The Fall of Hades (19 page)

35: THE ESCORT

The tiny apartment Vee had been temporarily assigned was in a section of the 128th floor that had once been a level in one of Tartarus’ mecha-organic buildings, every surface here a glossy black like obsidian but compounded of dense, unfathomable detail: printed circuit boards, pipes (that occasionally gurgled disconcertingly), cables (or were they veins?), teased out entrails and large organs (one of which pulsed regularly like a rubber bladder), together oddly suggestive of the mechanical, the insect, and the reptilian all at once. Even the shelf that served as her bed, which seemed to grow out of the wall, was of this glistening material, but at least it was uniformly smooth on its upper surface and she had been given a thin mattress to place atop it, and blankets.

She had also been given new clothing, something in keeping with the uniform she had acquired from the skeletonized Demon in the basement.

This uniform was also a one-piece suit of lycra-like material, even thinner and more flexible than the other, without the first uniform’s padded elbows and knees and ribbed chest, making her look as if she’d simply been dipped in black paint. The back was open like the first, to make room for the Demon’s wings she didn’t possess.

Before leaving the “print shop,” Frank Lyre had handed Vee a package of well-worn books to borrow. They were the same titles Alighieri had shown her:
Letters From Hades
,
Beautiful Hell
, and
Voices From Hades
. He had tapped the cover of
Beautiful Hell
and said, “I wrote this one, but read
Letters
first. Consider it orientation material on pre-revolution Hell. And there are some hot sex scenes in my book, too.” He’d winked at her, and Vee had chuckled, relieved at having been dismissed from Alighieri’s office as a citizen of Freetown.

She was in her little cubicle, seated on her sleeping bench and several journal entries into Alighieri’s
Letters From Hades
, when there came a knock on the wall outside her doorway, which was covered only by hanging strips of black rubber. She parted these with her hands, and was startled to see the figure that stood beyond her threshold. It was one of those robot-like Demons, perhaps the same one she had seen on guard duty when entering Freetown, with its shovel-like face of bone and the single red eye in its center. Not to mention, the limbs that ended in automatic weapons. Before, Jay had questioned whether these entities could speak, but now a clear if uninflected voice came from somewhere on the large automaton’s body. “Come with me, please. Someone is waiting for you.”

“Who?” She couldn’t help but feel a little wary. Had they had second thoughts about her?

“Palladino? Alighieri?”

“You know him as Adamn. He has volunteered to help you become orientated in
Freetown—to show you around, assist you in finding work and a permanent dwelling, and so forth.”

“Ah. So Adamn volunteered, did he?” Vee snorted. “Okay, I guess it’s about time I met my virtual friend Adamn in the flesh…so to speak.” Vee placed the book aside. “Let’s go.”

They ended up traveling quite far together—it felt like they crossed the entire length of the city-building—but she supposed the time spent in such endeavors meant little when one was immortal. (What must a work period be like? Could “working overtime” amount to an extra decade in the office?) At least, this way she got to see more of Freetown, its characteristics varying according to the many former buildings of Tartarus—fused together to form the unified Construct—they passed through. They cut through an interior farmland, where edible infernal plant forms were cultivated in abundance, their growth accelerated by solutions and processes once used in the production of new Demons. There were markets where these food stuffs were sold (though, with relief, she saw no meat for sale in Freetown), alongside clothing and numerous other articles, often ingeniously fashioned from unlikely materials. She looked forward to spending more time exploring such markets in the future—not to mention the sight of the rows of vegetables awakening suppressed hunger deep in her guts.

Finally they arrived at what turned out to be one of the buildings that had defined the border of Tartarus—the terminus of the Construct. There was a great open chamber here like the inside of an airplane hangar, and it was filled with activity; machinery being assembled or disassembled, computer terminals being manned, by both humans and a variety of Demons—many of the automatonic variety, like her escort, in a diversity of forms. Thick power cables crisscrossed the floor and sparks showered from arc welders.

From this confusion a man emerged, and strode toward Vee and the machine Demon. He was lanky, dressed in an oil-stained, short-sleeved top and baggy trousers, rather like green hospital scrubs. She recognized his face from his virtual hideaway—the desolate shopping plaza—if not from his memories.
Yeah
, she thought, confirming her earlier impression of him,
a nicely aging Kevin Bacon
. Late thirties, early forties?

Adamn gave a crinkly, pleasant smile. “Hello, Vee.”

“Hello yourself,” she said, making her own face look stern. “So you let them know I was coming, huh?”

He stopped before her. “Hey…I had to, didn’t I? But here you are, right? You obviously passed muster.”

“Lucky for me. So, you want to make it up to me by being my guide or whatever?”

“Or whatever. You know, we can’t just set you adrift in town without holding your hand a while.”

“You mean you can’t set me adrift without having someone keep an eye on me a while.”

“Hey.” Adamn grinned and threw up his hands. “Come on…if you’re not so on guard, I don’t have to be on guard, either.”

“So what are you doing in here?” She gestured around.

“Oh, we have all kinds of projects going on here.”

“I mean you specifically. You told me you were involved with memory recording.”

“That’s one of the projects I’ve been involved in, yeah. Are you interested in restoring your own memories? You told me you’d forgotten almost everything. I think I could help you, you know.”

“Help me how?” she asked warily.

“There’s a machine that belonged to the Demons—they used it for torture, but I’ve helped adapt it to more positive uses.”

“What are you, some kind of mad scientist? I didn’t get that impression from your memories.”

“When you saw me I was a machine adjuster on the graveyard shift for a pharmaceutical manufacturer. I was divorced, losing my house…I was even going to have to give away my dog or else put her down. In Hell, it’s funny—and it’s not just me who feels this way—but it’s like I’ve been forged again. Everything got burned away, and I had to start over, but I became better than I ever was alive. I feel like I do valuable things here.

I feel like part of a community, which I never really felt before. In life I was basically a loner, uncomfortable with other people. I guess two thousand years have helped me hone my people skills.” He shrugged. “Hone everything.”

“That is pretty ironic. In Hell, they’re supposed to break you, not remake you.”

“Well, it’s like I say about this machine. It was intended to punish, but we’ve made it into a tool. So do you wanna see it or not?”

“Okay, sure, show me.”

He motioned for her to join him, and as they began crossing the huge open space Vee glanced back to see the robot escort wasn’t accompanying them. She said, “There’s a lot of these machine Demons here. I’d have thought they’d be the last Demons to align themselves with humans.”

“That was the idea when they were designed, but interestingly enough the opposite has been the case. A lot of them resent that their souls—well, Demons don’t have souls, so I’ll say minds—are confined in a mechanical form. They could sympathize with the imprisonment of the Damned, in a way. After all, didn’t you arrive here with a Demonic gun as a sidekick?”

“Yes. And speaking of which, when can I have my sidekick back?”

“Only our security people can carry firearms, but if you ever choose to leave us of course they’ll give him back.” They passed another automatonic entity, and when Adamn nodded to it the robot nodded its own head, a riveted brass globe like a deep sea diver’s helmet, in return. “They do have one interesting advantage, we’ve found, which is you can transfer their sentience from one Demonic machine to another, and you can even store their mind for a time until you can find it a new vehicle.”

“Store it? On like a flash drive or something?”

He snickered. “No. In the Mesh.”

“You’re really a cybergeek, huh? You should be with the Enmeshed, not the Freetowners. My gun seems to think what they’ve got is the closest thing to a Heaven that can be achieved these days.”

“I’m not ready for a virtual Heaven, yet.” Adamn smiled anew as they continued their comfortable, unhurried pace. “But I did have a virtual girlfriend in Naraka.”

“The Indian cybergeeks? Really?”

“I’ve been married a couple times in Hades, but she was the woman I cared for most. And our virtual sex blew away any real sex I’ve ever had, even as a mortal. And yet, we never once met face-to-face.”

“Huh.”

“You know that shopping plaza where you met me? A building of condo units is one of its anchors, and I have a virtual apartment in there.

My girlfriend and I used to spend whole days in there at a time.”

“Romantic,” Vee said drily. “But you don’t shack up anymore?”

“No…afraid not. I caught her avatar with another guy’s avatar—one of the Enmeshed, and in my own apartment.” He wagged his head, smiling, but she saw a vestige of pain behind it. “Just like my wife all over again. But that’s life. And death, too. So how about you? You have any significant others here in Hades—besides the gun?”

“I have an ex-fiancé, in
Los Angeles. But the last time I saw him, I blew his face off.”

Adamn looked over at her steely profile. “Why am I not surprised?”

he said.

36: THE MECHANICS OF LIFE AND DEATH

They reached the far wall of the projects hall, and a pair of sliding doors. Set into the wall beside them was a small control panel from which Adamn pulled a retractable Mesh jack, which he plugged into his port. It appeared to Vee that in his brief communion with the Mesh, his identity was being verified. The doors opened, he unplugged the jack, and Vee followed him across the threshold. The doors clanged shut again behind them.

On the other side stood two fierce-looking female warriors in the uniform of Palladino’s security forces, bu
t these uniforms were much modified to accommodate their physical state. Owing to the fact that they were Damned and thus indestructible, both women—in addition to being heavily tattooed—were extensively pierced with spikes and shards and strips of metal, as if filled with exploded shrapnel, wed into and
through
their bodies in ways that would be impossible, if not lethal, for a mortal.

The guards were both jacked into the Mesh with long black rubber cords, but looked very alert in the here-and-now, challenging Vee with their scrutiny. Tough as she was, she avoided their eyes, which were themselves like cutting bits of shrapnel, as Adamn led her past them.

“Environmental control for Freetown,” he explained, as they now threaded their way through crevasses between house-sized machines, banks of gauges with quivering needles, walls of valves and knobs and orange glowing lights. “Alighieri would probably be pissed if he knew I’d brought you here—this would be a prime target for terrorists—but he did make you a free citizen and all, so…”

Vee read little plaques and labels identifying the functions of various machines and processes as they passed them.
Differential Pressure.

Cooling Air Suction. Heat Zones 1 and 2. Cool Zones 1 and 2.

Recirculated Water Pressure. Manifold Controller. Vacuum Pump Connection. Filter Station Tank 12 Control Panel. Fan Interlock. Manual Valve. Bleeder Valve. Environmental Monitoring Station Viable and Particle Counter.
It all sounded pretty important, if incomprehensible, to Vee and she could see why this area would be protected, and Alighieri protective of it. This time it was she who nodded to a robot Demon, this one checking the readings on one of the control panels, and it nodded back to her politely. There was a deep pulsing thrum in the air that Vee could feel vibrating through the chambers of her body. It sounded to her as if an endless train were running below the floor she stood upon.

“So has any terrorist ever tried to get in here?”

“We don’t advertise the location of our environmental control center, but recently a Mujahideen did get into another part of Freetown through a pretty clever method. See, we’ve made sure any ventilation shafts or utility passages or whatever that might give access to our city are too small to negotiate, or at least are barred or solidly grated, but this guy cut one of his own fingers off and pushed it through the bars of a grate.

Normally his finger would grow back in no time, but he had buddies with him who quickly dissolved his body with acid. So the finger, on the other side of the grate, regenerated into our terrorist friend. But Michael Palladino’s people caught him before he could do any damage, luckily.”

“What did Palladino do with him?”

“Well…” Adamn stopped to face her. “Michael has his own invention he’s worked on in the projects hall. It’s a kind of gun, that he was hoping to make small enough for a man to carry, though the prototype is the size of a howitzer. Its purpose is to destroy a human soul. I mean, not just dis-integrate a body that will regrow later one way or another, but totally make a soul cease to be. To…I don’t know…just punch it right out of existence.”

“Is that possible?”

“Apparently. They tried it out—on that Mujahideen terrorist they captured. But who knows…maybe a soul can never be destroyed, and the gun actually sent his spirit to another plane of existence. Maybe it sent him back to Earth to be reborn into a new body, either after the Big Bang or maybe even before it. But whatever happened to him, it made him disappear, and he’s never returned
here
, at least.”

“Oh wow. Oh Adamn…I don’t know about that one. I mean, I have no love for the Mujahideen, believe me, but my concern would be about them or even my father’s people getting their hands on such a thing and posing a threat to everybody in the Construct.
Everybody.
”

“I agree, and fortunately so does Alighieri, and while he tries not to wear that leadership hat, he definitely made his voice heard about this. I hope Alighieri has Michael dismantle it entirely one of these days. This is our second chance. It was things like that gun that brought about the Big Bang. No, we’re all immortal, so we have plenty of time to try to change things in other ways.”

“Do you
really
think some people will ever change? Even given all of eternity?”

Adamn remained quiet by way of response.