The Department of Corrections, Book One

Level NegSix - Virology. Sector A. Secondary Elevator A. Level 66. Walkway A.

Outside of (locked) Dissection Cell A-4891.

Overlooking the Subterranean, Three-Plus-Dimensional Atrium.

AlterGrav On: alternating gravities currently macroengaging and disengaging and microengaging and disengaging like the irregular, tug-of-war heartbeat of the atrium.

Correction-proof Malyj was still drugged. Everything a retarded blur, like staring through the epicanthic folds of a mongoloid. His finite mind overloaded, functioning and malfunctioning, calculating and miscalculating, straining to comprehend the infinite space of the atrium that now confined him. Thinking like a quilt, like a patchwork, of threaded together strange thoughts, such as: Unseen time a knot—like linear time folded into space dividing distance, tying together the space-time continuum . . . and: Outer space is like inner space is like outer space . . . Religious hallucinations like colorful Orthodox icons come to life. His dream world his awake world, his awake world his dream world, like he’d been pulled inside out. He could feel the parameters of unsafe pressures. Unstable AlterGrav: macrogravity too weighty, time and matter compressed; microgravity weightless, time and matter expanded; standard Earth gravity and time and matter in-between. Vertigo . . .

His copper-bright eyes adjusting—shadow birthing shadow birthing shadow birthing . . . His copper-bright eyes focused—a man-made hell reflected in them. The atrium an ancient amphitheater, its play a modern tragedy.

He stood upon an ancient, cantilevered, see-through walkway (something like a rusted, diamond-shaped, industrial-strength chain-link), cautiously peering over its handrail’s rusted edge. Massive vertical tubes of clear glass, filled with silvery explosions like harnessed lightning rising and falling, were propelling clear-glass elevators full of white-coated, horrifically-masked VirEngs to their petri dishes/designer viruses designated storage level. A whiff of Karpian death rose up to greet him from the depths of the man-made hell below like the rotten bouquet from a dozen dissected cadavers.

Stacked, rust-encrusted, blistered-metal cantilevered walkways above, around, and below him. A grainy, reddish-orange curtain of rust dust hung in the metallic air. The place a living kaleidoscope of color. The ancient atrium’s void was filled with an oily, silverblack liquid shimmer, a visual poem of changing shapes and colors composed within, like a mosaic-blur of black, white, gray, silver, chromium, bronze, copper, and brass. Everywhere: rust stains like spilt wine and palmetto bugs acrawl.

Malyj dropped Ivanov’s heavy steel rod like it had burned his hands, macrogravity slamming it against the cantilevered walkway. Dull, metallic sound waves fading with the falling rust. Malyj, a stationary mass of potential energy, suddenly (after being released from macrogravity into standard gravity) “ran” to his left, his body transformed into kinetic energy. “Help me, Jesus!” His faith guiding him, supporting him, pushing him through compressed shadow below enemy lines. Tripping, stumbling, scrambling, gathering momentum like a spooked horse. A pale-naked-blur galloping upon its foreshortened shadow. He galloped awkwardly, drunk with “freedom,” hurling himself down the cantilevered walkway as if bloodhounds were nipping at his dirty, rust-orange-stained heels. Like an awkward interpretive dance, he attached to and detached from stationary shadows. Like an unchoreographed ballet, he blended with and separated from pirouetting shadows. The ancient steel walkway straining and groaning under his bouncing weight, sifting its tetanized rust onto the ancient steel walkways below. With every painful step Malyj’s unyielding mass warped time, reshaped space, defied the system, escaped the Karpian State, tasted freedom, and glorified God.

Suddenly, Malyj was dispersing beads of floating sweat into microgravity like his emaciated matter was melting into a Salvador Dali painting. Abruptly, the beads of sweat slingshotted back down into his pores as he once again “ran” as a solid man through the friction of standard gravity, through shadows like phantasmagorical police barricades. The event impregnated him with a surrealistic kind of fear.

Left-side peripheral vision: rusted cell doors. Snatches of blue and pink. A blur of black alphanumeric identities. Glowing reflective-yellow paint. Rust-encrusted call boxes on pitted concrete block walls. Blood-smeared, alphanumeric-stamped stainless-steel CorpseChutes leading down to?—to where? Massive corridors every ninety-six feet, every eight DissCells. Their dark mouths like giant portals to giant insect tunnels. Each massive corridor penetrating deep inside of the honeycombed structure, deep inside of the insect geometry, deep inside of the alien architecture. Each massive corridor lined on both sides by DissCells. Each DissCell filled with a dissected impound still stiff with rigor mortis. Each dissected impound’s khaki-colored limbs still frozen in impossible gestures as if still crying out to God for “Help!”

Above: hanging at non-equidistant odd intervals from the bottom of a cantilevered, see-through, chain-link walkway—rust-dusted light bulbs imprisoned within rusted iron-mesh cages, like a long line of electric pores sweating polluted drops of bile-colored artificial illumination. Unseen nanobots repairing the ancient walkway’s molecular degradation. An echo from below now a downward pulsing sound like some giant Karpian computer system processing . . . like the sound of the World Brain humming, thinking, calculating ways to pull the technological-wool over the surface world’s citizens’ eyes.

Below: looking down as he hurtled forward, past his bare, dirty, rust-orange-stained, bloodied feet, looking through the stacks of ancient, cantilevered, see-through walkways below. Suspended sixty-six levels above the humming, chromium-glinting stainless-steel skeleton of the infected, virus-birthing conveyor system within Mother’s foul, waterlogged concrete womb. Falling chunks of Mars-red rust vanishing into a black hole of deep subterranean space. A sudden, intensified vertigo. Malyj’s horizon tilting and overturning, his world spinning off-axis, spinning the wrong way out of control. Drug withdrawal similar to the DTs (delirium tremens). Feeling nauseous. Vomiting only bile. Praying to God.

Right-side peripheral vision: the handrail’s rusted edge. A sixty-six level fall to his death into what looked like the valley of the shadow of death. A sixty-six level ascension to a frescoed and domed ceiling. Minkowski space. Two giant searchlights, like two giant fingers, were reading the atrium’s pitted walls like braille—enlightening the blind-black void. VIL-EN’s female, life-size, holographic image omnipresent—sexily strutting the rusted cantilevered catwalks. Uniformed K9/KP Patrols like clones policing distant walkways behind formidable, attack-black Giant Schnauzers. HoverCarts transporting entangled, jiggling mounds of dissected impounds to Stella’s kitchen—just Karpian casualties to be processed/extruded into ImpKib. White-coated, horrifically-masked VirEngs were crawling the atrium’s honeycombed walls (the ancient atrium so vast, gravity had to be altered at times to maintain it): up and down and back and forth and up and down and back and forth when effortlessly floating in microgravity; struggling to climb in any direction during standard gravity; everyone and everything like welded rivets during a wave of macrogravity. Glass elevators streaked perpetually, up and down nonstop—like flashes of silvery lightning, or liquid drops of silver mercury rising and falling—inside of the death-black void of the poisonous atrium. The eternally-humming, chromium-glinting conveyor system a metallic-boned skeleton birthing death below. Thousands of tiny mechanical drones like blueblack flies were swarming the dark void fantastically: each one watching and listening for VIL-EN. Like going cold turkey: a feeling of nausea, of motion sickness. More vomiting. Praying for a cheap shot of vodka, for a dirty fix of heroin.

Behind Malyj: Ivanov was still violently raping Dnarnya inside of DissCell A-4891. VIL-EN watched the Karpian State Code R-101 violation—infuriated!—screaming!:

“Code R-101 violator identified! Ivanov CBC058908! Code R-101 violator identified! Ivanov CBC058908!”

His numb, bloodied, gnarled toes (dangling from rust-orange-stained, raw, bare feet) stubbing against the ancient, cantilevered, see-through walkway’s rusted, diamond-shaped, industrial-strength chain-link. Each mechanical stride like kicking at the face of a giant cheese grater, making the cantilevered walkway bounce and buckle and reverberate wildly like a flimsy sheet of razor-sharp galvanized tin. The long dark space between Malyj and the unknown—like running down the long oily barrel of a loaded assault rifle.

The flashing, non-synchronous, caution-yellow lights stroboscopic—their countless bursts of light like neon-yellow paint splattering on a vertical canvas of black air. The continuous Code-R-101 siren wailing like Mother’s colicky baby. The wailing siren, VIL-EN’s infuriated screams, the humming conveyor system birthing death, and the reverberating walkway a cacophonous four-movement symphony sickening Malyj.

His soul weary from no rest, no peace, from freedom deprivation. His drugged mind racing, thoughts about to crash. His logic illogical, like Christians being arrested by the State for feeding the starving homeless, everything backasswards. His migraine headache resurfacing, throbbing, as painful as a right eye being gouged out by a splintery nightstick—over and over again. His hazel eyes glowing like hammered copper behind a panicked mask of reddish rust. His horizontal mouth a raised metal seam welded shut. His sacred heart a clenched, arthritic fist—inflamed, thorny, bleeding. His blood vessels dried up like ancient aqueducts. His oxygen-starved lungs a pair of rigid hot-water bottles, unable to expand, unable to gasp for air. His skin as cold and pale and transparent as an albino salamander. His stomach a surgeon’s knot, tightening, pressuring his bowels to release. His ass burning as if being goaded by an electric cattle prod. His numb arms dangling meat anchors, pulling him down. And his numb, trembling legs weak—still stumbling on top of raw, mangled feet and bloody, shredded toes, still kicking at the face of a giant cheese grater. Memories of his screaming mother and her metal meat mallet fluttering behind him, chasing after him, assaulting him to “succeed.” He was watching his berserker mother chase after him, frenziedly swinging her little metal meat mallet at him as though it were Thor’s mighty hammer—his vantage point an autoscopic hallucination. A quick prayer to his guardian angel . . .

VIL-EN’s infuriated automata voice booming from a million frowning speakers, her warning message repeating over and over and over again:

“. . . Code R-101! PsychIntTec Dnarnya down! . . . Level NegSix - Virology! Sector A! Secondary Elevator A! Level 66! Walkway A! Dissection Cell A-4891! . . . Code R-101! PsychIntTec Dnarnya down! . . .”

VIL-EN’s infuriated, synthetic computerized voice was screaming so pained, it sounded like she was straining to take a huge data dump. The omnipresent Queen’s angry orders were echoing within the nefarious honeycombed atrium as she commanded her deadly alien/insect-faced (bio-filter masked) subjects—most now buzzing above Level NegSix’s DissCells (DissCells - Levels 01 - 66), to swarm down upon Malyj’s location from the slanting half-shadows of Level NegSix’s VirCells (VirCells - Levels 67 - 132) like a colony of killer (Africanized) honeybees erupting from a violently shaken beehive to rescue their fallen female comrade, PsychIntTec Dnarnya.

Unnerved (scared shitless). Malyj was still tripping, stumbling, and scrambling across the rusted walkway like a spooked horse—like the White Horse Prophecy charging headlong across America whose Constitution now “hangs by a thread.” His pale-naked-blur awkwardly galloping upon its foreshortened black shadow as if he were fire-walking across red-hot coals on a steel trampoline. Fearing for his life, he willed himself to push/bounce forward.

A tidal wave of . . .

“What–the–fuck!” Malyj blurted in broken Ukrainian.

A loud sound wave of respirator-muffled voices and clanking tactical gear. An actual physical wave of bouncing and buckling and reverberating steel. The cantilevered walkway stomped on by bloodied, dull, black-leather jackboots. A homogeneous evil was approaching fast. Innumerable spears and lances of white light from obscured flashlights pierced a shield of black shadow, each unknowingly thrusting for Malyj.

“Damn it! . . . Damn it!” Malyj exclaimed twice, in English.

He ducked/catapulted left into the mammoth black mouth of the next corridor, Corridor C, then pressed his bare back up against its pitted, cold, damp, right-side concrete block wall—his naked, now rust-dusted body disappeared into a slanting shadow the color of carbon. He made the sign of the Cross three times from within the shadow’s darkness. A surreal K9 unit swept past Corridor C’s open mouth: one dog-masked, uniformednarmed officer pulled along the cantilevered walkway by three leashed and mini-goggled and open-toed-mini-jackbooted attack-black Giant Schnauzers foaming and snarling and clawing rusted steel rabidly. Followed by a clone-like swarm of bisex/inversive, brown-clad, KP-patrol officers running past him on the bouncing steel catwalk (double file, two by two, shoulder to shoulder, a hundred deep). All wearing silver, rounded, steel helmets having the black KP (Karpian Patrol) insignia in front and a Palmerton, Pa. zinc-miner-like flashlight/camera unit mounted on top. All wearing horrific, hissing-hosed, full-faced, alien-faced bio masks or horrific, hissing-hosed, full-faced, insect-faced bio masks. Loaded AK-47s bouncing on their uniformed backs. All wearing overloaded utility belts: their sagging weapons banging in unison with each collective jackbooted step. All wearing full tactical gear—like the surface world’s riot police—their clear oval shields poised to block and black telescoping batons drawn to strike, every weapon clenched in an angry white-knuckled fist. Each KP-patrol officer having the exact same psychological profile: each itching for a “justified” kill. Each KP-patrol officer, male and female or other, black and white or other, if they had been aware that Malyj had escaped from his DissCell, would desperately want to be the one to liquidate the uncorrectable, God-fearing impound.

Across the twenty-four-foot-wide corridor, in front of Malyj and unshadowed, stenciled on the gray concrete block wall in a reflective-yellow paint:

LEVEL NEGSIX - VIROLOGY

SECTOR C

SECONDARY ELEVATOR C

LEVEL 66

WALKWAY C

DISSECTION CELL C-9418

CAUTION - DANGEROUS CONTAGIUMS - CAUTION

Where the fuck am I? Which direction to freedom? God?! . . . His unbreakable spirit crying out from his broken flesh and bone.

Taped to a rusted steel cell door, a pink temporary name card labeled “Equality 112731.” It was the E-number of an older woman he vaguely remembered—due to the chemical persuasion and chaos, she had been removed from POD A along with Sylvia Black and himself.

Malyj peered into DissCell C-9418s two-way judas hole. E112731 had already been dissected—harvested for organs. Her hollowed-out carcass had been abandoned atop of a cold, blood-puddled stainless-steel autopsy table inside of the dank, half-dark cell—along with all of the plunged-empty hypodermic syringes and blood-stained surgical-steel instruments and brownish wads of blood-soaked gauze used during her unholy dissection. Small, empty, rubber-plugged, clear-glass vials—once containing clear-liquid narcotics—littered the DissCell’s blood-stained concrete floor. One of the DissCell’s lockable, indestructible glass display cases open, its glass shelves empty; E112731s E-numbered and E-graded Equality specimen jars AWOL.

“Jesus Christ!” Malyj said horrified, no longer as drugged thanks to time and shock.

“Jesus Christ!” The impact from his amplified echo stunned him.

Her wrinkled face had been cut in an angry arch from ear to ear across her liver-spotted forehead, the parchment-thin skin peeled back over her senile skull, her bloodied, blondish-graying scalp dangling over the cold autopsy table’s edge like a frozen animal pelt. Her suture-etched skullcap had been sawed off; her gelatinous brain still thinking and teeming with a lifetime of electric memories—scooped out and jarred like pickled red cabbage. Her icy-blue eyes had been plucked from their ancient, cold-dark sockets. Her gaping mouth echoing her last word (“Help!”). Her chest had been sawed down the breast bone, divided, a fatty-white ribcage still held wide open by a pair of large, sagging, freckled breasts—one on each side. All of her internal organs had been removed with surgical precision; inside her torso’s hollowed-out cavity, everything dusted white with borax. Her khaki-colored limbs frozen in impossible gestures, still stiff with rigor mortis. E112731s “delicious” pre-boiled remains had already been scheduled to be picked up by HoverCart 66, transported to Stella’s kitchen, and processed/extruded into nutritious ImpKib. Nothing of zero value. Impound Kibble: a necessary evil.

“Dear God!” Malyj gasped at the empirical evidence of E112731s dissection, immediately thinking: It wasn’t psychological warfare! A feeling like being out of sync with his artificial environment; a feeling like unreality had backhanded him across his haggard face. Then praying out loud: “Please Lord Jesus, not Sylvia Black!”

“Dear God!” . . . A moment later, “Please Lord Jesus, not Sylvia Black!” echoed back at him from the open mouth of the buttressed-walled and high-ceilinged dark corridor like the Evil One mocking him. The rusted overhead pipes were groaning like possessed demons. Bloated power cables floated above, like belly-up electric eels. A forgotten iron ladder, cold, eroded by time, built into the damp concrete block wall like a rusted sculpture stretching, reaching, rusted rung by rusted rung, for the A/C vent/shaft high above its arthritic, abruptly terminated, crumbling self—never reaching its lofty destination.

Malyj cautiously unlatched the rusted steel cell door, slowly slid it open, grinding it across its rusted steel tracks. He pulled the heavy cell door almost shut behind him, grinding the ancient rust into a coppery dust, just as—without warning—a dangerous K9/KP patrol charged through the massive corridor’s slanting shadow. Man and dog passing like a Passover plague just outside of DissCell C-9418s lamb’s-blood-red-rusted steel-cell-door’s doorframe. Bloodied DissCell C-9418 was dim, dank, and reeked of eradication, of annihilation, of E112731s unchristian death—reeked of “progress.”

Out of nowhere, another strange thought born of toxic side effect: Modern man worshiping technology and science and reason, just fools unable to comprehend the universe—let alone God who created it. For their every discovery another discovery, apes forever scratching on the infinite surface of God’s Creation—the simple believing they have discovered something new. Modern man devolving, believing they evolved from apes—killing one another in the name of profit. Malyj’s intelligent thoughts still shaped by the powerful Karpian narcotics still surging through his hypo-abused Ukrainian veins.

Extracting an alien-looking surgical-steel scalpel from a pool of congealed blood from on top of the stainless-steel autopsy table—from a pool of congealed blood from E112731s now stiff remains—Malyj cut through the taut flesh along the fresh scar on his left hip. Screaming out in pain, almost passing out, he dug out the tiny GPS-tracking microchip implanted deep inside of his still sore hipbone, instantly becoming an alphanumeric-less individual and instantly severing him from all of VIL-EN’s collective techno-surveillance. To throw off any potential pursuers, he hid the tiny, bloody, marrow-coated microchip tracking device deep inside of E112731s khaki-colored, goosefleshed-skinned, hollowed-out carcass. Her dull appearance and foul odor made him vividly recall something he witnessed a couple years earlier: a carved up, days old, Thanksgiving Day turkey carcass that had been left to fester inside a humid, turkey-vulture-and-maggot-filled, Central Florida dumpster (Malyj had been dining in a disgusting green dumpster, enjoying the free holiday buffet, just another innocent soul reduced to prejudiced starving-homelessness by the unjust, corrupt, for-profit DOC). He shook both images, having zero vital signs, from his repulsed mind.

I will find Sylvia Black. I will escape to the surface world. I will regain my freedom. I will warn the surface world of the hidden Karpian agenda. I will return one day to free every last soul imprisoned within this Karpian Hades. Malyj vowed all of this to the One True God, to the Only God—to the Lord Jesus Christ.

He pressed his dirty thumb over the two-way judas hole. His throbbing ear pressed to the cold steel cell door. No rumbling sound of the K9/KP patrol. Only the sounds of his heart’s erratic beating in juxtaposition to the siren’s linear wailing and VIL-EN’s repetitive warning message and the humming conveyor system’s uninterrupted activity and the white-coated, horrifically-masked VirEngs’ respirator-muffled voices echoing up from sixty-six levels below could be heard through the ancient steel cell door’s cold, crumbling rust. He waited for what felt like an eternity . . . until he determined it sounded safe to exit the putrid, slaughterhouse-like DissCell.

Malyj, panicking that Sylvia Black may be deceased, exited right from DissCell C-9418—leaving the cell door wide open behind him. He was naked, bleeding from his left hip, still holding the surgical-steel scalpel. He took a right on the main cantilevered walkway and cautiously incised his way through the walkway’s compressed shadows back toward DissCell A-4891. His perception shadows in angles altered from their origins reality, altered by the drugs, flashing artificial lights, and ominous architecture. The surgical-steel scalpel—now heavy in his hand, was reflecting light from within dark shadow like Morse code, was reflecting light from within dark shadow like an SOS. He was hoping to stumble upon her corridor along the way. He was praying to find her DissCell. He was hoping and praying to find Sylvia Black still alive.

Finally, on his right, Corridor B emerged from the darkness like the wicked face of hell. He slipped into its open mouth, then slid under its black tongue of slanting shadow. And, just like in Corridor C, stenciled on the left unshadowed side of Corridor B, on the gray concrete block wall in a reflective-yellow paint:

LEVEL NEGSIX - VIROLOGY

SECTOR B

SECONDARY ELEVATOR B

LEVEL 66

WALKWAY B

DISSECTION CELL B-1849

CAUTION - DANGEROUS CONTAGIUMS - CAUTION

Taped to the rusted steel cell door, a pink temporary name card labeled “Equality 121867.” Malyj, heart hammering his body apart from the inside, peered into DissCell B-1849s two-way judas hole. Sylvia Black was not dissected, but appeared to be asleep atop the stainless-steel autopsy table. She also appeared to be alone.

“Thank God!” Malyj blurted, wondering: Were some things down here only psychological warfare?—or!—did I get to Sylvia Black before “they” could? Then, praying out loud: “Thank You, All-Holy Jesus!”

“Thank God!” . . . A moment later, “Thank You, All-Holy Jesus!” echoed back at him from the open mouth of the buttressed-walled and high-ceilinged dark corridor like the Evil One mocking him. Reddish stalactites of rust hung low from the concrete ceiling high above. The stale artificial air was sprinkled with a rusty, wine-colored dew that had stained his pale skin an old Merlot. Intricate black shadows were folding and unfolding like ethereal origami.

Malyj cautiously unlatched the rusted steel cell door, slowly slid it open, grinding it across its rusted steel tracks. He pulled the heavy cell door almost shut behind him, grinding the ancient rust into a coppery dust. Malyj apprehensively approached Sylvia Black. She was breathing quick, shallow, jerky breaths—like a panting dog.

Sasha shook Sylvia softly, no response. He shook her again, vigorously, still no response. She was naked. He could see the fresh scar on her curvy left hip where her microchip tracking device had been implanted. Using her unconscious state to their advantage, taking his surgical-steel scalpel, he cut her taut flesh and dug from her still sore bone the tiny GPS-tracking microchip that had been implanted deep inside of her curvy left-side hipbone, instantly creating an alphanumeric-less individual and instantly severing her from all of VIL-EN’s collective techno-surveillance. To throw off her pursuers, he dropped the tiny, bloody, marrow-coated microchip down the DissCell’s perforated floor drain.

“Escapee! Equality 30541! Escapee!” VIL-EN had just discovered Malyj had escaped from Dissection Cell A-4891. Her alphanumeric voice boomed from the honeycombed atrium’s frowning speakers: “01000101 0110011 0110000 0110101 0110100 0110001 01101111 01100110 01100110 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100101!” E30541 offline! rattled off in binary code; digits spoken like shots fired. The flashing caution-yellow lights the bright-warm glow of a coppery fire and the fluctuating continuously-wailing siren screaming like a colicky baby were both still active and intermixed.

“Who’s . . . there?” mumbled Sylvia Black, flat on her back atop a cold stainless-steel autopsy table. She was gazing up into the semidarkness. VIL-EN’s booming voice had roused her from slumber.

Leaning over her, face to face: “It’s me, Sasha Malyj.”

“Who?” she said groggily, her eyes and mind trying to focus. “Dr. Burgess?!”

“No! No! Me! . . . E30541.”

“Who?” Above her, a nebulous humanoid silhouette, someone cut from a black hole floating around in the cold, dim, static-starred universe of the torturous DissCell.

“Don’t let’s waste time on reintroductions, we have to get out of this cell, and fast,” said Malyj, the ever shapeshifting inkblot inside of Sylvia Black’s drugged mind.

Helping her up into a sitting position on top of the raised stainless-steel autopsy table, he gently lifted her down onto the cold concrete floor—to a “standing” position. His steely arms hooked around her silken waist, catching her constant fall into standard gravity; their warm, naked bodies commingled (suddenly, Sylvia’s drugged limbs—rubbery and writhing like tentacles from a voluptuous mass—were exploring Sasha’s chiseled form), eventually floating over to the rusted steel cell door like a sleepy, underwater bilateral cephalopod expelling red blood like black ink into the artificial air during a moment of microgravity.

The frenzied sounds of stomping jackboots echoed in unison outside in Corridor B and inside of DissCell B-1849. Another K9/KP patrol was approaching fast. The loud marching boot steps and their loud marching echoes halted outside of the almost shut DissCell Door B-1849.

Silence.

Terrified.

Shuddering.

Sasha and Sylvia squatted down into a singular fleshy blob behind and against the inside of the DissCell’s rusted (turquoise-patchwork/patinated) steel cell door, just out of range of the two-way judas hole’s line of sight.

Dogs suddenly sniffing, snarling, clawing like starving wolves hunting delicious

sheepeople.

Stifled breaths and spasmodic heartbeats thundered unheard.

“Statusth?!” a familiar lisp shattered the strained silence.

Every word spoken, every sound made, in any corridor—quick to echo.

“DissCell B-1849, clear!—Dr. Burgess, sir!” an electronically-amplified female voice roared like a ballsy lion after its owner had peered into the rusted cell door’s two-way judas hole.

The sounds of bio-masked voices and stomping jackboots and long dog claws clawing rusted steel echoed, moving away to the right, toward the cantilevered walkway, eventually fading left . . . Karpian hunters, Karpian assassins, evaporated into a black sea of oppression, evaporated into folding and unfolding black shadow resembling evil origami, evaporated into silence like a secret shadow government running through the futuristic world of tomorrow today . . .

Shielded by his guardian angel’s wings, their “normal” breathing and “regular” heartbeats resumed.

Malyj slid the rusted cell door open; holding groggy Sylvia Black upright—they stepped into Corridor B; he pulled the rusted cell door completely shut behind them.

Heading left, away from the main cantilevered walkway—their feet heavy as if balled and chained—they bumbled forward into the unknown. Penetrating deeper inside of the honeycombed structure, penetrating deeper inside of the alien architecture, stumbling into slanting shadow the color of carbon down a massive, stench-filled concrete corridor lined on both sides with incalculable DissCells filled with dissected impounds frozen in impossible gestures. The shadowy corridor’s length seemed infinite (as did its stench that hung in the artificial air like a million crucified saints): about once every half mile a mammoth intersection with another perpendicular, also infinitely long concrete corridor lined on both sides with incalculable DissCells filled with dissected impounds frozen in impossible gestures. No labyrinth here, just a vast, unimaginative matrix of intersecting straight-lined corridors; within each perfect square of the uniform grid, thousands of foul DissCells, each housing a different nightmare.

“Go on . . . without me,” said Sylvia Black, feebly. “I can’t . . .”

“Yes! you can,” Malyj interrupted. “You can!”

They teetered and tottered down Corridor B like two drunken acrobats bouncing off of carbon-colored, ethanol-filled shadows. They passed an oxidized metallic map bolted to the pitted concrete block wall: it was a floor plan of immense Level NegSix - Virology, Level 66; it was stamped like a prison-made license plate, braille-like, with strange raised symbols that resembled the imagined writing from an advanced, off-planet, alien civilization. The subterranean, rust-dusted corridors now looked like the subterranean, dog-dick-red canals of planet Mars.

About two miles deep into the honeycombed edifice:

“Escapee! Equality 121867! Escapee!” VIL-EN had just discovered Sylvia Black had escaped from Dissection Cell B-1849. Her alphanumeric voice boomed from the buttressed-walled and high-ceilinged dark corridor’s frowning speakers: “01000101 00110001 00110010 00110001 00111000 00110110 00110111 01101111 01100110 01100110 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100101!” E121867 offline! rattled off in binary code; digits spoken like shots fired. The flashing caution-yellow lights the bright-warm glow of a coppery fire and the fluctuating continuously-wailing siren screaming like a colicky baby were both still active and intermixed.

“He injected me with something aggressive . . . into my bloodstream . . . having a twelve-hour incubation period,” she said terrified, her face flushed as red as Christ’s pure blood, “an experimental virus called AIDS-12 . . . Activate Impound Destruction Sequence Twelve. It kills you twelve hours after instant seroconversion . . . its symptoms worse than the airborne Ebola virus . . . worse than polonium-210 poisoning. Rids the Karpian State of undesirables . . . of unproductives . . . of unprofitables . . . quickly . . . by controlling impounds’ and surface citizens’ life expectancy. An economic solution to . . .”

“Who injected you?!” Malyj blurted out of breath, panicking.

“Dr. Burgess,” Sylvia Black mumbled, “and his two goons.” They were still naked, embracing, stumbling down the shadowy corridor together, racing against their flat agitated shadows and slipping past VIL-EN’s now-blind-to-them ultra-oppressive technologies and info-stalking algorithms. She was getting sicker, and heavier, by the accelerated minute. “I feel high on drugs, but not as high on drugs as the Highest Court in the Land must be in order to amend and pass the laws it does that are killing the rights and freedoms of We the People, killing the rights and freedoms of our once great nation. High crimes and misdemeanors. The only thing capable of destroying America—is America.”

God! . . . No! Malyj thought to himself, not wanting Sylvia Black to sense the overwhelming fear that now poured from his body like cheap US vodka from a non-biodegradable plastic gallon bottle. He could see her deteriorating—physically and mentally—right before his transfixed eyes. He felt cast in fear, held in traction, helpless. Her gluey, out-of-place words sticking to his thoughts.

Overhead, enormous conduits appeared; stenciled long ago, in a now faded reflective-yellow paint, the rusted steel pipes were labeled:

----- SALTWATER INTAKE / FLOW----->

TO

MAIN NUCLEAR REACTOR

CAUTION - NON-POTABLE WATER - CAUTION

Deeper into the shadows they staggered, pale into black, following the faded reflective-yellow arrows stenciled on the bottom of the rusting and gurgling and seeping saltwater pipes overhead: encountering new sensations. The four smooth planes of the four perfect-cornered concrete block corridor devolved into a roundish, rough-hewn, coral and fossil embedded limestone tunnel—looking like something a leviathan-sized Jetty Park ribbon fish had savagely burrowed through using its open vertical mouth like the circular face of a mechanical clock having sharp spinning teeth like second, minute, and hour hands consuming bedrock like time—a machined limestone tunnel abandoned unfinished and flooded with the half-and-half smell of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Subterranean peninsular gravity had stabilized. The once stable temperature now constantly alternating between arctic and tropical and arctic and tropical. Sound seemed pressurized, like listening through conch-shell ears. Dull aquatic sounds like submerged explosions thundered and rumbled around them—more felt than heard—like hunger pangs streaking as fast as Central Florida lightning bolts across the planet’s empty belly. The place suddenly awash with echoes like mimicking parrots. A feeling like the heavy pounding waves of a rolling ocean were rhythmically beating down upon their bobbing buoyed bodies, like a strong undertow was trying to pull them down down down to the bottom of the unfathomable Bermuda Triangle. The stale artificial air now smelled and tasted of sea salt and the golden rust of sunken Spanish treasure. The old tunnel’s limestone walls suddenly swirling with spaceship-bronze and Martian-red rust stains bleeding through the man-made vein in the Earth’s upper mantle. Gigantic sinkholes left over from a secret 1950s NASA project dotted the tunnel’s limestone walls, just man-made voids where concrete bunkers and titanium vaults never materialized. The abandoned tunnel’s uneven limestone floor was now vibrating as it would have during a multistage rocket launch, was now covered in a dancing beach-colored sand. Oxidized lamps like fiery clones replicated toward the equator, toward a tropical infinity, like ancient satellites hanging askew from rocket-fuel-scarred limestone walls, their flaring light sliding along the tunnel’s moon-pitted-like skin seen, until converging into the cavernous darkness’s black-hole-like vanishing point unseen. Above, swirling clusters of screaming speakers dangled by sparking electrical wires like swirling clusters of golden dates dangling from swaying date palms under a colorful impressionist sky of limestone: reminding one of crazy Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The ancient, flashing, lightning-yellow lights and the ancient, staticky, hurricane-wailing speakers hung unfinished and salt and time eroded, nevertheless, still active. Finally, a tidal wave of nausea hit them, along with the physical sensation of being microwaved from head to toe—like sunburnt flesh burning while being stung jellyfish-like by billions of radioactive isotopes during a deadly storm of radiation exposure.

Naked Sylvia Black had aged right before Malyj’s sunflower-like hazel eyes: her long cinnamon-brown hair now a silver-white stubble; her lovely gray eyes hidden, bulging, wandering under cataracts as thick as a film of curdled buttermilk; her once smooth-pale, now wrinkled-gray-skinned face swollen and unrecognizable, morphing brownish-red into a baked apple; her now saggy mouth a billion-wrinkled sour-pucker; her now yellow, brown, and black Seminole Indian corn-kernel teeth falling out of bloody, black gums; her fleshy hands now wooden with tangled, unmovable root fingers; her pale body now a bruise the color of police brutality, the color of excessive force; her posture now hunched over, compressed, like an ancient woman sapped of strength yet carrying the weight of the world on her scoliotic back; her beautiful bare feet now gnarled, arthritic decades before their time, as dusty as the Earth is old—too much pain to walk unassisted; and her mind was slipping in-and-out of sanity, startling Malyj with her random outbursts of insane gibberish caused by AIDS-12-induced neurodegeneration:

“. . . American-made ‘Manchurian Candidates’ shooting up America . . . the American media knowingly spreading US government-manufactured fear . . . to modify existing laws, to create new laws, to amend the Constitution of the United States . . . the Zero Freedom of Information Act . . . the for-profit American government is capable of anything, of everything, if left unchecked by We the People . . . America the Beautiful has morphed into something grotesque, morphed into America ’The Wanting Seed’ . . .”

“What?!” Both still staggering, staggering into shadow of volution.

“. . . to change the US Constitution, US laws, and US regulations . . . to change the status quo . . . create fear using brainwashed minds, aka ‘Manchurian Candidates’ . . . then manipulate voter emotion and behavior using sensationalized media . . .”

“What?!” Staggering to a halt.

“. . . the Creator ripped from the Constitution . . . the Constitution raped by greed—the organic now inorganic . . . everything an implied right . . . equal protection equals equal destruction . . . mandatory online voting equals rigged elections . . . the majority vote ignored . . . a technological revolution . . . humanity bound by technological slavery . . . everyone slaves to the machine in an unquestioning world believing what it is told . . . I feel like Leonardo da Vinci trapped inside of a Flintstone’s cartoon . . .”

Malyj was speechless. . . .

“I need to stop,” Sylvia Black gurgled in a moment of clarity, drowning, straining to breathe through, speak with, liquid-filled lungs. “I can’t go on . . .” She collapsed onto the uneven limestone floor. Malyj carefully propped her back up against the rough-hewn arching wall of the mammoth tunnel. Above her, stenciled on the pitted limestone wall, slashed by a Soviet-looking sickle of sharp artificial light, a sizable WARNING in faded reflective-yellow and faded reflective-black paint:

<----- CORRIDOR B -----

----- MAIN NUCLEAR REACTOR ----->

----- K-NAVY NUCLEAR SUBMARINE DOCKING STATION ----->

SCBA / HAZMAT SUIT REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT

CAUTION - RADIATION ZONE - CAUTION

“You can only rest for a second,” said Malyj, “time a new obstacle. We have to find our way back up to the surface world. I need to get you to a surface hospital. You need a surface doc and surface meds stat.” Both as white as sugar cubes and dripping with boiling-hot, chai-colored sweat; the saltwater intake pipes groaning and hissing and steaming above them like angry samovars brewing a lifesaving antidote.

“. . . I have incited revolutions, brought down nations, with only my pen . . . America a racial and socioeconomic divide . . . violent protests and fiery riots across our once great country . . . every courageous civilian hyper-emotional, unable to breathe, pushing back against a deadly militarized police state in a time of peace, pushing back against zero constitutional policing, pushing back against injustice . . . an ultra-corrupt techno-government playing the race card . . . unjust arrests a numbers game, a dollars game, a deadly for-profit game . . . entrapment equals quota equals profit—and all too often equals death . . .”

“Sylvia?!”

“. . . oppressive police policing oppressive police—everything, even the murders they’ve committed on the inhabitants of our states, “justified,” unless captured on video . . . a black-and-white problem—yes, a black-and-white race problem—no, a black-and-white uniformed police state’s manufactured-for-profit problem—yes . . . every pig in uniform knowingly pissing on the American flag . . . the United States Declaration of Independence, the Constitution with Amendments, and the Bill of Rights a profound blueprint twisted, flipped upside down, and pulled inside out until its powers become a misconstructed weapon of abuse . . . faded parchment, the supreme law of the United States of America, reduced to police station toilet paper, reduced to police officer toilet paper . . . human beings shit on, citizens unjustly arrested, never to be seen again, their ‘absconder’ wanted posters the only tangible evidence they ever existed . . .”

“Sylvia?!” Malyj blurted, confused by all of her talk about the surface world, shaking her by her frail shoulders. “Snap out of it! I need you down here! I need you lucid!”

“. . . I feel outraged, like a pissed-off Founding Father, like the freedom-fighter Benjamin Franklin imprisoned within the borders of America’s current totalitarian state, where there’s . . .”

“Sylvia?!” Fear flickered wildly behind Malyj’s lion-hazel eyes, flickered like the flames of two church candles battling the political and moral winds of change.

“. . . zero exercise of Christianity . . . zero freedom of speech . . . zero freedom of the press . . . zero right of the people to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances . . . zero right of the people to keep and bear arms . . .”

“Sylvia?!—shhh!” Malyj was agonizing over Sylvia’s retrospective ranting and raving; she was making him sick with anxiety. Her mind was tuned in to an insane surface world frequency; her grotesquely caricatured mouth was working overtime—spewing unwritten laws over written laws.

“. . . zero right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures . . . zero due process of the law . . . zero speedy and public trial by impartial jury . . . zero life, zero liberty, and zero pursuit of happiness . . . zero public safety . . . zero public good . . zero private property . . . zero right to keep our government from shutting down . . . zero public confidence in our government . . . zero right to oppose those deaf to the voice of justice . . . zero right to preserve, protect, and defend our, not their, Constitution . . . citizens, civilians, subjected to zero right, zero need to know . . .”

“Shhh! They’ll hear us.” Their words echoing their location.

“. . . we must oppose with manly firmness these invasions on the rights of the people . . . we must throw off such government and provide new guards for our future security . . .”

“Quit ranting and raving about the surface world! Please! keep your voice down!”

“’. . . the seeds of future revolutions are already visible as the rantings of today’s heretics . . . true literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics . . .’” Sylvia Black now quoting Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Ho—ly—shit! She’s too far gone. She’s looney tunes, Malyj thought.

“. . . the cops have been watching too many Hollywood shoot-’em-up/blow-’em-up movies . . . they have been ‘Drinking the Kool-Aid’ . . . they need a reality check . . . they need our many, many boots on the backs of their few necks . . . for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction . . . let’s blame their murders on ‘excited delirium’ . . .”

Sylvia’s cataractous stare and crazy words—unsettling. Malyj’s face a long wooden mask painted with fear, like the frozen face of a terrified carousel horse (eyes and nostrils and mouth evermore open) perpetually spinning and spinning and spinning in a colorful blur of carny music and up-and-down never-ending circles. Jesus the Messiah, Chagall, Tchaikovsky, Dostoyevsky, and A. A. Parland a beautiful mental whirlwind swirling inside of his well-educated and Bogonarkodenotikos-19-66.67® drugged and radiation poisoned Orthodox Christian head.

“. . . the three-dimensional Shroud of Turin, pieces of the Dead Sea scrolls, the original Bible, the Bible code, are all embedded in the tunnel’s limestone floor . . . the tunnel is filled with angels and demons . . . Satan stole my pain meds, passing out on the tunnel’s ceiling after taking them . . . man is Creation’s only monster . . . godless ‘intellectuals’—the ultimate oxymoron, for-profit homosexuals, and radical Muslims a trident, a three-pronged attack against the American way of life—our Declaration of Independence, Constitution with Amendments, and Bill of Rights their three weapons . . . it’s all poop . . .” said terminally ill (AIDS-12 infected/radiation poisoned) and drugged (Bogonarkodenotikos-19-66.67® injected) Sylvia Black, now rambling incoherently like a deranged jazz musician improvising frantically.

An AIDS-12 blister appeared on Sylvia Black’s now brownish-red, swollen, ruptured, baked-apple-looking face. AIDS-12 blisters suddenly bubbling, seeping, bursting open, leaving black holes weeping green-and-yellow-tinged pus—from her now rotten-apple-looking face—like wriggling and squirming worms. Her hot breath like boiled-cabbage farts. Her bloodied, multicolored teeth still falling from her saggy, billion-wrinkled mouth. She shed her thick, yellowing fingernails and thick, yellowing toenails like withered, fall-colored leaves. The revolting, squirting, exploding AIDS-12 blisters reproduced exponentially all over her once lovely body.

“. . . for decades the US government, the US Post Office, have been collecting our contacts, handwriting samples, and fingerprints from our mail . . . collecting our DNA samples from licked stamps and licked envelopes . . . have been reading our letters . . .”

The sounds of bio-masked voices—echoed, the sounds of stomping jackboots—echoed, and the sounds of barking and snarling dogs—echoed, from which direction the echoing intermixture originated, it was impossible to tell. Time and space seemed to fold and expand and fold and expand like an accordion bellowing vertigo. One moment the sounds seemed close, then faraway, close, then faraway. The tension of the unknown pushing and pulling and pushing and pulling on their frazzled nerves. Their two heartbeats volleying between their clasped hands. The flashing caution-yellow lights and colicky-wailing siren were still active. VIL-EN was still screaming, screaming her little microchipped heart out:

“Escapee! Equality 30541! Escapee! . . . Escapee! Equality 121867! Escapee!”

Sylvia Black vomited, pollinating the tunnel’s sandy floor with her few remaining T-cells. Malyj plucked her frail, retching body from the vibrating limestone, her head dangling from her limp neck like a wilted hibiscus flower. She was dying, the AIDS-12 virus/infection reaching its twelve-hour mark (she had been inoculated against living). The tunnel’s radiation also expeditiously destroying what was left of her minuscule immune system.

“. . . the for-profit US government fining the obese, the sick, the unemployed, the uninsured, the indigent, the imprisoned—assets Big Government and Big Business created . . . squeezing profit from the undesirables, from the unprofitables—like blood from a stone . . . a warning to every citizen not contributing enough, a warning to every citizen not reading beyond the headlines, a warning to . . .”

He struggled to carry her. Stumbling. Stopping. Stumbling. Stopping. They advanced in small increments, like the ticking second hand of a clock pushing against the heavy veil of time.

“. . . Zero tolerance equals mass incarceration equals mass genocide! Deadly force laws unconstitutional! No justice, no peace! Civil disobedience! Domestic insurrection! Indict the System! I can’t breathe! . . .” Sylvia Black ga-ga-gasped for air one last time—a sharp utterance like her throat was being slowly cut, or, unjustly crushed by a banned police chokehold—then died in Malyj’s trembling arms. Reality sinking into the gray quicksand of her dead mind. His salty tears fell upon her cratered “face” like optical flares illuminating a bruised-brown/rotten-apple-skinned, cataractous-eyed, noseless, billion-wrinkled-mouthed, toothless, black-holed/green-and-yellow-pus-oozing, constantly-distorting, Halloween-mask “face.” Her still erupting varicolored and varipatterned pustules smelled of blood from a cauterized wound—like volcanic sulfur, struck matches, and copper—smelled of discharged gunpowder ending a deadly game of Russian roulette.

Sobbing. Sobbing uncontrollably. Remembering how beautiful she had been: the sharp lines of her beautiful profile had melted into something ugly. Screaming. Screaming out “Why God?!” in displaced anger. His words echoing and echoing and echoing, scattering like disoriented bats. He carried her lifeless body as far as he physically could, then carefully laid her down on her back in the distorted shadows of the unfinished, irradiated limestone tunnel—which now served as her mummified/liquefying body’s makeshift tomb.

Mechanically dragging her deadweight then pausing, mechanically dragging her deadweight then pausing, mechanically dragging her deadweight behind him; he dragged her inert corpse across the uneven-and-gritty, vibrating limestone floor until he was physically unable to drag her soulless flesh another inch, until he collapsed like a malfunctioning machine.

He positioned her naked body with a loving respect, kissed her Halloween-mask “face,” then checked her vital signs, hoping and praying for any sign of life. . . . Zero. Zero sign of life—like an ancient reflection in a window from the future.

The reality of Sylvia Black’s death, and the fact that he would have to leave her behind, gave Malyj a violent, painful mind fucking.

Linear time slowed down, stopped, bent and folded, touched itself, creating a loop. Two points in time that were once separated by distance were now overlapping and everything repeated. Just for a moment, it was like this had happened before, yet it was only detectable inside of Malyj’s mind at that moment (as if time resides inside all of us separately). A déjà vu.

He positioned her naked body with a loving respect, kissed her Halloween-mask “face,” then checked her vital signs, hoping and praying for any sign of life. . . . Zero.

Zero sign of life—like an ancient reflection in a window from the future.

The reality of Sylvia Black’s death, and the fact that he would have to leave her behind, gave Malyj a violent, painful mind fucking.

“Dead . . .” Malyj said in disbelief, crossing himself over Sylvia Black’s dead body three times, right-to-left, followed by a slight bow. “Watch over your departed, Lord Jesus.” He wiped the puddling tears away from his swollen eyes with the back of his dirty hand. Heartbroken—and all alone, he reluctantly stumbled down the ominously-shadowed, irradiated limestone tunnel back toward the slanting shadows of radiation-free concrete block Corridor B: leaving her behind. Her naked body unrecognizable, now a bubbling, green-and-yellow-pus-oozing mound of AIDS-12-infected/irradiated flesh. “Sorry, Sylvia . . .” he said, feeling guilty for abandoning her liquefying mass (a crucified guilt only those loyal to someone unto death could fathom). But! he had to vacate the deadly radiation zone immediately, get out of the tomb-like limestone tunnel and back into radiation-free concrete block Corridor B—and fast, to save his own life. He started to laugh wildly, hysterically, uncontrollably, not understanding why because he was so terribly! terribly! terribly! heartbroken.

Malyj’s entire body was now covered in blistering, erupting, green-and-yellow-pus-oozing, blackened sores. His irradiated skin like Pepper Jack cheese microwaved until a bubbling film; each bubble/sore congealing, leaving dark, irregular patches like deadly melanoma, or ugly cigarette burns. His death-black craters/sores smelled of volcanic sulfur, or spent SOS flares. Now back inside of radiation-free concrete block Corridor B, the limestone-tunnel’s dose of radiation was still rapidly destroying, precious T-cell by precious T-cell, his fragile HIV-1-compromised immune system. His irradiated mind slipping into infinite madness: seeing repetitive patterns on everything; seeing religious symbols in everything; seeing the unseen for the first time. Hearing God’s voice screaming “Why art thous?” inside of his fission and fusion swollen head. Smelling and tasting sulfur. Trouble swallowing, panicking, head snapping down and to the right, Adam’s apple painfully clicking. His equilibrium unbalanced, like his upper body was twisting away from his lower body, like he was half-snake above half-man. His large irradiated feet arthritic, making it difficult to walk—let alone run; the bones in his feet deforming right before his bloodshot eyes. The radiation poisoning was making him feel ill, like he guzzled three pots of black coffee on an empty stomach. He was experiencing the shakes, he felt weak, he felt nauseous as though he were going to vomit. He felt on edge, irritable, like he could kill someone, kill everyone—or commit suicide. He was getting another migraine—a bad one, thoughts like flash-bang grenades exploding inside of his head; his right eye was throbbing, just like Sylvia Black’s heart had once throbbed. Suddenly, floaters of light like spastic sperm swarmed his vision until he was blinded by their light as though his eyeballs were eggs to be fertilized. He fought to not pass out—

A swarm of armed drones whizzed past the back of, and disappeared in front of, Malyj’s nuked head like a flock of miniature metal seagulls. VIL-EN’s hologram emerged from the stormy cloud-shadows behind him, and like a ghost ship, she sailed right through his solid body as if he wasn’t there, quickly pulling away from him, navigating toward the atrium’s main cantilevered walkway like it was the edge of the Earth, like it was the edge of time. The enemy wave was rolling down the massive concrete block corridor, hunting for Malyj’s alphanumeric (E30541) GPS-tracking microchip (still hidden like buried treasure deep inside of E112731s hollowed-out, borax-dusted carcass) like it was still his implanted homing beacon (zero digital footprint equals modern privacy, equals modern freedom). Cipher-less Malyj now offline, making himself invisible to the State’s technology: technology makes all of Mans’ walls—physical and mental, transparent. He was left behind like an island drowning in a sea of radiation. Black scabs clung to him like diseased barnacles, clung to him like the blots of his many transgressions.

The sounds of angry, bio-masked voices—echoed, the sounds of heavy, stomping jackboots—echoed, and the sounds of a K-9 unit’s rabid dogs’ barking and snarling—echoed. How close, how far away, or from which direction they originated, it was impossible to tell. Sound seemed to bounce back and forth and up and down, echoes crisscrossing along the infinite concrete block corridor.

Malyj’s mental compass suddenly bearing-less: no sense of direction.

Nothing looked familiar.

His irradiated mind a redacted map.

Lost.

Panicking.

Terrified.

Malyj’s deteriorating mind questioned: Am I really experiencing these things, or am I going insane?

His smooth, pale man skin had congealed into a bumpy, gray alligator hide—had congealed into a scabby armor. His transformed body was shaking as though the secret police were hammering on his front door at midnight.

The flashing caution-yellow lights and colicky-wailing siren were still active. VIL-EN was still screaming, screaming her little microchipped heart out:

“Escapee! Equality 30541! Escapee!”

No mention of escapee Equality 121867 this time. Had “they” already found Sylvia Black’s “body”? Are “they” close behind me? he thought anxiously.

As Malyj “ran” for his life through a subterranean hell—guided by his guardian angel, he could still hear Sylvia Black ranting and raving about the surface world, still hear her words like a crossfire of echoes inside of his battered head, still hear her words like a footnote to nothing:

. . . the for-profit philosophy of the United States of America . . . all men are created to equal profit . . . unprofitable equals expendable . . . of honor, trust, and profit—only profit remains . . . profit, not prudence, not God, will dictate US government, will dictate US corporations . . . profit waging war against God, against nature, against human nature . . . anything and everything found profitable—no matter how vulgar, no matter how immoral—now an “implied” constitutional right . . . loss is the product of profit . . . correction equals conformity, conformity equals profit . . . Karpian impounds lobotomized, their spirits excised like cancer, their souls extinguished like church candles, all in the name of profit . . .

Malyj had learned—the hard way, a lesson about himself: Without his secret strength of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit—he would not have gotten this far, he would not have a prayer of surviving this subterranean hell. Malyj had learned—the hard way, a lesson about the world, about mankind: Without God, without God’s Word as a guide, the world is lost, the world is hell, and unawares mankind—surface or subterranean—its greedy for-profit demons.

Malyj felt like he was running in place on the cantilevered walkway, like he was running across a rusted horizontal timeline—only stuck on zero, as if being pulled by positive and negative infinity equally.