The Fall of Hades (15 page)

27: THE POWER OUTSOURCE

Atlevel 90, Vee came upon another large community, this one consisting of the Damned, but at their border the security forces were polite with her and she took the chance of trusting them with her weapons, curious to find out more about them. And also, it appeared she would need to pass through their district if she meant to continue her ascent of the Construct.

The colonists of this city, dubbed Naraka, were almost entirely of Indian descent, most of them having died in the Big Bang, and committed to Hades for being Hindus. When Vee explained she was an Angel her hosts seemed a little dubious about her, and she felt like apologizing to them for their unfair damnation, but they treated her no less politely, and gave her a tour of their domain.

The point at which Vee had entered Naraka had once been a barracks structure for the Damned laborers forced to work in Tartarus. It had a biotic feel, as if the whole former building had been a single growth of glossy gray bone, translucent where it was thinnest. The countless original chambers on this entire floor had been further subdivided by the colonists, though some of these spaces remained immense. Vee’s guide, a soft-spoken man named Harvinder, who had explained he was a lead tech and technical instructor, guided her into the largest of the colony’s chambers, and her mouth opened in awe as she took it in.

The gray bone walls, from the floor up to the soaring c
eiling, were honeycombed with rows of organic-looking recesses, hundreds of tiny apartments more like shelves where the laborers had once rested. Now, each hollow had become a work cubicle, housing a desk and computer. These devices, Harvinder announced proudly, were the colonists’ own design, constructed from materials and circuitry that had once served others purposes, linked into servers adapted from Demonic computer systems. Men and women typed diligently, their combined tapping creating an incredible chattering noise like that of the giant insects one might imagine swarming through this hive. Harvinder had to raise his soft voice above the din. Many of the workers wore headphones against it, and to communicate with others she saw that some spoke into microphones. Other workers, though, sat over their keyboards with their hands motionless and eyes vacant, as if dazed, or even slumped back in their chairs as if dozing. A cable ran from the computer terminal of each of these curiously inactive people and plugged into a hole in their right temple. Vee had already noted that Harvinder, and indeed every colonist she had seen, right down to the children, had one of these input jacks grafted into their right temple. The jacked-in workers she saw now, she knew, were interfaced directly with the Mesh.

“What is it you do, here, all of you?” Vee asked, still feeling wonderment at the immensity of the operation. “I
mean, I always figured telemarketers were from Hell, but…”

Harvinder smiled. “Basically, it is through us that the Construct continues to function. Many of the people who live in it never realize this, so it is largely a thankless task, but one that must be done. We see to it that the electricity is maintained, the lights, the ventilation systems, the climate controls—indeed, the Mesh itself would not be possible but through our support and maintenance. Nothing would run at all, or at least not for long, and only in isolated sectors.”

“Wow. Like you said, I had no idea. Doesn’t anyone at all pay you, or trade with you, or something?”

“Well, it is not done entirely for the sake of altruism…mostly we do it to maintain these systems and comforts for our own sakes, but we feel that as long as we’re doing it we might as well benefit others, too. But if an enemy were ever to threaten us, we could then shut down the systems in their region, unless they used their own systems to block us. I doubt any other colony in the Construct could challenge us in that way, though—no one else has anything nearly as sophisticated as our network.”

“Not even the Enmeshed?”

“No, I would say not even them,” Harvinder boasted. He might be quiet and polite, but he was exceedingly proud of his people. “It is because of our benefits to all, and our ability to shut down the life support and power facilities on other levels, that Naraka is almost never threatened by hostile individuals…and never by hostile colonies.”

“Wow. That’s pretty impressive, Harry.” Harvinder had told her he preferred this nickname. He seemed a bit flirty toward her, in his own shy way.

They strolled closer to one of the walls of cubicles, and some of the workers looked down at Vee to smile or nod. They seemed a pleasant and mellow people, and she felt
self-conscious about her bullet-riddled and torn body suit and unkempt hair.

“You should stay with us,” Harvinder told her. “There are a small number of non-Indians here. You would be comfortable.”

“It looks comfortable enough. But I’ve already got it in my head to see Freetown. Do you know about them?”

“Oh yes. We interact with them through the Mesh—they’re a friendly colony. But we never go up to visit them in person, because of the Mujahideen, only a few floors above us. And the Freetowners try to keep away from the Mujahideen, as well.”

“Who are they?”

Harvinder told her. And then advised her, “So that’s why I wouldn’t try to reach
Freetown, if I were you.”

“There’s got to be a way for a single person to sneak past them.”

“I really don’t think it’s a good idea,” Harvinder reiterated. “They leave us alone, too, but we don’t push them. They can’t be reasoned with.”

“I appreciate the warning. And I will stay here for a while, at least, if you’ll have me. Because there’s something I want from you, Harry.”

“Oh?” he said, smiling with nervous anticipation.

She tapped his right temple with her finger. “I want you to hook me up.”

28: THE MESH

Harvinder took Vee to his own, more private and much less noisy office for her first immersion into the Mesh. In its heavy brass casing, thoroughly stained green with verdigris, his computer looked like it could survive a drop off a roof, though it sprouted cables and tubes gurgling fluid like a terminal patient on life support—a Frankenstein monster resembling something cobbled together by high school students in metal shop, or maybe in art class. However suspect its appearance, though, it responded quickly to his deft keystrokes. He sat Vee in his work chair, pulled another chair up beside her. She resisted a smile as he plugged the computer’s interface cable into the fresh orifice, like a tiny bullet hole, in her temple, wondering if he found the procedure erotic. She felt no discomfort.

“What am I supposed to do first, in there?”

“I’ve made an avatar for you, scanned from your own body,” he told her. “Try to move about as if you were using your physical body. Explore your environment, but remember that you can also control your environment. It may start out as little more than a void until you call into that space whatever information it is you seek. In order to better focus that information, try to envision some physical medium upon which to project it. A TV screen, a blackboard, the wall of a room familiar to you, or what have you. The Mesh is a very fluid medium, not as structured or predictable as our old Internet, which can make it frustrating and difficult but also very free and exciting in other ways. Don’t worry—I will stay right here beside you, and pull you out if I see you’re having difficulty.”

“Difficulty?”

“Not to worry. I only mean confusion, nervousness, agitation. I will be monitoring your experience out here, on the screen, seeing through your avatar’s eyes. I want to let you get a feel for it yourself, so I won’t go with you to hold your hand, and I won’t speak to you inside the Mesh unless I absolutely need to guide or prompt or reassure you.”

“Um, okay. Whatever. I guess I’ll see when I get there.”

“Do you have any idea what you might like to start out looking for?

Some bit of information you’d like to research, that might have been stored in there by someone from Naraka or Freetown, or by the Enmeshed?”

“Well, hm. Actually, Jay…that is, my gun…showed me some memories he found recorded and stored inside the Mesh, from a Damned man named Adam. Maybe I could see if I can retrieve those same memories on my own, if I concentrate on them.”

“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 beau
tiful 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.