I had endured enough fire in my life. After sixteen years of battling demonic fire creatures, I was, no pun intended, burnt out with the whole fire affair.
Fortunately for me, hell was neither scorching nor demonic. It was surprisingly cold in hell, but I welcomed the change.
I had no misconceptions about where I was headed when I died. What surprised me was how civilized and organized my descent into the underworld was.
I was in a large, all-white room that seemed rectangular in shape. There was a massive red carpet that traveled down the middle of the room, which made the whole area seem like a giant hallway. I was on the red carpet, in a giant line consisting of Infernoids and humans alike.
I was surrounded by Infernoids on both sides. One of them saw me, its body recoiling in shock before it hunched its large frame and lunged at me. My gun was nowhere to be found, and I was too close to dodge, so I just stared as its wicked claws approached my face.
Right as it was about to hit, an invisible barrier bounced the attack away from me. I raised my brow, not knowing what happened, and it seemed like the Infernoid was equally as confused as it tilted its head. It tried again, but to no avail.
I peeked my head out and looked down the line. To my left was an endless line of creatures that spread so far down I couldn't even see the end. To the right, it was much less busy, with a few hundred people filing towards what looked like a doorway.
Squinting my eyes, I saw the tattered remains of a black uniform around thirty people to the right of me. It looked similar to the uniform I was wearing.
"Hey!" I yelled.
The figure froze, her shoulders tensing.
Yup, definitely one of my soldiers. They all tensed up when they heard my voice. I was a hardass, admittedly.
The person turned around and gasped. It was Sergeant Yuli, who had joined me on the suicide mission. We didn't have our helmets, and it was good to see her face again. She had just died in my arms not even ten minutes ago. She smiled and gave me a thumbs up.
I tried to step out of line and walk towards her, but an invisible barrier kept me from doing so. It seems like whoever put us in the line hated cutters.
Oh yeah, Yuli died. So it was safe to assume that this was death. I had died too, no doubt, and this was some sort of line leading us into the afterlife.
I knew that I had died, but it was still hard to fully accept. I thought I’d be vaporized, but here I am, in one piece. It was all a bit overwhelming, but I suppressed those emotions. I was dead, no need to stress anymore.
I looked down the line again and saw just how monumentally long it was. These were all the people who died in the blast. Miles and miles of people in the line of death, all because of my plan.
Crazy ideas were kinda my thing, but I had really done it this time.
I wasn't well-versed in Infernoid, so I just waited silently as the line got closer and closer to the doorway. When I reached the front and walked through the doorway, I found myself in an office.
There were two people, a man and a woman, waiting for me. The man wore a well-fitting suit, while the woman sported a skirt and blazer that did little to conceal her ample figure. They lacked any facial features, including eyes or mouths. They were like walking, talking mannequins.
"Oh boy," the male sighed, despite not having a mouth. He approached with a clipboard in hand. "Another soldier? I hate judging soldiers. Morality? Duty for their country? It all becomes clouded. Soldiers could be good people doing bad things for good or bad causes that they don't really get to decide."
"What are you? Zedd, was it?" the female inquired as she sat at a desk, rifling through a stack of papers.
"I feel strange," I said, furrowing my brows. My mind felt hazy. I didn't feel like myself.
"You're at the gates of hell," the female stated flatly. "Most people deal with death poorly, so we sedate your emotions to prevent outbursts."
I nodded, accepting the explanation. Feeling numb seemed somewhat pleasant, all things considered.
"Now answer my question, Zedd. Who are you?"
"I'm a bad person who did bad things," I admitted, "But I don't know if that makes me evil. I feel like I did a lot of evil things, but not for evil reasons. I see how this could be complicated. You're the professionals here, help me out?"
“As long as you don’t complain where our help sends you, for sure. We have some measures to figure out how damned you are,” the male said as he walked over and placed his hand on my shoulder. It was surprisingly warm.
The room around us shifted. The female, and her desk, remained the same, but everything around us was now a blank room with a giant scale right in front of us.
And giant was an understatement. It was a huge, gold scale that held two Olympic-sized pools filled with water on either side. The walls containing the water were made of glass, and the sheer size gave me a sense of megalophobia.
"Alright, hop in one of those pools and we'll sort this out,” the male said pleasantly. “Once you get in, the weight of the sins you committed will darken the water around you and make it heavier. Conversely, the good you've committed will weigh on the other side and lighten the scale. We’ll see how it turns out. I can’t explain why it does that, but I know it's through a method that definitely works - just trust me."
"I trust you," I said honestly. Part of me wanted to be hesitant, but since I was dead I really didn't care anymore. All the sins I did, I did with conviction, so whatever the consequences were, I would take them in stride.
"Oh, good. Sometimes people say it's rigged, and we hide all the good acts away, or the scale isn't balanced. Honestly, I spend more time arguing than judging."
"Nah, I'm cool.”
"Awesome, here," the male gestured to the female, who lifted her pen. As she lifted her pen, my body also lifted into the air. Dragging her pen across the air, she used some sort of telekinesis to pull me over to one of the pools and dropped me in.
The first thing I noticed was that the water was really warm. It was like a relaxing bath; my body, so used to the stress of war, decompressed instantly. I closed my eyes and let myself sink to the bottom of the pool. It was just me in here. No armies to lead, no people to protect, no enemies to kill. It was just me.
I opened my eyes, but I couldn't see anything. It was all dark.
What? I put a conscious effort into closing my eyes and reopening them again - still black. What was happening?
I kicked off the bottom of the pool and swam to the top. Breaking the surface, I looked around me.
It was all black. The entire pool was pitch black. It wasn't a dark grey or faded black, but pure darkness. Vanta-black, I vaguely remembered the darkest shade ever being. It was beyond dark.
"Fuck," was the most eloquent thing I could say to encapsulate the situation.
My jurors, the male and female, both lacked faces to make facial expressions, but judging by the staggered stance the male had, they were equally as surprised.
"Okay? Well, I've never seen that before," the male said before an eerie silence filled the room.
After a few minutes, the male hesitantly asked, "Any genocide recently?"
"Actually, yes," I answered honestly. "Very recently."
"The death you caused is more than Atilla the Hun and the black plague combined, yet your scales are surprisingly balanced," the female noted, writing something down. "Defensive, I assume?"
"You don't know about the war I just ended?" I had to ask before pondering pensively, "I hope I ended it."
"We usually don't concern ourselves with the matters of the living," the female replied as she stamped a few papers. "We care about the workload it gives us, but not about the reasoning or stories. It's all trivial after so many years. I might have to get a newspaper for whatever you did. Anyways, I think we have to put you in a maximum security-hell."
The male figure snapped out of his stupor. "I was thinking about minimum security," he countered. "He's been nothing but relaxed and compliant. He'll fit in."
"Can't do," the female denied instantly. "I already took his attitude into consideration. Not only did he shatter the human record but also the universal record for murders committed. Protocol is pretty clear with these kinds of things."
"War is different," the male persisted. "Protocol works with numbers, of course, but also morality. The scales were balanced for a reason, right? Clearly, he's not a bad guy, so why does he need to go to the lower three, of all places?
The female let out a sigh, tapping her pen on her desk in irritation. "Are you saying we need to do a manual audit and go through every... single… sin?" I could hear her voice wavering and sunk into the water, not wanting her to see me.
I felt bad. There were a lot of sins. I didn't want to go through them, even if it exonerated me. Too tedious and too embarrassing. I really hoped that I wouldn't have to be involved personally.
"It's war," the male insisted, his voice tinged with resignation. "We usually check morality anyway. So let's put the stamp down, cancel our plans for the next fifty years, and brace ourselves for the paperwork avalanche."
The female let out an exaggerated sigh. I imagined that if she had eyes, she would be rolling them. With a theatrical wave of her hand, papers began to materialize in mid-air, fluttering down like autumn leaves. They fell onto her desk, forming precarious stacks that quickly reached the ceiling. The papers continued to multiply, spilling onto the floor, surrounding her like an army of bureaucratic soldiers.
With a defeated groan, the female looked on as gravity inevitably won the battle. The towering piles of paperwork collapsed, burying her in a mountain of administrative chaos. Her muffled voice echoed from beneath the avalanche, a mix of annoyance and resignation, as she accepted her fate as the paperwork queen.
"Um, sorry?" I said meekly, cringing at the sight.
"It's alright," the male said, deflated. "It's not your fault… actually, it is your fault, but you already did it all. All these," he pointed to the ever-growing pile, "are all the sins you committed. We have to manually review every single life you've taken or were directly involved in taking, and judge the morality of each one individually. Once we figure out your score, we can move you somewhere."
"Score?" I asked. "Like in Monopoly? Or bowling?"
An aggressive growl came from the mountain of paperwork. The male, sensing his colleague's irritation, stepped up and lifted his hands in the air. I was pulled from the water by an invisible force and carried through the air towards the male, who handed me a towel as I landed.
"Thanks," I said as I dried myself. It was a nice towel, I vaguely noted.
"No problem!" the male replied pleasantly. His voice was kind; I liked him. "Let me explain another concept to you. We try to streamline the whole sorting process, but we always get people demanding answers, especially the sociopathic ones, so I'm pretty well versed."
"Sorry?" Was he implying I was a sociopath?
"No, it's alright. Everyone deserves an answer, in my opinion."
"Not in my opinion," the female interjected.
"And that's why you're stuck with me," the male quipped instantly.
A hand shot up out of the mountain of papers with its middle finger up.
“The point system isn’t like Monopoly or bowling, it’s more Call of Duty,” he explained.
“Oh, okay… nice?”
"It’s through a process called karma," he continued. "There are positive and negative karma points that people accumulate throughout their lives. We have Virtue Points or VP, and Sinner Points, called SP. People with an overwhelming balance of VP compared to SP go to heaven, and those with larger amounts of SP go to Hell. There are nine circles of Hell, and the more SP you have correlates with how low you go."
"So, how'd I do?" I asked. "I must be pretty low, ain't I?" The Geneva Conventions only applied to human versus human conflicts, not aliens. Rising through the ranks and becoming a general in the worst war in human history required results, not morals. I definitely earned my fair share of SP, however much that would be.
"Defense against a warmongering race is still a subjective matter, according to protocol. You’re allowed to defend yourself and we understand that a cornered animal will do desperate things, so you get some passes for that. Defending your planet and race earned you a lot of VP. However, killing is still killing and sins are sins, so you accumulated a lot of SP as well."
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“So, like points I get for killing are SP, and points for… assists? Saves? Those would be VP?” I guessed, trying to think of the last time I played COD.
If I knew the laws of the universe treated my life like a video game, then I definitely would have done a few things differently. I still would have blown up the planet, but other things.
If life was a game, and I broke the kill record, did that mean I broke the high score? Was it going to be like an arcade where I can put my name as ‘A55’ at the top of the leaderboard for everyone to see?
That would be pretty cool.
"So, how much did I score?" I asked, genuinely excited to find out.
"Well, that might take a while," the male admitted, "the paperwork just keeps piling up. The issue is that the results of your actions still haven’t ended. Humanity is still alive, so you’re still gaining VP because we can attribute their success to you. Also, the regret and consequences for destroying your planet haven’t fully sunk in either. It'll take years to sort everything out - decades. We'll need a god or goddess to audit the whole process, so even longer. You’re gonna have to wait somewhere suitable for your crimes, like a holding cell. Unfortunately... with the number of sins you committed..."
"What? Do I have to wait in the darkest pit in Hell until I'm sorted out?"
"Sadly, it's a precaution we have to follow."
I shrugged. It was what it was.
----------------------------------------
"...and according to protocol, the only person comparable to me is you," I said to Ilbis with a sharp look. "I've been stuck here, half-frozen in ice, for who knows how long?" I lamented.
"Three hundred years," Ilbis offered.
"Seriously? That long?" There was no way. Had it actually been that long?
"I'm fairly certain. I've been imprisoned down here since the dawn of humanity, so time feels different for me, but I believe my estimate is accurate. I have always been good with time, trust me."
"I thought the number one rule in life was not to trust you?"
"Then don't. You have a choice."
"Is that what you said to her? 'You have a choice'?" I asked, an edge to my voice. He, or it, acted pleasant, but I knew it was all a ruse.
"Even when faced with a multitude of options, there are moments when the weight of indecision renders us incapable of choosing; it's as if we're trapped in a paradox where choices are abundant, yet none can be made."
"What does that even mean?"
"All it took was one, simple, minuscule bite. That's all it takes for anything - a single taste."
"Did you make it taste sweet?" I had to ask. It wasn't often you could find out the truth of the original sin. Especially from the perpetrator itself.
"No," a maniacal laugh escaped Ilbis. "It looked sweet, sweeter than anything she had ever laid her eyes on, but I made sure it was bitter. The look of disgust on her face, and then the horror as she realized what she had done. One of my three greatest pleasures, no doubt."
"Three? What's better than making Eve eat the apple?"
"One thing comes to mind," all three of Satan's faces looked at me, eyes gleeful and mouths grinning uncontrollably. "You!" it said joyfully.
"Me?" I asked, filled with disgust. "What the hell are you talking about? You never made a deal with me? Even if you did, I would refuse it!"
"I'm trapped here, but my influence is free from these shackles. It cannot be escaped. That is the seed I placed in the world. As long as humanity is alive and conscious, then my will shall live forever."
"Sounds like you're just coping."
"Whenever someone crosses a line, thick or thin," Ilbis went on, ignoring my barb, "it involves me. My whisper is so soft, so gentle, that one would think it's their own idea."
"But you didn't do that with me," I said defensively, "You're not taking credit for what I did. I did it myself! Actually… go for it. Let's call the judges and tell them that you blew up the planet! Set me free, because Satan himself planted the idea in my head and let me go to fucking Heaven!"
"Ah, you finally said my real name," it said with satisfaction.
"Shut up," I growled, frustrated that I let him goad me. I hadn't said his real name for three hundred years until now.
"It wasn't me," Satan admitted. "Blowing up the planet was something I admired, but cannot take credit for. The fact that you, Zedd, thought and manufactured that plan, is something I respect more than anything. You made me proud."
"Fuck you."
Satan went on, spewing more garbage from its mouth, but I put my head down and refused to listen. Anything, I tried to think of anything in an attempt to keep that demon out of my mind. It was hard since Ilbis' voice was like nails being scratched on a chalkboard. If I had my hands, I would tear my own ears out just to not hear him anymore.
Deep breaths. Think about something else. Think about something else. Think about something else.
A hand touched the top of my head. It was warm.
I looked up. It was a walking mannequin wearing a suit. I knew this figure.
"Hey," it said gently, before hesitantly asking. "Are… are you alright?"
"Did I really deserve this?" I asked tiredly.
"Nobody deserves being around that," the male admitted, making a gagging noise as it looked at Satan. "Sorry, Zedd, but it took way longer than we expected. Let's get out of here and I'll explain to you what's going on."
An intense warmth surged through me, unlike anything I had ever experienced. With a determined effort, I mustered all my strength and tugged at my arms, finally liberating them from their icy confinement. A plume of steam billowed around me as I lifted my freed hands in the air.
Studying my palms for the first time in three hundred years, I was struck by how familiar they appeared, they were exactly as I remembered. Placing my hands firmly on the ice, I braced myself and pushed upward, pushing myself out of my icy prison.
Standing tall on my own two feet, a wave of triumph washed over me, filling my chest with a joy I could no longer contain. I threw my head back and laughed exuberantly, the sound echoing across the barren Ninth Circle. After centuries of confinement, I was finally free!
"Congratulations," Satan said, but this time his voice was different. The three voices were warped into an even more demonic tone that was filled with a heavy energy that made my knees weak. Ilbis had never shown me this side before.
"Piss off," I said with a dismissive wave of my hand. "We'll never see each other again."
"Sure, we'll see about that… Zedd," it said my name slowly, savoring the taste of it. It started to laugh, making the temperature drop even more and causing ice gales to shoot from its body.
"Let's get out of here," the male said frantically, placing his hand on my shoulder.
We suddenly appeared in another area, completely different from the icy lake of Cocytus.
However, I could still faintly hear Satan's laugh.
----------------------------------------
“My dearest coffee, How I have missed your rich, bold, and slightly sweet embrace. For so long, I have been deprived of your exquisite presence, and oh, how my heart aches for you. I fondly recall our past rendezvous, savoring the memory of iced coffee on warm, sun-drenched days.
Yet now, after enduring three hundred years of unfathomable cold, it is the warmth of your cup in my hands that truly soothes my weary soul. The enticing aroma that wafts from your steaming surface entices me, promising comfort, solace, and a love that never falters. Yours always, Zedd.”
“Please stop,” the female mannequin said tiredly, throwing a stapler at me from her desk. Around her were hundreds of filing cabinets all filled with the centuries of paperwork she had just finally finished.
I dodged the stapler gracefully, making sure to not spill a single drop of coffee. “You don’t know how much I needed this,” I shot back, taking a dramatic sip of the nectar.
“You don’t know how much I needed!” she argued back, throwing her hands in the air. “All this paperwork was all because of you - all of it!”
“Okay, my bad,” I relented. “However, I just spent the last three hundred years suffering for my crimes, so cut me some slack. I died thinking that I’ll take whatever punishment comes my way, but I take that all back. It was horrible.”
“You had it rough,” the male interjected, his voice empathetic as he leafed through a stack of papers. We were still in the all-white room, but now there was a wooden desk where the female sat, and an orange couch the male was perched on. I was savoring the newfound freedom of movement and was prancing around, my spirits lifted.
It was an exuberant feeling, being free from the ice. I had never felt so trapped before. The only sensation I was given was the freezing cold. In the Ninth Circle, whatever ambition and drive that took you so deep into Hell was stripped away by the lack of stimulation. All of it was just flat ground and ice. You live, day by blurring day, wondering how long has passed, what could or should have been as you froze.
Boredom, the greatest punishment for those with wild, wicked minds. Don’t punish them with torture, but let them punish themselves by allowing them a place to wallow in their own regrets.
Ingenious, no other way to describe it. I was lucky. Those trapped in the Ninth Circle can never leave, but here I am, an anomaly that managed to escape through a loophole - my karma had not been decided yet.
I could very well go back, and if that did happen I’m sure that who I am, Zedd, would cease to exist and I’d be a caricature of myself that wanders the Ninth Circle a shell of my former self. It inevitably happens to everyone.
I was not religious, and even the heavy allusions and coincidences with religion in the afterlife didn’t change that. I always used religion as a backbone to give me the strength to fight and make my own decisions. I knew some who were convinced their god was going to come save them. I never discounted anyones god, but I felt like the gods wanted us to be strong on our own by giving us the security of knowing that someone had our backs.
Probably a flawed mindset I admit. No god came and helped when the world was on fire and their temples were being burned, but I still wanted to believe. I wanted to, but I know I can’t, that’s my perspective.
So, if any god can hear me… please don’t put me back in the Ninth Circle. I'll take anything else. Torture me with whips and fire for all of eternity, but please don’t put me back in the cold.
“Karma doesn’t stop being accumulated when you die,” the female explained, neatly shuffling a stack of papers and stapling them. “After you destroyed Earth, the repercussions affected the entire universe. As the main instigator of such a decision, you’ve been gaining karma for the last three centuries. As a result, we couldn’t accurately count your points until it slowed down to a level where we could.”
“That took a while,” I noted.
“It did. For three hundred and one years, you were continuously being attributed to and thought about in people's minds in both negative and positive lights. In the past thirty years, it started to slow down, and now the giant snowball of accumulated Karma has slowed its roll to the point where we can call it.”
I swallowed the massive lump in my throat. This was it. The ratio of SP to VP would decide where my soul was going to spend the rest of eternity. Would I be doomed to the emptiness of the lower circles without the chance to repent? Would I be given a chance to absolve my sins through torture? Or maybe I could live peacefully in Purgatory, the place for soldiers, or even Heaven?
A window appeared in front of me—an opaque, orange-colored window that seemed like a hologram. There were words on it.
SP: 4,789,867,513
VP: 4,965,242,999
“Damn, that’s a lot.” I expected a pretty high score, but in the billions? That was more than I could fathom.
“You destroyed the Earth, which was a planet filled with culture and history. You get SP for destroying so much culture and for ruining your home. The fact that you kept it a secret for so many is considered treachery. Treachery towards your kin, your benefactors, your world… it’s all there. Treachery is considered the worst of the worst,” the man explained earnestly. “That doesn’t even begin the huge list of unethical strategies you used.”
I nodded tensely.
“However,” he continued, his voice taking on a more hopeful tone, “you saved your species from extinction. Who can ever say that? Your decision to unshackle AI’s and abandon Earth saved your species. You pragmatically realized how rushed the Infernoids were to migrate their queen to Earth and ruined their empire by killing said queen. The Infernoids crumbled all across the galaxy thanks to you, which saved and liberated more species than just your own.”
“There’s more species?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“Of course. You met one type, the Infernoids, but they’re one of many. Powerful, no doubt, but not the only ones that can traverse the cosmos. Space expands infinitely, which means there are infinite possibilities for an infinite amount of species to be born. Quite a few species have evolved into multicell organisms.”
“Okay, cool. So, that’s why my points are relatively even.”
“Indeed, if you repent for a few hundred years you can probably make it to purgatory,” the male said with a nod.
I smiled. It was better than I expected. Purgatory was a place where soldiers who committed grave sins in the name of their country spent their afterlife. They were just following orders, but could not be forgiven, therefore they lived rather ordinary lives without many amenities.
I was afraid since the decisions I made forced a lot of soldiers to live in Purgatory. I did them all with the desire to save humanity in my mind, but I definitely went off the deep end and did things that were borderline inhuman.
But it was okay. I was judged to be somewhat even in Karma. I would have to be tortured in the lower three circles for a while, but then I could be free to see my men again.
“Is that alright?” the male asked cautiously.
“I guess… I don’t have much of a choice, anyways. Anything to stay out of the cold.”
“What if you did have a choice?”
I looked at the male figure, confused.
“Karma points can be traded for certain amenities, especially in the lower circles and Purgatory. For example, if you have a hundred Virtue Points you can buy fresh water or some bread. Sinner Points can be traded in for things as well. There’s a shop.”
“I didn’t realize death had an economy,” I noted blandly, trying to hide my ever-growing interest.
“There are certain rewards that everyone thought were just jokes, added by the gods. Amenities that cost so many points that it was considered impossible to ever get close to them. The amount of points needed would take lifetimes to achieve.”
“How much is that?”
“Billions.”
“I have billions.”
“I know. Exactly.”
“I have the most of anyone, ever?” I couldn’t help but wonder. Who created antibiotics? Surely he had a lot of points. The seatbelt? Distilled water? Electricity? Those were all things that positively impacted a lot of people, which should form a lot of VP. “No one else has gotten close?”
“Not as close as you. Here,” the male swiped his hands through the air, words started to coalesce in the air, “take a look.”
GRAND SHOP
REVIVAL: REBORN AGAIN: You can walk amongst the living yet again!
- Reborn with no memories: 1 million VP or 10 million SP
- Reborn as a baby with memories: 7 billion VP or 100 billion SP
- Reborn as an teenager with memories: 6 billion VP or 100 billion SP
- Reborn as a young adult with memories: 5 billion VP or 100 billion SP
- Reborn as an adult with memories: 4 billion VP or 100 billion SP
There were hundreds of more modifiers and other descriptions under it that seemed to list on forever. 'Be reborn tall', 'reborn handsome', 'as a prodigy' all appeared to be different modifiers that could affect how I wanted my rebirth to happen. It was like customizing my character before starting a game, with each option offering a unique advantage.
“You’re telling me that I can be reborn with no memories, but I can buy so many positive attributes that I can have a way better life than I did before?” I asked, my eyes wide with disbelief.
“Yeah, you wouldn’t be you anymore, but the wavelength and resonance of the soul would be similar. The person would probably grow up somewhat like you, but as you know the circumstances around someone will ultimately decide how they grow up.”
“And this allows me to choose the circumstances.”
“Yes, it does. You have enough points to be reborn with your memories, if you deem fit.”
“Not a whole lot,” I noted, realizing the limitations, “I can only do one.”
“That’s when our deal comes in.”
“A deal?”
“We have a job for you.” The man's voice grew serious, indicating that this offer was far from a simple task.