“Pardon me,” said two Chinese Americans as they bumped past the Japanese man. The pair then ascended a scaffold and affixed four more centimeter-sized lenses to the ceiling. Junichi Daisuke had counted over one hundred and forty such devices positioned throughout the gala room—above, below and on every wall. Tonight was the first time that his nishikigoi were going to be captured in real-definition, and he was pleased that the whole world would have a chance to see their splendor.
The Chinese Americans climbed down and walked to the tank, where they lingered, observing the graceful fish within. The younger man said, “These’re really pretty.”
Junichi Daisuke asked, “How come you do not see the lenses when you watch m.a.? They are everywhere, and they are green.” He pointed to the tiny glass beads that winked upon every surface of the gala room.
“The green gets isolated and masked out.”
The older man saw that Junichi Daisuke was confused and added, “Like green screens in old movies.”
“Then why are there not holes in the image where the lenses were?”
“Pixels are smeared over the holes, automatically,” said the younger man. “Anything that doesn’t look right, an image architect can correct.”
“Xie xie,” the Japanese man said to the Chinese Americans.
Nodding respectfully, the pair walked toward a floating cart that was loaded with equipment.
The small Japanese man watched the fish swim through the clear water and wondered why a copper Kawarimono that he had named Akihabara seemed both sluggish and confused.
* * *
Junichi Daisuke, four catering chefs, three dendrologists (who had overseen the installation of the golden weeping willows that stood behind the nishikigoi tank), and eighteen unhappy police officers sat behind the stanchions, facing the wooden dais upon which rested three oak chairs, none of which looked comfortable. Twenty reporters from the same number of countries sat upon plush divans to the right of the raised area.
From the living wall emerged a female pastor who was clothed in dark green vestments, her silver hair withheld from her kind face in a tight knot upon the top of her head. She was soon succeeded by a small Indian man who had a brown suit and a humorless face. Together, they walked toward the dais.
A chromium mannequin, model 8M, then emerged from the wall. The re-bodied man had light brown hair and wore a black suit and tie, a gray shirt and a generic face. His hard-soled leather shoes clacked upon the tile floor as he strode toward the dais.
Junichi Daisuke felt the caterers, dendrologists and police officers grow tense. The nishikigoi stirred as the machine approached them, and soon, they fled to the far side of the tank, repulsed.
Pride filled the Japanese caretaker.
The ordained woman in dark green walked to the middle of the dais and announced, “I am Pastor Svetlana Graekow-Jacek.” Her subtly amplified voice reverberated throughout the gala room. “I’d like to remind all of the reporters present to withhold their questions until after Mr. Dulande has spoken.”
A reporter called out, “Why’re you speaking on his behalf? Mr. Dulande’s a Catholic.”
“Mr. Dulande is no longer Catholic,” replied the pastor.
An awkward silence sat in the room.
“Good riddance,” said one of the policemen near Junichi Daisuke.
The reporter asked, “Why has—”
“Please withhold all of your questions until after Mr. Dulande has spoken,” restated the spiritual woman, equitably.
The reporters remained quiet, and soon, the pastor and the Indian man seated themselves upon two of the three uncomfortable oak chairs.
Hard soles clacked upon wood as the chromium mannequin that contained Derrick W.R. Dulande’s mind ascended three steps and walked to the center of the dais.
A policewoman near Junichi Daisuke pressed her right palm to the razor gun on her hip and tapped its polymer shell.
“I’ll give you five hundred globals,” said her partner, facetiously.
“I’ll do this gratis.”
Derrick W.R. Dulande employed his iridescent lenses and looked upon the gathering. His gelware mask was inscrutable.
“I haven’t come here to apologize,” announced the re-bodied man. His subtly amplified voice resounded and decayed within the gala space.
People shifted uncomfortably. Junichi Daisuke heard several policemen snort.
“I, Derrick Wilfred Raymond Dulande, do not offer apologies, because the things that I did in my first life were and are unforgivable. To ask the friends and families of Jessica Reynolds-Tam, Lana Pearlman and Rena Takahata for forgiveness would be a thoughtless and uncaring request. I don’t deserve forgiveness: I was mean and loathsome. I did awful, disgusting things to these three women and to the hundreds of people who cared for them. I committed these foul deeds in a deliberate manner, and I fully deserved the death sentence that I received.
“Nicolai Dhanikov, Po-Li Fan, Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler had far better motivations than did I.
“As I stated earlier, I haven’t come here to apologize.”
Junichi Daisuke saw that everyone in the room was confused by the re-bodied man’s words. All of these people had expected to hear contrition.
“I have come here to tell the human race what I’ve learned.” The mannequin’s eyes retracted deep into his head. “I have come to tell you what I know of Hell.”
Reporters shot up from their seats as shouts, solicitous hands and derisive remarks flashed across the entire room.
The re-bodied man was silent.
A moment later, the small Indian in brown stood up, walked beside the mannequin and said to the assemblage, “If there’s another interruption, the media will be asked to leave.”
The assemblage quietened and soon became silent. Coolant ducts hummed, stirring the golden branches of the weeping willows.
The reporters and the Indian man reseated themselves, and Junichi Daisuke surveyed his fish; Akihabara was still behaving peculiarly for some reason.
The re-bodied man interlaced his gelware fingers in front of the second button of his black jacket. “Hell is not an imaginary place,” he resumed. “It is not a place of pitchforks or grinning daemons.
“It is a real, physical place, one that we look at every day.
“Hell is within our sun.”
Several people in the room laughed. An officer whispered, “He’s totally nuts.”
Like the people around him, Junichi Daisuke thought that the re-bodied man was insane. Only a score of the sixty-one thousand resurrected subjects had remembered anything from the years during which they had been dead, and all of these recollections had been vague, inconclusive amalgams of faces and light, dismissed by scientists as hallucinations that had occurred just before and after death.
Derrick W.R. Dulande continued, “The great majority of you, perhaps every single person watching me right now, will dismiss my experiences as dreams or malicious fabrications or manifested psychoses, but the fact is that I went to Hell and have returned.
“From what I’ve witnessed, I will conclude that there is no heaven. There is no utopian realm that is the opposite of what lies within the sun. Heaven was created by mankind to give us hope in a vast and senseless universe. Heaven is a fantasy.
“For you to understand my journey, I must first tell you what I have learned about the human soul.
“Every single living human being is two connected but separate entities: a physical body and a spirit body. The spirit body is a living and tangible thing, a symbiotic creature, but it exists in a dimension that is separate from what we know as reality.
“The reason that scientists have never been able to figure out exactly how the mind works is because so much of it i
s in that other dimension.
“Dreams, artistic inspirations, spirituality, premonitions, intuitions, abstract correlations and sense memories are byproducts of our symbiotic relationship with our spirit bodies.
“I’ll wait until you stop laughing.”
The mannequin paused until the cacklers quietened.
“The spirit bodies of most human beings dissipate when the physical body dies.
“When philanthropists, artists, doctors, lawyers, priests, rapists, rabbis, animal slaughterers, child molesters and thieves die, they all simply end, unless they are cryogenically preserved, in which case they are stuck in a limbo between existence and absolute obliteration.
“Whether preserved in a cryonic vault or allowed to decompose naturally, all murderers go to Hell.
“When I committed my first murder—when I strangled Lana Pearlman in twenty-nineteen—my spirit body changed and became a permanent thing in that other dimension. It became something capable of transubstantiation and even multiple transubstantiations. My soul became something that could journey to Hell.
“Vile killers like myself go to Hell. Soldiers who kill in war and are celebrated as heroes go to Hell. The man who pushed the button for the injection that killed me will go to Hell. Doctors who euthanize patients go to Hell. A policeman who kills a serial killer goes to the exact same place that the serial killer does.
“Charles Manson, despite what people did at his behest, did not personally kill another human being and so did not go to Hell, nor did Isabelle Xia, despite her part in the destruction of the Empire State Building. A sweet old woman named Roberta Saunders who lost control of her car and accidentally killed a child was forever condemned to Hell.”
Two of the policeman near Junichi Daisuke left the gala room. Another officer muttered, “Fuck this nonsense,” and departed soon afterwards.
The mannequin watched them leave and resumed, “There’s a scientific principle at work in the dimension or dimensions of souls—the place where our spirit bodies live. This science does not at all recognize what we conceive of as right or wrong, any more than molecules do. But for some reason, the act of killing another person—and indirectly, its spirit body—differs dramatically from any other thing that a human being can do. This act changes the chemical makeup of the killer’s spirit body so that it can leave the phantom moon.
“Perhaps this is a safeguard, something that isolates the killer’s spirit from the other spirit bodies so that it won’t infect them.
“I’m not sure.
“I know that most of you will disregard my tale of dual transubstantiations as a malicious fantasy, but I will tell it anyway.
“This is not a pleasant story
“I was about to be executed. I said good-bye to my mother.”
Derrick W.R. Dulande stood upon the dais, silent and inert, his face neutral. Junichi Daisuke and the assemblage stared at the abruptly frozen mannequin, concerned that the machine had malfunctioned.
Suddenly, the re-bodied man moved his left hand. “I was secured to a gurney. They slid needles into my arms. They pumped thiopental through my veins, and I went into a coma.
“They injected the toxins into my paralyzed body.
“I faded and died.
“I wake up inside a lunar body that orbits the Earth. From this dimension—or overlapping cluster of dimensions—the Earth looks like ten or eleven overlapping violet spirals…but still, I recognize it.
“The moon I’m in isn’t our moon. It’s made of some matter that’s unlike what we interact with, but it coheres and has energy.
“It might be dark matter, or maybe something entirely different.
“The interior of this shadow moon is hollow and pocked with billions of craters. Within each of these concave areas is something that looks like a glowing squid.
“I understand why you’re laughing at me,” the re-bodied man said to several chuckling reporters.
When the room was again quiet, Derek W.R. Dulande continued. “These glowing squid-like beings are iridescent gray and seem very, very large, though I have no reference point to gauge exactly how big. They are covered with nerves and creases that remind me of the exteriors of human brains.
“Every single one of these squid-like beings is anchored to a person on Earth: These are the spirit bodies I mentioned earlier.
“When a human being goes to sleep, the squid connected to that person opens its eyelids a millimeter, maybe two. The lights of the other squids shine upon these partially open eyes and create dreams, abstract associations, artistic inspirations and a sense of spirituality for the anchored person.
“A few squids have their eyes wide open: These are tethered to men and women who are insane.
“I’m not sure how I understand all of this, but I do the moment I see it. Instantly.
“All of you gathered here today or watching this on your mote aquariums at home have spirit bodies in this shadow moon.”
Several people laughed at the comment.
Derrick W.R. Dulande let the sound decay. “I rise out of my crater, as if pulled by a magnet. I fly toward a hole that is bright with multicolored sunlight. When I try to cover my eyes, I see that my limbs are curved gray tendrils like those of the other inhabitants, but—since I’m a murderer—I don’t glow like they do. I’m drawn through the hole.
“The gases in my body swell in the vacuum of space. I bloat, expanding bigger and bigger until I burst.
“But I don’t die.
“My exploded squid body, a mass of tangled gray gore, speeds toward the sun.
“The sun grows as I fly toward it. The only thing that keeps me sane is that I know this is all a dream—that I’ll wake up soon and be human again.
“I pray that when I wake up, I’ll be a kid or a teenager and not have murdered anybody. That I’ll be good.
“To mark the passage of time, I start counting stars. By the time I reach one million, I know for certain that I’m not dreaming, that no dream goes on for this long. I flail my burst body to no avail. I can’t change my course or wake up or do anything.
“The sun fills the horizon ahead of me.
“I plunge into Hell.
“White fire dominates all of my senses. I have no idea whether I am stationary or flying at relativistic speeds. I’m oblivious of everything but continuous solar explosions.
“I am alone.
“All I can do in this nuclear limbo is contemplate my horrible life and the people whom I hurt: the victims, the families of the victims and my own mother and father. For two months, I ponder a minor argument I once had with my dad. Regret consumes me. For one full year I think with despair of a time when I was a child and called my mom a bitch.”
The mannequin tilted his head down and shook it from side to side. “For every second of seven straight years I ponder the murder of Rena Takahata.
“And somehow, I know that I am damned to the sun for its entire life cycle. That is my sentence. I will be there when it turns into a red giant, and I will be there when it turns into a white dwarf, and I will be there when it cools. I can’t touch or create or interact with anything. I can’t learn or discover anything.
“I will be alone with the memories of my tiny horrible life for more than six billion years.
“That is Hell,” stated Derrick W.R. Dulande with finality.
The room was quiet.
Junichi Daisuke and those around him pondered the elaborateness of the resurrected man’s hallucination.
“When my brain was thawed,” the re-bodied man resumed, “my spirit body returned to its crater within the shadow moon and reconnected with what remained of my physical body.
“But still…”
The re-bodied man shook his head. �
��That perdition is what awaits me when this brain dies.” He slid his gelware hand through his light brown hair. “Six billion years of isolated agony.”
Derrick W.R. Dulande raised his head and looked at the assemblage. The Indian man in brown and the female pastor stood up from their seats as the reporters (several of whom were grinning) dialed through the sheaves upon which they had typed their questions throughout the speech.
“Mr. Dulande will take two questions from each reporter and then conclude the conference.”
Junichi Daisuke gasped when he looked at the suspended aquarium behind the mannequin. The copper Kawarimono that had been acting strangely was floating at the top of the tank, dead.
The fish’s belly swelled and erupted with a squeak. Tangled piscine remains splattered the far side of the tank’s surface.
A flash of metal launched itself from Akihabara’s guts, arced over the Indian man and impacted Derrick W.R. Dulande. The mannequin toppled forward, slamming onto his knees and gelware palms. Attached to the side of his chromium head was a metal horseshoe crab that had four fluid vials on its back. Junichi Daisuke had no idea how this strange machine had gotten into Akihabara’s belly.
The pastor and the Indian man hurried across the dais as Derrick W.R. Dulande reached for the device that drilled into his head.
Plungers sank, shooting serum.
The re-bodied man shrieked, popping two of his throat speakers. Static melded with an aluminum wail.
Throughout the room, people covered their ears.
Corpus Chrome, Inc. Page 13
