I spent the next day setting up a protection circle around Veazey’s house, a collection of manufactured homes sitting on a plot of land opened up by one of the Reclamation Acts.
Anyone who came across it would think he was squatting, but he had a legal claim on a wide swath of worthless land by an old U.S. artillery fort and had set up a home here a year or so after he started at Innovex. It wasn’t practical to live here before the age of flying cars, and Veazey clearly liked it that way.
He told everyone he was living the dream, living an isolated life fifteen minutes from a major city. On weekends he would get dropped off at a parking garage and take his father’s old truck out on what was left of the roads. He was often the only human on the ground for miles, trapped between massive, automated freight haulers that were too heavy to fly.
Veazey’s first job was serving as troubleshooter and remote pilot for a fleet of these drone trucks, so he wasn’t scared of them, and he knew all kinds of priority codes that let him blow past them if they got in his way.
He spent his weekends taking long trips to forgotten corners of the United States, visiting lonely ghost towns and U.S. historical sites that didn’t have markers anymore. The truck had been converted to run on hydrogen fuel pellets, so he could drive for thousands of miles without having to stop. I used to joke that the whole thing would go up in a giant fireball if he got in a wreck, but Veazey just said that would be a fine way to go out.
His home was actually four small manufactured homes hooked together into one big one. The units were meant to be individual tiny homes, built to be easy to transport and set up on short notice. He used one entire home for his workshop and another for his entertainment room, with one reserved for kitchen and bathroom, and another just for his bed.
He talked about saving enough money to build a real house here one day, but the prefab walls were surprisingly strong, and everything in them was easy to replace. Veazey got a deal by buying in bulk and having them air-dropped in, buying defective units that had scuffs or scratches or holes in them and then patching them himself.
The end result was a sprawling prefab castle filled with electronics and robot parts, with every available surface covered in collectibles and movie posters. I couldn’t imagine trying to bring a woman back to this insane nerd hive, but every time I teased him about it, he showed me a drawer full of underwear and personal items women had left behind.
He’d asked me to come and live with him half a dozen times since we met, but I was pretty sure being his roommate would end our friendship. Veazey was the best friend in the world when he wanted to be but could get moody and temperamental at the drop of a trucker hat. He assured me he lived away from people for a reason, and he couldn’t stand the thought of being stuck in an apartment.
I spent the afternoon painting a magic circle around the whole structure, using a smart sprayer to copy the runes just as they looked projected on the ground. I was going to leave the projector running and rely on the painted symbols to be an old-school backup if demons found a way to take it out.
Veazey made a big show of not needing protection, showing off his massive gun safe full of forbidden firearms. He had enough hardware in this house to put him in a work camp for twenty years, but he clearly didn’t care. Half the land was devoted to a shooting range where he took young programmers and introduced them to the wonderful world of guns, whenever he decided one of them was cool enough to be trusted.
He insisted that he had enough security to spot any demons attacking his island and that he had enough firepower to deal with them, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
“Please,” I begged him. “First sign of trouble, call me and let me deal with it. Please don’t try and fight these things one on one.”
“Fuck that!” Veazey said, insulted. “These things may be fast, but no way they’re faster than a bullet.”
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“They don’t have to be faster than a bullet, they just have to be faster than your finger, and trust me, they are.”
Veazey grumbled for a while and finally gave in, promising that he wouldn’t try to play hero if he got attacked.
* * *
Once I decided Veazey was as safe as I could make him, it was time to tackle the real problem.
I had hoped my midnight breakup with Judy would convince the demons they couldn’t use her against me, but Baalphezar had blown that theory out of the water.
Judy needed physical protection beyond anything I could provide. I did not want to get caught painting a magic circle around Judy’s house. That would be one awkward conversation.
There’s no way I could convince her to live in a church or a DMA safe house, but maybe I could move her to a safe house by calling it something else.
The portal to Elysium was opened by Thomas Edison at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition on October 30, 1915. Edison said he had found a way to use technology to punch a hole through the membrane around our universe, creating a stable tunnel to a new Garden of Eden.
A popular conspiracy theory said Edison stole this technology from a man named Alvin Cartwright, who went missing in 1883, but nobody could prove it, and Edison left no trace of his equipment behind, after he opened the first man-made portal on Earth. Edison said he destroyed the machinery because he had been convinced that he got very lucky with his portal to Elysium and that randomly opening portals could easily destroy the planet or leave us open to invasion.
The conspiracy theory says Edison was just covering his ass here, and that he never opened another portal because he only found one working gateway in Cartwright’s lab, and no one had been able to build another one.
But the portal to Elysium remains, 143 years later. The virgin planet beyond was now a kind of extradimensional Las Vegas.
The first explorers stepped through that portal onto a wide-open field of perfect green, filled with Earthlike plants and animals. Originally, they thought they had found an alternate primordial Earth, but the fossils turned out to be much older than that. They found slightly mutated versions of Earth animals, but no dinosaurs, and no signs of intelligent life.
Not a post-apocalyptic Earth, but an Earth where life was so easy and food was so abundant, nothing had ever evolved enough to use tools. The soil was incredibly fertile, and the climate was unusually stable, like aliens had made a better version of Earth, but had to stop right before they moved the people in.
Christian cultists said this world had clearly been made for them, as a reward for those who repented their sins, since the whole world was still a garden, and magic didn’t work there at all. No wizards, no savants, no monsters, and no demons. If I walked through the portal to Elysium, I would just be a normal guy again, and if Lydia tried to walk through, she would simply cease to exist.
By 2058, Elysium was the ultimate corporate retreat, with an adult playground built around the portal to suck up tourist dollars, and elaborate resorts on the shores of perfect beaches everywhere else.
The civilized areas might be under the same corporate governance we suffered with on Earth, but a man could still buy a hovering wagon full of supplies and settle a plot of land in the middle of nowhere.
The DMA maintained a network of safe houses here, to hide people threatened by the supernatural. Almost certainly where I would end up, if I ever got desperate enough to call the cops.
The Paraíso colony was a giant tourist trap, full of shiny corporate casinos next to campy old west saloons, but the town had a top-notch research university, and that university had a museum, with staff slowly assembling a whole new fossil record.
It was the perfect place to hide Judy, but I had to come up with an excuse to get her there and keep her there, without letting her know I was involved.
I used Evan as the middleman and had him ask my old boss at the museum to get her a job on the other side of the portal, by promising he would have the eternal gratitude of one of the most powerful mages in his program. Judy hated magic and had no compelling reason to stay on Earth, so I was hoping the offer of a prestigious job in a place with no supernatural threats would have her jumping at the chance to move.
I asked the director to mention that there would be jobs for Brian, too, since Paraíso had a dozen active theater companies performing on any given night.
Judy called me a few days later to tell me she had accepted the job and had to leave in a few days. I was so overwhelmed thinking about the number of questions I couldn’t answer and the number of things I would have to lie about, I couldn’t bring myself to answer the phone, so she left a rambling voicemail about how she hoped we could always be friends.
I resolved to call her back and smooth things over if I survived the fight with Baalphezar, noting there would now be at least one upside if I lost. If the demons killed me and dragged my soul to Hell, at least I wouldn’t have to talk to my ex-girlfriend again.