Before Heaven

Chapter 15

XIV

I was distraught to be Chayne Summers.

There was a cold emptiness in my soul, I think. I'd once been proud to call myself, more or less, a morally upstanding woman. I'd had a normal enough childhood, in hindsight; my father, one Lester Ivorich, had been a working man from Russia who'd moved to America some decades back. My mother, Yanina Landau, had been a comparatively more eccentric Yiddish woman with many a weird superstition about here. Lester had the looks, Yanina had the bizarre charm, and through whatever miracle, I'd been conceived in upper Wisconsin and raised there until we'd all moved to New Jersey. New Jersey wasn't the rat-hole every single person on the planet had made it out to be, to be honest. The air was a bit smoggy, and the atmosphere a little drab, and the populace more than a little peculiar, but let us be honest here; with which American state isn't this the case in? That was when I'd met Ashton, in college. Ash was as much a weirdo then as he was now, perhaps even more so. He'd been raised in the state by a distant mother, an alcoholic father, and a brother he'd later confessed was the one member of his family he'd ever held any affection for, however remote. Ash lucked his way into college; he was a brilliant student, especially in the fields of psychology and the general science courses he'd studied, but he'd fallen to the trap of drugs early. He'd started with m*******a. Then crack. Heroin. A few dips into ecstasy and LSD. Crack always remained his favorite. I figured those drugs did a number on his mind, whatever was the case;, but they in no way made him the man he became. He'd always been something of an emotionally stunted sociopath with a tendency to mutilate small animals he found near his parents' house and physically beat the absolute s**t out of anyone who sufficiently angered him. The first incident had been in the third grade, where a fellow elementary student had accidentally made him spilled his juice. Ash put his thumb in her eye. That had been one of many incidents that had cultivated a rather nasty reputation for Ash through his childhood and teenage years. He'd always had piss-poor impulse control – not that he ever cared – and all the drugs had done was shred apart what was left of it. There was a beautiful irony to a low-functioning sociopath being as intelligent as he was; through a mixture of luck and intellect (mainly luck) Ash graduated and we'd attended a medical college in New Jersey together. Years of hard work granted us both doctorates, and a twist of fate later, I'd met the man who'd become both my husband and the future CEO of one of the most powerful companies of Earth, Mason Summers. The decades that followed were happy ones and memories I still cherished; Lester's death and Yanina's depressed departure to a lonesome house somewhere in the ass of New Jersey aside, I married Mason at the age of twenty-nine and we'd borne our child two years later. Her name was Aria.

How did I put my love for my sweet daughter into proper words? Nonsense. I can't properly express the affection I had for her in mere English. From the time she'd been a sleeping babe to the time she'd matured, Aria had been my pride and joy. She'd been a ginger, like her father, but she had my beautiful eyes. She'd been energetic, perhaps a bit loopy but never afraid to speak her mind. She was loyal to her family, an excellent student, possessed of a respectable ambition; she was amazing. Repeat the word a hundred-thousand times and it would not equate to one infinitesimal speck of the wonder that constituted Aria. For the time I had her and Mason, I had something. I didn't care that I had such a lucrative position; strip me of everything and leave me with Mason and Aria, and I still would have been completely satisfied. Those years were truly the most joyous of my life.

I could recall the flames. I could recall the screams of anger. We'd come back one day after a blood test for Aria. They'd discovered something in her blood, something peculiar. They'd initially thought it was early stages of the Phantom, but further analysis proved it was something that could not be recognized. It wasn't a virus, or a disease; it was more like a particular strain of something, an anomaly in the blood, of the ilk of a missing or displaced gene. I don't know how exactly it happened, but there was a miscommunication; maybe the initial diagnosis of what was observed leaked out somehow. Perhaps a rumor started and our security was compromised. But regardless, before the situation could be clarified, my neighborhood organized into a lynch, something better suited to the era of the Ku Klux Klan, and they descended upon my house like vultures. Me and Mason got away. My daughter didn't; when the flames had cleared out and the mob responsible was detained, they found one body charred so badly it was unidentifiable and no other sign of Aria.

How did I put my hate for the people responsible into mere words?

It started out as shock, naturally. Disbelief. A literal refusal to comprehend what was happening long after the firefighters had arrived to curb the remaining flames of my house and the midnight sky was swallowed by the flashing blue-and-red dance of the police sirens, cars drowning the street and a mass arrest being held. That shock had manifested into grief. I'd felt depression – an ocean, an all-drowning ocean of depression – that had flooded my heart and sunk it. Mason tried his best to console him; God bless the man, and I think the same feelings were coursing through his head. But while he continued to work regardless and tried to power through those thoughts, my depression did not waver. It transformed; transformed into hate, and rage, and all the things that fuel pain, a realization of the irony of the world at large. We, the people at Paradise Association, those trying to help the masses, are repaid by the people we benefit with such savage cruelty. Why help the world when it only takes? Why clutch to things that make you happy, knowing they will vanish? Eventually, I wished for the death of all mankind. I don't know how the transformation was as grand as it was. My hatred had initially been directed towards the people who had lynched my daughter and burned their house down. Some regretted it. I cannot blame them, any longer, and they have long received my forgiveness; they were drawn in by the chaos and the violence that influenced them, drawn them in with its intoxicating vapors and made them ignore common instinct. They were part of a hive-mind, and the state in which they were in is but the true, barbaric nature of mankind. But those who put the idea to murder an innocent human being in their heads to begin with and followed through with it – and continued to show no remorse over what they did – those people incited within me a pernicious, noxious hatred that overruled my own conscience. Eventually, that hatred manifested as a disgust so whole it could corrode, not for any one individual but for humanity as a whole; some diseased blot, a stain on the black rug of the universe, that simply needed to be cleaned out. I hid it well, with a mask of tolerance and joviality, but beneath the persona, the only thing that remained of me – the one thing that motivates and pushes everything I do and plan – is hate. I seek nothing less than the eradication of all life in the most tortuous, painful way I can think of. I wanted to spew my hatred as a river of acid to drown to world and boil the flesh from the bones of every woman, man, child and animal. I wanted to cough up a cloud of fire to burn the Earth to its core. I wanted to scrub it all clean.

I was already placed on the P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. program – or the Rapture Assignment – and already meant to conduct a series of tests in dimensional warping to pull energies from Heaven. The first few tests resulted in aberrations that simply violated the laws of physics altogether, twisting the fabric of reality itself like a wrung cloth and bleeding dry into our universe. One room testing room started to subtly warp at the sides, with the corners stabbing inwards and two inches in the room bending into three. Continued tests exaggerated the aberrations. One testing room became as long as a cruise ship. The next almost created a goddamned black hole. The tests, for whatever reason, continued. That's when we first pulled trace energies of Heaven itself through that thin, metaphorical border between worlds – the Boundary – and somehow managed to program them. The energies somehow warped into reality as near-sentient beings, trying to twist into physical shapes. They tried morphing into us, the researchers, a few times. It seemed external stimuli influenced the shapes the energy beings took. For shits and giggles one day, Ash decided to show them a Picasso painting to see how they'd react. Much to our surprise, the things finally took a defined shape and stayed in it; humanoid beings dressed in puffed-up suits, sort of an exaggeration of a tuxedo, with "masks" patterned with distorted, Picasso-like images on them. That was their best attempt at mimicking a human being without directly copying their form. One of the Red Clover researchers almost had a heart attack when they'd taken the form they did, but the energy beings seemed remarkably docile. They seemed to bear no real mind of their one and simply followed whatever directions we gave them, somehow comprehending English at the drop of a hat and completely almost every request in their own bizarre way. They were like robots, or slaves, with their will dictated by us alone. The favors had started out fairly mundane; they'd been asked to help watch future test, and had even been used as lab rats, with a few being commanded to stand in the rooms where the dimensional warping was being tested. One had ended up having its upper body fused to the testing room ceiling while its other half somehow ended up warped halfway across the world into a sign in the middle of Tokyo before disintegrating (as I'd later find out on the news, something with gave everyone associated with the experiments a good chuckle). Then the demands and orders got a little more complex. Sometimes, they were made to make food or drinks. Provided with the right ingredients and resources, they somehow managed to complete the request. One scientist told one of them to dance – and when one of them had been shown a Michael Jackson music, it had replicated the dance moves almost perfectly. The energy beings were versatile and obedient in every way. Out of curiosity, one day, I'd ordered an energy being to kill one of the other scientists by slashing his throat. The energy being produced a pair of scissors from absolute nowhere – likely formed from excess energy comprising the being's formed – and had been a second away from slitting the man's throat before I'd boredly commanded it to stop just before the scissors met his flesh. Ash had gotten a merry kick of laughter from that. The scientist who had almost been killed had shown up pale and unresponsive for a few days afterwards before he'd left the project completely. A good deal of fun. I'd use these things to complete my master plan; have the energy beings run through Paradise during the Rapture Assignment's simulation phase and butcher every applicant to cover myself, then have them slaughter everyone else involved with the project – as well as myself – and leave the entire world to pay the consequence. I would doom the world to the Phantom, not through active cause but simple deprivation of the one thing that could stop it. I'd tear apart the project meant to save the world and forever be cast as an innocent victim of the immoral experiments of the Association, while the Phantom slowly choked the life out of the world and eventually suffocated mankind. They would be too busy arguing and fostering debate to notice; even after the Phantom had wiped the human race down to a few people in the streets, those survivors would find any cause to bicker and turn against each other even as the Phantom continued to kill them. Without this project, the Association would crumble and the world was doomed.

Until Ash, that is. An unforeseen consequence came our day when Ash had drunkenly waltzed into the testing room with a hole in reality still present and been exposed to the dimensional warp. No human had ever been exposed to it before, and I'd frantically closed the rift in the testing room before coming to his side. Ash, impeccably, was fine – at an outer appearance. Somehow, those energies had gotten hold of Ash's very mind. Ash had just looked at me with a massive smile and said his mind was connected to Heaven, somehow. He said there had been something, something incomprehensibly powerful, on the other side – and that if the Boundary was ever truly broken, it would overwhelm the universe and destroy everything. I'd dismissed it as Ash's usual ravings at first, but Ash was insistent. Somehow, he seemed convinced, and he had certainly changed; he now acted as if he was perpetually high, his mood flopping like the leap of a frog and his capability of reasoning damaged. He'd become even less able to control his impulses and he seemed to forget things at random. Still, the hedonistic Ash was still there. The energies were just accentuating it. I ultimately concluded Ash had a point and, by whatever process, his mind had been hooked up to the other realm. Not soon after, me and Ash had deduced we were infected with the Phantom; Ash had likely caught it while he was in the testing room, and he'd spread it to me at some point. That was just before pre-simulation had started. Me and Ash modified the plan, right there; we'd use the energy beings to slaughter the applicants and faculty all the same, but then we'd draw that force in Heaven into Earth itself and destroy everything. The latter part would be accomplished on its own once Charles shattered the Boundary in the Courtyard in the final phase of the simulation, but we just needed some way to stay alive during the process. Then it hit me – Jenny.

She was immune. She'd been registered to the program at the last minute because Mason wanted to see how she reacted to direct exposure to the anomalies. If she could stand the energies of the Phantom, then by God, she must have been able to stand the energies of Heaven itself. That was it; use her to contain the energies of Heaven, gloss knowledge on how to use it, then take those energies into ourselves, like some sort of drug. I was confident that energies like those, manifested from some eldritch force on the other side, would transform us, make us into some form of meta-human capable of withstanding Heaven's energies even when it leaked into our world and destroyed everything else. From there, I could watch Heaven twist the universe into something incomprehensibly twisted to human eyes. Mankind itself would be made prey to the eldritch forces that dwelt on the other side of the portal while I stood and watched. A fitting fate. From there, I didn't care how I would do it, but I would recreate the world. I would make humanity clean of flaws – the very things that doomed Aria and make humanity so disgusting – and rule over them as a supreme god forever.

Farfetched, maybe. Ambitious. Cold-blooded. Call it inhumane – but I was sick of being human anyways. I was fully prepared to become a monster to achieve the greater good, and I simply didn't care.

Ash liked the idea. He did, however, draw hesitance at the idea of bringing back humanity. From what I got through his reactions, he simply wanted to enjoy the eternal pleasure that came with the energies of Heaven forever, all on his own. I laughed and told him that he was free to do anything when he was a god, and if that meant whisking himself a way an infinity away from me and my planet Earth, he could do it. I was suited to being a god, I think. I had the lavish looks, the razor-keen intellect, the fierce ambition and pride, and the willingness to do what no other person could. I could tailor mankind to my liking – by the God I would soon replace, I felt I was meant to. The conscience, sadly, is a horrible thing; for as long as I was plotting, the lingering humanity behind the hate that had consumed me screamed at me to stop. Remorse was tempting. Guilt was a heavy weight. It took an amazing amount of willpower to continue doing what I was doing with the intent I had, because as much as I wanted to deny it, I still cared for the people around me and I still wanted things to get better – and of course, the grief over my daughter pestered me every day and every night. I didn't have the luck of being born without empathy, like Ash; I had to constantly mush it down and suppress it to continue my goals. But I did it, and they never came over me. The only way for things to get better was for me to do the job myself, and that required cleaning out the old and going in with the new. I'd scrub myself clean of my remaining morals once I ascended. Then, I'd be free of those burdensome human feelings forever. The extermination of all humanity – of all life. I could imagine it; myself, in the centre of a room filled with billions upon billions of candles. Each flame has a story to tell, an experience to share, a life over years and years it's lived. So many stories. So many experiences. So much destroyed, and lost forever, once you blew it out. I'd blow out the first one. Then the second. A third, a fourth, a fifth – then one gust of wind and they are all blown out. Just like they blew out my innocent daughter's candle, I too intended to blow out all of theirs – and light them all again with my own flame.

I could remember the final irony of my life before I went out to the Solomon Islands to commence the Rapture Project was, in fact, getting infected with the Phantom myself. I managed to keep it secret; wearing Red Clover's safety uniforms constantly, even under pedestrian clothes. Keeping my distance from people. And, most conveniently, utilizing the purpose of a body double. Ash made the preposterous suggestion to me while he was spread out over my couch high, one day. I'd taken his raving to heart and begun investing in shady markets – some over the Deep Web – to find someone willing for such a cause. Eventually, I found a woman named Angelica willing to buy my offer – which eventually became one million dollars – to accept my request. I'd written "temporary process" on the application, but I, of course, was lying. Angelica would serve as my double until the day she died, robbed over her own identity forever; through precise surgery done by those trained under Ash, Angelica's neurosurgery was conduct in a hidden room in the Association's headquarters. She was made to look like me, walk like me, talk like me, and – through the assistance of a neurochip planted in her brain during the surgery – think like me, acting as Chayne Summers in my place as I kept to some other room or even the safety of my own house, watching her every move with a hidden camera in her necklace. I'd begun to use Angelica more actively when we came to Paradise; whisking her over with a private plane was a cinch, and controlling her was as simple as retreating to the back room in my place where I could monitor her movements. I do not deny any realizations that I enjoyed robbing some human fool of any identity and replace it with that of a lifeless, opinionless automaton under my control. Technology had come so far.

I could remember the day I'd realized I'd had the Phantom. That night, on the 46th floor of the towering apartment complex I lived in within the bowels of downtown New York City (far apart from Mason, I'm afraid; I found I could no longer tolerate him after Aria's death), as I was eating a bowl of Cheerios in the kitchen with the sliding glass windows windows wide open, I could hear the crowds below ablaze with the true state of mankind; strife. The controversy started with Ash, or rather, his offspring; Ash had a son he'd managed to score sixteen years before the whole event (just a short time before the Phantom broke out in Australia). I don't know to whom he was conceived. Maybe one of those whores Ashton had f****d – likely non-consensually either way. Ash raised the poor sod as his own son, as a single father. Now, I hate to state the obvious, but Ash wasn't a very good father to him. Andrew was raised under neglect and abuse, almost every day, from his father – kept away from society's eyes, of course – and the things Ash boasted to me many a times when he was drunk or stoned or whatever stupor he'd put himself in was horrendous. Sometimes they involved a clothes iron to the back. Some times it was a knife through his shoulder. Kicking, smashing, beating against the wall, full-out manhandling – Ash was the biggest monster in Andrew's life, either way. Ash even bragged that he'd "f****d" the kid a few times; I sincerely, sincerely hope he didn't mean that literally. Either way, Andrew had been twisted into sort of a replica of his old man, which I have to concede was probably Ash's intention. Ash didn't know, or didn't understand, love like his father. He'd been raised so thoroughly without it he'd likely concluded brutality was the only answer. Ash did say Andrew had fought back a few times. Never did they end well. But either way, Ash turned Andrew into himself; a twisted, loveless brute who only sought happiness and pleasure through any source, even if he had to beat and rape and murder to get it. I don't know why Ash was my colleague and friend for so long without ever attempting to kill me. Maybe he saw himself in me, by some twisted chance; a thought that still makes me cringe.

Ash's spawn, sixteen years after his conception and battered into a monster like his father, had been looking over a crowd of protesters one day from a high floor in an Association-owned tower in Manhattan. The protesters were, naturally, rallying against the Association's extremist actions. There had been over six-hundred people laid off by the Association in the past three days, and the reason giving was profits. This had prompted a mob of protesters under Andrew's room in the Association tower to protest that the Association was just a bunch of hypocritical, authoritarian liars and nutjobs. Andrew, evidently, must have found this crowd annoying, causing him to go to his dad's room, load his gun – likely taught by Ash himself – return to his window, and start shooting at the crowd. Four people died. Two more were injured. The raucous protests had turned of chorus of screams on the streets of the city below, cut only by the bangs of Andrew's gun, and naturally, a fire of controversy erupted. Andrew was protected under "self-defense" - self-denfense, mind you, against a crowd of people outside his building that posed no physical threat to him whatsoever – and was legally protected purely because he was the son of an Association high-up. The crowds had once again burst into furious crowds and mobs the nights following this, and the night they protested the loudest and the brightest was on the night I found out I had the Phantom. I left my window open purely to hear the music of their disorganized song of rancor from down below. I loved the Association's apathy. I loved their hypocrisy. They suppressed and ignored the very people they were supposed to be helping. I love the lies they fed – "for the greater good, for the greater good," they'd always jeer – and all the propaganda they made. I loved that they deliberately turned a deaf ear to the crowds of suffering civilians purely to line their own pockets and fund their own mad experiments. I loved how they covered up everything they didn't like, pulling the strings behind everything. And I especially love that their oppression of the citizens was the cloak I'd use to plot the plan that would doom the world. The natural state of mankind clouded out its own destruction. I loved that irony.

Everything that had happened after I'd arrived at Paradise went exactly as planned. Angelica covered my own movements. I paid the other faculty, included that fat i***t Harlow, into stating quiet about the truth about the Rapture Assignment that would happen as a result of the applicants butchered. I even managed to keep Jenny, the key to my ascension, onto the project itself. That i***t Charles was so easy to manipulate, I must admit; Mason had mind-warped him so thoroughly with the Association's propaganda he'd completely fallen victim to it and believed every single part of it without cause. He believed it so thoroughly he'd decided to use Jenny in the experiment after a little pushing from me and Mason following the revelation that she was immune. He'd even bought into the lie that, somehow, letting the energy beings butcher every other one of the applicants (sparing his daughter, of course – for future experiments, I'd told him) was a good idea. He was just a mindless pawn of the Association now, some drone who'd been made so desperate over the loss of his son he'd let himself simply be converted by the Association. I pitied him. Charles had once been a strong man; passionate, dedicated, and loyal to the Association, damaged after his son Jason's death but still fiery, but at the reveal that his own daughter was immune and the potential cure to the Phantom he was trying to stop, somehow brought down to a nervous, unsure, unstable individual. He was so pathetically easy to manipulate it was a genuine pity.

And, naturally? Ash had to almost ruin it. Ash had shredded his impulse control, and as a dedicated ephebophile – likely even worse, as I reasoned – had decided it had suddenly been a good idea to grow the hots for Jenny. He decided to quietly stalk her and watch her through the monitor. Through that, we learned of her plan to escape. And though it took some warding off of Jackson – who gained privy to too much information but was reasoned to stay silent about it by my very self – we learned that she would be attempting it shortly before the experiment commenced. Ash and I decided to end that little attempt by stopping Jenny as she tried to escape the night that she did. And although Ash did ambush and stop her as she tried to escape as we planned, what he did following that when he lost control of his inhibition was simply unspeakable. It stood as the most senselessly violent act I'd ever seen my colleague commit.

Ash raped her. That barbarian up and mounted her on the spot, unclothed himself, and violated her. He'd decided to have some fun as well by testing his little medical instruments on her, which lead to her right arm being rendered literally unusable. Flayed, twisted, burned, the bone broken in four places and the skin subjected to every sort of mutilation imaginable – that sort of thing would just never heal properly. Ash couldn't remember, after. He apparently just walked away from Jenny back to his office in Paradise, leaving her splayed, half-naked, in a pile of blood and semen as she slowly just bled – conscious but in intense shock – in the corner of the room. A guard had discovered an hour later in that same position, still conscious, barely alive. Ash couldn't even remember when we jostled him. Though it took an immense amount of impromptu manipulation, proposals, bribes, and so forth to keep silent, we eventually convinced everyone else working with the project to keep quiet about the incident from the Association and the outside world. Jenny would still be used in the simulation, even in her traumatized state. The neurochips used to stimulate the applicant's minds would wake her right up. That's what we fed everyone, and, naturally, the last person we needed to convince was her father. Charles was not a happy man, and, unlike the times before this, we couldn't just convince him to look past it.

I could remember the thrash against the wall when Charles slammed Ash, in my own office, on the night Jenny had been discovered raped and Ash was deemed responsible. Charles had his normally dull brown eyes locked in a flaming glare, with all the intensity of a charging bull, boring right into Ash. He had him pinned to the wall, his right arm against Ash's neck and his face spread in a murderous scowl.

"I'll kill you," he said, his pale body shaking as he exerted his infected self. "I'll kill you, you bastard... You will not use my daughter in this experiment anymore! I will have you both arrested and charged for letting this happen, you...!"

Ash, even with Charles' bony arm pressing against his neck, still chuckled out a taunt. "Ay, Charlesy, remember, man; for the greater good. All for the greater good."

Somehow, Charles resisted the words that had controlled him for so long. "No! No more of that extremist bullshit, you bastard! This is just... depravity!"

Ash grinned, sickly. "Aw, so you're through listenin' to our propaganda bullshit, Charles? Too bad, too fuckin' bad. So let me resort to point number two. If you relent against us, Charles, I'll hurt your fuckin' brat some more."

I saw the fire in Charles' eyes die. "W-What?..."

Ash's grin widened, almost ear-to-ear now. "Yeah, now you're listenin'. All of that 'for the greater good' nonsense? Bullshit, Charles. It's all about yourself. And if somethin' happens to yourself that you can't fuckin' take? Well, that's when you lash out. So come on, Charles. Attack me. Sue me. Have me arrested, have this project taken down, cost the Association the billions and billions of dollars of what was put into this project, and have the eyes of the millions of angry people you've betrayed stare at you. You do this, you doom the world, Charles – and I'll doom your kid as well."

Charles was shaking, probably wishing for a gun or a knife, or anything convenient. Charles shook, stumbling over words, before he turned to me in a moment of desperation so typical to him. I was casually watching the scene with some ice cold whisky in hand, watching Charles' tear-soaked face look at me with his gaze shattered like glass. He was so broken, unsure, so miserable. I pitied him, almost, at first, but then I considered the fact he'd now lost just as much as me. He was probably feeling my pain now. I considered empathy, for a bit. But the only thing I truly felt was amusement that someone else could be as miserable as me, with not an iota of emotion towards Jenny herself. Just concerned that my chief tool – my key – might have been damaged. Ash's retarded blunders would put an end to this plan before it was ever successful.

"Chayne, do something," Charles pleaded. "Speak some reason. Please. Please. Just tell this lunatic he's insane!..."

I took a sip of the whiskyy and stared at Charles with a cheerfully sadistic glint in my eye. "My apologies, Mr. Waits, but I think Ashton has the high ground here."

Charles' eye twitched in anger and shock. "W-What!?"

"You heard it from the woman herself," Ash said, sneering. "You feel trapped now, don't you? Well, now that I've got your fuckin' intention, let me key you in here on what I'll do to your fuckin' kid, Charles." Ash grinned his usual savage smile as he looked at Charles, jabbing a finger at him.

"If you let us do our fuckin' thing, Charles, we'll end this parade of s**t here. You can have your fuckin' kid and keep her after this is all done. Tell her she's a hero, go frolickin' in the fields, visit the beach – what-the-f**k-ever, man. But – if you get in our fuckin' way and complicate this s**t – I'll do so much more than just fuckin' rape your kid, Charles. I'll take her away. To some horrid, decrepit fuckin' place you'll never see her again, the rankest s**t-hole in the world. I think my uncle's old fuckin' cabin out in the forest he sold to me would be a good start. Haven't cleaned out the fuckin' please in years. I'll chain your kid to the fuckin' wall and every day, I will visit a new torture upon her. Trust me, man – I got some sick ideas. I'll thrust glass into her unmentionables. I'll ram needles up her nails and break every single one of her fingers. I'll gouge out her eyeballs – make her choke one down and eat the other myself. I'll burn off her fuckin' face with hydrochloric acid, make her swallow the damn stuff. And, yeah, I'll be fuckin' her – every day of every week, I will f**k her so hard she will fuckin' bleed. And I will fuckin' destroy you, Charles – Chayne and I will pin the deaths of the applicants on you and you will never walk a free man again. And every day, for years to come, I'll be rapin' and beatin' and torturin' your kid, Charles. Over and over and over – until one day, she just dies from the shock of it. Wouldn't that be fuckin' nice, Charles, old buddy?"

Charles had no more defense left him him. He quivered, perspired, and his anger toppled before me. "I-I..."

Ash chuckled to himself as Charles' arm dropped from his neck. "Aw, that's cute, Charles, man. Can't make up your own mind? You already lost one sniveling brat, after all – might as well not lose two. So what do you say, buddy? For the greater good?"

Charles looked at the ground, murmuring. Ash had destroyed his high ground and left him, once again, pleading before our feet.

Ash's grin climaxed in length. "For your daughter's good?"

"...For Jenny's good."

Ash nodded in triumph, like he'd just trained his dog to sit down. "That's a good boy. Now, get out of here. We've bought off everyone else. You just run back to your fuckin' post and keep your mouth shut, and we'll cover up the whole thing and let you and your daughter live in peace after this. She's savin' this damn planet, after all. Now get on out of here, Charles. And don't you say nothin' about anythin' that happened here – 'cause I'll be there."

Charles was still stammering, his composure broken like a china doll and his voice reduced to repetitive sobbing and stuttering. Ash helped him along every step of the way out of my office, sent him on his way, and shut and locked the door in. He crossed his arms and leaned on the door like some bored college student as I put the whisky on my desk and rose up from my seat.

"Well, how'd I do, major?" Ash said, gleefully. "Charles is a fuckin' i***t, man. He's doomed anyways. Hey, you think I should fuckin' cut his daughter's throat in front of him after we'd used her?"

I used the time while Ash was giggling out his depraved intentions for Jenny to sigh, stand up out of my desk, and walk over to Ash. The moment he finished speaking, I lashed out my hand and slapped him sharply across the face. Ash stumbled back, his toothy smile dropping as he clutched his face and looked back at me, stunned.

"Ow!" he cried, growling. "You fuckin'... b***h! I just saved our asses, you fuckin' i***t!"

"If it weren't for your reckless actions, you retard, we wouldn't even be in this circumstance!" I snapped back at him. "How can you be this stupid!? I mean, you really though it would better us if we went ahead and f****d the daughter of the person running this?"

Ash snarled and looked away. "Oh, f**k off, I felt like bonin' somethin'!"

I once again slapped Ash, this time with the other hand, prompting another yelp of agony from him. "You couldn't hold in that urge? Have you destroyed yourself so thoroughly you fell to that compulsion? You'll be a vegetable before we ever use Heaven's energies, you prick!"

Ash slunk back. "Gah, f**k off. You don't have any fuckin' idea what this s**t does to your mind."

"Because I'm not stupid enough to use their energies as drugs," I hissed, my aggression slowly simmering to a bitter sigh. "How could you sink this low, Ashton? You used to have some sense of self-control and reason..."

Ash shrugged, as though the ordeal was no such problem. "Aw, forget those things, Chayne. Only thing they were doin' was holdin' me back anyways. Besides, I figure just before the apocalypse should have me riotin' and doin' whatever the f**k I want to prepare. No one'll even care once everyone in the fuckin' world is roasted alive!"

"And doing it this soon, Ashton!?" I screamed. "We have eight weeks left. Eight weeks! And you honestly thought it was a good idea to jeopardize the entire experiment before it even started!"

Ash struggled for a response. "Well, I... man's gotta fuckin' do what a man's gotta do."

"Ash, I swear to God, I'm going to blow out your brains myself before we ever get this going," I vowed. "God, we're never even going to become gods if you keep acting like this."

Ash crossed his arms, glaring at me. "And when we become gods, that s**t'll be free for us."

"Yes," I hissed again. "Yes, when we ascend. Nobody will be able to judge you there. But until then, we're still just scrawny mortal humans with nowhere to go if we're discovered, an extremely tight plan we need to cover, and no phenomenal powers except the phenomenal power of your stupidity. They will cut us down before we can do anything, Ashton. Do you really want that?"

A glimmer of relent – not our of any remorse, of course, but simply wariness that his continued idiocy might cost him something dear – flashed in his eyes and he finally boiled down low enough to accept defeat. "No. No, I do not."

"Then never pull anything like this again," I finalized, "or we are both dead."

"Fine," Ash said. "I'll resist my fuckin' compulsions, fine, f**k, whatever. Easier said than done, bitch."

"Then actually try for once in your life," I said to him, my tone bitter. "Actually put effort into something aside from your crusade to destroy yourself so you cans pay attention to the task!"

Ash nodded, averting his gaze. I sighed, realizing half of the facility must have heard me over the volume of my yells, and I retreated to my desk with an exhausted sigh. Ash remained standing in front of the desk, his arms crossed and his lips peeled in a scornful frown. As I sat down onto the desk, I pondered everything I'd just said to Ash before my eyes caught eye of the picture I kept framed on my desk. It was a picture of Aria, fourteen years old, in a pile of leaves one cheery fall, her smile for the camera wide and beaming. That smile, for the first time in months, resonated with me and I looked down, some of my lingering humanity peeling through to speak its mind.

"Ashton," I said, my voice much quieter. "Can I confide something to you?"

Ash stood up, his expression turning from defeated shame and humiliation to an alert, concerned frown – although he was probably just leaping to the chance to get back his composure. "Uh, yeah. Anythin' you want."

I let myself speak the truth from the absolute deepest, quietest part of my soul. "I wish we didn't have to do any of this."

For a moment, I saw something resonant in Ash's eyes. Almost understanding, maybe even a mutual feeling between both of us. Then they glimmered back to steel-hard, inhuman animal eyes that only reeked on befuddlement. "What? The f**k are you talkin' about, Chayne? Come on." Ash walked over to my desk and put a hand on my shoulder. "Aye. We're gonna become gods, man. Finally put all of our worries behind us. We'll be able to do whatever we want, forever. Doesn't that fuckin' make you happy, man?"

"I wish I had your lack of humanity, Ash," I confessed. "I envy your ability to care absolutely nothing for the life of another."

Ash just seemed further confused. "Uh... Thanks, man?"

"I've tried so long to scrub the human feeling out of myself, Ashton," I said. "I've tried so long to ignore this persistent feeling of remorse, and guilt. But it clouds me, Ashton. It haunts me. I still care for people, Ashton... and I still care for my daughter. Dammit, it never leaves..."

Ash's expression changed. His eyes softened – as much as they could, anyways – and his frown turned to one of apparent sympathy. "Ah, yeah. Aria, her name was? Nice kid, from what I remember. Still can't get over what happened to her, huh, Chayne?..."

I couldn't lie. I dedicated my entire life to this goal, now. I tried to suppress all the invasive thoughts of remorse, drowning out even common instinct I could use to finally evolve past the confine of my weak human body. I tried so hard to accept the monster I could become, but one thought always followed me. Always. Aria. The memories of my house burning down. The sound of my own sobs as I broke down before the burned-out shell of my house as Mason comforted me. My love for her and my grief at what had happened still plagued me. That was the event that had spiraled my transformation into motion – and I wondered to myself, that if it had never happened, if I'd be a better woman. Someone able to accept the grief of the world I'd have better reason to live in it. That reason, for me, had been lost, and it had taught me that human compassion was broken and easily stolen – and thus, meaningless. That was what had driven me to such hatred of the world. That was what had motivated me to try and start anew. But even after coming so far – even after covering up a rape to further my own agenda – that one lingering spark of the woman I was remained deep in my mind, telling me to stop.

I wished she'd go away. Truly, I did. But she refused to leave, refused to stop egging away at the back of my mind and eating away what sanity I had left – or perhaps, acting as that one remaining voice of sanity in an otherwise mad mind – never relenting and never quieting. She wanted me to hear her, and I was finally at that point where, at my most inhuman act yet, I was finally starting to question if it was really worth it.

Ash frowned and put a hand on my shoulder. His voice, for once, was tender. It was so horrifyingly out of place on Ash. He stroked my shoulder and talked reason to me as I stared wistfully at the picture of Aria, wishing for the good old times.

"There, there, Chayne, man," Ash cooed. "It ain't your fault, man. Nothin' there was your fault."

I could feel tears coursing down my cheeks now. I didn't respond to Ash, just sinking my head lower and closing my watery eyes. That niggling piece of conscience whispering remorse in my head was screaming, now, and for just one second – one measly second – I was ready to finally accept my daughter's death and forgive humanity for their sins. Then Ash spoke again.

"It was your daughter's."

My eyes opened.

"...What did you say, Ash?"

Ash took his hand off my shoulder, shrugging. "Well, you know, man. It was your daughter who attracted all that attention, not you. Fuckin' obviously. Shouldn't be puttin' the blame on yourself for the guilt of another, man."

I reared up off my chair. As Ash chuckled his smug little ass off at me, I turned back to him, clutched my fist, and sent it careening into a fierce clout directly into his right eye. Ash's obnoxious laugh turned into a curse of pain as he tumbled back, tripped, and fell back against the left wall. As he clutched the eye in pain and stared up at me in surprise, I faced down him with a face that surely looked like an enraged tiger's from Ash's point-of-view.

"If you ever speak foul words about my daughter again," I uttered, my voice flaring, "I will personally shoot your kneecaps and leave you to burn with the rest of this filth on this planet as I alone ascend! I will burn out this lingering speck of humanity within myself in time, but if you ever shame me or my daughter again..."

Ash spat in my direction as he heaved himself up t he wall, his hand still on his eye. "Gah, f**k you and your snotty dead cunt. I was tryin' to offer some fuckin' help, you ungrateful shitstain, and you go and bean me in the fuckin' face for my generous little act there. f**k you people. I'm not gonna bother with that s**t again." I lowered my head, my fist shaking, as Ash scoffed. "And besides, I think someone preachin' herself above humanity is a mite hypocritical if you're still thinkin' like a human. Just a heads-up, bitch."

I sighed and sat myself back down, as Ash stormed out of the room and left me to alternate between staring at Aria's photo and staring into my own palms as my mind went into a hurricane with a hundred different thoughts. I could no longer hear the call of my conscience. Just a cold, deathly wind blowing through my mind that wanted all of humanity dead. I was in a world of filth, surrounded by filth, contaminated with filth – so I might as well get going to clean that filth out of me. So it would be. Damn my daughter. Damn my grief. I would let my ambition and nothing else drive me.

I would be a god.