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"two for audience, Seattle level", a Reaper said to a speaker grid.
Valentine found it interesting that even Reapers had to report in to some central authority. Bureaucracy or security? Weren't these Reapers animated by Seattle himself?
The elevator rose fast enough for Valentine to feel the change in perceived gravity for a moment. Then he concentrated on swallowing to relieve the changes in air pressure.
The elevator opened out on a wide bay. A Reaper in a purple robe, his face hidden by hood and fabric mask, nodded, and Silas led Valentine out of the elevator into the plain, well-lit lobby. Valentine noted that the walls had a metallic sheen, and there were what he supposed were two-way mirrors on each wall.
"Silvers used to wait for me in this room. But he kept getting nervous around the avatars and soiling the corner".
"You feel like you need a bodyguard up here?" Valentine asked.
"You never know. A Grog's like a big, comforting dog sometimes. A dog that can shoot".
The Reaper pointed to a door on the right wall.
"Crap. I hate the tunnel. I was hoping he'd talk to us in the gardens. You're on your own, Valentine".
Silas hurried over to the door, waved at a camera lens - Valentine noted the door had no ID card slot - and it opened. Dim light, such as one might find under fifty or sixty feet of murky water, showed a room beyond.
"Go on. It's safe, until he decides it shouldn't be safe".
"See you", Valentine said.
Valentine passed in, ducking slightly to clear the door, wondering if another elaborate death awaited inside. Funny how even involuntarily one developed a fatalism about that sort of thing. Did they put some psychotropic in the food?
While touring a classroom once in Biloxi as a Coastal Marine, Valentine had to do "community service" in a classroom. The class had a small family of hamsters, and the hamsters had a little plastic warren of connecting tunnels and shafts and rooms. The room he stepped into reminded him of those shafts, save that it was in the shape of a slightly pregnant triangle and surrounded by some kind of liquid.
He thought he could see other shafts and rooms through the liquid, but they might have been decor, or models; the rather cloudy water - if it was indeed water - made it difficult to tell.
Valentine saw dozens of bodies floating in the liquid. Most were in the shape of the octopus-bat creature that Valentine knew to be a Kurian/Lifeweaver form. Wires or lines projected from their extremities and "necks" to a football-sized orb that glowed mysteriously now and then as the forms floated. Something about the slowness of the movements inside made Valentine decide the liquid wasn't, in fact, water.
Others shared the space with the aliens, gentle and predatory. Valentine saw a Grog or two, and humans. An encephalitic fetus, tethered both to mother by umbilical and to its own football, yawned and stretched.
"Do you admire my menagerie?" a voice in his head asked. It was slightly mechanical, and Valentine realized it was from an old battery-operated Ready Reader toy he'd heard Amalee playing with the last time he'd seen her. He'd given it to her when he arrived on Jamaica, and she proudly showed "Uncle David" how good she was with it already, dog and cat and hat and ball prancing, stalking, bouncing, or spinning across the faded screen.
Valentine decided to respond aloud. If he started having conversations with himself, or the Kurian, or maybe that floating fetus, he didn't like his chances of making it out of the tunnel a complete personality again. "Which one are you?"
"All of them. In a way. You have a well-rounded mind for your kind, Vaal-eyen-tine-Dee. Strong extremes of love and hate. I hope you know the narrowness of the balance point on which the scale rests. Oh, here she is. How are you, sweet boy ?"
The last was said with his mother's voice. Valentine felt a piece of him fall off. "Don't do that!"
"Do what, you little pail of piss water?" an old drill instructor from the Labor Regiment asked. "Oh, I like him".
What am I here to do again?
"Bargain, I think", LeHavre's voice said. Suddenly he was eleven again, standing in the kitchen above his pantsless mother, blood all over the floor, tomatoes stewing on the stove.
"Oh, that was delicious, thank you", Father Max's voice said. "But my time is limited".
Valentine found himself on his knees in the tunnel, gasping like a fish, his heart pounding. "Stop it! Please!"
"Very well. Why are you wondering if some of these are Dau'iveem?"
"I have old friends in Southern Command who have vanished".
"I assure you, they are not here", Ready Reader said.
"What is this thing?"
