Chapter Thirteen

Dalton tried to turn on his computer, without any luck. He nonetheless tapped repeatedly on his keyboard, expecting something to happen.

“Didn’t Einstein say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?” asked Darcy, who took a seat next to him with a smile.

“I’m so sorry I killed you,” said Dalton. “I had no idea—”

“It’s all right,” she said, braiding her hair. “Now let’s find a way out of this mess. Why won’t your computer start?”

“Nothing seems to get it started again. The servers are all blown up. It’s hopeless.”

“And yet, Quentin still seems to have a link to your program.”

“I know.”

“Then surely there’s some way of getting it running again. Let’s retrace our steps. How did it break?”

“I got hacked… by God, apparently… and everything stopped working, and then that replaced the screen.” Dalton pointed toward the void.

“If God broke it, God can fix it. It just needs a little power.”

Darcy showed Dalton the electric energy running through her hands. She aimed two bolts at the dead servers. In a matter of seconds, they began running again. Dalton’s personal computer screen lit up, but the void remained present.

“Now what?” asked Darcy.

Dalton typed a series of numbers and letters that Darcy didn’t even try to understand. “I need to figure out what the nature of that void is,” said Dalton. “The void is the source of the malware that broke my system. If I can understand it, I can beat it.”

Darcy nodded hesitantly, looking into the abyss. The realm of emptiness was oddly compelling, almost hypnotic, drawing all her attention to it. It seemed to be slowly spinning around itself, affected by some kind of gravitational force. “I think there’s a little more to it than your ordinary malware, love.”

Dalton shook his head and kept typing, furiously. “I need to figure out what it is. I can’t just keep brushing it off as eternal uncertainty and avoiding having to face it. Everything we take for granted was at one time uncertain, until it was understood.”

As he typed, Darcy blasted any demons who tried to approach them. Several times, Dalton brought his hands up to his head, muttered, no, no, no, fuck, slammed his keyboard with his fists, got out of his chair, circled around it, and sat back down.

“Persevere,” said Father Peter, approaching the two of them from behind, clutching the Pope’s staff. “You’ll find hope.”

Darcy turned and jumped up from her chair upon seeing Father Peter. He was covered in burn marks and was drenched in green acid.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Killed some demons with what little strength I had left.”

“How did you find any?” asked Dalton, looking at his computer helplessly. “The strength to keep going?”

Father Peter remembered the desolate feeling, the disconnection from reality, that overcame him inside Dalton’s mind and realized how similar he’d felt when he blindly stormed the demons in anger. He recalled how the Pope’s staff illuminated the room when he’d saved him, not from the demons, but his own mindset.

“Dr. McGovern, I know how lost you are. And nothing a priest like me or a psychic like your sister could say would ever bring you comfort or help you understand life’s meaning. Your mistake was giving up on trying to understand the world, opting to create your own instead. Others have made the mistake of failing to understand how you see the world and trying to impose their own understanding of it onto you as if that would free you of your angst. How did I find the strength to kill those demons with the little life inside me I had left? I remembered who I was: an exorcist. And you, Dr. McGovern, are a scientist. You will find life’s meaning, if you keep trying, in your own way. Tell me, Dr. McGovern: how does a scientist give meaning to his environment?”

Dalton smiled. “As Lavoisier said, ‘we must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.’ Words to live by, even though he was later guillotined.”

Father Peter fell to his knees, dropping the staff. Darcy raced over to him and held him.

“Don’t worry love, nothing a little holy water can’t fix,” she said.

“Alas, there is no holy water in this laboratory,” Father Peter said with a laugh, which turned into a coughing fit.

“Now, now, get some rest; you’ll recover soon enough.”

Father Peter shook his head. “You know just as well as I do that there is no hope for me. I can feel myself fading into the void.”

Darcy held his hand as he rested his head against her shoulder.

“Picture something in your mind you really like,” said Darcy, stroking his hair. “Something that makes you smile.”

“I don’t need to,” said Father Peter, as he admired Darcy’s perky breasts. “What I see is perfect.”

Dalton felt something soft brush up his leg. He looked down. It was Clyde.

“Perhaps your friend could be of some assistance,” Father Peter said to Dalton. “Isidora had a theory you’d done something to the rats to have greater control over their codes in the virtual reality.”

“Of course!” said Dalton. He grabbed Clyde, took a pen from his desk, and opened a stitch on the side of the rat’s body. He carefully used the tip of the pen to fish out a chip from under its skin. Clyde nipped at Dalton to get away. Dalton let him go once he’d removed the chip. It was approximately the size of the tip of a needle. He brought it over to Father Peter.

“Here, find a way to consume this,” Dalton told Father Peter. “By having you bring this chip along with you to your journey into desolation, I should be able to retrieve data on the void and hack it back.”

Father Peter reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bag full of cocaine. He poured the content of the bag onto the floor next to him and Dalton placed the chip into the mix. Father Peter rolled out of Darcy’s arms and onto the floor, blocked one nostril with his hand and snorted all the cocaine as well as the chip.

“That should work,” said Dalton.

The priest winked at Dalton. “Remember, my dude: nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.”

Father Peter vanished into a pile of cocaine.

* * *

Quentin Campbell gripped Stanley and Isidora’s hands and pictured all the things in the world that he liked. Maps. Beer. Boxing. Visual representations of data. Football. Sex. Sex in a fire. Fire. Hellfire. Eternal damnation.

“Quentin!” said Isidora, nudging him gently. “Focus. Your skin is peeling faster.”

“It’s getting harder,” said Quentin. “I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this.”

Stanley flicked open his switchblade and brought it to Quentin’s neck. “Don’t you dare go soft on me.”

Quentin smiled at Stanley. It hurt to pull his cheeks back. He could feel his skin crack with every movement he made. But in that moment, he felt like a proud parent.

“Good lad.” Quentin patted Stanley on the back. It burned the child a little, but Stanley knew he had to be hard and not make a fuss or he would lose all credibility.

The three watched Chief Constable Glasgow and Dr. Whalen take on a dozen demons together. They were a surprisingly effective team. The Chief Constable was a good fighter, and Dr. Whalen would finish them off with her surgical tools once they lay helplessly on the floor. However, they were terribly outnumbered, and it was difficult to say for how much longer they could hold off so many evil entities.

“We’re running out of time,” said Quentin. “If I become a demon, the apocalypse will start and there won’t even be any soldiers of God left in the laboratory to hold back the gates of Hell over there.” He pointed to the void.

“I thought you didn’t care about any of that,” said Isidora.

Quentin looked at Stanley and Isidora. “I might care a little.”

The demons split up Dr. Whalen and the Chief Constable. Though the Chief Constable managed to fight off her group, six demons piled up on Dr. Whalen, scratching her, taking out her eyes; biting her, chewing off her nose; spewing acid on her, tearing off her limbs, poking her with her own tools, smothering her.

“Fanny, hang on!” said the Chief Constable to Dr. Whalen as she struggled against a demon, shielding herself from its jaw and claws with the back of a chair.

“It’s too late for me, Evelyn. Remember to aim for the neocortex.” Dr. Whalen vanished into a pile of luminous angel dust.

Watching the scene unfold, Stanley gasped and Quentin’s head dropped. “Two left,” murmured Quentin. “Two soldiers of God, and an endless number of demons.”

“The two best,” said Isidora, squeezing his hand. “Darcy and the Chief Constable can hold them back. Just focus on yourself.”

“That’s right,” said Dalton from the desk of his computer. “I will need you soon, Mr. Campbell, so don’t you dare turn into a demon.”

* * *

Dalton watched reams of data appear on the screen of his computer. He shook his head from side to side in small, rapid movements, and it was unclear whether he was gesturing the word “no” or whether this motion enabled him to read faster.

“It’s chaotic,” Dalton said to Darcy. “I can’t figure out what this section here means.” He pointed to some code on the screen.

“It looks all the same to me,” said Darcy.

“Darcy, I could use a hand over here,” said Chief Constable Glasgow.

“Perhaps you would be most useful assisting her,” Dalton suggested.

Darcy stood up and shot several bolts of divine electricity through the demons between her and the Chief Constable. Dalton ignored their battle and focused on his own, his eyes locked on the screen.

I can tell this is the point where the priest entered the void due to the absence of external stimulation, thought Dalton. But temporally, geographically, it’s nonsensical. It’s like he’s everywhere at all times, and nowhere ever. What the bloody hell am I supposed to do with this kind of information? 

Someone pulled out the chair next to Dalton. Karl sat down and angled the chair toward the screen.

“I never understood what you found so fascinating about series of numbers and letters on a screen.”

Dalton frowned. “I never understood what you found so fascinating about poorly worded laws in terribly organized books.”

“I didn’t. I did it for the money.”

“I know.”

“I did a lot of things for money.”

“I know.”

“I left you because you weren’t earning as much money as I’d hoped.”

Dalton turned away from his computer screen and looked at Karl. “You can’t be serious.”

“I thought, computers are the future, law is a dying profession, he’s clever, he’ll design some sort of app and make us both millionaires. Instead, look at what you chose to do with your talent. You ended the world. Well done!” Karl sarcastically applauded.

“I’m trying to focus on fixing that. If you don’t mind, please go back to whatever it is you demons do in your spare time.” Dalton turned back toward the screen.

Karl kept his eyes glued on Dalton. “Give up already. Science can’t solve everything. Some things are simply too much for the human mind to handle.”

“Not mine.”

Karl moved in closer to Dalton and stroked his arm. He realized he burned him upon seeing the marks he’d left on his skin. Dalton, wholly absorbed in the task at hand, did not so much as flinch.

“Tell me, how can you possibly be so close-minded as to turn a blind eye to the divine phenomenon happening right behind you?” inquired Karl. “It’s a miracle, Dalton. Stop trying to make sense of it in scientific terms. It’s pointless.”

“What a stupid thing to say. I can’t believe I ever dated you.”

“Just give up, Dalton. You hate the world. The only reason you can’t stand seeing it fall apart is because you’re not the one controlling its downfall. Accept that you’re useless. You’ve always been useless, and you always will be. You had it right when you tried to kill yourself.”

“Shut it.”

Karl sneered. “You really are no more than a burden. You were a burden to your mother until you drove her mad; you were a burden on me until you drove me away; and you were a burden to Darcy until you killed her. You are an unbearable human being, and the reason you cannot stand being alive is because you experience the world through that miserable little mind of yours.”

“Seriously, Karl. Shut it.”

Karl edged in closer and whispered in Dalton’s ear. “The only reason you haven’t tried to kill yourself again yet is because of your vanity. You think you’re doing the world a service by staying alive. You hope one day you will be recognized for your imaginary greatness. But you won’t ever be. You aren’t great. You aren’t as clever as you think you are. You are a useless, dependent, selfish waste of oxygen. Kill yourself, Dalton. Cut your wrists and do it right this time, you incompetent, pathetic fool. Open up that artery and make sure you die. Do it!” Karl’s evil eyes widened, and he broke out into an unnaturally broad grin.

Dalton kept his eyes fixed on the screen, resisting the urge to acknowledge Karl. “I have a theory about the nature of the void.”

“Of course, you do, you twisted little narcissist.”

“If two protons collide, they can create a minuscule black hole.”

“You say that like I would care.”

“The collision would create a small opening of interdimensional space where the laws of physics aren’t the same as the ones we have here on Earth.”

Karl’s grin dropped and his eyes lacked any expression.

“You see, in string theory, there are ten different dimensions. Dimensions five through ten include all possible futures and past events, even in realities that don’t abide by the laws of physics as we know them.”

Karl frowned.

“Ordinarily, if such interdimensional space had enough gravity to interact with our world, it would grow at the speed of light and destroy everything as we know it, ending our world’s existence and changing the laws of physics of our universe. However, somehow, my program seems to have frozen this interdimensional bubble, allowing passage through different dimensions by travelling in what we’ve been referring to as ‘the void.’”

Karl considered sinking his nails into Dalton’s neck and ripping open his jugular.

“The void isn’t a void at all, you see. It’s an interdimensional portal.”

Karl thought it might be easier to just grab him by the head and snap his neck.

“How would you like to test my theory?”

“I beg your pardon?” asked Karl.

Dalton turned around and nodded at Darcy. She blasted Karl with her electric bolts, sending him into the void, and went back to fighting demons with the Chief Constable.

“Quentin, could you please come over here?” asked Dalton. Isidora and Stanley helped Quentin up and seated him next to Dalton.

“I appear to have inadvertently created an interdimensional portal.”

“I hate it when that happens,” replied Quentin. He picked up the pen Dalton had used on Clyde and began drawing a black hole on the desk.

“At the moment, it is nearly frozen, enabling relatively safe passage for virtual entities, not unlike what you experienced crossing over from my virtual world. However, I fear it is slowly expanding. The more it expands, the more it changes the laws of physics of our universe, which explains all this chaos. Should you lose touch with your virtual self, I fear the portal will expand at the speed of light, becoming a Cosmic Death Bubble that blows us all out of existence.”

“That’s reassuring,” said Quentin. He drew a few stick figures running from the black hole.

“In the portal, you can navigate through ten different dimensions. Do you know any of them?”

Quentin put down the pen. “Well, you’ve got your height, and your length, and your width… and time. I like maps, you see.” He drew a graph with an X axis for length, a Y axis for height, and a Z axis for width, and drew a cube around it for time.

“How fortunate.” Dalton paused and smiled. He was beginning to like Quentin, whom he’d feared more than anything up until that point. “I’m going to send you in there. I want you to only focus on those four dimensions. Ignore the others. They will send you into bizarre alternate realities in which you might get lost forever.”

“Sounds like rubbish,” said Quentin. He redrew the different axes of his original map in a manner in which they appeared to be folding over one another. He added a dismembered stick figure floating inside it.

“Indeed. I sent Father Peter into the void with the chip I put into Clyde, so I should be somewhat capable of modifying the void from within, despite other forces working against me. I’m going to use the chip to determine the path you must take toward your destination in the space-time continuum.”

“Shit, all right.” Quentin drew a point in his graph and circled it.

“You’ll need to use those mapping skills to find your way to those coordinates, because once you go through the void, I can no longer communicate with you.”

“That sounds like somethin’ I can do.” Quentin polished up his drawing.

“Once you’re in there, you must get to the coordinates the chip will have located. Of course, Father Peter won’t be there; unlike you, he lost all contact with his virtual self and is now sparsely spread across the ten different dimensions.”

“Poor priest.” Quentin drew an arrow toward the dismembered stick figure’s face and wrote, Father Peter.

“But once you’re in there, your code form should help you keep your consciousness together and with a bit of luck, you might be able to find the location where I will be sending you.”

“There’s no need for luck,” said Isidora, who stood behind the two of them. She pulled Brooke, the formerly large rat, out of her pocket. “Use her chip to help guide Quentin.”

Dalton smiled widely at Isidora. “You found her. Excellent.”

Quentin took Brooke out of Isidora’s hands and petted her gently with two of his blistered fingers.

“Quentin, I will be sending you to my own apartment, just over a year ago.” Dalton paused, feeling his throat close up in an attempt to get more words out. He closed his eyes, exhaled deeply and resumed his explanation.

“In there, you will find me trying to kill myself. You must talk me out of it. If you do, I won’t create the afterlife and this whole sequence of events will have never happened, closing up the interdimensional portal at this point in space and time, allowing for all our lives to go back to normal. Can you do that?”

“Anythin’ not to turn into a bloody demon. Let’s map it out.”

* * *

“The surface of the water in the middle of the Albert Dock was point 0. That’s where the portal brings you,” said Quentin, tracing the map he’d designed within the virtual afterlife, while Dalton coded next to him. He now drew on Karl’s yellow legal notepad. Dalton couldn’t concentrate with Quentin drawing on his desk.

“That means point 0 is also right here in the laboratory.” Dalton pointed to the entry of the void.

“Right. Since point 0 is there, using the address of your apartment, we can easily locate where I have to go in the first three dimensions once I’m inside.”

Dalton gave him his address. By juxtaposing a map of Liverpool against Quentin’s map, they established the coordinates of Dalton’s flat within the void.

“The trouble now is, when you’re in the void, time stands still. It was a feature of the virtual afterlife I had programmed, thinking it would make it eternal. By reverse-engineering the standstill command, I just might be able to give time the vector necessary to send you back to the moment before my suicide attempt by cutting through the sixth dimension.” Dalton typed code into the program, stopped, edited, and coded some more.

“Nearly there?” asked Isidora, looking around. Chief Constable Glasgow appeared to have vanished and Darcy was taking on all the demons herself as more and more poured out of the void.

“Don’t pressure me,” grumbled Dalton.

Stanley gawked at Quentin. His face was hardly recognizable from all the burns and blisters. The colour in his eyes had nearly faded away entirely. Though he never complained, his pain was visible; his pen trembled in his hand as he fought to draw out his maps. Stanley flicked open his switchblade and held it between Dalton’s eyes.

“Mr. Scientist, which eye do you like best? If you don’t hurry up, I’ll cut it out!”

A bolt of electricity hit the knife, projecting it out of Stanley’s hand and into the void.

“Children shouldn’t play with knives!” Darcy shouted and went back to frying demons.

Stanley deftly reached into Quentin’s pocket and extracted his switchblade. He stored it in his own pocket.

Dalton typed away some more, smiled, and hit one more key like a classical pianist finishing a virtuoso performance. He turned around as though he were awaiting applause. “There, I’ve done it. Go in there, and you’ll travel through time and space back to my apartment.”

“Brilliant!” said Isidora, staring at the screen in wonder.

“Hang on,” said Quentin. “What about all the other dimensions?”

Dalton nodded. “About that. I don’t quite have them figured out just yet.”

“How long will it take for you to figure them out?” asked Isidora.

Dalton avoided her icy stare. He paused, leaned backed in his chair, away from his screen, and sighed. “Years, probably.”

“Years?” Stanley exclaimed. “We probably don’t have a bloody hour until Quentin goes full demon!”

Dalton adjusted his shirt collar, which felt increasingly tight. “I don’t have control over those dimensions. I didn’t intend for them to interfere with the afterlife; I only expected dimensions one through four to have any significance. Whoever hacked my system controls the other dimensions.”

“God and Satan,” said Isidora, in an oddly distant tone, staring into the void. “Those are their dimensions.”

Dalton shrugged. “Call them whatever you like. It would take years for me to get through their insane firewalls.”

“Hellfire,” said Isidora.

“Whatever helps you understand it.”

Darcy found herself surrounded by demons. She felt her abilities diminishing as her energy began to run low. She desperately needed a break to recover her strength, but the more exhausted she grew, the more demons appeared.

“Dalton, I can’t fend them off much longer,” she cried out.

“You know what? Fuck the other dimensions,” said Quentin. “We’ve got the time, and the location. That’s all we need for me to get there, right?”

Dalton nodded. “In theory, yes. I simply cannot anticipate how the other dimensions might interfere with what I’ve programmed.”

“I’ll just ignore them,” said Quentin.

Dalton grimaced, then tried to give Quentin a reassuring smile, but his face contorted awkwardly. “Right. Well. We don’t have much of a choice.” He pointed to Brooke, who was in Quentin’s pocket. “Can you please give her to me? I have to get the chip out.”

Quentin turned away from Dalton and covered Brooke with his hand. “No.”

“You cannot possibly be serious.”

“I’d like to bring her with me.”

Dalton shook his head. “She’s likely lost touch with her virtual self. Bring her in there with you and she’ll burst into an infinite number of pieces throughout time and space.”

“I bet you she hasn’t. She probably hated when Father Peter made her small and turned her into an angel-rat or whatever. She wants to be big again. Just like me, she’s latched onto her virtual self.”

“Quentin, leave the bloody rat behind!” exclaimed Isidora.

Dalton turned back to his computer and scrolled through some code. “Oh. You’re right. Her program is still active.” He typed a few lines of code. “I’ve made her your tour guide. When you get in there, follow her. She’s processed all the data from your map, she will know where to go better than you do because she won’t be distracted by her own perception of reality. I have a lot more control over the rats than I do over you.”

“Why?” asked Stanley.

“Because humans deserve free will. Ethically, it would be unthinkable to use my program to control you. The rats were programmed to expand the afterlife for me thanks to those chips. Since Clyde’s program vanished after whatever Father Peter did to the rats, I could only use the chip to collect data when Father Peter brought it back into the void. With Brooke, I will still be able to use her to navigate through the void since, for some reason, she’s still part virtual.”

“I told you, it’s because she wants to be big again,” Quentin said, patting the rat on the head.

“Funny how that works,” said Isidora. “By giving us so much free will and power over our environment, you made it possible for Father Peter to denature it entirely, allowing for the other dimensions to interfere with it.”

“You’re right,” said Dalton. “I couldn’t give you that much freedom and expect to maintain control over the situation.”

“You can’t be a prisoner in your own mind, so if your mind dictates your environment, expect the walls to fall,” said Quentin. “Now do I go in there or not?”

Dalton pressed the “enter” key on his keyboard and turned to Quentin. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Preferably sooner than later, but no pressure, love,” said Darcy, as she shocked a demon biting her hand.

Quentin nodded and approached the void. “All right, I’m off, then. Catch you later. Or earlier, I suppose.” He waved to the others and stepped toward the void.

“Wait!” said Isidora.

Quentin turned around.

“There’s something I need to tell you.” Her voice quivered.

A long pause followed, and Isidora became increasingly aware that everyone had stopped whatever they were doing and were now staring at her. Even the demons had stopped fighting Darcy, waiting to hear what Isidora had to say.

“G’wed, then,” said Quentin.

She hesitated. “Have fun in there!” Quentin’s eyebrows raised slightly, and Isidora felt her cheeks burn hotter than when she was in demon form. “But not too much fun, of course. We wouldn’t want you getting lost in some hole in time and space for all eternity.” She giggled, then suddenly became very aware of the fact that she didn’t know what to do with her arms. She shifted from one position to another self-consciously. “In fact, don’t have fun. I hope you hate it in there.”

Isidora tried to take a step forward for one final embrace in an attempt to distract him from what she’d said, but she tripped over her own feet and nearly fell to the ground, saving herself with a few stabilizing hops.

Quentin furrowed his brow but smiled. “Thank you.”

He stepped into the void and vanished.

Dalton broke the oppressively awkward silence that followed. “This evening, my virtual afterlife was hacked by the heavens, I witnessed some of the most brutal deaths imaginable, I got possessed by an old man, I murdered my own sister, the Pope stormed my laboratory and tried to start the apocalypse, and I watched my demonic ex-boyfriend vanish from existence. But that, Isidora… What you just did right there… That was the most horrific scene of all.”

Stanley gave Dalton a high-five.