From Heaven's Door

Chapter 9

VIII

Salvation.

Purify yourself.

"#7. Wake up. #7. Wake up."

Some hushed, monotone voice, baritone and powerful, slipped into my consciousness and pulled me from the dregs of a heavy sleep. Grogginess and a vague discomfort where the only things I could feel. I blinked open my eyes and saw a thick, intensely bright light shining on my eyes and a silhouetted face in front of it. I tried to move and found myself firmly bound to a flat metal surface.

What a lovely way to wake up.

I weakly struggled and the silhouette put a hand on my head. "Hush. You're still weak, #7. We're lucky we retrieved you from the anomaly as soon as we did."

Anomaly...?

I thought. There was a black spot where my memory was about the Mad Room itself, thank God, but unlike my last bout of amnesia, I knew I'd entered the Mad Room, I knew everything that had happened prior, and I was lucid enough to realize I was likely in a state of jeopardy. I tried to vocalize in protest, but nothing came out. Not even a grunt.

The silhouette nodded to itself. "You are still incapable of speech. What an unfortunate imperfection. Your right arm was also still paralyzed – completely non-functional, in fact – so I took the liberty of removing the useless part from your body. I sincerely hope you're grateful for that."

One part of me was outraged this fucker, whoever it was, had taken off my goddamned arm. Another part of me was sincerely grateful, because that arm had literally been nothing but a load to me. I limply tried to c**k my head to the side and found an unbearable pain shoot through my spine.

"Do not move yet," the silhouette requested. "The anesthetic is still wearing off. You should be able to move normally in about half-an-hour."

I silently cursed to myself and righted my head to the straight position it had been in previously. From how I felt, I was in a supine position, my spine straight and my limbs fettered to the surface I was on through some metallic straps. I peered down my body through my eyes. Through the glare of the light, I could see my clothes had been replaced with a blank white hospital gown.

Fucker had undressed me. Kill me now.

The silhouette reared up. "I trust you're in something of an uncomfortable position right now and I imagine you're wondering what you're doing here. I'll explain momentarily."

They got up and walked out of my vision. I knew better than to crane my head to follow them. I could hear them press something a few feet away, and the metal bed started shifting under me. Gradually, the bed pulled upwards with me still on it, bringing the light out of my direct line of view and stopping after it had pulled up to a slanted position. The silhouette walked back to me and pushed the light out of the way.

He was quickly identifiable as a middle-aged male. He had thin brown hair, frameless glasses, side-burns, dark skin, and a round, plump face. He generally looked of Indian heritage, his eyes plain and brown, his nose large, and his mouth flat and unemotive. He was dressed in a white lab coat with a familiar emblem woven into the left breast pocket. It was tiny and indistinct, but I knew what it was immediately.

Red Clover. He was with Red Clover. My favor of the man – what little there was of it – quickly evaporated as the man sat down on a metal chair he'd pulled up to the metal bed I was on. The room, from what I could see of it, was fairly dingy looking, materials and beakers and things of all sorts scattered about the counters surrounding us, organized on hooks and shelves and labeled with numbers and letters that meant nothing to me. The walls were a dull dark blue, tiled. I assumed the floor looked the same. There was a yellowish-brown stain at the far corner of the left wall, where I could see another gray door with a level knob out of the corner of my eye. My eyes moved to the Red Clover man.

"My name is Harlow Grave. You should know me solely by this point as an affiliate of Red Clover, correct? That puts me at a hostile end from your point-of-view." He leaned in a little closer. "We are not the enemies, #7. We're doing everything we can to stay away from that label."

I mouthed something, and Harlow stood up. "Do excuse me for a second. I don't want to talk to you and not give you the chance of asking any questions of your own. I took the notebook #48 gave you, as well as your other items, for the time being, but I think you'll find this much more convenient."

Harlow walked off, to the right side of the room and through a door I couldn't see, leaving me alone in the room. It looked like a sort of laboratory, but it was hard to distinguish between my throbbing headache and the fact I had no goddamned idea whether or not this was still part of Paradise or not.

Where was Mint? Darby? Any of them? Had they been killed? Confiscated? Strapped to a table, like me? Had they gotten away? All I knew is that I'd been exposed to the Mad Room for much longer than I'd wanted to be and it had taken a severe toll on my consciousness.

Harlow returned with a square-shaped device with a padded gray back and a dark-green screen, a segmented tube extending from the bottom of it. In his other hand was a stand, apparently meant to hold it.

"These were made for a few of our mute subjects," Harlow explained. "You seem to be the only survivor among them, so I wouldn't have figured we'd need to continue using these."

He leaned down, put the stand on the left side of my head, and adjusted it so the top of it was near my neck. He put the device on the stand and put the tube onto my neck. I immediately felt a sharp prick of a needle going into my neck and I bit my lip in pain. Suddenly, a distorted, unclear sound started coming from the device, which caused Harlow to lean over and adjust a knob on it. The sound came out clear.

Words came out.

"W-What the hell is going on? What-!?"

They were responded to my thoughts. My vocal cues.

My voice.

Through the digital layer, it, too, was fairly raspy and androgynous. Tomboyish, if anything.

"I- you- I can talk?" I said, through the device. It was all at once relieving and horrifically startling to me.

"That is correct," Harlow responded. "I won't get into the technicalities of it. How would you like to be addressed, #7?"

I thought.

"Tango. Call me Tango. Now who the f-"

"Tango it is, then," Harlow said, cutting off my first question. "You're a survivor. #48 noted that quickly. Our subordinate, Ash, let us know at the first opportunity, and we reasoned that after you'd seen what you did, there was no more excuse to continue allowing you to run around in the dark."

I paused, then shouted. "What the f**k do you mean 'survivor?' Why the hell are you assholes killing people!?"

"All part of the program," Harlow said. "That is... the P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. program. It stands for Paradise Association – that being Red Clover's parent company – Rapture Assignment: Dimensional Interlinking Simulation Exercise."

That only raised up more questions than it did answer.

"Simulation exercise? Why the f**k are you simulating something?" I asked, growing more and more impatient.

"To test our theories about the Boundary," he said, with another non-answer. "You were one of one-hundred individuals who signed up to experience the simulation back in the open world. Your involvement was completely voluntary – otherwise, we never would have put you here to begin with."

"Voluntary? I've had no f*****g idea who or what anything is for the last few days, I've been running away from those things you're using to f*****g murder us, and I can't remember one single thing about who I was. Does that strike you as 'voluntary,' Dr. Harlow? What sick experiment are you assholes running?"

"A test in dimensional warping," Harlow replied. "We filed out applications globally for the program. We outlined everything that would happen: the purpose, the research, and the dangers. It was all very apparent. To the one-hundred who eventually volunteered, we implanted a sort of neurochip in their brain that induced what we call 'controlled amnesia.' That is, as long as the chip is implanted in your brain, certain memories – primarily that of your self – are blocked out. As soon as we remove the chip, you'll remember everything."

I deadpanned. "So you stripped us of our memories then sent us to romp around in some weird-ass complex. How the hell did you even get the applicants?"

Harlow chuckled, the first form of emotion I'd heard from him the entire conversation. It was incredibly unnerving. "That's a very, very simple answer: money. We realized that nobody but the brave, possibly suicidal few would willingly apply with only the words on the paper alone, so we simply attached an extra note of a payment of three-hundred million American dollars to each person who applied. Technically, if you step out of this establishment, you'll be a millionaire. Nobody can say no to indulgence. You certainly couldn't, and neither could the ninety-nine other people who signed up for the program."

I felt disgusted. It was goddamned bribery that brought me here. Common f*****g greed.

Harlow continued before I could squeeze in another question. "The applicants, as you can imagine, came from a wealth of backgrounds, heritages, and ailments. None of them were particularly morally upstanding. Your compatriot... #93, although I believe they called themselves Darby, was a wanted murderer from northern New Jersey."

My heart skipped a few beats.

"You're lying. They're not like that," I pleaded through my digital voice.

"You have no idea of how to judge who is guilty and who isn't, Tango. We made sure of that."

"You bribed one-hundred people into signing up for some twisted experiment that meant erasing their identities and tossing them in a f*****g maze to be killed by monsters! I think that sounds plenty guilty to me!"

"No. Not guilty. Never guilty. Every experiment, every test, is for a purpose. To discover something. Something new. Do you know what it was we're trying to discover, Tango? The scale of what is what we're trying to find?"

I glared at him, silent.

"...No. But it can't be anything good."

Harlow smirked. "You are again wrong, Tango. This has all been for the purpose of enlightenment. As I said, the P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. program was meant to test the theories of dimensional warping. Through advanced, covert studies, we'd discovered something remarkable that tested the very limits of what we knew about our own universe. What could only be described as the signals of another plane beholden to an alternate set of physics was found at the farthest point we've ever analyzed in the universe, in the reaches where we only thought dark matter existed. It was a weak spot – a warp – in our own universe, and through it, energies of the other world could be detected by the equipment we'd used to inadvertently find it. Discussion broke out in the scientific community, and we eventually decided to name this alternate plane the only thing we could all agree on: Heaven."

Heaven. Fluffy f*****g Heaven. Christian Heaven. The goddamned afterlife Heaven.

"You're f*****g kidding. You have to be f*****g kidding me here," I said in disbelief.

"Everything I tell you is the absolute truth. There is no point in lying. Years of studying and analyzing these signals commenced, and it was eventually decided to replicate the effect in facilities here on Earth. Through the effort of billions of dollars, we built a fifty-floor multi-purpose complex called Paradise in a remote location for the purpose of housing these effects. Testing the warps here led to very, very interesting side effects. Rooms would subtly alter their shape and the laws of physics broke if you looked at them hard enough – three inches could now exist in a place where there was only room for two. As the effects continued, some of the rooms completely altered and changed. Other effects were a little less desirable on the overall outcome, but it confirmed to us we were doing exactly what we needed to do; some sections of Paradise completely gave away into the weak spots in reality we created. These resulted in the aberrations you know as the Mad Rooms... and what we plucked you and your compatriot out of before you were driven completely insane."

Compatriot. Mint.

"M-Mint?! They're still alive?! Where? Where? Where did you take them?"

Harlow laughed. "Ease yourself, Tango. They are perfectly fine. They have been taken to a separate room to be groomed, retested, and implanted with a new chip to be reentered into Paradise in a new amnesiac state. They won't remember you and we can start the tests with them anew."

I struggled against the binds, which only caused me to hurt more.

"N-No! You can't do that! They'll die, o-or worse!" I begged.

"Such as it is," Harlow said, with a frightening lack of human concern. "Your neurochip sort of malfunctioned upon contact with the anomalies resultant from the Mad Room. Not enough to stop working, but enough to concern us. Your compatriot – #59 – simply went unconscious, but you briefly lost your sanity. When we retrieved you, you were in a sort of half-conscious zone, reduced to a gibbering, schizophrenic vegetative state. We repaired your chip and saved your mind before it completely collapsed; that, too, you should be thankful for."

I was already starting to cry. "I'm not going to be f*****g thankful for anything you do, you sick bastard!"

Harlow gave a low, mirthless chuckle. "You'll learn to be gracious. After we obtained everything we could from the initial experiments, we decided it would be best to test the effects of living subjects in such an environment and how the environment would affect them. That's when we came up with the program. Everything we have gleaned from these studies, every single thing that has transpired in this project has given us more knowledge about the universe at large in the past ten years than all of humanity has discovered in the past one-thousand. This is all for the purpose of punching a hole big enough in the fabric of our space that will allow us to breach past the space-between-spaces – the Boundary, as I mentioned – and reach Heaven itself. That on its own will bring us knowledge to push humanity forwards into a brand new, enlightened era. The next stage of our development."

I thought back. Through my scrambled memories, I remembered what I'd thought up in my vegetative state.

Alien eyes. Boundary. Other side.

Something.

I started to panic.

"Harlow," I explained, my voice for once no longer hostile but desperate, "you can't do that. When I was knocked out by that f*****g whatever in the Mad Room, I saw things. Felt things. There is something horrible in Heaven, and if you give it a chance to get in-!"

"Simple ravings of a damaged brain," Harlow said, suddenly. He dismissed it as quickly as he could. "You saw and felt nothing, Tango. What we are accomplishing by breaking the Boundary and opening up Heaven is like reaching into a hole and pulling out a solid chunk of gold. The experiments have been commencing beautifully and the fact some of the survivors have persevered for seven straight weeks in the simulated environment confirms to us we're almost ready."

I look at Harlow, eyes wide and pleading. "You can't be serious. You can't do this."

"But we can, Tango. And we will. This is for the betterment of mankind itself."

Greed. Ill-placed curiosity. A desire to muck about where they shouldn't have.

Self-destructiveness.

These were all the aspects of humanity. This is what they were doing to themselves.

Harlow stood up. "We are entering the eighth week of development in Paradise. Not including you and #48, the latter of whom has been temporarily employed for us as part of their deal with the Director after they came across the surveillance rooms, there are... five survivors left. #59, #85, #93, #37, and #65. Since you've already seen the true nature of the simulations and now know the true nature of the experiments, there is no longer any reason to keep you here."

There was a shifting sound of metal from under me and I could feel my arm suddenly hang loose. The anesthetic was wearing off and I leaned forth a little.

"Red Clover is thankful for your cooperation for this far into the simulation. Outside, in the hall, is your escort; they'll take you out of the laboratories to have your chip extracted. From there, you are free to go with your three-hundred million and our appreciation back to your life."

Back to my life.

I stared at him, uneasy. "If you extract my chip... I'll remember everything. Who I was before this."

"That is correct," Harlow said. "Your role in the simulation is over and as by legal obligation, we will be returning your identity to you with your payment. It was but a temporary extraction, anyways."

I considered things. I had the answers. I knew everything now. Extract the chip, and I'd get my memory back. I had a chance to walk out of this alive and intact. Harlow had a wide smile on his face and seemed to be inviting me to step off the bed.

I looked around the room. There was another door leading to a side room at the left, visible through a rectangular mirror. I looked at the counter closest to us, and saw a pocket knife conspicuously within Harlow's grasp.

I decided, that day, that I was going to take down Red Clover myself and stop this hideous experiment.

I immediately brought my fist into Harlow's face and felt a wed thunk under it. Harlow felt back with a muffled groan of surprise, his nose broken and his blood now on my fist. As he tottered back over the chair, clutching his bloody nose, I took the knife, reared over, and jammed it into his fat neck before he could recuperate. A rasping gurgle escaped this throat as he looked up at me with wide, terrified eyes. I glared down at him without any semblance of pity and thrust the knife in deeper, his rich, foamy blood pouring out from his neck and mouth in a bubbling torrent. I finally drew the knife out from his flesh and stood up, the tube connecting me to the device allowing me to talk falling out. Harlow twitched, drowning in his own blood and finally going still after a few minutes. His clouded-over eyes were locked on me the entire time he died, agony and anger still apparent in them as they glazed over and stopped seeing. His blood poured out of his throat and pooled around him, staining my naked feet red. His lifeblood had already thoroughly soaked my gown. I looked at him.

Waste of life, I figured. He was a smug asshole anyways.

I quickly tucked the vocal device into a pocket in the front of my gown just as another person opened the metal door in surprise. They were dressed in the same black suits I'd seen on the people accompanying Ash, the Red Clover emblem bright and mocking on their chest. They immediately aimed up some jet-black semi-automatic Uzi at me and opened fire. The moment I saw the gun go up, I rolled under the counter with a brief surge of energy, my heart racing.

Holy s**t. Now I was officially on Red Clover's s**t list. I'd just killed a living, breathing human being. Then I remembered that human being had been complicit in the deaths of the ninety-three other survivors, and I suddenly didn't feel so bad.

The sound of the Red Clover gunman's footsteps approaching the counter echoed through the room. I was all at once incredibly panicked and prepped to make a mad dash out of this place. The moment the gunman's foot peeked over the edge of the counter, I swiftly kicked out my leg and tripped them. Taken aback, the gunman fell face-first towards me and I stuck up the knife. They collapsed right onto it and pinned me to the ground, the strength of my scrawny left arm falling quickly against the weight of their body. The gun left their grasp and a muffled gasp left their obscured mouth as a damp spot appeared where the knife had entered their body. Through the lungs, I think. They sputtered, convulsed, and started to die on top of me, their body rigid and wracked with spasms. I let out a mute cry of revolt and pushed up with all my strength to get them off me. In their convulsions, their fist shot up to my face and got me hard in the mouth, and the iron-laced tasted of blood filled my mouth. Through a good deal of effort, I finally their dying form off of me and took a deep breath in, breath taken away from the effort of having to shove that asshole off of me. I spat out a broken upper tooth and felt a dribble of blood trickle down my lip. It didn't really hurt, but the shock was apparent. I looked towards the collapsed Uzi and pondered.

I had absolutely no experience with firearms – let alone a f*****g Uzi – and firing with one arm would be, at best, reckless and hazardous to my own safety. I put my foot on the dead gunman and wrenched the knife out. Thankfully, no alarms had set off – either the surveillance didn't work here, Red Clover didn't care, or I was a lucky bastard. I looked to the door and mapped out my action plan.

Find Mint. Find my stuff. Break out.

I looked at the hospital gown I was clad in. It was the only thing I was wearing and it was already sticky with blood. I scowled in disgust.

Get some new clothes. Jesus f*****g Christ.

I breathed in.

Don't engage in conflict unless I need to. Red Clover and anyone that tries to keep me out of this place can die. Uh... don't die, myself. Death isn't exactly good for my health right now.

I couldn't help but smile a little even in the heat of the moment. I stepped over the dead bodies of the Red Clover gunman and Harlow.

Here I was now. A murderer, an escapee, a fugitive, and a renegade who just turned down my one easy way out of this hellhole. I needed to. Red Clover couldn't open a hole in reality to Heaven. The only apt description of that something that wanted inside our world was the only thing that could go alongside Heaven itself: God.

God could not be allowed in. From Heaven's door, nobody was allowed in and nobody was allowed out. I guessed it was up to me and the other runaways to prevent that.

I walked away from the people I'd killed and entered the door out of the lab.