Chapter Two

Fractal Freaks

All things in this world have a mystery of their own.
-- Zohar 2:16a

Psycho Macchina

Morning glittered across the dewy turf brilliant as Mozart. The white building on the manicured lawn looked like music, too. Its melodious, horizontal geometry of ceramic walls curved to green tinted glass and created a feeling of movement.

Landscape screens of Italian cypress hid adjacent houses in the exclusive neighborhood overlooking the Hudson. Manhattan, spangled with sunlight, dominated the eastern prospect and cast bold shadows on the river. Snaking across the broad lawn, a blue brick path led to an airy entryway. Jade glass sidelights framed a monolithic eight by nine foot sliding door of brushed steel that glided open silently.

In the sunstruck foyer, a polished bronze of a nude female torso mounted on black marble gigantically occupied a space of high skylights, sinuate walls, empty and white, and no furniture. The visitors, two elegantly dressed men, stood baffled before the colossal bronze until a young, strawberry blonde in a blue silk shirt and gray slacks approached smiling earnestly. “Bevan Powers – Motassem Razori – please, come in, gentlemen. E. Randolph will see you shortly.”

E. Randolph Rayne, gallery owner and executive art dealer, knew more about the secret world of vampires than anyone on the planet. For that reason, Bevan Powers had sought him out here at Psycho Macchina, Rayne’s exclusive art salon, reserved months in advance by corporate clients seeking monumental, contemporary chef-d'oeuvres. But Bevan had not expected to wait. An aggressive arbitrageur with a majestic net worth, he moved through circles where people usually waited for him. Today, however, he would wait, because four nights ago he had met his first vampire.

“I’m Jenne Prosper.” The strawberry blonde led the men around the mirroring torso to a placid, vacant space of curly heart pine floorboards with a single desk of smoked glass and a stainless steel chair. A flat screen monitor and wireless keyboard shared the desk with nothing else, no telephone, no pad, not a pencil. “Please, sit.” She motioned to a low bench of laminated birch and took her own seat. “Something to drink perhaps?”

Both men declined and sat. With a flagrant murmur of silence in the air and nothing on the white, undulant walls but slants of sunlight, they stared at their bespoke shoes. Motassem Razori reached inside his jacket pocket, removed a small pad and began to scribble. Bevan Powers flexed his hands and, in the singing silence, remembered why he was here.

Four nights ago, when the trill alarm in his mattress had gently awakened him, he had groggily noted the time on the nightstand’s digital display: 2:49 AM. Razori’s voice quietly informed him on the intercom, “Sir, I find your daughter at the gate.”

A week earlier, sixteen-year-old Ivy Powers had disappeared from the hospital where her doctors had admitted her for treatment of lymphoma. The disease had manifested suddenly and aggressively, resistant to therapy. She would be dead in six months, and he hadn’t blamed her for running away to die somewhere else on her own terms. “Let her in, Razori.”

“She will not, sir. She would speak with you at the gate.”

“She knows I’m here.” Olivia Fairleigh-Powers sat up in bed beside Bevan. “That’s why she won’t come in.” Olivia, his third wife, a tall, striking woman of honeyed skin, frost hair and razor blue eyes possessed a face of stern beauty. “She despises me.”

Bevan did not refute her. He put on a kaftan and hurried out of the bedchamber. As he passed through the dressing room, he glanced at himself in a cheval mirror. Blue-black hair stood out stiffly. His very pale face and dramatic hazel eyes hovered like an apparition in the focal light, and he startled himself. Sleep creases marred his boyish, heartbroken features. Quickly, he swept fingers across his scalp and rushed to the stairwell.

Razori met him in the security office on the first floor. The front gate monitors showed a midsize car, empty except for Ivy in the driver’s seat. He asked her to come in and opened the gates, but she refused. In exasperation, he agreed to come out.

Razori gave him a disquieted look. Perhaps Ivy had not run away from the hospital. Perhaps she was a lure. In Bevan’s business, underworld figures sometimes made trouble. And that’s why he had hired Razori, a former Iraqi intelligence officer and Sunni thug with a falcon’s furious face.

Razori drove Bevan out to the gate in the Peugeot, and when they arrived, sure enough, there was a big man with a shaved head sitting next to Ivy. “Stay, sir.” The trained killer got out of the Peugeot and approached the midsize, hand in his jacket gripping an M11 compact pistol. “Miss Ivy, please, come from the car.”

Ivy got out. She didn’t appear as emaciated as she had in the hospital, where she had shrunk to her skeleton. In the metal halide floodlights, she looked implausibly beautiful: spiky midnight hair in perfect disorder, surly teen features pallid as if a cutout of moonlight. She spieled some long speech about how she was all right now and had decided to live on her own and didn’t want her father worrying about or searching for her.

While she rattled on, Bevan exited the Peugeot and gradually approached, intending to grab her and haul her inside, away from that big stranger in the passenger seat wearing ski sunglasses in the dark. The stranger stepped out, and Razori drew his M11. What happened next...

Evolving Door

What happened next? Bevan dizzied at the memory and stood up. “May I look around?”

Jenne Prosper peered over the flat screen with a rabbity pout. “The installations are in the east wing. Some are mechanical, others electrical. For your safety, Mister Powers, be sure not to touch them.”

Razori moved to rise, and Bevan motioned for him to stay. “Finish your poem, Razori. I’ll be fine.”

Sunlight bounded off the Peroba Rosa floorboards in the hall effervescent as champagne and instilled Bevan with sufficient well-being to remember the horrid details of what had happened four nights ago when Razori aimed his pistol at the stranger with Ivy.

The big, bald man – or the thing that looked like a big, bald man – seemed to flow through space as he or it moved across the drive. It had features that must have been broken in hell and then fused to silence, for surely that was more mask than face.

Razori never got off a shot. It collided with him violently, slamming the bodyguard against the wrought iron gate, and its mask burrowed against his neck. Razori cast up his eyes, which filled with radiant pain, and he cried a lustrous song of agony reveling in every twisted syllable. Bevan wanted to delve that desperate scream out of his memory.

“He’s a vampire,” Ivy had explained, stepping closer, speaking with a sweet chill in her voice. “And I’m going with him. Do you understand?”

He didn’t. He couldn’t.

Morning occupied the east wing. The installations there loomed large as house frames. He approached one that struck him as a revolving door set on a platform of blue lace agate. When he bent toward the small identifying tag on the stone base, he expected it to announce: Door to Nowhere. Instead, he read, Evolving Door.

A cage of white mice stood at one corner of the agate platform. Despite the front desk’s admonition – or perhaps out of spite for making him wait – he worked the aluminum lever that opened the cage like a shutter, releasing one mouse into a chamber of the Evolving Door.

He pushed a glass pane of the door to let the mouse out, so he could catch it and return it to the cage, and stood back with surprise at how easily the door swung around. The door swept the wee creature through an entire rotation counterclockwise. For a moment, the brass panel at the bottom of the door hid the animal from sight. When it came back around and reached the open threshold, not a mouse emerged but a sizable amber insect – a water bug!

He inhaled a small, reverse laugh, a sucked-in gasp of amusement. Intrigued, he repeated the action, this time pushing the door clockwise – and, instead of a mouse, a red squirrel rushed out. The bushy tail flurried around the exhibit hall and disappeared through a small swinging door beneath one of the tall, narrow windows.

Bevan stood at the window and watched the spry creature bound across the lawn and swirl up a tree trunk. Delight propelled him backward several paces, and he almost began to laugh before he recalled why he was here.

The vampire had dropped Razori like a bag of sawdust. The Iraqi’s eyes inked up, clouding like squid smoke. The jackhammer jolts of Bevan’s heart used all his blood, and he couldn’t move. He stood transfixed, gaze jittering between Razori and Ivy, afraid to see but needing to see if she, too, was a vampire. “Bernie’s not like other vampires, Dad. He’s a twice dead thing. He kills vampires. You’ll see.”

Bernie... Bevan raised his eyebrows. What kind of name is that for a vampire? Or a ... what was that? A twice dead thing?

He waded through a wash of sunshine toward the other installations in the east wing of Psycho Macchina. The gallery lived up to its name. Each art piece dominated space like a stupendous machine.

A gargantuan robotic armature attached to a vaguely anthropoid figure with prismatic visor looked about to rape him. Another work consisted of a series of LCD monitors displaying a severed head bouncing twice in an endless tape loop. Was that his face on the bounding head?

He glanced around for the camera capturing his likeness and imposing it on the projected head. Monumental titanium gantries enclosed contraptions he couldn’t decipher at all: a kinetic Mobius ribbon churning madly inside the hole of a glass torus crisscrossed with laser rays; tetrahedron gadgets of hypnotic strobes and flickering keypads slowly gyrating atop mirror-faceted fulcrums; cantilevered, compound pendulums of steel beams rhythmically floating among each other with massive weightlessness. The labels identifying these works displayed binary code, making no sense to him.

Nothing had made sense since the vampire. That hideous night after it had dropped Razori, Ivy had informed him she was leaving with Bernie for good. He had looked on horrified as his personal guard convulsed upright with a blurred face and outer space eyes.

“Your tough guy’s a vampire now, Dad. He’s the undead. You see?”

He didn’t want to see. He reached desperately for Ivy, and she backed away.

“Watch,” she commanded. “Watch this now.” Bernie gripped the undead Razori by the back of the neck and mashed something into his gaping mouth, something like dirt. “It’s the ash of a twice dead thing. It completes the fractal blood soul and gets rid of the vampire virus. It happened to me, Dad. It cured me. I’m whole now. You understand?”

Understand? Not at all! That’s why he was here.

He decided to return to the front alcove and see if E. Randolph Rayne was ready to receive him. But first he had to find out how the Evolving Door switched animals. So, he entered and pushed through it clockwise, looking for the exchanging mechanism.

He was still searching when he came around and stepped out. His brain outburst orchestrated chaos. Instantly, he perceived that everything fit together meaningfully, every detail of awareness large as his heart was keen. Everything succinctly fused into his pleonastic mind of Mind.

Two Bounces of a Severed Head

Now, he understood. This whole hominid world was an attitudinal problem. Anthropocentrism embedded in biocentrism nested in chronocentrism distorted reality.

Who could blame the humanimal for believing consciousness required a brain? In the experience of sapiens, everything living was a slippery complexity of chemicals. And chemistry floated adrift on a one-way current of temporal flow, the thermodynamic river bound for the vast Entropic Ocean. Everything decipherable had to fit in the neural net of the brain – or it didn’t exist for the humanimal.

Bevan pivoted, charmed by how this room had been designed to fill with reflected sunlight. All around him, the sun’s fusion radiation wobbled off the edges of things. Valence electrons spitting photons from reflective surfaces entertained him a moment. And in this reverie, he appreciated how the anonymous One, observing him from beyond the resonance cells of spacetime, impulsed him.

Without thought, he eased his mind toward the beyond-ego. And the anonymous One undulated awareness from off the chromosomal ribbons whose protein kinesis generated his consciousness. Ego, he knew, existed as an epiphenomenon linked to physical existence and all its biophysical illusions. With this easing away from ego illusion, time centered.

He sensed the archons. These sentient entities intersected the worldsheet from 5-space the way physical objects met two dimensions with their shadows. Their beauty touched him as a raw dreamy feeling. They noticed him while egressing through the worldsheet.

He noticed himself. His anti-self moved as a shiver in the radiant room. Death closed in. The beyond-ego collapsed at this perception to the egocentric awareness that he didn’t have any idea what was going on here – but he knew he didn’t have much time.

Joy in the flesh moved him around the east wing. These so-called sculptural installations he immediately recognized as devices. He wasn’t sure yet what function each machine served. He did recognize the Evolving Door as a transdimensional machine, a hypervectorization contraption that had rotated him into this world from a parallel universe where evolution had more expansively convoluted the hominid neocortex.

Clever quantum gate appliance! He admired its elegance. Who constructed this?

At a colossal mechanical rotor coil affixed to a giant cataphract with prism eyeshade – the humanlike armorial figure that he had originally thought looked about to violate him – he read the label in binary code: Backhoe in the String Theory Landscape.

He knew about the Landscape, the mathematical space whose values were the ‘fields’ that made up the physical laws and constants of any particular vacuum or what the humanimal commonly called a ‘universe.’ The many possible sets of physical laws and constants generated stupendous numbers of vacua or universes, with less than 1% capable of evolving observers with consciousness and imagination. In most universes, there could be no observers, because the fundamental conditions for observation – spatial dimensions that differentiated things and permitted subject-object relationships – didn’t exist. This device could tunnel between vacua. It had excavated the passage to a compatible parallel universe that the Evolving Door had used to deliver him here. But why?

Earth had many replicas in the Landscape. In this one, he had a daughter – Ivy. Morphogenetic field memories fit snugly in the similar yet more convoluted crannies of his brain. He ‘remembered’ the nightmare of four nights previous. The experience did not frighten or baffle him. He knew about the fractal aspect virus with its recursive self-similarity to the genome. Its incompleteness required that those infected feed on self-similar blood.

Bernie, the big stranger with the shaved head accompanying Ivy, was not a typical vampire. Bernie had obviously discovered that a dead vampire was a ‘twice dead thing’ and its remains canceled the fractal aspect virus of the undead. Bernie had infected Razori with the vampire virus by biting him – and then, right in front of Bevan’s eyes, cured the bodyguard with the cremated ash of a twice dead thing. Ivy had wanted him to see that, to know that she was herself cured and on a crusade to exterminate vampires.

Bevan’s anti-self shivered closer, a tremor in the air like thermal wrinkles from a radiator. The archons circulated closer, faithless to the gallery’s geometry or his biology, just pastels of mood coloring him with transparencies of anxiety. He – or actually his less-aware ego in this world – had come to Psycho Macchina, because his best investigators informed him that E. Randolph Rayne knew a great deal about vampires. Looking around the east wing, at the ominous machines disguised as artwork, Bevan realized E. Randolph knew a tremendous amount more about the boundaries of reality than simply the history of the undead. Perhaps, as the gallery owner’s acronym E.R.R. suggested, coming here was a mistake.

Too late now, the anti-self insisted. Too bad, the archons imposed with their glare of foreboding as they portaged upstream into a past of their choosing from some future roaring off a cliff-edge into vaporspace.

He thought of calling out to his bodyguard. No. The vampire bite and the cure had transformed Razori from a stonehearted killer to a Sufi poet. He sat now in the front office composing a love song to his soul. This mystery would have to disclose itself without him.

Bevan studied the powerful and mysterious devices on display in the sunny gallery. He stood before the array of LCD monitors showing his lopped head spinning blood as it rolled. When he bent over to read the binary code tag – Two Bounces of a Severed Head – he glimpsed the colorless chromatics of his anti-self closing on him and knew in that instant the injured truth that his arrival in this more primitive parallax of his origins fulfilled his destinal limit. His life was over.

A scything fin of volcanic glass large as a propeller vane dropped from the ceiling, guillotining him. The glass fin slid through a floor notch, tripped a mechanism that sprung open a trapdoor and plummeted the beheaded body down a chute that quickly clicked shut behind.

The severed head bounced twice as it had in many symmetric vacua of the Landscape. Bevan’s rotating perspective whirled across the enamel platform, a birling, blurring arc that jolted abruptly when a hand seized his hair and hoisted his dizzy head.

Eidolon Agglomerator

“’Sup, Mister P. Gettin’ ahead of yaself?” An African face assessed the severed head, a chiseled Oromo face with cavernous eyes, broad nose, and proud lips bent to an ineffable smile. “The mind takes us far away. Don’t it? Even across universes. But the heart, man – the heart, it always brings us back.”

“ReShawn, why must you talk to the heads?” A short, narrow man of gaunt, unshaven countenance with a sinister scar across his thick nose pulled himself from a hatch in the String Landscape Backhoe. His dense mane of coarse, shoulder-length hair shone dully as steel wool, and a smoldering Drina cigarette dangled from reptilian lips, smoke leaking from that harsh mouth like an escaping soul. “They hear, you know.”

“I know that, E.” ReShawn dropped the head in a plastic bag and zipped it shut, careful to keep the streaming blood on the enamel pedestal. “Straight up. They listen. That’s why I speak.”

“Install him, will you?” E. Randolph spoke impatiently, shutting the hatch with thick hands bulging with veins, tattoos in Serbian on four square knuckles: kuga – plague, pest, infection, death. “Hurry – before he’s meat.”

While ReShawn carried the plastic wrapped head to the vitreous torus of latticed laser rays, E. Randolph lowered a hideaway desk built into the curved wall. He knelt in a fold-out transformer chair, wrists propped on a slender white laminate desktop and began typing across the surface touchboard, his input slowing the Mobius ribbon rotating in the torus.

When it stopped, a box drawer slid out from the installation’s blue epoxy platform, and ReShawn unbagged the head and seated it in the drawer’s cradle of open-cell black foam. Immediately, the drawer slid closed, and the Mobius ribbon spun again with a deep ascending whistle that abruptly resolved to silence.

A moment later, the laser rays in the torus realigned, and a holoform eidolon of Bevan Powers stood upon the epoxy platform.

“E. Randolph Rayne gone see you now, Mister P.” ReShawn offered a hand to the eidolon. “Thanks for waitin’.”

Bevan hopped down from the dais. He eyed the splattered blood on the enamel pedestal and snorted with derision. Modern art. Then, he assessed ReShawn in denim jumpsuit, scuffed work boots, black bandana wrapped over his long skull and turned his attention to the seated man with the scarred nose and two day beard. “You? You’re E. Randolph Rayne?”

Above his flat Tartar cheekbones, E. Randolph’s thin, red-rimmed eyes with their muddy irises and capillaries tangled like hot filaments smiled. “ – Emil Radovan Radmilo.” His speech, fully modulated, carried no hint of accent. He dragged on his cigarette, blue-whiskered chin upraised, the dimple at its center deep as a nail hole. “E. Randolph Rayne better suits an art gallery owner, don’t you agree?”

“But you’re not a gallery owner, are you?” Bevan stepped closer. Despite his coarse, unshaven countenance, Emil Radmilo wore Gucci jeans, scarlet Berluti loafers and a black V-neck silk t-shirt. “This is a front, isn’t it?” He tracked his gaze around the sunlit gallery while ReShawn unlocked a transformer chair from the wall and unfolded it for the financier to sit. Bevan touched the unusual chair with his fingertips, testing its stability, and sat. “You’re a vampire expert. That’s right?”

“Oh, yes. And gallery owner as well.” E. Randolph waved his cigarette through curlicues of smoke. “These installations sell to corporations worldwide and finance my research.”

ReShawn’s deep eyes widened, noticing that the back of Bevan’s head and neck blurred to smoky plasma wisps. In moments, his entire skull would vanish. Behind Bevan’s back, he gesticulated frantic concern to E. Randolph.

“You research vampires?” At the edge of sight, Bevan caught a glimpse of scintillant fumes, sparkling confetti of his vaporizing eidolon form.

“Fractal freaks.” E. Randolph typed furiously at the touchboard. The Mobius ribbon yawed slightly, and Bevan’s head reconstituted itself. “You know about fractals, Mister Powers?”

“I know about vampires,” Bevan responded, his voice hollow and stiff. “I saw one four nights ago. It attacked my bodyguard and ran off with my daughter.”

ReShawn hissed in disgust. “Yo, that is cruel!”

“ReShawn, the installation in the south wing, CryptoCyborgCipher?” E. Randolph exhaled smoke-jets through his nostrils. “The movers are picking it up today.”

“On it, E.” ReShawn gave Bevan a comradely slap on the back while surreptitiously nodding satisfaction to E. Randolph. “Easy, Mister P. This the right place. E. will do for you.”

E. Randolph dragged on the Drina while ReShawn ambled off. “He’s an Oromo chief’s son, from Ethiopia. Vampires claimed his family. I brought him here when he was a child.”

“Okay.” Bevan bobbed his head impatiently. “You rescued him – can you rescue my daughter?”

E. Randolph gave a gravelly laugh. “She doesn’t need rescuing, Mister Powers. You do.”

Bevan hunched over. “Excuse me?”

“Your wife – the girl’s stepmother – she is a mighty pythoness.” He stubbed out his butt in a shagreen cigarette case and drew another Drina to his lips. “The pythoness is the most dangerous fractal freak.”

Bevan stared at him as he lit up with a Caran d’Ache gold lighter. “How do you know I even have a wife?”

E. Randolph returned the stare, leisurely exhaling tobacco fumes through his mouth while inhaling them through his nostrils.

“All right, you did some homework.” Bevan remained flat-faced. “So, tell me then. What’s a fractal freak?”

“Your wife, the pythoness.” He pointed his whiskery, nail-hole chin to the windows of creamy sunlight. “Your daughter Ivy’s boyfriend, Bernie, the twice dead thing.”

“Enough! Listen - ” Bevan paused, weighted down with anger, the vein down the middle of his brow darker. “I don’t care about your strange ideas. I want straight answers. I want the truth.”

“Ah, Mister Powers.” E. Randolph shook his shaggy head morosely. “Do Gödel, Heisenberg and Wittgenstein mean nothing to you? Hmm?” An accusatory squint tightened his smoke-raddled eyes. “You are a 21st century man. You should know. There are no straight answers about the truth – only many, many wonderful questions.”

The Afterlife Machine

Bevan focused on the thin windows that framed wind-wafted trees. From a low bough, the red squirrel that had escaped the gallery gnawed an acorn. “Okay, look. Something ... horrible happened at my home four nights ago. I need you to explain it to me.”

“There is a secret and sublime world of profoundly broken people carrying on their aberrant lives outside the society of ordinary human beings. They are fractal freaks.” E. Randolph spoke to his cigarette. “A fractal is a geometric pattern that repeats at endlessly smaller scales. Bear in mind, fractals were first known as monster curves.”

“So?” Bevan groaned.

“This original intuition proves uncannily accurate, because fractal humans are monsters.” Wafting the lit end of the Drina under his nose, the art dealer faced his new client through a swirling veil of blue smoke, his haggard, damaged visage a caricature of the monstrosities he described. “They are not whole. Their DNA is broken, as the name fractal implies. Its Latin cognate, frangere, means to break. When the fractal aspect virus inserts itself into the human genome, people become inhuman – vampires, werewolves, demonic creatures like your wife. Fractal freaks.”

“What makes you think my wife is ... one of these monsters?”

“As you say, I did some homework.” After a brusque puff, he confided, “A cosmic battle rages, Mister Powers. Angels and demons. They have been fighting since the origin of the cosmos. Angels built life from the elements. They are Fire Lords, and for them life is a complex machine and the human brain a quantum computer that will eventually figure a way out of this cold, dark void into which angels and demons alike have fallen. The human brain will find a way back home, to hyperspace, whence the cosmos originated and where all opposites are reconciled beyond good and evil, life and death, Fire Lords and Dark Lords.” He squinted through another puff. “Dark Lords believe that’s nonsense. They are convinced there is no way back. They want only to attain to the void and the serenity of formlessness. For the Dark Lords, life is an execration. They are the ones who inserted the fractal aspect virus in the genome – a monkey-wrench in life’s creepy, slimy works.”

“And you’re on the side of the angels.”

“No, Mister Powers.” E. Randolph continued in a low-keyed yet serious voice. “I take no sides. I am a scientist. Observation and data – that is my methodology. I experiment with the world as I find it.”

Bevan’s jaw pulsed. “That sounds unlikely, Mister Radmilo.” His voice hung from the edge of his nerves, and he seethed with indignation, watching this Euro-trash art monger coolly smoking, calling himself a scientist while Ivy romped somewhere with an abomination. “I can’t imagine any reputable scientific journal publishing your findings about fractal freaks.”

“The research I conduct is strictly for my own purposes.” E. Randolph spoke off the back end of a long drag, his tone soft and neutral. “Knowledge is power. And I have accrued extraordinary knowledge.”

“Do you know how to get my daughter back?”

“Yes. But you would not live to see her return.” He inflected his words with an ominous timbre. “The pythoness tried to eat your daughter, and the pythoness knows now she has failed. Worse for you, she knows you know. She will devour you.”

“Hold up. The pythoness – you mean, my wife – Olivia?”

“Yes.” One word crammed with horrifying certainty. “You married her eighteen months ago. Your daughter’s lymphoma began shortly thereafter.”

“That’s crazy.”

“What you witnessed four nights past, was that not crazy?” He lifted bold eyebrows. “Perhaps you are crazy.”

“Maybe I am.” Bevan pushed to his feet. “I made a mistake coming here.”

“Before you go, there is a strange device you will find edifying.” E. Randolph stubbed out his cigarette in his shagreen case, snapped it shut and stood. “Come.”

Briskly, the small man crossed through optimistic swathes of sunlight to a gargantuan titanium scaffold housing a slew of pyramidal metallic gizmos. Some small as thimbles flickered with dichroic pinpoint crystals. Other pyramids bulky as compact cars flashed mesmeric strobes from chromatic pendant keypads and electroluminescent rotary cams. Each tetrahedron reeled slowly on a pivot of faceted mirrors. “This is the Afterlife Machine.” The gallery owner reached into the array and manipulated a backlit spherical input device. “This will reveal your destiny when you die.”

He’s insane! Bevan fully realized and muscled down the impulse to flee immediately. “So ... my destiny – when I die? You’re referring to heaven and hell?”

“Those who serve Fire Lords are recycled. Reincarnated.” E. Randolph let his words hang in the softly tremulous air while he took Bevan’s hand and placed it on a palm sensor set in the gantry frame. “Waveforms of individuals useful to the angels are reinstalled in quantum computers – in human brains – repeatedly, with the promise of ascending to hyperspace once humanity designs a way out.”

“And the Dark Ones?” Bevan dragged the words out, reluctant to encourage the madman. “What do they do with souls?”

“This.” As E. Randolph stepped back, the mirror planes of the numerous pyramids darkened, and a ghostly reflection of Bevan, naked and terrified, pirouetted in each of them. His wraith spun in empty space, hot fragments spitting off him. Incandescent bits congealed in the void to fiery peels as though his phantom twirled on an invisible lathe. Though the apparition whirled in dark silence, his contorted expression of flapping g-force cheeks and piggy eyes translated shrieks of hideous suffering. “Dark Lords deconstruct human waveforms to ores of silence and slag of stillness. The hellish process occupies a dilated time span of aeons. And that is your fate when the pythoness you married devours you.”

Bevan snatched his hand from the palm sensor and staggered backward. “You’re a lunatic,” he uttered in stricken monotone.

E. Randolph shrugged – it is what it is.