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Authors: Ty Beltramo

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BOOK: Eden's Jester
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Six impressive low-brows stood guard. That made more than twenty tough guys protecting this place. Whatever Aeson had down here, he wanted it kept safe. He was making a major blunder, cluing me in to its existence. How could I resist such temptation in the future?

The vault door opened silently and I was practically carried through. The room beyond was an indoor zoo. Row after row of cages, some stacked five high, were filled with all manner of creatures I didn’t recognize. Most were reptilian or arachnoid. There were many more terrariums filled with Fluffy’s giant-spider cousins. One leapt toward the glass as we passed. Another sat on a branch, leisurely cleaning its fangs. I slowed to take a closer look. The thing stopped its preening and met my stare. It looked smart.

“What are you doing here, Aeson? These things don’t look legal,” I said.

He didn’t answer. Instead he led us down the middle aisle of the room to the far end, where other cages, the prison kind, were filled with people. Men, women, and children huddled together, trying to stay as far away from the caged monsters as possible. They didn’t look healthy. Stress and general neglect had taken a toll on their bodies and spirits.
 

I looked back at the animals in the cages. They were well tended and fed.
 

A door at the end of aisle opened and two thugs brought out some sort of lawn ornament and placed it on a table near the cells. The thing looked like an ancient birdbath covered in runes. I recognized the language as a pre-human Engineering dialect that looked like a cross between hieroglyphics and trigonometry formulas. I couldn’t read it, but more than once I’d wished I could. It was before my time.
 

The birdbath existed in all the planes I could see. That meant it wasn’t made in America. The thing was alien. I doubted it could be destroyed easily, or at least not without serious side effects.

Aeson approached the table and placed his hands on the birdbath. I noticed that grey breeze of non-energy again, this time much stronger. Some of the people began to whimper.
 

“I have never understood why you pester me so, Elson. I don’t recall ever doing anything to you--until now.”

I looked around. The thugs had me surrounded and were controlling access to the other planes, I was certain. I’d been in tighter spots. But this one was pretty tight.
 

“I don’t know what you’re all excited about, Aeson. I really am trying to help resolve this mess,” I said. That grey breeze was becoming a wind.

“Maybe, Elson. But it doesn’t matter, now. You see, while you’ve been an eternal pain, you’ve only been a pain--a mere nuisance. Now, you risk much more. So, I’m afraid I must neutralize you entirely. Say hello to my friends. I’m sure they shall enjoy you.” I didn’t like the way he said “enjoy.” Not one bit. He smiled. “Good-bye, Elson.”
 

The room colors swam and began to blend together as a grey mist obscured them. I tried to gather enough energy to resist the pull of the vortex, but Aeson and his brutes were limiting the ambient energy fields.
 

I decided to go for the catastrophic results. Blindly, I commanded any matter within my sphere of control to disband. Almost none heeded my will. But some did. I heard a large crash and glass cages shattering. I managed to see, as though through a veil, a Fluffy leap upon one of the enforcers and tear at his head. He ran in circles screaming, with a giant spider for a face. He tripped over something and went down, crashing through another set of cages. Spiders went everywhere. Some scampered toward the human prisoners, who screeched in terror. Others made haste toward the door. Uh oh.
 

Before I could do anything else, I was sucked into a void of vacuum and cold. In an instant, the room and everything else was gone, replaced by a monotone grey world utterly lacking in any features, sounds, energy, or space--the waterless place, the Abyss.

CHAPTER EIGHT

This was bad. Engineers could not be destroyed. At least, no one had ever destroyed one. But there existed the Abyss: a prison meant to permanently extinguish, for all practical purposes, any Engineer. There were no landmarks, no way to find anything. The world was featureless and it was infinite and it had no doors. Frozen grey was the sum of it. No one escaped.

I groped for any scrap of energy or matter that I might use to try to affect an escape. There was none. My body had been stripped from me. The place was empty. Completely. It was so empty that I wondered if my soul itself was in jeopardy. I always viewed my soul as an imprint embossed upon energy and mass. Neither existed here. How long could I survive? I didn’t feel like I was wasting away. But how long would that last? As far as I knew, no one had ever studied the effects of long-term Abyss-mal imprisonment.

I floated along, paralyzed, extending my senses in every direction as far as they would go.
 

Nothing. Not even any background noise from the multiverse. The place was as sterile as a vacuum. For all I knew, I was the only artifact in the whole place. Actually, now that I thought about it, I preferred it that way. There were ancient stories of the beginnings of earth that told of nasty characters who were so bad that the Designers themselves imprisoned them here. My guess is that they’d make poor company.

You didn’t get imprisoned in the Abyss for being a Good Samaritan--except in my case, of course.
 

Crap.
 

How had it come to this? Sending me here was completely off the reservation, even for a creep like Aeson. He certainly wasn’t allowed to do it. Without a fair trial it was forbidden. And it shouldn’t have been so easy. Opening a portal to the Abyss was hard. You normally needed several very senior Engineers, and protocol demanded that they be a balanced group of both Law and Chaos. For Aeson to be able to do it with ease meant he had found some big guns. It also meant his opponents were going to be very surprised. Man! How does that guy keep getting away with stuff like this?

Oh well. I couldn’t do a thing about it. My new job, thanks to that idiot Aeson, was to float around in the largest sensory deprivation tank in the multiverse and just think. Nice. I figured that after one or two millennia of that I’d go quite insane. It wouldn’t be a pleasant journey, either. Stage One would involve trying to find a way out. That would last perhaps a few years. Then I’d give up and pass the time by trying to sleep, something Engineers didn’t do. Then I’d start to hear voices. That little voice deep inside me—the one that keeps trying to kill me, but was now conspicuously silent—would probably be one of them. At first they’d just be voices. But they would grow to become the new Elsons of my schizophrenia. Then we’d begin to argue. From there it’d be all downhill.
 

Any love I’d had for Aeson went right out the window.
 

The cruelty of the Abyss was now clear. Who made it, and why? Perhaps it was a natural by-product of a multi-plane universe. Maybe the Abyss was the place between planes. There was no way to tell. But whether it was intended or an accident, having access to it was certainly a piece of knowledge that had come from somewhere, and I had a good idea where--just one more reason why I’d like to give the Designers a good smack on the head, if they had one. They’d supplied everything we would ever need to accomplish their goals, Aello had said. To me, they had provided everything we needed to make war and misery for the world and ourselves, while providing little training, vague guidance, and no accountability. We were kids with atom bombs.
 

And where were they? Some of the faithful maintained that they had never left, that they were simply hiding their presence from us, guiding us from an unseen vantage point. Well, if that were so, they were doubly guilty. Leaving us to ourselves would be reason enough to pound them. Sitting back and watching us while we struggled was inexcusable.
 

Their stated purpose was progress toward perfection. Why not go right to the perfection? But as much as I wanted to thrash the Designers, I knew deep down that the real dilemma was not rooted in their transgression, but in our lack of understanding. No. Our understanding of their plans and purposes was incomplete. That was certain. The party line was only a piece of the puzzle, a puzzle I’d been trying to put together for a long time.
 

Well, I had plenty of time to consider the problem. There was nothing else to do. The only thing in this world was me, and I wasn’t going anywhere.

With nothing else to do, I turned my senses inward and began to study my own soul. The familiar latticework was comforting, like seeing home after a long absence. I was always intrigued by the structure and form of the inner being. Most Engineers paid little attention to it. It was basically immutable and immune to external forces. The only way to alter it, other than through a Psychic Duel, was to alter yourself. That took time, talent, and perseverance. Studying the inner makeup of others always provided me valuable information.
 

The paradox of the soul is that it’s both simple and complex. Whatever it’s made of is one thing, one substance. There isn’t the complex molecular composition of elements that make up the physical aspect of a human. At the same time, the arrangements and patterns that are formed with that ethereal substance are wondrously complex. They are unique and fascinating--like art. I was always partial to my own inner artwork. But that’s probably true of everyone. There’s some natural affinity between one’s inner self and one’s opinion of one’s inner self.
 

I’ve always liked myself.
 

I followed the familiar patterns and junctions, trying again to see something new. The same scars were there, shadows of past Psychic Duels. Every once in a while I’d identify some new configuration or some previously unnoticed pulse.
 

As I traced the lattices around toward the center of my soul, something struck me as odd. I couldn’t quite place it, but something was different. Something marred the familiar symmetry of the fractal patterns I was used to. But it was subtle, more a feeling of wrongness, a spot. I struggled to see it, but the harder I tried the more it slipped to the edge of my vision. I changed my vantage point and rotated in many directions, trying to see what it was. At last, I could see it: a thread, gossamer-like, intertwined around and throughout the core of my soul. It was so fine that it would be hidden from a normal perspective.
 

The pristine state of the Abyss offered no background noise that so often, in the material world, obscured the finer details of energy and ethereal constructs. Here there was nothing to interfere with my perception. Only here would I have ever been able to detect it without someone showing it to me.

I closed in to study it in detail. It was a masterpiece of complexity. A trace amount of energy was intertwined with some foreign structure, which looked like part of another’s soul, to form a delicate double helix. I knew what it was--Melanthios’s glamour. That’s how it worked. He wrapped up a small part of his soul, juiced a simple strand of ether with a little energy, entwined them, and inserted the little thread into my core. The double helix formed a stream out of the soul lattice. The energy formed waves that floated up and down the length of the thread. No energy was lost, so it would never wear out. Every wave gave the soul on the other end a quick touch with the soul on this end, namely me.
 

This was a rare opportunity. You couldn’t just take a peek at the innards of an Engineer such as Melanthios—not normally, anyway. But I could today.
 

There wasn’t much of him there, but a few gems might present themselves. I went up and down the thread trying to piece together as much as I could of the great Melanthios’s most hidden person. There wasn’t as much complexity as I would have expected. The threading was compact, more tightly woven than the typical Engineer. I guess that made sense. In person, Melanthios was always relaxed, but I knew from experience that when it came to North America he was as uncompromising as a Salvation Army drill sergeant. There was no evidence of any Psychic Duels, won or lost. It had probably been centuries since he tangled with anyone personally. Maybe longer. Over time the scars fade, though the effects just blend in. The last time I knew for sure that he had seen action was during the Fourteenth Century. Some Grand Poobah from the Chaos side of the Biology Discipline had gone rogue and had to be put down. Melanthios was the one to finally corner her.
 

My soul was surprisingly different from Melanthios’s. We had radically divergent personalities and had fought different wars. Seeing his Euclidean patterns next to the psychedelic fractals of mine showed we were made of different stuff. That suited me just fine.
 

After a time—I had no idea how much time had passed—I felt I had learned enough about the thread’s form and function that I could reproduce a glamour for myself. Not a bad little trick. It would come in handy, if I ever got out of this place.
 

The most fascinating thing was that it was in operation, even here. The little waves, pulsating with energy and soul, traveled up and down the thread. Since the waves were coming back, they must be reaching some destination. That could only be Melanthios. Otherwise, the whole thing would unravel.
 

I noticed some movement far away. At least I hoped it was far away. It was impossible to tell.
 

BOOK: Eden's Jester
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