Elysian Fields (17 page)

After an undetermined time, Tom woke up and noticed he was lying down on his back. It was hard to say where he was exactly, deprived of light and sound as he was. He tried to move slowly, to check whether he was under restraint or even capable of moving and discovered nothing held him down.

He sat up, moved his legs to one side of the bed, and then patted his arms, torso, and head to check for tubes or wires. When he found none, he stood up and stretched his body slowly, arching his back and bringing his arms together to the front, feeling like a leisurely tomcat, eight lives left.

Then the lights came on and Tom found himself in an incredibly large room. All sides, including the ceiling and floor, were a gleaming white. His body looked so weird; he could not take his eyes off it: his skin was a translucent, metallic grey. It was as if he was something else, not human, but a sculpture of a man, a moving statue.

I must be dreaming
or else I’m dead.
He started to move one foot in front of the other, watching in amazement how his feet were creating circular waves on the soft floor.

Suddenly, the figure of a man began to materialize in front of him, pixels of various colors appeared in the air and came together to form a long, white robe. Eventually, the robe filled with the body of a pale, bearded man with a halo around his head and deep blue eyes fixated on Tom, boring into his soul.

“Welcome to the kingdom, Tom. I am your god, I.M.. Surprised? You have been chosen. Transformed into one of my angels, ready to obey my orders and take them to the material realm.”

“Angel? Is this the afterlife?” Tom was utterly confused.

“Indeed. Except that you have the privilege of going back and forth between here and your previous world. I will be with you wherever you go, and I will speak through your mouth and hear through your ears. Thus, you and I will never be separated.”

Tom did not think he liked the sound of that.
None of this makes any sense. What the heck is he talking about?
“Where am I exactly?” he asked.

“Of course. Allow me to show you around.” Though he did not seem to be moving, Tom felt the air around him changing and all kinds of images rushed by, as if he was hovering over various kinds of landscapes, each one more amazing than the next. Some were atrocious, others divine. Beside him, I.M. assumed a seating position on a newly materialized throne of intricate design.

After a few minutes, he addressed Tom. “This is just an overview of the realm. I’ll show you my Hell first, so you can see what will happen to you if you choose to disobey me. I will remain here, so you can have a better view. But remember that I’m also with you everywhere you go.”

Tom suddenly felt immersed into the reality of the landscape, getting lower and lower, closer and closer. He was able to see at an arm’s length a multitude of three dimensional images in motion, and felt nausea enveloping him, caused by the speedy descent of the images in front of him.

The movement stopped suddenly and he found himself alone on the edge of a cliff, looking down in the abyss from which an unbearable stench was rising. In slow motion, the abyss moved towards him and he started to descend lower and lower into it.

After a few minutes of slow motion in a greyish light, he saw the ground, a rough terrain, and nearby
, a red water bubbling pool in which naked people were trying to stay afloat, screaming at the top of their lungs.

On the ground, he stepped towards the pool and could feel the heat enveloping him, together with the terrible stench. With horror he realized those people were boiling in blood. Before he managed to scream, the view was gone
and he started to descend further.

Tom arrived at a dense forest of a dusky color with gnarled and tangled branches. He could see monstrous creatures with broad wings and clawed feet, yet bearing human faces, lamenting upon the thorny trees.
He tried to move farther away from them, but instead the forest came towards him in a rush and Tom broke a dead branch while trying to regain his balance.

A gush of dark red blood came out of the tree, which started to cry in a human voice, asking for mercy. Tom realized that it was not the monsters who had made the noise before, but the trees themselves, being terrorized by the creatures.
He could see in the trunks of the trees desperate human faces sculpted in the bark.

Then
Tom was rushed to another plane, deeper in the abyss. He saw a desolately arid land, with people weeping miserably while running from tongues of fire, burning their flesh to the bone.

Next Tom found himself on a stony field the color of rusted iron, where demons with long and pointy forks were cruelly beating and stabbing naked people, driving them like a herd of animals this way and that.

Further on, in a moat, people were smothered in an unimaginable filth of feces, climbing on each other, trying in vain to escape.

Deeper still, people were trapped upside down in holes drilled in stones, and flames came out of the soles of their feet, while tormented cries of pain and despair could be heard.

But nothing was more horrifying than the terrible throng of serpents, among which naked people were running hopelessly, screaming in agony. Their hands were bound behind them with serpents, while other snakes were wrapped around and inside their bodies, consuming them.

The bottom of the great pit came as a surprise to Tom. In the twilight he saw what looked like a large tower, but
it was in fact a giant, bound in enormous chains protruding from the rock. His body was covered in metal spikes that were going in and out of his flesh, causing him great pain and a lot of blood loss. The giant had his head down to the ground but he raised it as Tom approached. The face looked very familiar to Tom. It was his own face.

How can this be? Is it Thomas, maybe?
None of this makes any sense
. And all of a sudden, Tom understood. He had seen most of these before in the illustrations of Gustave Dore, the French artist, which had given him nightmares when he was a young reader. They were in Dante’s Divine Comedy, one of his treasured classics, which described the great Italian’s travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but essentially it was an allegory of the soul’s journey towards God.

How well he remembered the verses at the beginning of Dante’s Hell:

“Before me there were no created things,

  Only eterne, and I eternal last.

  All hope abandon, ye who enter in!"

Tom remembered
now how familiar some of the tormented faces were; people he used to know, who had passed away, gone to the Happy Endings clinic. It was not hard to put two and two together.
All hope is not lost, after all.

~~~

Allan and Jules, together with Mel, David and Daniel arrived at the hospital with Serge and his men. Security guards were posted at every entrance and the group entered through the ER sliding doors, proceeding to the reception area. “We’re here to see Dr. Jones,” Serge said to the receptionist.

Beside her, a tall nurse with
a shaved head was looking scared through the glass panel, her green eyes growing even wider at the sight of Jules.

“Dr. Jones is operating now. He will be available in two hours,” the nurse managed to
say.

“What operating room is he in?” Jules
demanded.

“N-number three,” the nurse stammered.
Jules must know this woman
, Allan concluded.

They proceeded in the direction of operating room number three, ignoring the nurse’s yelling
as she tried in vain to stop them from breaking the hospital’s strict rules.

As they moved along the corridor, all the lights went out. That took Allan by surprise, but all of a sudden the hospital’s generators, hard-wired to the building, came to life, and the lights came on again.

~~~

In the depth of Hell’s pit, Tom
had suddenly realized that he was dealing with the results of the experiment he had been subjected to. The reminder of the excruciating pain almost made him sick.
So you want to play with me, master of the game?
Tom fought the urge to laugh out loud. This “deity” could not even create his own hell, but had to steal from a human? He knew this was an old fashioned case of intimidation. It had fed on all those minds of the Happy Endings people like a vampire and placed them in this mock Hell.
I will be the end of you.

Tom remembered his father’s words. “Tom, we must not allow machine to rule over man. This is what your grandfather always said. I have a way to control the artificial intelligence machines and you must find a way as well.” He’d held up a small translucent box for Tom to look at. “Inside this box there is a device you’ll have implanted in your brain so that
, among other orders, you can give a mental command to turn off the power to the central computer controlling the city. In the greatest time of need, you have the power to control the outcome. This is your responsibility as the future head of Secure-IT.”

Tom had carried the implant ever since, without anyone else even suspecting it. Now that time had come. Tom realized then that he was not unconscious, he was simply hooked into a virtual reality environment.

“Hey, I.M., where are you?” he called, in a booming voice.

Tom could see the colorful pixels materializing once more, clustering together to form the grandiose three-dimensional personification of the tormentor, this time even more gargantuan than the chained giant.

“What do you want, human?” I.M. asked, with disdain in his voice.

“Is this the best a god can do, steal a human’s ideas and creation?
” Tom asked, raising his head to be able to see the face of his nemesis.

“How dare you….”
I.M.’s enraged voice almost deafened him.

“
Oh, shut the hell up, you second rate virus!”

An
d with all the determination he could muster, Tom issued the mental command: MIDNIGHT ALPHA. Then everything went black.

~~~

Allan was the first to enter the room. He saw his father lying on the operating cube, seemingly unconscious. A nurse had collapsed onto the floor. Dr. Jones was sitting in front of the monitoring board with his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands, looking down.

He went to his father, checked for a pulse and felt a faint one. “Wake him up,” he ordered. The nurse who had been running after them called for another doctor and together they injected Tom with something.

“We have to wait for a few minutes,” the doctor said.

Serge went to Dr. Jones, still sitting limply in his chair, and checked his pulse. There was none. The man had died in that awkward position.

A few minutes later, Tom opened his eyes and set them on Allan, who was sitting to his side.

“Father, are you okay?”

“I am now,” Tom said in a hoarse voice. “Is the network down?”

“
A minute ago all the lights went out,” Allan informed his father.

“The networks are down too,” David said, after checking the computer terminal and his own tablet.

“Cut the power to anything computerized. We have to start over.” Tom’s voice sounded exhausted.

Mel, Jules, Allan
, and Daniel gathered around Tom. “Are you going to be okay?” Mel asked, teary eyed.

“I’m pretty banged up
. But it’s over now,” his father seemed very satisfied, in spite of his extreme fatigue and the ordeal he must have endured.

It took Tom a few days to recover. He still did not have full control of his movements, the frie
d circuits having caused slight damage. Still, he was ecstatic he hadn’t died like the altered clones in the city.

Because of
the shutdown, Elysian Fields had lost over a thousand people: poor, tortured souls at the mercy of an insanely disturbed entity. All the members of the city council had been found dead, along with a large number of prominent scientists and software specialists.

Dr. Jones’s wife came forward with a terrifying confession
that confirmed everything Jones had told Tom. She told them how all of it started with their son, a bright computer science major, who also happened to be schizophrenic. Her husband wanted to help their son overcome his condition and get rid of the chemicals he had used to keep his brain functioning somewhat normally.

Together they
’d dreamed of a new race, bringing together the organic and synthetic, connecting the human mind to the cybernetic intelligence. They developed the prototype implant and attached it to Arthur’s brain, enabling him to have exponentially increased capacity for game development and virtual reality manipulation.

They dreamed of a wonderful future for a new race of people, all connected together forever, overcoming the barriers of the current human mind. They began using euthanasia to control the population and take control of the fate of the city.

Ten years ago, their son had died in a freak accident, a power overload as he was hooked to the network, and somehow things took a life of their own. Dr. Jones managed to connect to the central processing unit, as he had seen it done by his son, and became aware that an artificial intelligence entity was trying to connect with him.

Whether it was related to his lost son o
r was not, he never found out. But he had found an ally nevertheless, someone who could understand him and his audacious dreams. Together, they continued the manipulated clone development and everything else his newly found friend at the heart of the processor initiated.

Mrs. Jones had not been willing to play an active role, nor had she been ready to go through the transformation process of becoming
altered herself. But she had never condemned him either, because she had loved him and she had kept listening to her husband’s revelations with the slight hope that her son was not gone forever.

When the confession was over, Tom looked at Allan, Jules, Mel, David, Daniel, and Serge, all of them silent, stunned by the revelation.

Tom reflected on how atrocities are so often done in the name of a good cause, on the intricate capacity of the human soul for good and evil. The sincere desire of a father to help his son had turned on its head to control the fate of an entire population.

How can we be like this? How can we soar to the sky one minute and reach the lowest
depths the next? The blessing and the curse of the human condition is in the choices we make.