“Okay, that sounds like a good exercise. Are you ready, then?”
Vee settled back in the chair, gripped its armrests and closed her eyes—maybe a little too tightly, because she heard Harvinder snort in amusement. Then she heard him touch a single key.
And she was in.
If a total absence of everything could be thought of as being “in” anything. Maybe, outside of everything. She stood in a blackness more absolute than closing one’s eyes, than having no eyes at all. It was not merely quiet; it was as though a “mute” button prevented even the possibility of sound.
And as to having a physical sense of a body, well, maybe…a ghost of physicality. At least, she vaguely felt like she was standing on a surface, not floating in space, so that was something. She willed her avatar to move, willed it to raise its right arm, and maybe it did…maybe…but there were no air molecules to be stirred, to resist the movement, and without seeing her astral limb she couldn’t be sure she had succeeded. The same when she ordered her body to turn around and face in another direction. Perhaps it had, but in this environment she couldn’t really say.
If in Hades she was already a facsimile of her mortal self, now she was a facsimile of a facsimile, like copies that degrade in quality with each recopying. Was her soul now attenuated to the point where it might just cease to be altogether?
A teasing foretaste of panic fluttered through her. She was reminded of being entombed in her cement sarcophagus, utterly helpless, unable to move her body, let alone escape. What if the man who waited and watched outside couldn’t pull her back, and she could never get out of this place?
What if she were still encased in her stone coffin, had never actually been freed, and all of this was just a dream—just madness?
She willed herself to look up, though she expected up to be no different from down, from the void that surrounded her. She was wrong. Her avatar opened its mouth, and would have gasped in surprise if there had been any air to draw into her lungs, if lungs she had.
Dense constellations of stars filled the high heavens, stars that gleamed and glittered red against the blackness, like millions of tiny rubies dusted across black velvet. A universe of nothing but dying red giants. Myriad stars were moving quickly, as in time lapse photography of a night sky, though some moved in this direction and others in that direction, while others remained stationary. Some so far they were little more than a sparkling dot, while others floated by like glowing hot air balloons.
There were those that moved languidly, others that streaked by like meteors. Some met and flashed in silent collisions, or else met and merged into one new star that drifted or shot off in a whole new direction.
Information, she thought. The information that had been introduced into, stored in the Mesh. Moving along pre-programmed orbits, or pushed and pulled, summoned or sent, by the minds of those who were interfaced with the Mesh at this time. The busy, insect-like workers of Naraka. The dreaming Enmeshed. People in who knew how many other colonies, or individual loners like herself.
Was she supposed to swim up there, then, and enter into those currents of information? What next?
Well that was up to her, wasn’t it? Had she forgotten about the exercise she herself had chosen for her first venture?
A man named Adam. Waiting for the stomping boots of the bombs to advance on his frail shelter, and to reach his sister, his mother and brother, helplessly removed from him…
Mother. Brother. For the first time in a long while she remembered that she had a mother and brother of her own. In Los Angeles, Tim had told Vee that her mother hadn’t accompanied her husband on his holy crusade into Hades, had remained in Paradise—but what of her brother? Maybe her brother had been too young to participate in the crusade, or even disinclined. Vee hoped disinclined. She hoped he was like she was now.
But thoughts of her own family were muddying her focus, and she was afraid she might end up conjuring some unwanted memory of her own instead of recalling the one Jay had screened for her. So she locked down on the name Adam again, concentrated on his fragmented memories. Adam, returning from his studio apartment to the house the bank wanted to foreclose on, hungry for their money even as doomsday loomed. The house where he kept the dog, a beautiful white Akita with a raccoon-like mask, because he couldn’t have her in his apartment, didn’t know what he was to do with her. Adam walking his dog around a shopping center that had never taken off because of the crippled economy, having rented only a handful of its shop space. And then, Adam and so many, many others flushed through the gates of Hell.
Prodded along by the drone Demons. But finally, pushed too far after what they had endured already as mortals. Rebelling. Adam leading others away in a new direction. Away toward the city that would ultimately become the Construct.
A sound reached her ears, the first she had perceived here; a distant noise like sawing. It grew, increased rapidly as it neared her. It became the roar of a train, but even as she registered this comparison the train was there beside her, hurtling past, and she rocked back from it. It was a luminous red like the distant streams of information, and looked as much like a ribbed snake skeleton as a train. Were those blurred human figures standing inside it? She had a flash of white faces peering out at her through a framework that glowed like red hot metal. Was it going to stop?
Was she supposed to board it, so it could take her to the memory she was seeking to summon?
But the skeletal train never stopped, kept flickering by, until it receded and was gone.
Without any better idea, she started walking in the direction the train had taken, and she believed she was actually experiencing a sense of movement this time. Yes, yes, surely…one foot placed in front of the other, connecting with a solid if unseen floor, conveying her forward.
At last, ahead, the barest suggestion of light. She kept on toward it, increasing her stride, and as the dim light grew so did she begin to hear her own footfalls, muffled at first but finally coming clear.
The light was a mist, but through it she began to discern shapes: the hulking black suggestions of buildings, low and angular, arrayed around her at a remove. She kept on heading toward the nearest of these silhouetted structures. The haze was slowly dissipating, or else she was leaving it behind as she neared the buildings. Details finally started to become available to her avatar’s sense of vision.
Brick walls—the bricks new, barely worn. Glass doors. A brick walkway, lined with young trees spaced between mock antique lamp posts, bordering a parking lot that still faded off into the mist. Walking at a more casual, exploratory pace along the brick sidewalk, Vee understood where she had arrived. The shopping plaza where Adam would walk his dog. She had not only downloaded his memory from the information currents, apparently, but entered into it.
The plaza was laid out like a little village square, the shops facing inward toward the empty expanse of the parking lot. Not only that, but with their bogus bricked up windows and other clever features, a number of establishments had been designed to look like old mills or factory buildings that had been converted into these shops and markets. Just as the factory buildings of Tartarus had been converted into the miniature universe called the Construct.
Vee approached the long front window of a supermarket, one of the mall’s anchor stores, but she couldn’t see inside even when she cupped her hands around her eyes close to the glass. Only blackness beyond; the void again. (She had thought she might see others like herself inside, shopping for glowing red information neatly stored on the supermarket’s shelves.) The automatic door, when she approached it, wouldn’t open. Everything here only a facade then, like a movie set?
She was beginning to turn away from the supermarket’s door when a voice behind her said, “You’re trespassing here. What do you want?”
She spun around the rest of the way, absurdly expecting to see a security guard or policeman there. What she saw instead was a youngish man with a dog on a leash—a beautiful white Akita with a
black, racoon-like mask.
29: THE AVATARS
The dog looked friendlier than the man, its tongue hanging out and small eyes beaming, and Vee smiled at it. Not that she didn’t find the man easy on the eyes; he put her in mind of the actor Kevin Bacon. Or was this avatar taken from that actor or another model, and not the man’s actual form? She had viewed his memories through his eyes, and hadn’t had the opportunity to see his reflection in a mirror or glass clearly.
“Are you Adam?” she asked.
“Was. People have been calling me Adamn for a long time now.”
“Ah…right. I heard someone call you that in your memory.”
“Heard who? What memory?” he asked warily, maintaining his distance, holding back the dog either to protect Vee—though it didn’t seem at all inclined toward attack—or to protect the dog from her.
“Sorry…look, I’m Vee.”
“Vee?” She saw his eyes run down and up her avatar’s body in its ripped rubber casing distrustfully, though she hoped he found her attractive enough to hear her out.
“Yeah. I was a prisoner of the Demons from the early days of the Construct—almost two thousand years, and I just got free. I found a gun, a sentient Demonic gun that can access the Mesh, and it used your memories to fill me in a little on what had happened, because I was suffering from amnesia. I’ve gradually remembered the mortal world in full detail, but I don’t really remember my own life at all, and—”
”Okay, wait, hold on.” Adamn scrunched his face. “How did this sentient gun find my memory recording?”
“I don’t know—just Mesh surfing, I guess. Did you record it yourself, or did the Demons pull it out of you, or…?”
“No, I recorded it myself. An experiment of mine. Not the cheeriest stuff I could dredge out of my brain, but they were the last memories before I died and the first since I came here, so I guess they were the most vivid. The easiest stuff for me to get my hands around.”
“Why record it at all?”
“Why record anything? Why write books? It’s to remind me who I was, and for other people to remember the life they had before. It’s part of a project I’m involved in. We never really forget anything, right?
Everybody has a photographic memory…it’s just that we disregard what isn’t immediately important to us. So what we’re trying to do is extract the memories of movies we’ve seen, music we love, books we’ve read…call them out and record them so others can play them back and enjoy them, too. So they’ll never be forgotten. All we’ve got left of our civilization is in our minds.”
“Your dog.” She nodded at it. “He’s just a memory, too, huh? Not a soul like us?”
“It’s a she. And no, you’re right…she’s not really here.” That didn’t stop Adamn from bending down to ruffle the fur between the burly animal’s shoulders. “She’s just a construct I generated. But I really worked on her until I got her just right. It took me centuries to refine her.”
“You did a good job. And you made this, too, right?” She gestured at the mall village around them.
“Right. My dog needs a place to do her virtual pee, doesn’t she?”
“It’s like the holodeck on Star Trek, huh?” Vee said.
Finally the man smiled. She liked it—crinkly and unexpected after his leeriness. “You say you don’t remember your own life, but you remember Star Trek?”
“Yeah. I guess that says a lot about our culture, huh? Or a lot about my life.”
Adamn turned away from her, gave the dog’s leash a tug to get her moving. Obviously, he was growing less wary of Vee—and obviously, inviting her to fall into step beside him. She did so.
He asked, “Where are you now?”
“In the city Naraka. They just adapted me for the Mesh, so this is my first time inside it.”
He glanced over at her, impressed. “Really? Well, you’re doing good for a first-timer.”
“Thanks. So where are you at now…really?”
The man seemed to regard her for a moment before answering, a little of his wariness returning. “I’m in a city called Freetown.”
“Freetown? Really? That’s where I’m headed.”
“You’re headed to Freetown? Why?”
“Why? My gun told me about it…it sounds like a good place to settle.
Isn’t it? From what I understand, you’ve welcomed all kinds of people there. Damned, Demons, Angels…”
“I’m not saying we haven’t, but if you’re in Naraka on the 90th floor and you want to get to us on the 128th, you’re going to have to get past the Mujahideen.”
“I know—they’ve told me about them.”
“It used to be a lot easier for people to get to us, but not anymore, if you’re coming from below. They’ve really locked down their floors and it’s a real problem. Every now and then they launch attacks on us, too, so were always having to watch our borders.”
“Well, I guess I’ll just have to be extra careful getting past them, huh?”
Adamn looked over at her again, his avatar’s face intense with thought, but she couldn’t gauge what those thoughts might be. Suspicion?
Concern? He looked like he wanted to say more but was restraining himself. Vee had the intuition that he knew a way past these Mujahideen, but was reluctant to share it until he felt her out some more. Was he always this untrusting, or was he just so disconcerted by her intrusion into his private little thinking place?
They had reached the far end of the plaza, and turned to cut across the parking lot toward the opposite line of stores. Out in the center of the lot, though, like an island in an asphalt lake, was a bank with a drive-through window. Vee nodded at it. “Can we stop there for a sec? I’ve got to hit the ATM.”
Adamn snorted. “No need—I’ll lend you a few bucks.”
“Good. Where can a girl get a coffee around here?”
The dog stopped abruptly in its tracks, and growled. Vee looked down and saw it bunching its muzzle.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” Adamn snapped at her, giving her leash a little jerk.
Vee lifted her gaze toward where the computer construct was looking, and hissed, “Christ.”
Standing in the empty parking lot not too distant from them was an apparition in human form, but made of shimmering static. Again, she thought absurdly of the TV show Star Trek, of someone having difficulty being teleported. But then, a few horizontal bands passed through the image and it cleared. Became a life-sized figure standing there in a white robe with its cowl pushed off. An older man, tall and lean, with white hair in a crewcut and deep-set eyes that Vee could see were a startling blue even from here.
It was from the eyes that she recognized him. Not so much because she remembered her father from life, but because his eyes resembled her own.
Her father began speaking, though those eyes of his stared away from her and Adamn, off into the mist. Speaking with the resonance of an evangelist.
“I call out to you, who were saved in life. I call out to you, who through our Lord had found the way to Heaven. I call out to you, my blessed brothers and sisters, who proved your commitment to your faith…who followed me and others like me into Hell itself, so that we could squash the unholy devils, squash the sinful Damned, who dared to rise up against Him. I call out to you, who are isolated, alone or in groups, to go forth and find your way to us. Find your way to the City of Angels, on level 7. We must combine all our forces. We must become strong once more. Because the battles are not yet won! No, the battles are still not finished! We can never grow complacent again! I am freed from my captors, freed from the devils, and I will make them suffer for their crimes and rid this place of them! Together, we can demonstrate to our Father that we have not forsaken our holy task! And when we have fulfilled it, we will be delivered, my brothers and sisters! Returned to the Paradise we came from!”
“Oh my God,” Vee breathed.
“Yeah, I know,” Adamn snarled. “These assholes in L.A. have been hacking into our sy
stems with this bullshit for a few days now. We keep blocking them, and they keep finding ways around it. But this is the first time they’ve gotten into my programs. Fuck!”
The specter went on, its voice becoming louder, more impassioned. “I know there are some of you in other cities. You have become frightened, or misguided, and dwell at the side of our enemies. You must turn away from them, brothers and sisters, and remember who you are! You need be afraid no longer! You must return to the bosom of your true family, and redeem yourselves! Stand by my side, and together we will avenge ourselves! We have become prisoners of the Tower of Babel itself, but Babylon will fall again! ‘Yes, march against Babylon, the land of rebels, a land that I will judge! Pursue, kill, and completely destroy them, as I have commanded you…’”
“I’ve got to get back,” Adamn told her. “I’ve got to get this crap out of my program before it does some damage.”
“‘…Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.’”
“Insane,” Adamn said, wagging his head.
Yes, Vee thought. He is.
So, Roper and his team had been able to find her father on their own, based on the information she’d given them, and release him. Return him to Los Angeles. Had Pastor Phelps overthrown Pastor Johnston, then, as Roper had envisioned? She was certain Roper would have told Phelps how Johnston had set him and his daughter up to be ambushed. And what more might Roper have told his leader?
The preacher continued, and even Adamn hadn’t yet torn himself away from listening to his rant.
“How true am I to my own convictions, brothers and sisters? How devout is my own faith? The Lord told us, ‘He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me.’ And children, too…yes, children, too!
For I will tell you that even my own daughter, my daughter Rebecca, has succumbed to evil and betrayed me! She left me in monstrous torture, abandoned me to my suffering, while she herself escaped the Demon prison in which we long were held. In the company of her Demonic familiar, she went on to the City of Angels, and lied to the commander of security, telling him she would lead him to rescue me—but instead, attacking the commander and his men viciously so that I might never be found. She did away somehow with the son of my friend, the Pastor Jacob Johnston, perhaps even now in the clutches of the Demons she allied herself with in return for her own freedom…”
The Fall of Hades Page 15
