by Paul Neuhaus
“You said no tricks.”
“That wasn’t a trick. That was street fighting one oh one.”
To my right suddenly, I heard a voice. I looked in that direction, and, in defiance of all reason, there was Pan holding a gladius. He tossed it to me and I caught it. As the Arae watched, I took the sword and jammed it into the soil at my feet. “No tricks,” I repeated to my enemy. Without turning, I said, “Stay out of this, Pan!” Then I rushed forward, and she darted left. I went through the space where she’d been and pivoted on my heel, so I was facing her again. I rushed forward. She darted right this time, I spun, and we were back more or less where we started. I used the evolving pattern to my advantage. I pretended to rush forward but stopped almost immediately. The Arae darted right again, and I went to where she was rather than where she’d been. I grabbed her by the ankles and pulled. Once I had all her weight under my control, I reversed the direction of my arms and slammed her into the dusty ground like a rag doll. All the air came out her body and she laid there for several seconds. I let go of her ankles and tried to race up to where her torso was so that I could fall on it with all my weight. I missed when she rolled to the left. I ended up sliding and throwing up a cloud of dry ground. I looked left and was pleased to see she’d not made a clean getaway the way a non-winged person would have. She was a tangle of feathers, and I stamped out with my left foot so that it landed on her right wing, pinning it to the ground. She didn’t realize what I’d done until it was too late. She rolled too far and almost dislocated the wing I had locked in place. It hurt, too. She screamed loud and it echoed through the empty terrain. She brought up her left hand, rolled her torso back in my direction and clawed my arm. I didn’t even feel it. I was too focused. For the immediate future, I had one thing on my mind and one thing only. I used the fact she’d rolled closer to me, throwing my left leg over her body and sitting down on her stomach with all my weight. Her head snapped back and all the remaining breath in her escaped through her mouth. I didn’t do anything until her head popped back up again. As soon as it did, I leaned forward and took her head in both of my hands and started to squeeze. It was a maneuver I’d done a time or two in the past, but it’d been harder to pull off on those occasions. Right then, I was dealing with a creature who was part human and part bird. Hollow bones. When she felt her skull start to compress the Arae panicked. She clawed at me with her hands and feet both. I ignored the buffeting and the pain with a singular focus. I put all my upper body strength into the task, and at last, the Arae’s head popped, spewing blood and gore and gray matter all over me. Even after the monster was dead, I continued to push until my palms met in the soup that’d been her brain. Finally, it clicked in my own head the Arae was dead and I’d won. I sat up again and looked into the distance. I saw a huge, dark shape that blotted out the purple sky. At its apex, there were lights. But not electric lights. The illumination came from fires and torches. I had an immediate sense of deja vu, but it was too much for me to process right then. My breathing leveled off and my hands went to my stomach. When I felt down there and realized for certain I was no longer pregnant, I collapsed into a violently weeping mass.
Pan came to me, but I could neither understand what he was saying nor care.
I wasn’t pregnant with a daughter named Calliope. I’d never been pregnant with a daughter named Calliope.
I’d slept. I didn’t remember doing it or even how I’d gotten into the pup tent. I woke up with a start and looked around with huge eyes. “What—? What—? What—?” I shouted.
Pan was out of his sleeping bag in seconds and over to where I lay on the other side of the enclosure. “Easy, Dora. Easy. I’m here to help. No one’s gonna hurt you.”
“Where am I?” I said.
The satyr loosened the grip he had on my shoulders. “Look outside,” he said. “Look outside.”
I looked at him first and he nodded reassuringly. I crawled over to the tent flaps and undid the zipper running down the middle. I folded one side back and stuck out my head. The sun was just rising and, in front of me, I could see the Parthenon Restaurant. It was completely deserted—and it wasn’t just due to the earliness of the hour. It looked like it had sat empty for some time. Also, it looked like something was hanging from one of the drive-in roofs. It was too far away for me to make out. I looked to my left and could see the highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas right where it should’ve been. There were no cars on it at all. In either direction. I noticed too that the colors weren’t ultra-vivid, and the ground wasn’t awash in pine trees. The world I’d reconciled myself to over I-don’t-know-how-long-a-period was no longer in evidence. If my senses could be trusted, I was back in the place I’d been pre-Conclave. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“Look to your right,” Pan said.
I did as he said and was flabbergasted. The dark shape I’d seen the night before was a mountain. It was no Everest, but it was tall nonetheless. I scanned upward toward the top and could just barely make out Grecian buildings and what appeared to be many large birds.
The mountain had not been there before the Conclave of Universal Consciousness.
The mountain was Olympus.
I felt myself growing faint.
My friend poked his head out alongside mine. He was close enough that I could smell his muskiness. “You’ve been inside an artificial reality,” he said gently. “Prometheus did it to take you off the table.”
“How long?” I said.
We looked at one another and Pan hesitated.
“How long?” I repeated.
“Nearly a year,” he said at last.
I’d propped myself up on my own forearms, so I could look out. They almost buckled underneath me. Pan placed a reassuring hand on my bicep. “So… Now I’m back…”
“Now you’re back.”
“How do I know for sure?”
“How do you know what for sure?”
“How do I know I’m back and this isn’t just another artificial reality?”
He blanched. I could tell he didn’t have a good answer.
I quickly said, “Never mind.”
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Wobbly” was the only thing I could think of to say. I didn’t tell him I’d been pregnant back in that other place. I would never tell anyone I’d been pregnant back in that other place. “Do you have a car?”
“I have your car.”
“Where’re the others?”
“Nearby. One of them anyway. We’ve been waiting for you here in shifts just in case you came back. Ty made it, so we could talk to you—although we were convinced it wasn’t working.”
Ty’d sent what I’d taken to be dreams. “The fact you’ve been waiting for me here… It wasn’t strictly for sentimental reasons, was it?”
He started to say something pithy but thought better of it. Instead he shook his head.
I started to crawl through the exit. “Let’s get going then.”
He grabbed me by my left ankle. “Are you ready to go back?”
“Do I have a choice? Besides, is it even safe to be here at the foot of Mount Olympus?”
He nodded, saying, “Can you give me a hand breaking down the tent?”
We stopped at the Joshua Tree Motor Inn and didn’t even have to get out. Elijah emerged carrying an army surplus duffel bag. He jumped into the front seat of the Pontiac while I remained in the back. Pan was driving. My ex-boyfriend looked into the backseat and smiled a smile with as much relief as joy. He only had one eye. The other was covered by a patch. “Christ,” he said. “I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again.”
I hesitated at first. I had to wash away the idea that the two of us’d been joined in wedded bliss. (Soon I’d have to sit and take stock of just how many of my experiences from the last year were now rendered null. It would’ve been easier to just say, “all of it”, but jumping ahead like that would’ve given me a psychological Charlie horse, I’m sure.) “What happ
ened to your eye?” was all I could think of to say. Not a bad place to start, really.
El put two fingers up to his patch and touched it lightly. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Sometimes I forget. It happened at the battle. There was a battle right after you disappeared.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I wanted as clean an understanding as I could get of what had happened at the Conclave of Universal Consciousness. For me, that event was split exactly in half. There was the real version I’d attended, and the fake version from after Prometheus had zapped the pinecone. What’d happened in the real world after I’d been disappeared? “Wait, hold on. I’m gonna need some help with this. You and I went to the Conclave to rescue Keri. Prometheus raised my magic pinecone, everything went white and—for me—after my vision cleared, the Conclave went on. It just went on inside an artificial reality. What did you see when the smoke cleared?”
Elijah nodded. Apparently, he’d expected my dislocation anxiety. “Everything went white like you said. After my sight returned, I looked over and you weren’t there anymore. Only the pithos was there. Sitting on the ground.”
I experienced a sudden start. “Oh, my gods! The pithos!” I’d just realized I didn’t have it. I’d left it back in the artificial reality. Actually, that wasn’t true: it’d been destroyed back in the artificial reality. Where was Hope? What was Elijah telling me?
“The pithos was on the ground where you’d been standing,” he repeated. “You didn’t take it with you.”
I did a quick calculation. If what he was saying was true, only I’d gone into the artificial reality. Only myself and the Arae had been real. All my friends and the people I’d met had been part of the simulation. “Does that mean you have the pithos?” I said to Elijah.
Elijah looked briefly at Pan and the two of them looked back at me (Pan for just a moment since he was driving). “I picked it up,” Weiner said. “I was going to try and get it out of there, but all hell broke loose.”
“Who has it now?”
“Prometheus. He wanted it for himself. That’s why he sent you away without it.”
I closed my eyes again and sighed. I couldn’t be mad at Elijah. Not without at least hearing the rest of the story. “Okay, so rewind again for a second. You looked over at me and I was gone but the pithos was still there. What was Prometheus doing?”
“I knew right away what’d happened. He’d put you inside the pinecone or some other kind of trick. But the rest of the people at the Conclave didn’t know that. We were deep inside the crowd and almost nobody saw you disappear. After a moment, Prometheus made a joke out of it. He said, ‘Kidding! It’s just a pinecone!’ Everyone laughed politely then he did what he really came there to do.”
“Which was to bring Mount Olympus to the desert between Las Vegas and L.A.”
Again, the two men looked at each other. Pan elaborated on what I’d said. “To bring Mount Olympus to the desert between Las Vegas and L.A. and to empty out the pocket dimension the Olympians fucked off to.”
“Empty out? Why?”
Pan drove in silence for a moment. We were headed toward Los Angeles. The highway was empty. “The old gods are back, and Prometheus is running the show.”
“Fuck,” I said. It was mostly a weary exhalation, but the word was in there too. “So, that’s why you wanted me back.”
Both men fell over one another trying to amend my statement. “That’s not the only reason we wanted you back,” they both said.
“Sorry,” I replied. “I didn’t mean that to sound so harsh. So, if Prometheus emptied out the place where the gods go to fuck off, that explains why you’re back,” I said to Pan.
“Exactly right,” the satyr said.
“What does Zeus make of all this? I can’t believe he’d just roll over and let Prometheus take charge.”
“That would be incorrect,” Pan replied. “I didn’t even know this—I had no prolonged contact with Zeus on the other side—but it turns out the King of the Gods was undergoing a serious depression.”
That really hit home for me. I was fascinated. I’d had a little experience with serious depressions myself. “Get the fuck out of town!”
“It’s true. Apparently, it set in not too long after he decided to fuck off. Turns out he regretted dropping out of the game. He missed the old days of bossing people around and electrocuting stuff. It happens to a lot of retirees. Long story short, when Prometheus dragged him back into the world, he was all ‘whatever’, and ‘I don’t care what you fuckers do’. We’re talking a serious case of ennui.”
“Wow. So, what happened?”
“Well, you’d think Prometheus would’ve just ignored this pathetic little, Prozac-needing former divine chief. I mean I’m told Zeus was beyond pathetic. But Prometheus has been carrying a grudge for thousands of years, so he couldn’t just let it go. He strapped old Zeus-y to the same rock he’d been strapped to. Now, a buzzard eats Zeus’ liver all day long, and Zeus grows it back at night.”
I was stunned. The story beggared belief—and yet it was too outlandish not to be true. I turned back to Elijah. “You said there was a battle…”
“There was a battle. It broke out right as Prometheus was moving on from the pinecone trick. Right before he brought back Olympus and the gods—which, by the way, I didn’t even see because of all the confusion and on account of me losing an eye.”
“Okay. Well, who attacked who?”
“Sebastian Squire attacked the leaders of the Church of Reciprocity. All the big shots up by the stage. Sebastian, all his people, your boy Calesius. Against Taylor Chriss, and his bodyguard and a bunch of other cultists I didn’t know.”
“Wait. Isn’t Sebastian Squire on Prometheus’ side?”
El shook his head. “No, what gave you that idea?”
“Never mind.”
“Yeah, apparently, Squire’d been planning the attack for ages. He knew what Prometheus was up to and he had photos of the site and maps and whatnot. He tried his damnedest to stop it all from happening, but, as you can see, he wasn’t successful.”
Weiner pointed out the back window, and I looked. Olympus still loomed behind us.
“Did Squire make it out alive?”
“He did, but just barely. Cal did too. Practically no one else, though. Squire’s forces were pretty well annihilated.”
“Fucking hell. Well, what happened to you?”
Elijah sighed. “If I’d done what I should’ve been doing, I would’ve been fine,” he said.
“What should you’ve been doing?”
“Running like hell and not looking back. It was the second part I got wrong. I kept looking back to see what was happening on the stage and I wasn’t watching where I was going. I slammed right into Church of Reciprocity security. They’d been moving toward me the whole time from the direction of the highway. Obviously, they’d been sent to collect your pithos—and collect it they did.”
“They worked you over?”
El flushed. “Only if you call one punch being worked over. In my defense, I will say that the guy who hit me, had his keys in his fist—with one of the keys pointed out.”
I cringed and shrank down into my seat. What Elijah had just described was the kind of sucker-punch anyone could’ve fallen victim to. Including yours truly. “Oh, Gods, El, I’m sorry.”
He shrugged to show there was no bad blood between us. Not that there would’ve been anyway. It was clear from his demeanor he knew my not being there had been outside of my control. “I really want to thank you for trying,” I said and meant it.
Again, the shrug. “I wish I had more to tell you. I haven’t heard word one about the pithos since I lost it.”
Pan looked at Elijah and said in a serious tone, “Tell her what else you haven’t heard anything about…”
El looked as though he’d been struck, but he wasn’t mad at the satyr. “Keri’s still mixed up in the Church. I think they took her to Olympus, but I don’t know for sure.”
&nb
sp; Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. For just a moment, I struggled to find who I was or to latch on to who I’d be in the coming days. Which of the personas I’d built would be most appropriate to deal with the horrendous situation that’d unfolded since I’d been removed from the picture? I knew I didn’t want to play the heroine anymore, but that was looking more and more irrelevant by the minute. Finally, I said to Pan, “You’re headed back to Los Angeles, right?”
“Right. We’ll hook up with the others there.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to sleep. I wanna get some things straight in my head. Wake me when we get to the outskirts of the city.”
“Roger wilco,” Pan said, and both men turned to face the highway.
I slipped in and out of sleep. Mostly, I was trying to figure out my place in this world—and to jettison the memories I’d made in the artificial reality. I spent part of that time working out the “physics” of Demizois. I’d only ever been in two, and I found that, if I worked through my experiences, the ruleset was a fairly simple one. What it boiled down to was, in an artificial reality, only someone from the outside can affect someone else from the outside. When we’d gone into the pinecone, I’d warned Connie and Amanda that, if we were killed inside, we’d die on the outside. Turns out that wasn’t true. If we’d been killed by any of the creatures that were part of the simulation, we’d have bounced back out of the simulation. Only if we killed one another would there be lasting change. Medea—someone from the outside—killed Connie and Connie died in real life. I killed Amanda and she died in real life. Then I killed myself and I died in real life. Thinking back on it now, it all made sense to me, and the rules held true in my second Demizoi experience. In Prometheus’ alternate reality, El had made me pregnant. Since the El inside the simulation was part of the simulation, he couldn’t get me real world pregnant. No, the only “real” creatures inside that second simulation were me and the Arae—and the Arae was not something Prometheus could’ve planned for. He had no idea Adrestia was as crazy as she was. I made a note that. If I survived to the end of this new adventure, I’d go to Addie’s shade and thank her for giving me a hand. I was certain she’d just love that.
