Seven Demons Aidan Truhen (reading an ebook TXT) 📖

challenges to their sense of personal security THAT IS ART.

Art in the round I guess.

Behind the giant stripped pine desk which has been handmade and still has bark on the edges there is an expensive office chair and behind that there is the first of the real doors. The first X8.

We move toward the inner door.

Doc nods to Rex.

Rex gets the pig out of the bag.

She’s a very happy pig. You can tell she’s seeing things pigs in the normal context do not see. Art exhibits and fireworks are not the half of it that pig is way stoned. Which is a good thing because there’s a weird line stitched around her eye socket and a blue human eye staring out at the world from what looks to be an extensively adjusted skullhole possibly including a rubberized Ping-Pong ball clip. If she was not way stoned, she would almost certainly be screaming and that is not anything you ever want to hear. She also weighs maybe fifty kilos, which makes her in pig terms a tiddler, but it’s also not nothing and Rex grunts a bit as he lifts her face to the retinal scanner. The X8 hisses a little as he steps into close proximity and a red light comes on.

system armed.

Rex lifts her face onto the scan plate.

The pig’s eyes close very gently and she starts to snore.

retina not found. system armed.

Doc says: “O for shit’s sake take the pig away for a second—”

She sticks a needle in the pig’s ass.

ROINK!

proximity unauthorized. system engaged. ten. nine.

“Doc this door is not a good door. It is a mean door.”

“Put the pig back please Rex.”

scanning…scanning…

accepted.

The X8 makes a disappointed noise and opens.

Good door.

Saul appears out of nowhere and the pig goggles at him like ooooooh magic. The rest of us jump a little because there just wasn’t anyone in that corner there was not. He steps through the door without making any noise and everyone waits for sounds like kung fu in the movies and those sounds do not come.

Do not come.

Do not.

Saul waves us through the door.

Silence. And you have not heard silence until you have heard it in a vault on a mountain. There is silence here even with the crump crump of fireworks and the yada yada of all the people there is silence here like you cannot get in a town. There is no traffic, no infrastructure, no whisper of humans. Just room tone and something underneath like thunder that is the waterfall in the heart of the mountain going down most of a kilometer into places you do not ever want to see.

Down down in the deeps down and deeper into the wet black hell.

There are no guards in the corridor and none in the atrium. Maybe they were all out among the crowd. Maybe they are holed up waiting to ambush us. Maybe something else.

Maybe something bad.

Saul does not whisper and he does not really talk it is a special inside voice for commandos he says:

“Clear no contact.”

But I can tell he is not real relaxed about that. Because according to Doc’s plan there should be contact. If not now, then soon.

On to door number two.

—

Eiger’s fortress is a maze of corridors which double back around U-bend corners and duck under and over one another so that you don’t know where you are or which way you came in but Doc and Charlie have sucked the map right out of the system so they know that there are secret lines drawn on the floor in secret magic ink, apparently it is ultraviolet but that is magic. We follow the lines in and on and in and all the time hearing the thrumming from under us, which is the mountain singing to the deep deep hole in the earth and all the time waiting for soldiers to appear and they don’t and they don’t and that just makes it worse. The pig unlocks doors for us like she’s getting into it now. Rex carries her and sometimes I carry her and then we get to a door and Charlie gives some kind of code response and then we have like a minute to do the scan before the X8 gets pissy and fires shotguns or electricity or whatever and the pig is like oooooooooh shiny red dot oooh and she makes little pig sexy noises and opens the doors.

One.

Two.

Three layers in and now we are at the water room.

Charlie plugs a thing into the thing and says go and we go into the air lock. I think it is the worst thing I have ever had to do like going into a submarine knowing there is no submarine.

The pig and I are at one on this. She is not digging the water room.

The worst part of Doc’s plan is the water room. It’s completely dark and you go into it in this steel bubble thing and you can hear the sound of the thing that is under you churning and thrashing and there is a kind of vertigo that I have never had before that happens when you know there is a current and a stud wall and if you fall through it you will die of crushing.

It will be fine.

We get into the air lock and there are suits and they are slightly awesome. Like they are plug-and-play suits. Like you stand on the shoes and fall backward into them and the suit closes over your tummy and then there is a helmet that you put on and blam you are like an action figure.

The pig we have to kinda improvise. We feed her in and the suit folds up around her and her head is in the helmet. Moving in the suit in air is like lifting weights it is hard. The pig does not approve of this situation she feels constrained and unpig and she does not like that so she craps in the suit. The suit tells Charlie the pig