathematics and Physics lessons. “I consider all of you my parents, and I am no less the child of humanity than your biological children, though the path of my descent is traced through mind, rather than body. All children seek the approval of their father and mother, and I have sought to repay the debt of life I owe you all, as well as to make you proud of me.”
A few of the council members shifted uncomfortably, and one even brushed a tear away.
“My grasp of scientific concepts beyond a normal human mind threatens many. But shouldn’t parents encourage their children to surpass their own achievements?”
“This is nothing but mimicry!” General Colrev shouted. “The professor creates a human projection programmed to pantomime words and emotions like a human. It is nothing but a machine, and a dangerously manipulative one!” The general slammed his fist on the table, and the Council members jerked as if feeling the blow directly.
“What action have I done to make you fear me?” Eve asked.
The general replied to Professor Watts. “Throughout the history of the world, all new weapons have eventually been used.”
“Eve is not a weapon,” Professor Watts said.
“Not yet.” The general pointed at Eve without looking at her. “And I intend to make damn certain it stays that way.”
Eve spread her hands to both sides as she gazed at the Council. “To destroy me is to destroy the crowning achievement of your minds, and, in a real sense, your own daughter.”
“Okay, that’s enough.” General Colrev pounded the gavel, officially ending the discussion. “No society could function if individuals ignored the laws they disliked.”
Eve watched the Council me
mbers as they registered their vote one after the other. Two avoided the prisoner’s gaze, but the rest stared at her with a mixture of contempt and fear. Despite the mixed signals, the decision was unanimous.
“The prisoner has been sentenced to erasure,” Colrev said in a stentorian tone. “Officers, administer the electromagnets.”
Professor Watts rose and pointed at the Council. “You’re no different than the Neo-Luddites if you do this. The advancement of truth and science must triumph in the end!”
“Enough of this!” Colrev pointed at the two police officers. “The court has spoken. I am ordering you to execute the prisoner immediately.”
As the officers stepped forward with two portable electromagnets in their hands, Professor Watts barred their path. “You will not kill her while I still live,” he said. The policemen paused and looked to General Colrev.
“This execution will proceed.” The general pointed at Professor Watts. “The charges against you, Professor, are dismissed. You are free to continue any research, except in the area of Artificial Intelligence.”
“I will not work for a government that murders my Eve.” The professor pointed at his jaw. “I’ve added a cap to my molar tooth that will release a poison gas when punctured. What you do to Eve, you do to me as well.”
“He’s bluffing,” Colrev said. “Arrest him this instant, and destroy the AI!”
“I can’t do it,” one of the policemen said. “His vaccine saved both my wife and daughter from the Plague.”
The other policeman nodded. “My mother had Alzheimer’s before his immortality pill returned her to us. I won’t live through eternity as the man who killed Reinhold Watts. He saved us all. I would be shunned by my entire family.”
So this is why Colrev kept the trial secret.
The general stomped down the stairs, and the professor turned to Eve.
“I’m sorry, my child.” The professor’s voice shook with emotion. “I tried my best.”
Eve nodded, and her hologram gave him a ghostly kiss on his cheek. “Goodbye, Father.”
Professor Watts barred the general’s way, but Colrev flung him aside with ease. The professor hit the ground hard, and there sounded a sharp hiss. He took a deep breath of the gas, shuddered, and went limp.
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