• Prologue

    Not mine, not mine, not mine... The rows of children continuously chanted this in a harsh, raking, monotone, giving in to the bribes of their tormentor, giving up their souls. They were suspended on stretchers that were connected to steel wires, snaking up into the infinite darkness above. They had just come out of the Stapling Utilities Area, or Staproom, and had Sense Removal Devices (S.R.Ds for short), goggle like contraptions that stole every sight, sound, taste, or texture available to the child, bolted into their skull and onto the stretcher. One small boy, about 6 years old, started to cry out. At approximately the speed of sound the cables released their burden which plummeted into the void below, to suffer a quick and painless death. Instantly another child was launched from a tube and was caught by a new pair of wires. The rhythmic chanting resumed its normal, hypnotic pace.
    The C.E.O looked over his creation and let out a cold and brittle laugh. The subject of his experiment were now renouncing their souls with their chant, feeding his children. Feeding their destroyers. They would grow powerful, until the Day, when his creations would be released for the Finale of all creation. A subordinate timidly inched his way onto the small ledge where his boss was perched. He considered lengthily weather it would be better to throw himself into the pit below than face his master, but decided that since 1 choice had a very slight chance of him surviving, he would fulfill the task he was sent to complete. He mumbled in a very submitting tone that silo 2 was full and the slave drivers were awaiting orders.
    "Pour it into the feeder chamber." He replied in a slightly mischievous voice. "They have been fasting several millennium you know." This said he whirled around and spread his wings out to their full span. His majestic darkness poured over the worker in a torrential downpour of malice. he stood at an even 6 feet 6 inches, donning a black robe with the 20 symbols of evil painted in red along the borders. He wore a breastplate consisting of the most beautiful metal, the armor of angels, but it was pitted and scarred from many battles against his creator, and burnt with all the flames of hell when he was first condemned to suffer. His skin was blackened like the skin of those who he had killed with the Plague, and slightly yellowed. His hands were huge, large enough to reach around a mortals head, and tipped with the most hideous talons known (a cross between a grizzly bear's and the poison tipped fangs of a viper). Like stories say he had horns on his head, that curved back behind his ears and then straight out, extending a good 3 inches past his face, each one tipped with a poison specialized for angels and which was 2,000,000 times stronger than what was capable to kill a human. But the face was the most frightening of all. The mouth was a lipless horror, containing the forked, green tongue that had coaxed the souls out of person after person. He had no nose, for that he had given (wrapped in a fabric made out of pure nothingness, the rarest and most dangerous material ever not-created) to the only thing he had ever loved, an angel, But when she had refused his hand in marriage he killed her. He had no eyes, just dark pits, and the lack of these was the most dangerous of his features. The lack of eyes in his head meant that he could have eyes anywhere, little seeds of his ultimate evilness, even in mortals, converting them to his cause.
    "You are dismissed."
    The worker scuttled away, stumbling as he performed the 200 steps of the intricate Bow of Submission. He transferred his message to the slave drivers, and then shook his way over to a secluded path along the wall of the bottomless pit. There he broke down sobbing and screaming for 30 minutes. He then calmed down, and deciding he had made the wrong choice earlier, flung himself over the edge.

    Chapter I

    As Melvin's vision slowly returned, he was startled by the fact that he didn't know where he was, as he always had prided himself on knowing almost everything pertaining to his situation. He quickly gathered that he was in a darkened room about 10 feet by 7 feet, and that there was a giant, almost 8 feet tall looming over the quivering form that was him. The stranger was obviously not friendly, and Melvin thought what might have gotten him here. He started from the beginning.
    During school Melvin had always been the nerd, the loser, the outcast. He was always a head shorter than the rest of his grade, and was very skinny. His lack of muscle caused him to be horrible at self defense, and he was occasionally beat up. Nothing there.
    Melvin scanned his life through middle school and high school but could not find anything horrible enough to have landed him in his current position. But then when he had started College his life had suddenly changed. He had become a professional hacker. Using his dad's old hand-me-down IBM Think Pad, he had started his career. At first it was just minor thefts, local small businesses, but it soon grew. Pretty soon he was attacking large companies, food chains, and even a couple major intercontinental enterprises. Maybe it was the McDonalds hack he thought. It had been a small robbery, him coming out with only about 500,000 bucks. Maybe the thing standing over him was Ronald the clown, come to torture me and turn me into chicken nuggets, he thought with a silent chuckle. But the he remembered the phone call. It had come during the middle of the night, from an unidentified caller. The message was in Morse, and when Melvin had put it into a Morse translator the next morning it read as follows:


    HACK WAYLORD GENETICS INC (stop) ADDRESS OF WANTED FILE IS HOME/DISTRICTSEVEN/FINANCIALS/PATENT (stop) KEEP MONEY ONLY WANT PATENT (stop) REWARD TWO MILLION USD (stop)


    The message had then ended. No identification. Nothing. Melvin knew he shouldn't, but he performed the job anyway. It was very strange, as there was almost no protection. No firewall. No alarm. Not even a password. Almost instantly he had the finances folder up on the screen. There were 3 folders: The patent, for something insanely complex and way above Melvin's understanding, a word document consisting of 600 pages worth of seemingly random numbers, and a folder giving him access to about 5.3 million. He took the five million (a medium amount considering his line of work), the patent, saving it in the most secure folder on his private network, and the document, just out of curiosity. He then did the proper check for trackers (small programs that track the location of a hackers computer) and went to bed.
    That must be it. As soon as he realized this a large hand reached down, grabbed Melvin by the neck, lifted him two feet above the floor and banged his head against the wall.
    "What did you do?" The questioner's voice questioned.
    "I don't know!" Melvin cried out when his head was once more rudely crushed against the wall, harder this time.
    "Don't play the angel" The thing said in a mocking coo, like a mother to a child, " Because if you didn't do anything you would not be here!" The voice had slowly gained intensity, until at the end of the sentence the voice was an incomprehensible shriek.
    Melvin stayed silent.
    "WHAT DID YOU DO??!" The voice yelled. Suddenly another hand appeared out of nowhere and grasped Melvin's neck. Each finger had 5 joints, and it was large enough to reach around Melvin's throat and have the thumb and middle finger touch at the back.
    Melvin then realized something. He had stolen from a genetical engineering company, and this was what seemed to be a genetical mishap. The company must be making these things.
    The hand tightened its grip, and Melvin realized that he could not breathe.
    "P-Please..."He muttered feebly,"L-let go...." His voice cracked and his vision started to fade to white. "I... I'll t-tell you.... e... e-everything...." The last words were just a feeble gasp. Suddenly the choking had disappeared and Melvin crumpled to the ground gasping for breath.
    "I hacked your finances..." he mumbled, subdued "Took 5 mil, patent, numbers..."
    "You could have saved yourself some pain by admitting it earlier." Said the thing.
    "Can you answer one question?" Melvin asked.
    "What?"
    "What are you?"
    "I am a product 2, class D!" the thing said with a touch of pride. "And you are lucky I'm that because As, Bs, and Cs don't have any pity circuits. If I were one of them you would be dead by now."
    "Well thank you for letting go, Mr. D" for this is what Melvin decided to call him.
    Mr. D laughed.
    "I wasn't really doing you a favor," He said, "for that would have been relatively painless compared to what you will have to suffer at the hands of the Master."
    This was followed by an awkward silence in which both sides of the conversation contemplated the many things that were more painful than death by strangulation. Melvin didn't like what he came up with.
    "Do you know much about mechanics?" Mr. D questioned.
    "Quite a bit." Melvin replied, now back to his usual arrogance. "Why do you ask?"
    "Well I think I will take you on a tour of what you tried to destroy with the theft of a mere 5 million." Mr. D said proudly.
    Suddenly the lights flashed on and Melvin's jaw dropped at what he saw.



    Chapter II


    They were suspended in a room of glass, hovering over a floor that seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions. It could only be called a floor because there was no evidence of walls or a ceiling, and it was impossible to pinpoint one point on the horizon, because of the extreme flexibility of infinity. It could exist more than anything else, but at the same time not exist at all. The platform was covered by the strangest computer system Melvin had ever seen. It was not entirely machine, as strange amoebas of black ooze and small humanoid creatures toiled inside of them, as parts of it. They acted as semiconductors, the silicon of these computers of torment. Though all lacked any facial expression, their violent jerks and shudders told the story of their pain. There was one central stage that was slightly elevated that housed what Melvin immediately decided was the CPU of the system. It had the body of a newly born child and was held by leather straps to a metal table. Its head was very large, four times the size of Melvin's, and was encircled by what looked like the prescription of an insane dentist. High voltage fuses alternatively connected and disconnected, and one huge one, from a cable the size of a person's wrist, arced its fiery blue path through the things head to a receptor on the other side. What looked like large metal jaws gnashed open and closed, bathing some kind of superconductor in a bath of what was instantly recognizable as mercury. The thing had no face besides a nose and small mouth, the latter having a tiny dribble of blood protruding from it, a visible sign of the obvious unimaginable mental stress. Suddenly the creature folded in on itself, like a parachute once it has landed. The head crumpled, and a hole like a bullet wound proceeded to open itself. Then, now lying in a pool of its own blood and brain tissue, the thing turned itself inside-out. Now it looked deflated, and was smothered in a pool of partially congealed blood. Suddenly the hole closed, and it shook itself vigorously, shaking off the layer of gore. Strangely, it looked like a deflated, younger version of its older self. Suddenly, the head inflated once more (Just like a balloon, Melvin thought) and the machine resumed its previous pace.
    "Where are we?" asked Melvin, wonderstruck.
    "You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you," Laughed Mr. D, "So I'll show it to you the way you're used to it." He drew his long fingers across his forehead in an intricate cross, and then placed his thumb and forefinger over Melvin's eyes. When he removed them Melvin saw something horribly familiar.
    They were surrounded by mountains and valleys of almost impossible size, a bleak landscape of shiny, shattered obsidian. From holes in the rock came torrents of burning air that seemed to get under one's skin and give huge, yellowish blisters that hurt so intensely that it would be less painful to cut off the limb and be done with it. Other pits in the ground regurgitated molten rock in deadly fountains of screaming hatred, like pits of pure, liquid malice. And then there were the prisoners. Closest to Melvin sat a man who seemed to be trying to cut his fingers off with a sharp bit of stone and eat them, but they sprouted little wings and flew towards him, tearing at already sightless eyes before dumping themselves suicidally into the magma pits. Another man, screaming, coughed up some internal organ, which then grew into a copy of the original, and killed the first with its bare hands before spiting up its own stomach/intestines/liver/heart. Yet another figure, this one hard to see under its punishment, was swarmed upon by rats. It was shrieking and shaking itself in small, but excessively violent motions.Suddenly the shape grew smaller, and its shakings grew less violent. Melvin noticed a puddle of gore, that was increasing its size at an alarming rate. When the figure ceased to exist, the rats, now larger than before, backed off, and the blood seemed to rewind itself, until it was in the form of the original owner, a dark haired woman. Before Melvin could see her better, the rats scuttled, pounced, and resumed their flurry of violence. The small shape of a child was cursed by blindly trying to stumble its way out of a smooth walled depression in the rock, a depression strewn with glistening daggers of black obsidian. The child would slip down the side, and his feet would be impaled with the shards. Trying to get up and walk, the child's pain became so intense that it fell, flat on its back, with a noise so sickening it almost managed to summon up Melvin's last meal. Shreiking with pain it mindlessly threw itself over onto its stomach, and the intensity of its screaming doubled. Shaking, it managed to stand. By now it looked more like a living statue of, black, bloodstained glass. Suddenly, the shriekling stopped. For a couple of seconds nothing happened. And then the child fell. It didn't fall normally, but in segments. like it was solid stone with a few joints, the only places where it was weak.
    It was dead.
    Melvin realized he was crying.