“Hell,” Sid giggled, “is exactly right.”
While New York “above ground” had stayed more or less the same for the past century, New York below was something else. It’d become an endless network of tunnels burrowing below the same bedrock that supported the crumbling skyscrapers reaching into the sky above. Day and night, city-block-long automated earthworm diggers churned through the foundations of Manhattan, burrowing it out.
Hollowing below was cheaper than building above.
Their elevator had arrived just seconds before—a sleek white egg propelled through the pneumatic tube system that fed the Purgatory Entertainment District, deep beneath the streets of Midtown.
“No chaperones allowed,” Sid warned. Bio-synthetics, like proxxi, were banned underground after a spate of psombie intrusions. Sid and Bob turned off the connections to their proxxi. You had to be yourself when entering Purgatory.
“We need to fit in,” Sid said as the elevator dropped. “If we go to Hell looking straight we’ll stand out like sore thumbs. We have to blend in. Consider this camouflage.”
Bob blinked and tried to focus. “What do you mean, fit in?”
Sid’s usual skin of a battered jacket, ripped jeans, and sarcasm had been replaced with a muscular-looking werewolf. Bob reached up to scratch his head but discovered a paw smoothing down the fur over his long ears.
It was his paw.
Sid patted Bob’s head. “I slipped some synthetic-K into your pssi channels and dressed us up for the party.”
The plastic walls of the elevator egg shimmered before Bob’s eyes. The last thing he remembered was closing off some details with Robert, knowing that he’d have to turn his proxxi off, and then everything went sideways. Sid must have slipped the K into his meta-cognition systems. It wasn’t a real drug, more like a virus Sid had infected his networks with. “Turn it off, Sid. This isn’t the time for one of your pranks.”
The elevator slowed.
“You need to loosen up.” Sid’s fanged mouth affected his lopsided grin. “Have a laugh with me, just for a few minutes? When we make the connection, I’ll turn it off and firewall a private meeting space.”
The egg rotated open.
The yolk of Bob’s mind slid out ahead of them, assaulted by the onslaught of the Purgatory entranceway. Pounding music poured out from a maelstrom flecked with distant lightning storms as it sucked the contents of the lobby into the spinning entrance portal.
A zoopharm of creatures thronged the waiting area. Some were in humanoid forms, but many were in fantastical shapes as old school met new in a trendy retro mash-up. Time-shifting faeries spun golden trails of temporal pixie dust in tight curls, while goblins danced aloft with fiery dragons sporting necklaces of shimmering sensory mirrors. In one corner a mass of snakes circled a dancing clutch of witches, and in the other a gang of neon pink babies shared a joint.
Everywhere Bob’s sensory spaces glittered and sparkled.
Hundreds waited in the shared pre-party space, and catching a glimpse of a stoned satyr passed out in the corner, Bob realized that for many this was as far as they went.
An uplifted gorilla in body armor poised as bouncer on the metal gangway spanning from the lobby into the black hole at the center of the entrance. Names floated in pssi-space in front of the Grilla, and with a huge paw it pecked them off. The individuals selected, up and down the hallway, sparkled in highlights before being sucked off into the center of the vortex.
“Follow me.” Sid grabbed one of Bob’s paws. Walking through the crowd, Sid released a weapon of mass seduction that cast a spell of sexual attraction, morphing their skins into objects of desire for everyone they passed based on analyses of likes and dislikes distilled from social cloud data.
Bob watched his mind follow its process, the step-by-step rationalization of the decision to enjoy the drugs for a few more minutes. What was the harm? It’d been a long time since he and Sid even had a minute to enjoy themselves. Just like the old days. The synthetic-K was settling in nicely. Maybe he could give this just a few more minutes.
Walking up the causeway to the Grilla, Sid announced himself. The Grilla’s fur bristled, its nostrils flaring. It was aroused—was it female? Bob could only guess what it saw as they arrived.
“Yeah sure,” the Grilla rumbled. Sid made a deal. “Go to Hell, boys.”
In an instant they were sucked through the eye of the spinning storm of Purgatory and into Hell.
In reality, such as it was, Hell was a moldy and silent room packed with people. With pssi, though, it pulsed alive in an orgy of sensory stimulation as Hell’s professional sense-shifting artists warped the partygoers’ realities together with the customized sensory landscapes of the bar.
Each person’s sound environment was based on their own musical preferences, merged with the beats and themes spun out from the sense jockeys hovering above the dance floors. Right now they were threading out a high beat-per-minute techno that was fusing into Bob’s new wave break beats to birth a syncopated, bass-heavy sound that was just perfect for his wandering mind.
Passing some immortal Goths on the dance floor, the music Bob heard shifted from drum-and-bass-inspired hardcore into industrial coldwave, and then his tunes morphed into freeform happy hardcore as they stopped to watch some pssi-boys and pssi-girls breaking it down in displays of neuroplastic gymnastics on the dance floor.
Sid collected drinks from a bartender and poured one of them into a bowl. Bob lapped it up while Sid surveyed the masses of bodies undulating before him like a raptor hovering above a kill. “Not bad, huh?”
Bob was already licking the bottom of his empty bowl. “Give me the key to unlock this synthetic-K.” He shook his head. “This is too much.”
Sid’s fangs showed at the edges of his smile. “Ask me one more time and I’ll unlock it.”
The pulsing sensorgy around them thrummed through Bob’s senses. He couldn’t argue that he wasn’t enjoying it. Just five more minutes. He shrugged. “So who are we meeting?”
“They’re going to find us.” Sid motioned toward some couches in the middle of the dance floor. “Why don’t we chill over there?”
Bob began wobbling over. The sense jockey started spinning more down-tempo themes, complete with fluorescent visual traces and a hypnotic aromatic scent that vibrated through the atmosphere. Bob looked back as he walked, watching his feet leave a phosphorescent trail across the floor. Weaving dancers flashed stuttering optical tracks and strobing fireballs against a black night sky.
He let his mind slide down the rabbit hole.
“Hey, boys,” came a voice amid the jumbled colors, “how you doing?”
Bob shook his head. From the melee crowding his visual systems, the image of a young woman distilled itself—or rather, the image of a large pink cat woman.
“My name’s Sibeal,” she purred. Her tail flicked back and forth, touching Sid.
Bob was collapsed on the couch, swimming in a sensory overload. “Turn off the synthetic-K, Sid, this is too much…”
“That might be her,” Sid said on a private channel. “Give me a minute.”
Bob shook his head. We have to stay together, he meant to say, but Sid disappeared into the crowd.
The sensory overlay of the couches gave the impression that dozens of hands were caressing him, and Bob shivered as he felt it kick in. He pulled his legs up onto the couch in a semi-fetal position.
He could wait a minute.
The pssi-boys and pssi-girls in front of him were putting on a great show, spinning and gyrating as their bodies morphed with the beat of the music. One of them transitioned from two arms to four arms to six and then into a humanoid-millipede form that wormed around a spinning dance move. The dynamics and physics of this multi-legged body shifted perfectly as he morphed from one form to another. The dancer’s real body appeared underneath the pssi overlay as the music stuttered, doing its best to mimic the synthetic body’s motion that the kid was controlling.