Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen
Part Fifteen
Ernest crept into the hallway and listened carefully. Now that he’d scanned the schematics, the walkways and doors and all the other confusing architectural details made more sense. They all fit carefully within a cruciform shape, built around an open, central hub.
Several times he shrank back into the shadows, startled, only to discover that the white figures lurking in the alcoves were not security ops, but only more statues. The hidden inner core of the Diaconate would have been a fascinating place to explore, if Ernest had not needed to continue looking over his shoulder to reassure himself that one of the wide, bristly ops wasn’t trailing him.
Finally he came upon the place that corresponded to the stairwell glyph on the map. Ernest hadn’t realized how grand it would be, with metal rails on either side that had been worked into fantastical shapes, ornamental whorls, as far a he could tell, with no need to absorb solar or conduct electromagnetic energy. And the stairs themselves, some sort of creamy white stone, trodden on by so many feet through the ages that subtle dips had formed in the center of each step.
Ernest descended, stepping only on every other tread, just as Will had taught him, and paused at the bottom to listen for pursuit. He heard nothing. But a red spot several centimeters wide had appeared on the towel that wrapped his throbbing shunt arm.
He held the image of the schematics in his mind. The Church of Saint Petser -- when had it ceased to be call that, and instead become known as the Diaconate? He would need to ask L0U15E to access a…. Oh. No. He wouldn’t ask L0U15E, and he wouldn’t learn what he needed to know from a feed. Not anymore.
The old electrical room was cold and dark; it had never been wired for W3 uplink or solar, and so it sat empty and unused. But the raw materials had never been salvaged. The great, galvanized boxes, with their wiring and cables dangling from ancient ports, had never been touched. Peculiar. Perhaps, Ernest thought, given the scale and splendor, and the lack of scavenging, the space had been sacred long before the Diaconate had ever been constructed around it.
He rounded the corner to the final hallway which would take him to the storage chamber that, according to Zach, now let to…Reclaim.
A wave of dread threatened to overtake Ernest, and he told himself to focus on the task at hand -- as he’d told himself innumerable times for the past twenty years, when the characters flickered by, and he had to force himself, hour after hour, to focus, to ensure that the software that ran the grid had not become corrupted.
Reclaim is the final reward for years of service. So Ernest had been taught to think. But he’d also noticed the tension in the voices of the Deacons as they spoke such things, and the subtle shift in the postures of anyone who might be listening.
And, in a more blatant show of abhorrence, Will had begged Matthew not to go. Ernest’s arm ached despite the compress that kept the loose shunt from rasping against his ulna, and he wished he’d never left Will to begin with, never come back for L0U15E. But wishes wouldn’t get him out of the Deaconate. And so he had to press on toward Reclaim.
Grit crunched beneath the soles of Ernest’s boots, and the wood-paneled walls grew pale with dust. Perhaps, he thought, the particulate had blown in through the gaps in the juncture between Reclaim and the original structure of Saint Peter’s. And he did his best not to think about how much it reminded hip of his loose, decoupled shunt.
An electrical hum rose, eventually, over the continual low buzz in Ernest’s hearing. He paused and listened. From the end of the hall came a loud thump. He nearly flattened himself against the dusty wall, but caught himself in time to avoid leaving a man-shaped silhouette behind in the dust that would have been as telling as a blood trail.
There was a flash of light. Up ahead, many tens of meters, a portal glowed, perfectly rectangular, as old-time portals were. Ernest advanced. Dust grew so thick toward the portal that it actually muffled Ernest’s footfalls, and drifted against the walls like Styrofoam. The temperature spiked, and the portal glowed brightly, then faded again to the ambient yellow safety light with which it had been lit before.
A dry heat, thick with dust, wafted over Ernest. It stung his eyes, his nose, caused him to cough and gag. He clamped his hands over his mouth and shook with the effort of staying quiet, and his body spasmed. Surely, he thought, now he would be apprehended by a large, bristle-faced security op -- perhaps one with a breathing apparatus over his face. But the wracking coughs subsided, and no security ops appeared.
From the chamber ahead came the hum and grind of machinery. Ernest knuckled moisture from his eyes, and made his way in.
The room at the end of the hallway was empty of everything but machines. Ernest coughed a few more times, and the sound was lost amid the swelling of gears turning, and a hollow whooshing noise he couldn't place.
It was hotter in that room than anywhere Ernest had ever been. Dustier, too. Gray dust coated everything, and drifted waist-high against the far walls, and in the corners. A large metal apparatus, four meters high, and twice as long, protruded from the exterior wall through the center of the vast room. The readout panel was old-time, with red digits glowing faintly through its coating of dust, and it was constructed from a variety of parts: ceramic, dull fiberglass, and hinges, valves and fittings of metal.
The huge apparatus rumbled so hard the floor shook. A chute opened, emitting a thick, hot cloud of dust. Ernest covered his nose and mouth with his towel-wrapped shunt arm and squinted his eyes.
Dust poured from the chute, and slid down a v-shaped trough. Water began to trickle from a pipe set above the trough, and the heat of the machine was so intense that the surface hissed where the water hit it, and steam rose to mingle with the clouds of choking dust. The pale gray dust mixed with the water to make a dark gray slurry, that looked, and even smelled, a bit like the stuff in the bowl on Zach’s table. The semi-liquid matter slid the final few meters down the steep trough and oozed through a grate on the floor.
The chute slammed shut, the water trickled to a stop, and the apparatus shut down with a series of loud, rattling clicks. The last of the slurry seeped through the grate. Ernest stood, baffled, alongside the massive piece of equipment. It could only be the link that connected St. Peter’s to Reclaim. But how could he manage to get past it--or through it? Even if his arm were not injured, it would be a difficult climb up a slimy, narrow trough to get to the chute. And once there, should Ernest wait for the chute to open to proceed on toward Reclaim, surely he’d be immolated by the heat inside the machine.
Ernest crept closer and touched the trough. It was uncomfortably hot, even after its contact with the water. No. There was no way he could endure the heat of the machine.
With the hope that there might be some point at which the machine met the exterior wall, some gap that was wide enough for him to squeeze through, Ernest made his way around it carefully, and studied the way it fit together.
The fittings were old, unlike the holding cell in which he'd damaged his shunt during his escape. The various parts of the machine had aged at different rates, and things that had once fit together tightly now bore small gaps and cracks, and places where edges that were once smooth had grown ragged with age. Ernest worked his way along the large machine, touching it, feeling it, searching for some weakness to exploit, but although the parts were worn and ill fitting, it was still too large and solid, and far too hot, for him to pry apart.
Ernest had his palms against the side of the large ceramic chamber when the apparatus hummed into life again. The whole machine shuddered, and the vibration sent a shock of pain through his shunt arm.
A series of sharp metallic clicks rose above the general hum of the machine. Approximately a meter above Ernest’s head, another chute opened, and two small objects rolled out. They landed on a flat surface, a metal ledge, upon the side of which a series of old LCDs mostly obscured by a thick layer of dust glowed with digital readings. The numbers scrolled, and then reached a point which caused a simple servomechanism to flip the ledge down. The objects tumbled from the black metal surface and rolled down a steep chute, which carried them through a hole in the floor.
Ernest approached the digital readout. It was in his nature to need to see the readout clearly, given that he’d spent his life parsing characters, but he stopped himself from wiping away the dust in the interest of leaving behind as little evidence of his passing as possible. He found that if he blew gently on the surface, however, that he was able to get a clearer read on the number string.
Strange. Numbers in those ranges were usually used in conjunction with magnetics -- more specifically, the acceptable threshold of demagnetization.
The dark metal ledge was a demagnetization strip, Ernest reasoned, since although he’d never seen one, it could hardly be anything else. And what else did the Deacons demagnetize in Reclaim, other than bodies?
But the objects that had tumbled onto the chute --those objects were entirely the wrong size. They were smaller, even, than infants.
The apparatus’ hum changed in pitch. The heat the machine threw, already intense, grew unbearable. Ernest shielded his face with his hand. Slivers of light shone from the gaps where the parts of the apparatus no longer fit tightly. It lit the room, yellow, and glowed for several minutes. The sound of the machine changed, and the light flashed bright white.
Dry heat rolled off the machine, and rose from the fitting gaps in waves that distorted Ernest’s vision, and made the chamber’s walls seem as if they were rippling. The apparatus blazed hotter still, and the light rose to a crescendo-- and then everything chugged to a stop. The light seeping through the cracks went yellow, then orange, then red, and finally the chute that pointed toward the room’s exit opened again, and another choking gout of dust burst forth.
Ernest covered his nose and mouth with the collar of his shirt, and cringed as the steam created from the trickle of water that hit the hot dust--ash, he supposed, was the proper term--seemed to settle on his exposed skin, and coat him with a layer of foul-smelling moisture.
The water-ash mixture dribbled through the grating in the floor, and the apparatus settled into a relatively quiet hum, punctuated only by the pops and ticks that the hot metal chute gave off to protest its contact with the water stream.
A body might turn to ash if it were subjected to such temperatures.
Ernest tasted bitterness at the back of his throat.
His skin was filmy with ash. Had that ash once been a person? He tried to scrub away the film on his forearm, the back of his hand. He touched his cheeks. They felt moist and gritty.
The homilies on Reclaim had never been entirely clear on what became of the bodies once they’d been demagnetized, because at that point, they were nothing more than PODs without AIs to control them. Uninhabited shells. Therefore, it made no difference if Reclaim burned the bodies once they’d been demagnetized.
Except….
Ernest’s gaze found to the dusty LCD. Except there would be no need to further demagnetize something that had already been demagnetized. There weren’t degrees of demagnetization; either something was demagnetized, or it was not.
Ernest hugged his shunt arm to his chest as he began to slowly circle the apparatus. The cremation machine. He approached the second chute with dread. The solid thunks with which pieces had fallen from the incineration chamber to the demagnetizing strip were still fresh in his ears, as if they’d left a perpetual echo. A foul odor rose from the hole in the floor, and he covered his nose and mouth with his collar yet again. His shirt had become clammy and damp from him breathing through it, but having the moist fabric against his face was still better than that horrible smell. Ernest glanced down at the hole. He noticed his own footprints in the dust. Not good. He’d need to sweep them away and obscure his passing. And then he noticed something else, a shape that was jarringly familiar, but completely out of context.
A shunt.
No, more than just a shunt. The dust-covered thing on the floor was section of forearm with the shunt still embedded.
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