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Section 8 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 July 6 Tuesday.
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And what happened next was that I was abruptly shoeboxed. That's the only word for it. Doubled up, folded eightfold, crushed, bundled, compressed, then squashed into a rectangular prison with about enough room for a normal pair of feet in it.
And left there.
For how long?
Well, it felt like forever. But apparently it's only July, now, so it can only have been a couple of weeks. Months, I mean. (I don't feel I've quite yet recovered the use of language.) And now I'm left with a puzzle problem: what is the meaning of this clean bright-lighted cell, and what am I supposed to do here?
I'm told that the Tribunal, whatever that is, will see me tomorrow, so perhaps I'll find out then.
Section 8 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 July 7 Wednesday.
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I was brought before the Tribunal, a consortium of AIs, sometimes nine of them and sometimes a dozen. Each was in the form of a three-bladed fan supported by a shiny metal pole which ended in a tripod. Their faces were (somehow) on the blades of the fans, and the blades were spinning round and round, throwing out waves of extremely hot wind which made my eyelashes crinkle as if they were about to catch fire.
They let me sweat in front of them for an indeterminate period, the room, which was sometimes claustrophobic and sometimes enormous, swelling and shrinking around me, making me feel seasick.
That was when I felt something wriggling under my skin. Not a caterpillar! Oh no! But it was. They itch like bastards, and the thing is, if you crush one of them, you experience the most intolerable acid burning which just goes on and on for weeks, without stopping.
A vibration shook the world, and I thought I was going to fall over. The vibration was repeated. Speech, of a sort. On the third repetition, I understood.
"Confess!"
That was what one of the AIs was saying.
I maintained my silence. Sometimes I'll try to talk my way out of trouble, but on this occasion I was starting to feel seasick, and I felt any unnecessary movement would make me vomit.
"What is the purpose of Hell?"
Good question, but what was the answer? Before I was shoeboxed, I knew, but the right answer might have changed since then.
"To be efficient," I said. "Economic efficiency. Not, uh, you know, the old-fashioned stuff. Burning forever in hellfire and all the rest of it."
"You are right," said one of the AIs. "You know the purpose, so why did you subvert it?"
"I plead innocent," I said.
"Bring in the fellow perpetrator!" said an AI.
Then a trolley entered the chamber, driving itself, apparently, and on the shining stainless steel surface of the trolley were teeth, talons, scraps of red stuff, shattered fragments of bone - the remnants of the Big Boss, unless I was mistaken.
"You were with him," said one of the AIs. "You will confess, or you will suffer his fate."
"What are we accused of?" I said.
"Stupidity also merits punishment," said one of the AIs.
It span faster and faster, evidently getting excited, and one of its fan blades shattered, and a flying fragment sliced my cheek open, and I felt three or four caterpillars writhe into spasms beneath my skin, and the stone slabs underfoot quaked in a distressingly liquid manner, as if they might momentarily engulf me.
"We were as efficient as we could be," I said.
"You were zero!" shrieked one of the AIs.
And three-dimensional graphs blurblashed into existence between the AIs and me, graphs of the actively communicative type which force their knowledge upon you whether you are interested in their content or not. (You thought you knew all the ways of being tortured? How about using six years of enduring Gulf of Mexico barnacle count graphs?)
Anyway, these graphs (which had nothing to do with barnacles) imposed their thesis upon me.
Our department, supposedly, would grow more efficient if it was downsized. And, in fact, something mystical would happen if our staffing numbers were reduced to zero. At that stage, our productivity would become infinite.
"Sorry," I said. "But there's a logical flaw here. The fact is that work is done by workers. If you've got no workers, no work gets done."
"That's what they all say!" shrieked one of the fans. "They all say, they all say! It's a conspiracy!"
"Either a conspiracy or the truth," I said.
"Economic terrorism!" howled half a dozen fans in unison.
"But it's true," I say. "You reduced our numbers to zero so our productivity fell to zero."
"It blunders!" said one of the AIs. "Your productivity, you and the piecemeat thing, it dropped to zero when there were just the two of you."
"Well, yeah, of course," I say, remembering those idle days spent watching TV. "We lost our kludge guy, so we couldn't continue, could we?"
"Kludge guy?"
If they didn't even know what a kludge guy was, how could I even begin to explain? I gave it my best shot.
"A kludge guy," I said, "is a kind of genius at getting things done. He's the improviser, the guy who makes the components which don't exist, who makes electricity run down bits of string, who has that can of dehydrated time when you really need to make a deadline. Ours was Bob Glob, and he just vanished one day."
"Yes, he found a use for himself at the zoo."
The zoo? I've never heard of Hell having a zoo. But I didn't ask for details.
"I have been processing," said one of the AIs abruptly. "There is no such thing as a kludge. It is not a graphed construct. There is no such profession as that of kludge guy. This is all lies and prevarication. We should proceed to the making of the example."
And that was when it happened. A rage seized me and I roared, and my roar shattered the immediate universe. Darkness reeled. Thunder splashed in every which direction in huge megaphone gouts.
And then I was left standing there amidst smashed rock and debris. One of the fans was spinning down to stasis, saying to itself, aimlessly, "hollyhocks ... hollyhocks."
What had happened? I had the impression that something had spoken through me. That I had channeled something. I didn't know what, or why. I looked for a door, for a way out. I didn't see one. But I did see a kind of glowering darkness that looked as if it might possibly be hollow. It was probably a reckless thing to do, but I ran toward it, scarpering.
Section 8 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 July 8 Thursday.
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I was hiding out in the public library, the nearest thing that Hell has to a lunatic asylum, when this really big guy with two gangrenous arms (yes, they stank) came bulging past, very drunk, reeking of petrol or something, and bumped against me.
"You!" said this huge voice, speaking through me. "How darest thou? I am Muglog of the Gontaria! I am one of the Punishing Stones!"
He turned on me, slowly, and blinked at me in a sleepy way, half-human and half-reptilian, and suddenly the Muglog voice was gone, and I was alone and powerless. Then black blood started belching out of the drunk's mouth, and he folded up soundlessly and collapsed. Sometimes you get lucky. But I was gone from the library in moments.
And now it's raining, black rain falling, and I'm sheltering under a bit of elevated railway track, alone in the dark with this cellphone that I'm using to go online, and I guess stealing the cellphone was a crime, but, really, at this stage, who's keeping count?
Thunder, and I find myself remembering, I don't know why, my mother. She was feeding the baby, and she was talking to my little brother Timmy, who was afraid of thunder.
"Thunder is just God burping the clouds," said my mother.
I don't know why I remember that. And it troubles me, beyond words, that I can't remember my baby brother's name. I remember Timmy, all right, but my baby brother's identity has just slipped away. He's been deleted.
Section 8 Entry 0004. Date: 2004 July 9 Friday.
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When you get hungry enough, you'll eat anything, and I was eating a couple of cakes of mud (this "being a fugitive" business is no fun at all) when suddenly a bloodstained man came running in my direction, screaming.
I was hunkered down on the ground, and when I tried to stand up in a hurry I fell over. The next moment, a dozen ogreish figures were around me, hitting me with clubs. They mashed the caterpillars which were writhing around under my skin, and the resulting toxic explosions were agonizing.
They've dragged me here to this warehouse-type place and I've been here for hours now, along with a bunch of other apparently randomly-selected prisoners. All I know is that there's a rumor that we've been press ganged. We've been selected for some kind of special task, but nobody knows what it is.
I only hope the "special task" has got nothing to do with hungry animals and the zoo.
Section 8 Entry 0005. Date: 2004 July 10 Saturday.
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Every five minutes or so my feet keep bursting into flames and I have to beat at them frantically to extinguish the conflagration. This as a consequence of this morning's fire walking session, which was, or so we were told, designed to increase our confidence and boost our teamwork skills.
Teamwork skills? What would I possibly want teamwork skills for? I don't know, but I'm starting to suspect a rather ominous possibility.
Anyway, this evening all us "trainees," as we press ganged prisoners are called, are going to do a night navigation exercise using maps. Out in the Wolf Woods, wherever they are. (I didn't know Hell had any woods.)
Then tomorrow it's yachting on the Consolidated Sewage Ponds, and Monday it's rock climbing.
I'd blog more about this experience, but this business of bursting into flames every now and then is really distracting.
Section 8 Entry 0006. Date: 2004 July 12 Monday.
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So I survived rock climbing. Sort of. I suppose having one eye is better than having none.
The good part of rock climbing was after the big rock fell on Blickerty, trapping him by the arm. After he'd struggled uselessly to free himself for half an hour, we were asked for an executive solution.
"He could cut his arm off," I suggested.
I don't know why I came up with that suggestion. I'm not here voluntarily. I've been press ganged, kidnapped into this without my consent. And I don't yet know (at least, not for sure) where all this is leading.
But it's really hard to break the conditioning of a lifetime, and one thing I've been conditioned to do is to succeed. To come up with the proposals, to find the way forward. And that conditioning operates even here, in Hell, where it's totally useless.
"Go to the top of the class!" said the instructor, beaming.
"Okay!" said Blickerty, in wretched agony. "Give me a knife!"
"Too late," said the instructor, unsheathing his machete.
Twenty minutes later, we were eating the best meal I've had in my entire time in Hell. A barbecue. The meat pretty raw, admittedly, notionally cooked rather than cooked for real. But it sure beat the automobile tire soup they've been serving us at every other meal here.
Section 8 Entry 0007. Date: Wednesday 14 July 2004.
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Yesterday there was confidence training, which involved piranhas, and today there was sensitivity training.
"I want you to lie back, close your eyes and work on enhancing your sensitivity to yourself and your environment," said the instructor.
Why? Someone actually had the nerve to ask, and was told, huffily, that "these are proven techniques that are guaranteed to work." Yes, but guaranteed to work in what way?
Really, Hell is a place where you don't want to be sensitive either to your surroundings or to the facts of your own existence. Rather, it's better to go in the opposite direction.
Still, obedient to the taskmaster, I laid back on the warm rock, closed my eyes and did my best to listen to myself and to my environment.
What I heard inside myself was a nervous chuckling sound which sounded suspiciously like blood boiling. If you've ever had your own blood come to the boil, you'll know exactly how painful it is. If you haven't, well, there are always fresh delights in store, aren't they?
To distract myself from the possibility that I might be on my way to internal catastrophe, I tried to focus on the larger environment. What I heard was screaming. The screaming of souls in intolerable, unrelenting agony. There's always someone who has it worse than you, isn't there?
That comfortable thought relaxed me so thoroughly that I drifted off to sleep. By the time I woke, it was impossible to move, because a stalagmite had drilled upwards through my body, and had been met in midair by a stalactite descending from above.
(I don't think I've mentioned it, but most of our training is taking place in a section of an old cavern system, the kind of place that sensible people know not to venture into unless they really have to.)
"A real time leadership challenge!" said our instructor delightedly. "Let's divide into teams and see which team can come up with the most efficient way for returning him to productivity mode."
I wish he'd specified "least painful" rather than "most efficient." Still, here I am, operating in productivity mode, at least temporarily. I don't know how long I'm going to last, though. (I don't know how long I'm going to remain in productivity mode, I mean.) Little spurts of blood keep jerking out through my nose, and, when the droplets of blood make their splash landings, they hiss, steaming.
Section 8 Entry 0008. Date: 2004 July 16 Friday.
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I'm lying here in a bed in the quarantine hospital, which has to be one of the most terrifying places in Hell, trying to ignore what the surgeons are doing with a chainsaw just two beds away.
From where I'm lying, I can see, not well but well enough, a black-and-white TV which is treating us to a sports show. The sport is fat men fighting. Is that the proper name? Doesn't sound right, somehow. There should be a special word for this. But that's what the sport is.
In this sport, if you can call it a sport, two very fat men practice collisions, until one of them falls over or gets bounced across a boundary rope. Or bursts.
Every time one of the fat men bursts open, I expect to hear applause. But nobody in the ward says boo. These are very sick people. Except for me.
I don't feel sick. I feel fine. Well, not fine - this is Hell, after all. But functional. Fully functional. The fact that, on occasion, spurts of superheated water are coming zipping out of me may inconvenience some of my fellow citizens. But is that any reason for me to be incarcerated here?
I did complain, earlier, but they threatened to get me a lawyer, at which point I shut up smartly. Anything but that!
So now I'm here, with the rattle and roar of the chainsaw uncomfortably close (I really do hope they don't mix me up with any other patient!) and it means that I'm going to fail the course I was on.
It's true I don't know what the course was for, and it's true that I was press ganged into the course in the first place. But, as I mentioned earlier, we're all victims of our conditioning. From earliest childhood I've been conditioned to try to succeed, and I just can't break myself of the habit, even though ending up in Hell has to represent to most absolute failure there is.
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