Ω 03

I was never a very church-going man, so I never really gave much thought to the hereafter. By the time I was old enough to have the maturity in order to appreciate my own mortality, I had done enough that was antithetical to the good book that such questions about the afterlife were pointless since I was more than likely bound for Hell’s fiery embrace. So you can imagine my surprise that when I finally did die and found not fire and brimstone but a small room with wooden flooring and plaster walls.

In front of me was a group of women, or to be more factual and definitive, a group of maids. There two lines along of them standing against the front and back walls, each facing towards each other. And me, I guess. All wore identical sets of scullery maid uniforms, which consisted of a calf-length black skirt and blouse with white trim, white ruffled pinafore, white stockings, and black ankle-length leather boots with a two-inch heel. They also had a ruffled headband, black silk cravat tied around their collars, not to mention expensive looking white gloves. These ladies were definitely of a much fancier sort of maid than I was used to. They were probably the type of maid you’d find at the White House, or serving a royal family.

What made this group most peculiar was the fact that their skin was made of porcelain. Upon first sight, I had reasonably assumed that they were just wearing masks. But the closer I looked the more I saw. The shiny, white material didn’t end at their faces; you could see more of it peeking from their neck collars and the space between their gloves and sleeves. I would have assumed then that these things were just really big dolls. Unfortunately, the fact that the one directly in front of me was moving dissuaded me of such notions.

The porcelain maid was tilting its head to and fro, its eyes obviously scanning me as much as I was scanning it. And those eyes. Oh boy, those eyes. They were creepy. Nothing like a doll’s eyes at all, something made to mimic human peepers. These eyes were inhuman.

The sclera was some type of silvery metal; hell, with how opulently dressed these things were, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was silver. The irises on the other hand were brass. Each resembled camera shutters, with each plate of brass moving to open and close the pupil, which from what I could see was just simple glass. The creepiest feature of these metal eyes though was the glowing. From behind the pupil I could see some sort of eerie, dim blue glow. Almost like the inside of the doll woman’s head was hollow and contained a single candle that was alight with a blue flame.

Moving from the eyes, I immediately noticed some lettering etched upon the maid’s forehead. The first letter was the Greek symbol omega, followed by the numbers zero and three. Omega Zero Three. The hell did that mean? Was it some sort of unit designation like in the army? If so, then that’s one fucked up army. Not only do they use old Greek, but their soldiers are automaton toys in fancy maid outfits. The enemy would probably die in laughter before a single shot was heard.

What I didn’t get was the placing of those letters. Each symbol was etched onto the maid’s porcelain forehead backwards. It was almost like the letters you would see in a… mirror.

Shit.

I moved to lift my right hand. The woman in front of me moved her left. I shook my head; the doll did the same. Finally, I looked to my left and saw another maid, this one identical to the one in front of me, except for the fact that she was also facing forwards as I was, and the etching on her forehead marked her as Omega Zero Four. It was then that I noticed that on the floor was the demarcation the wooden boards, one that stretched all across the length of the room parallel to me and the other maids I was standing with. There was no second line of doll maids. The scene in front of me was in fact a mirror, one that was reflecting what was in front of it. Which turned out to be me, along with along line of dolls.

I tried to take a deep breath, but then I noticed that I wasn’t breathing. I looked down at my hands and saw them covered in white silk gloves. They also looked thinner and more delicate than they should have. Nope, these hands definitely have never fired a gun nor have they ever throttled the life out of a man.

And for some reason I was wearing the same maid uniform as the other creepy doll women, and yes, those were breasts that seemed to be sticking out from the front of said maid outfit.

Though I had never found myself in a situation such as this, I would have thought that if ever I had the occasion to wake up in a dress, then I most definitely be panicking out of my god damned mind. For some reason though, I was completely, utterly calm. Instead of screaming, shouting, and running around like a headless chicken, I just stayed where I was, standing with the other dolls and staring down at my maid-coutured self.

Looking back at the mirror, I stared at the doll-me’s face. It was like a porcelain mask: beautiful, but stiff, unmoving. Cold. The blue, glowing eyes didn’t help make her look any nicer or more approachable. She also had long black hair that was tied back in a severe bun, all of which was under that stupid looking ruffled hair band. I looked around and saw that the other maids had the same hairstyle that doll-me did, but they had various different hair colors. Four was a ginger while Five was a blonde. Two to my right was auburn while One had snow-white hair.

What the hell was going on? Although I was far from panicking, the fact was that I was still thoroughly confused by the situation. I was dead, that much I knew. Was this hell then? I always knew that when I bought the farm, Satan and his twisted servants would lay claim to my soul. Yet now… where was the devil and his kin? Where was the fire and brimstone? Or was Hell really just some bad joke where I spent the rest of eternity as a doll maid?

What the hell was I anyway?

As soon as I had those thoughts, something strange happened. A blue box or page appeared hovering in mid-air before me, inside of which was a long string of words which made absolutely no sense to me.

Name: Ω 03

Race: Automaton

Class: N/A

LEVEL: 23

Job:

* Maid - lvl. 55

* Driver - lvl. 12

* Cook - lvl. 30

* Guard - lvl. 15

* Artificer - lvl. 6

Skill Points: 25/64 Assigned

* STR - 5

* DEX - 5

* AGI - 5

* INT - 5

* MAG - 5

 Proficiency: 0/7 Assigned

If I wasn’t sure before, I was damned sure of it now. I was definitely in Hell. Only the sermons lied about what Hell actually was. Hell wasn’t about punishment and brimstone and fires and all that scary shit. Hell was about confusing the bad thoughts right out of you every step of the way until your brain melted inside your skull and you couldn’t tell reality from a fever dream.

I was jolted out of my internal monologuing about the afterlife when the other maids suddenly jumped into motion. They lifted their heads, each coming to life with a whirr of internal machinery. Eyes began to light up with the same dim glow as mine, but unlike me the other maids had a silver colored light emitting from their pupils.

The maids, as one, stepped forwards, bringing themselves closer to the wall-length mirror in front of us. Each doll then began to fret and fix their uniforms and hair, making sure their appearance was pristine.

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What the hell were they up to? I was trying to watch the now living maids preening themselves in front of the mirror, but the unnatural floating box of weird words blocked most of my sight. Go away, I thought towards the box, and lo and behold, it actually did so. Unfortunately, there was another box waiting for me behind the one that just vanished. This box was smaller than the other, but was flashing an angry red.

0800! Prepare for duties!

I thought to the box to go away as well, and like its bigger brother it obediently did so. The maids looked like they had finally finished their primping as they were now perfectly still. A second later, each maid performed a perfect right face, each doll pivoting on their heels in unison to the right before clicking their boot soles together and standing at attention. My old drilling sergeant would have pissed himself in glee if he had these ladies to train with.

After a few moments of perfect stillness, Omega Zero One started moving, heading towards a door that I hadn’t noticed before. It looked to be the only exit in the room. As One stepped forwards, Two followed, then Four, and so on. They exited the room in perfect synch, and would have been a glorious sight at any marching band parade. The only thing that marred their performance was the empty space between Two and Four. I suppose that was where I was supposed to be marching if I ever had the inclination to be acting like some pretty performing doll, which I most certainly did not.

Finally, after the last maid went through the door (It was Omega Zero Twelve if you were curious) the wooden portal shut with a soft click. I was left in the room all alone, which gave me time to actually think about the current situation.

I looked to my reflection again, still not believing what I was seeing. I made to do as the other dolls did earlier by stepping forwards, and I was amazed at how smooth and graceful the thing in the mirror moved. I should have tripped on my ass moving about in those lady shoes, but somehow this weird doll-like body moved with a grace and finesse that was… unnatural.

Upon closer inspection of myself in the mirror, I saw that the porcelain skin of my face had several divots and hinges in the neck. I began moving my head and saw that those were there to allow full range of movement for my head and neck. I raised my left hand and wiggled my fingers and rotated my wrist. There was a soft whirring sound coming from the moving limb. I wonder if under the glove I had the same type of hinges in my digits.

I blinked, which startled me. I hadn’t even noticed that until that moment that I hadn’t been blinking at all. But having it happen then and there reminded me that, yes, normal folk should be blinking. But this doll body my poor wretched soul had found itself in was definitely not normal. So blinking was weird.

I looked at my reflection and forced myself to blink again. There. Eyelids were hidden underneath the openings for my eyes and flicked downwards whenever I wanted to blink. They were made of the same ceramic as the face, and had delicate bristles at the end to simulate eyelashes.

Simulate.

Yes, that was the winning word for this puzzle. This body, and the rest of the maids, were just some attempt by a Hero of Alexandria-type tinkerer to make machines look like living people. The hair, the outfit, even the blinking weren’t necessary for these machines to do their jobs. But whoever made us wanted us to look and behave like human beings. Why, though? Why not just hire some gals in town to be maids? It’d be much less troublesome than making your own, hell of a lot less expensive, too.

But I guess maybe that was why: to show off. To show the world at large that they were so rich that they didn’t need to hire simple human folk to be a scullery maid. To show their friends and rivals that they had the influence to have people actually made in order to fulfill simple jobs around the house. Seriously, rich folk pissed me off. Wasting all this money and resources for something so stupid. Even in Hell you couldn’t escape them, though to be honest it made sense that there would be rich people in Hell, and plenty of them. I may have been a mangy thief and cold-blooded killer, but the real crooks were living in mansions over in Washington.

The door slamming open caught me by surprise, and I instinctively bent low and reached for my gun. Of course, I was currently in a skirt and thus unarmed. I must have looked a fool to anyone who was watching.

“Omega Zero Three!” shouted the skinny, greasy-looking man who had just entered the room. “What are you doing?”

The guy was dressed in a fancy suit that screamed “BUTLER.” I knew the type, since my family had employed a bunch of them. Thankfully, my family had some taste and would never have hired on this mulch head; he looked way too slippery and disreputable to be put in charge of an entire household staff. My opinion of the owners of this place just kept getting lower by the second.

I stood up straight and clasped my delicate looking hands in front of me in what I hoped looked like a relaxed pose. It’s been decades since I’d seen maids interact with butlers so I was hoping I was remembering the behavior correctly.

“Hello,” I said to him. The voice that came out of my mouth was… wrong. Just wrong. It sounded female, sure, but that was to be expected. What I didn’t like was that it sounded smooth; elegant. Like some uptight, classy broad that was way too much trouble to deal with.

In other words, I sounded exactly like my mother. Heaven help me.

“Don’t ‘hello’ me, you stupid piece of junk!” the rat-faced butler snarled. “I asked you a question! Why are you here and not with the other maids in section Omega?”

I let out a blink before saying, “I dunno, suh.”

I decided that this current situation called on me to channel the behavior of my family’s old negro manservant, Lionel. Lionel was a smart bastard (he helped my father with balancing the numbers for his business) but he always acted like a fool whenever the butlers or my mother tried to order him around. He’d behave like one of the field slaves, putting on a far-away look on his face, and always answered the questions presented to him in as simple a manner as possible. This got him out of a lot of grimm manual work that he was not supposed to do in the first place (he was my father’s personal servant and was too valued for his intellect to have him work at anything else) and saved him the drama of disobeying the mistress of the house or problems with any of the butler’s orders.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I dunno, suh.”

“Good gods, I do not need this right now,” the butler muttered to himself as he rubbed his aching temples. “Just my bloody luck! The Duke himself is coming to this event, and now I have one malfunctioning auto on such an important day! Oh, this is all going to give me heartburn, I’m sure!”

Duke? The guy sounded important. Maybe Satan himself was visiting this place. If that was the case, then there was no way in hell I was going to remain here.

“Fine, whatever,” the butler sighed. “Just head on over to Omega section post haste!”

“Yes suh,” I muttered, stepping forwards and heading towards the door.

“Wait,” the man’s arm reached out to me as I was passing and grabbed me by the chin. It took all my willpower to calm my rage and not break his arm. Back when I was alive and, well, me, nobody would have dared touch me like this. Well, nobody who wanted to continue on living at any rate.

“Your optics,” the butler said as he lifted my chin higher so he could look into my eyes. “Why are they blue?”

“I dunno, suh,” I said once again. Optics? As in optical? Did he mean my eyes? Why didn’t he just say eyes in the first place? Pompous little prick.

“Have them checked out by the artificer,” he told me as he let my chin go. “We can’t have you not matching the other girls on such a momentous night.”

What the hell was an artificer? “Yes, suh.”

“Oh, and one other thing.” This time the oily creep reached down and grabbed my bottom through my skirt. My entire porcelain shell shivered in disgust as I felt his clammy fingers groping me. “You will report to my quarters after the event. I am in need of stress relief and you will be the one to provide it.”

This time I didn’t bother to hold back my ire. With my left hand, I reached back for the offending hand, then grasped it while squeezing with all my might. I heard a crack and a squeal of pain from the butler as his fingers broke. I then pulled back my right and socked him in the face. My ceramic hands, though dainty and frail looking, were obviously much sturdier than they looked since my fist managed to break his nose and knock out two teeth.

The rat-faced butler screamed, blood spurting from his ruined nose. I then lashed out with a left hook and smashed him in the chin. The thin man crumpled like a marionette with its strings cut, knocked out and down for the count.

“You’re lucky I don’t kill you, you piece of shit,” I told the unconscious man. I idly noted with irritation that my once pristine white gloves now had blood stains on them. Shaking my head in disgust, I turned away from the broken butler and made my way out or the room.

Let’s go see what the rest of Hell looked like.