JB CCXXXVII: The Wages of Sin
Dig below the surface of any European city and you can find graveyards, sarcophagi, ruins. The detritus of what came before, a broken record of long-dead people and civilizations alike. Walk through these shadows of dead history, and you can reach the underworld, a place no sane person would ever wish to stay. And sometimes, a powerful enough example of the unquiet dead can reverse the journey, stepping from the dark mirror of the underworld into the bowels of the Earth.
One of them is An-Jin Choi: Murder victim, analyst, conqueror, Deathlord. In one and a half decades of adaptation to unlife, he has learned to thrive in a society built on casual torture and violation. Become powerful, bloated on stolen power and unearned secrets and righteous anger. And in an instant, he would give up all of it for revenge. Because like every wraith, he is indelibly marked by the circumstances of his death.
When Jamelia Belltower stole his body for the sake of saving the future, it marked him. When Jamelia Belltower expended his life in service to the cause of human survival it gave him reason to hate. A cruelty to avenge. And when Jamelia Belltower's plan to change the past by destroying the archives and secrets of the NWO succeeded, forcing an evacuation of high-level academics and agents from the NWO's premier station until security functions were restored, it ended with his death.
His sacrifice widened the wire-thin path to the survival of humanity. His death lobotomized Threat Null's intelligence capabilities, cut it off from reams of blackmail and scores of trained operatives who would have become part of the exhuman gestalt that called itself the Agency. An unwinnable war became theoretically winnable. And all it cost was the terrifying violation and murder of a single man. An act terrible enough that it kept him from passing quietly, allowed him to steal dangerous secrets from Jamelia Belltower's mind to reinforce him, enough for him to usurp power from the rulers of the dead and damned. The irony isn't lost on him that he's done every sin he's accused Jamelia Belltower of doing, every sin he's seen Jamelia Belltower doing, and more besides. But it's the nature of men to create monsters, and it's the nature of those monsters to resemble the men who created them.
Belltower discarded him because he was weak, and An-Jin Choi wonders if she'll appreciate what he's become now. Strengthened via unholy hate and the desperation necessary to commune with the dead, usurped gods who seek only oblivion. A monster fattened on neverdying everdying primordial power and a million unforgivable crimes. A monster because he had no choice but to survive on stolen knowledge and skills and no goal save vengeance. A monster with a strange-bedfellows alliance along a group in the Technocracy called Oversight, which he knows wish to wrest control of the Technocratic Union from its too-dovish leadership and eradicate things like him from the Earth if they win. But he doesn't care about them or their goals. But whether they win or lose doesn't matter to him, nor does he care about their designs on the human race. If those sympathies didn't die the moment he did, they did at some point during the years when he sought out the power of the usurped progenitors of the universe, creatures so alien that their attempted destruction broke the very concept of death and allowed abominations like him to exist.
Oversight must wonder why he still keeps working with them when they've taken every opportunity to short-change him and his followers, giving them the bare minimum of table scraps. Jazmin Clock saw him as a useful idiot, even if she hid it well. Whoever he's talking to wants to make it clear that all he would ever be to them is a useful idiot, and even the 'useful' was up for debate. He's helped them localize Jamelia Belltower and assisted in spying on other Technocrats with wraiths they can't detect. He's played a loyal, deniable ally to them and all he's demanded for it are trinkets, goodwill, and this one favor. They must think him a fool. But they've never seen what the Underworld looks like. And even if they've seen it, it's hard to comprehend how awful existence among the dead is without living it. Nothingness would be better than this unlife, for all his power and wealth. And he can't pass on until Belltower is resolved, one way or another. He hardly cares about their inevitable betrayal. What are they going to do? Kill him again? If they want to do it, they'll need to get in line after all the other enemies he's made. And they'll need to wait for him to get his vengeance, anyways.
If he thought they would get in the way of that, he'd turn on them in a heartbeat. But he can sense how obsessed Oversight's leadership is with Belltower as well, sense their relationships in a black web of intrigue and pain. They'll wait to see who comes out victorious before taking any action, enacting their own contingencies. And that's all he wants from them. That one chance to take down Jamelia Belltower, and the knowledge that they'll be there to strike at her again if he falls. He hasn't told them that, of course. They might suspect, but as long as they think he's being gullible rather than mission-focused, it's been to his benefit.
He smiles mirthlessly as he walks through the skein separating the worlds of the dead and the living, stepping out from the cruel gray shadow of the underworld into the underside of Paris along with his few hand-chosen killers. He transitions from plasm into being embodied in the custom-built cadaver - grown from his DNA and augmented with wet and dry technology alike - gifted him as payment for the tools he gave to hurt Jamelia Belltower. The pain of the scars Elissa al-Hallaq left is damped through the numbness of dead nerves, but he does not care. He's a creature of the underworld now. He has experienced far, far worse than mere burns.
He has no time to prepare armies or lay siege here, because Jamelia Belltower is here. His murderer is here. The woman his benefactors call the Adversary is here. The anticipation drives him forward into hasty action, the whispers demanding that he to find her and make her suffer overwhelming rational thought. Images of what he wants to do to her fill his mind, and it takes all he has to tamp the feelings down and swallow the anticipation, to clear his mind of pleasurable revenge fantasies so he can concentrate on the situation at hand.
She
will suffer, An-Jin Choi tells himself. As long as he keeps his wits about him. She might be frail, barely more than human. Facing a Deathlord. But for all his power he is hardly invincible, and she has allies-people ensnared in her web, who might even think that she's doing something other than using them. Choi knows lacks even those sorts of friends. The Technocrats who called themselves Oversight would spend nothing assisting him that wasn't bought or bargained for, and it was clear to anyone with eyes that they would prefer he killed himself killing Belltower so they wouldn't need to expend anything eradicating him, another Reality Deviant, from the Earth.
But that doesn't matter to him. If a HITMark obliterates his corpse and banishes him to the Underworld again, or manages to end him with a phase disruptor, he doesn't care. Nonexistence would almost be better than the unlife of a wraith, even a powerful one. The only setback that matters would be a setback on his path of vengeance.
He has no time to prepare and had little time to move his forces, so all he has with him are a handful of hand-chosen killers. Unlike him, they wear stolen corpses of French police and soldiers, slowly rotting from soul-death and the strains of possession, wielding weapons and wearing armor forged from Stygian metal. There's only a handful of them-the realities of geography limit even him, and his nature shackles him further. All of them are here for the same thing he wants-vengeance on the woman who killed them. An-Jin Choi knew from Jamelia's stolen memories that she was a bloody-handed old woman whose adult life was steeped in the amoral world of black operations. Not all of her victims were willing to pass on quietly or forgive her sins. And some of them have left wraiths which have existed for decades, sharpening their grudges into murderous blades of hate and killing intent.
He can rely on them to assist him. They are loyal to him beyond death simply because he promised them this chance, and now they can feel their quarry so close, anticipate the cruelties that An-Jin Choi can indulge in when she is finally brought down. Their exuberance is so intense he can feel the emotional aura. They, too, know that they're expendable, but none of them care anymore. All they want now is that one shot at vengeance against the subject of their overwhelming, unceasing hatred.
He leads the handful of killers he's bringing through lost catacombs towards the current position of the train itself, seen as a red dot in a 3-D map on a borrowed Union smartphone. That, and a confirmation that Jamelia has two others with her, is all Oversight has given him. His new contact is even less talkative than Clock was, giving even less information, and although every single statement was given with no affect, Choi can still feel the contempt in the words.
But such small insults are below him now. It's taken over a decade and a half for him to get to this point. A decade and a half of nurturing his hate. A decade and a half of cruelties inflicted and received, of supping on stolen power and making bargains with unspeakable old gods. As long as Oversight leads him closer to his goal, he will embrace them as friends, no matter what their endgame is.
The whispers of the shadow in his head and the old gods seeking an end to all things and to all time drive him forward. His own hatred silences the doubts that the bookish young man who he was once might have voiced. They combine to drive him forward at a pace far faster than any human could move, kicking up the dust of dead men and forgotten history in the bowels of Paris as he rushes towards Jamelia Belltower's location.
Behind him, his followers growl their approval. All of them have their own reasons to want her to hurt. None of them have any sympathy for her left, their hatred almost as all-consuming as his own. He welcomes it. It makes them loyal, and it allows them to understand each other. He checks the map again. Only a few hundred more meters, a handful of minutes, before the confrontation. Only one side will walk away from it, and whoever the victor is will certainly be ambushed by Oversight, disposed of as either the great Adversary or as a loose end that is now surplus to requirements. All of them know about this. But they have no choice in the matter. Their paths were chosen a long time ago, when they chose to nurture their hatred as a survival mechanism, when they chose this specific way to resolve this specific anchor to existence.
And now all they can do is witness the consequences of their choice.
The Sorrow
An-Jin Choi has brought backup. Choose
three henchmen for his retinue to make Jamelia's life extremely miserable.
[ ] The Burned Man: He was a hero who fought for the Union and for humanity. He was one of the chosen to guard Cybersyn, to allow the Computer to bring utopia to mankind. When the Union came for him, he tried to reason with them. To bargain with them. He pitied the people who tried to attack it, hoped he could change their minds. He didn't feel fear, or remorse. And he didn't stop, until they started to kill the noncombatants and technicians. When he was finally forced to fight back in self-defense, he was scrapped by Jamelia Belltower using a tanker truck as an improvised bomb and a dozen plasma rifle shots. Then the Underworld took his confusion and anger and turned it into deliberate cruelty. His stolen body crackles with the barely-controlled fusion fires of the stygian mockeries of his prior augmentations, flesh flaking away to expose black alien metal.
[ ] The Prodigy: She was a young bullied girl, and when she gained what she thought of as psychic powers, she used them to take terrible vengeance on her tormentors, a rampage that ended when Jamelia Belltower used the high school's queen bee as bait and ended her life with a single Primium bullet to the head. If it had only been that, she might have passed on. But Belltower was thorough, and erased her existence and her revenge, attributing the deaths to tragic accidents and removing even her birth from records. Her current stolen body moves jerkily as if controlled by an invisible puppeteer, and her real body-a stick-thin teenager with long lanky hair over her face and poorly-fitting clothes-is a nearly transparent distortion floating slightly above it.
[ ] The Dreamer: He joined Orpheus because he was always interested in the occult. Jamelia Belltower led the raid which shut the facility down, trapping him in an undead existence and forcing him to turn to dark powers or cease to exist. And he knew enough about ghosts to know even before his damnation that this was a fate worse than death itself. He exists as an insubstantial body-hopper now, hollowing out souls to sustain his dreamlike existence, jumping from body to body. His host is pallid, with the bloodshot eyes and haphazard movement of an insomniac.
[ ] The Muscovite: They died all at once in a blinding flash and a crushing shockwave, their souls so shredded that they fused into one monstrous mind and body. All they remember is where they died-Moscow-and who they blame for their death-Jamelia Belltower, because she did not act when she could have, because she delayed and waited rather than take action. They are legion, dozens of stolen bodies moving and speaking as one, their bodies covered with radiation burns and with white, sightless eyes that somehow fail to impact their accuracy or visual acuity.
[ ] The Flayed Man: He fought with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. He was brave, crafty, dangerous. He led men on raid after daring raid against the Communists, and more often than not succeeded despite the odds. The Soviets put a king's bounty on anyone who could bring them his head. When a newcomer-a mere woman!-thought to question his judgment, sought to tell him where to go and what to attack, he scoffed at her and questioned her right to lead. Her "brothers," massive men with inhuman strength and cold deadly stares, broke him right in front of her. Tortured him. Flayed him. Left him there to die of his wounds, as an example. Now he knows who she is, and that he is not alone. His stolen skin ruddy and blotchy from old congealed blood, and he wields the weapons he fought with in Afghanistan-the rocket launcher, the Stinger missile, the AK-47.
[ ] The Datawraith: When her brother was arrested by the police on a trumped-up charge and vanished into the Technocracy's clutches rather than the prison system, she started to look for him, eventually becoming a member of the Virtual Adepts. Days became months became years, but she never forgot her mission. One day, one of her trusted Shadow Ministry contacts gave her information-a new lead, a new backdoor, a way to find out once and for all what became of her brother. The information sent her into a deathtrap, and she wasn't quite good enough to escape the Black ICE. As she died, bones snapping from biofeedback and blood fountaining from her mouth, she managed to ask a single plaintive question to the friend who betrayed her-
why? She never forgot his answer. Because Jamelia Belltower had found his boyfriend. Her possessed self is a glitch, an uncanny-valley corpse that is never quite illuminated correctly by the lighting conditions.
