The Gates (Samuel Johnson vs. the Devil #1)(5)

Victor’s face creased in concentration. Somewhere in the not very vast vastness of Ed’s board lay a submarine, a destroyer, and an aircraft carrier, yet, for the life of him, Victor couldn’t seem to hit them. He wondered if Ed was lying about all those misses, then decided that Ed wasn’t the kind of person who lied about much at all. Ed wasn’t terribly imaginative and, in Victor’s experience, it was imaginative people who tended to lie. Lying required making stuff up, and only imaginative people were good at that. Victor had a little more imagination than Ed, and therefore lied more. Not much, but certainly a bit.

Ed heard Victor sniff loudly.

“Ugh!” said Victor. “Was that you?”

Now Ed smelled it too. There was a distinct whiff of rotten eggs in the room.

“No, it wasn’t me,” said Ed, somewhat offended.

For the second time in as many minutes, Victor wondered if Ed might be lying.

“Anyway,” said Ed, “it’s my turn. E three.”

“Miss.”

Beep.

“What was that?”

Victor didn’t look up. “I said it was a miss. That’s what it was: a miss.”

“No,” said Ed. “I meant: what was that?”

His right index finger was pointing at the computer screen, which was occupied by a visual representation of all the exciting things happening in the particle accelerator, and which had just beeped. The image on the screen looked like a tornado, albeit one that was the same width throughout instead of resembling a funnel.

“I don’t see anything wrong,” said Victor.

“A bit just whizzed off,” said Ed. “And it went beep.”

“A bit?” said Victor. “It’s not a bicycle. Bits don’t just whiz off.”

“Right then,” said Ed, looking miffed. “A particle of some kind appears to have disengaged itself from the whole and exited the accelerator. Is that better?”

“You mean that a bit just whizzed off?” said Victor, thinking, who said we Germans don’t have a sense of humor?

Ed just looked at him. Victor stared back, then sighed.

“It’s not possible,” he said. “It’s a contained environment. Particles don’t simply leave it to go off, well, somewhere else. It must have been a glitch.”5

“It wasn’t a glitch,” said Ed. He abandoned the game and began furiously tapping buttons on a keyboard. On a second screen, he pulled up another version of the visual representation, checked the time, then began running it backward. Twenty seconds into the rewind, a small glowing particle came into view from the left of the screen and appeared to rejoin the whole. Ed paused the image, then allowed it to run forward again at half speed. Together, he and Victor watched as the bit whizzed off.

“That’s not good,” said Victor.

“No,” said Ed. “It shouldn’t even be possible.”

“What do you think it is?”

Ed examined the data. “I don’t know.”

Both men were now working on keyboards. Simultaneously, they pulled up the same string of data on their screens as they tried to pinpoint a reason for the anomaly.

“I’m not seeing anything,” said Ed. “It must be buried deep.”

“Wait,” said Victor. “I’m seeing—No! What’s this? What’s happening?”

As he and Ed watched, the data seemed to rewrite itself. Strings of code changed; zeros became ones and ones became zeros. Frantically, both men tried to arrest the progress of the changes, but to no avail.

“It must be a bug,” said Victor. “It’s covering its own tracks.”

“Someone must have hacked into the system,” said Ed.

“I helped to build this system,” said Victor, “and even I couldn’t hack into it, not like this.”

And then, less than a minute after it began, the changes to the code were completed. Ed tried rerunning the image of the particle separating itself from the accelerator, but this time only the great tunnel of energy appeared upon the screen, filled with protons behaving exactly as they should have been behaving.

“We’ll have to report it,” said Ed.

“I know,” said Victor. “But there’s no evidence. There’s just our word.”

“Won’t that be enough?”

Victor nodded. “Probably, but—” He stared at the screen. “What did it mean? And, more to the point, where did it go?

“And what is that smell . . . ?”

? ? ?

Scientists were not the only ones who had been monitoring the collider.

Down in the dark places where the worst things hid, an ancient Evil had been watching the construction of the collider with great interest. The entity that existed in the darkness had many names: Satan, Beelzebub, the Devil. To the creatures that dwelt with it, he was known as the Great Malevolence.6

The Great Malevolence had been squatting in the blackness for a very long time. He was there billions of years before people, or dinosaurs, or small, single-celled organisms that decided one day to become larger, multicelled organisms so they could, at some point in the future, invent literature, painting, and annoying ring tones for cell phones. He had watched from the depths of space and time—for rock and fire and earth, vacuums and stars and planets were no obstacle to him—as life appeared on Earth, as trees sprouted and the oceans teemed, and he hated all that he saw. He wanted to bring it all to an end, but he could not. He was trapped in a place of flame and stone, surrounded by those like him, some of whom he had created from his own flesh, and others who had been banished there because they were foul and evil, although none quite as foul or as evil as the Great Malevolence himself. Few of the legions of demons who dwelt with him in that distant, fiery realm had even laid eyes upon the Great Malevolence, for he existed in the deepest, darkest corner of Hell, brooding and plotting, waiting for his chance to escape.