The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[FireNexus]

Um, what? Nobody said anything about nuking Heaven. We still can't get there.

"I know what you're thinking, what happens if we disrupt the far end? Well, watch this." He pressed the remote again and this time the top sphere shattered. Deprived of energy, the lower sphere faded away, but the glowing particles didn't stop coming. Instead more and more started to appear and this time they were drawn straight to the central torus instead of passing through to the lower region. The spinning donut started to twist and oscillate more and more wildly as it was bombarded with energy, then suddenly the screen went dark.

Kuroneko swore. The simulation had been thrown together in a 36-hour coding session so bugs were to be expected, but it had worked fine in the dry run. Naturally. He reset and tried again. Again the torus was bombarded with energy, looking as if it would fly apart... but then it suddenly swelled to twice it's original diameter. The particles could now make it through, and both spheres reappeared, much larger than before.

"As you can see, unlike our own efforts to date the strange matter envelope in the demon version is self-stabilising. Simply pouring energy in will only result in it reforming around a higher harmonic." Some of the military types still weren't getting it. He sighed and rephrased it into baby-talk for them. "So no General, you can't nuke it. We'll have to think of something else.

The nuke is our way into heaven.

[Ilya Muromets]

Anyone else here think "Nuking Our Way to Heaven" would make one awesome title for a kickass rock song?

[JBG]

""Just where the blazes is he?" Commander Mike Wong pulled his F-18H..."

Mike has had a promotion! Well deserved, he's been in the thick of it from day one (or at least chapter 1 of Armageddon).

"Stuart is pretty heavy into foreshadowing, for better or for worse. When something then appears completely without notice, it's rather jarring."

erik-t, you haven't read enough of Stuart's stuff. The TBOverse material is full of surprises.

"A nuke blown up on the heaven side after he gets through would, if I remember correctly, make the portal much bigger. the bigger a portal, the harder it is to shut down. That would make Myanmar our point of entry into heaven. Considering the name of the story, too, I don't think the fall of heaven is going to be the climax."

Firenexus, whilst the Israelis have been caught unawares, robust Thai units are poised and in the vicinity to take advantage of any such portal. So you are right, this is our first big chance to force entry. Is that enough to reveal our nuclear devices to Yahweh? Mmmm, probably.

If such a revelation were to take place I would prefer that it was not initially due to Israeli nukes. I don't consider that Fluffy and the Whore warrant such treatment.

[Setzer]

"The Scarlet Beast has broken into Jerusalem. It is laying waste the city and destroying all that is sacred there. The Whore of Babylon spreads her contamination across the city and none survive its poison. The Whore protects the Beast while the Beast destroys and together they kill everything. The dead already number in their hundreds of thousands. "

This sounds more like something Michael would be saying. At first, I thought it was him giving another report to Yahweh.

[dragon]

How on Earth were the Israelis - of all people - unable to send helicopter gunships and Merkavas at the Scarlet Beast? I mean, if Wuffles got killed by a base full of troops, then certainly Israel would have enough firepower to use on the Scarlet Beast to kill it before reaching a situation wherein nuking their own cities would be considered, rite?

Because I doubt the Israelis would contribute so much shit to the HEA that their own forces on Earth and Israel woud be depleted (to the point of having no defense against giant monsters or the goddamn Egyptians, Syrians and whatnot except for their international goodwill)..

The Egyptians and Syrians sent in quite large numbers of their troops, each at around about several divisions if I remember correctly. Additionally, a lot of Arab divisions are understrength to begin with, so that would probably cut even more into the Arab OoB, and the soldiers in Hell would be the mechanized boys (you don't expect Egyptian and Syrian light infantry to accomplish much against Israel, and vice versa). And the Israelis have nukes.

Well we know that the Israeli at beginning of 2008 had hundreds of F15's and F16's over 100 Apaches plus over 3500 tanks and over 10000 APC. And that doesn't count all their old stuff they still have in service. And despite the tensions having eased off between Israeli and the rest both sides have been fighting long enough that some tension will remain and they would have kept some units back for defense.

from
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[Simon_Jester]

Why would the Israelis send anything to Hell if the Egyptians and Syrians sent shit there, anyway? The Israelis won't really give a crap about where in hell the Egyptians and the Syrians are sending their troops.

First, remember that they need to send something to Hell or every other developed nation in the world will place Israel on their personal shit list, which would leave them quite thoroughly screwed.

Assume the Israelis need most of their army to defend their country against Egyptian and Syrian attacks. Further assume that the Egyptians and Syrians send a large fraction of their own armies to Hell, including most of their heavy equipment (tanks, warplanes, AA guns).

The Israelis can reasonably say "Ah-ha! The armies on our border are smaller now, so we can pry loose some troops to send to Hell now!" This becomes a lot safer with much of the Egyptian and Syrian armies in Hell, because troops in Hell are not well positioned to launch a direct assault against Israel, what with being in another dimension and all.

Therefore, the bigger the chunk of their armies the Egyptians, Syrians, and/or Jordanians send to the HEA, the bigger the chunk the Israelis can afford to send without compromising their own defenses. Simple.

Why *WOULD* the Israeli Submarine Service possibly appear before now? They just weren't relevant to the story until now.

Yeah. I mean, the Israelis have submarines; this is fairly general knowledge. Their ability to fire nuclear cruise missiles may just be a rumor, but the submarines physically exist. They bought them from Germany in what, the '80s?

Well we know that the Israeli at beginning of 2008 had hundreds of F15's and F16's over 100 Apaches plus over 3500 tanks and over 10000 APC. And that doesn't count all their old stuff they still have in service. And despite the tensions having eased off between Israeli and the rest both sides have been fighting long enough that some tension will remain and they would have kept some units back for defense.

from
link

Absolutely, but if the countries Israel is worried about send half their army, the Israelis can reasonably send half their army... more or less. We know Israel has forces in the HEA, and I think this helps to explain why they felt confident in moving them there.

[Bayonet]

Also as a side point (well, not really. It's more of a random point but this is the best place to ask.), does anyone know what kind of gun this is? It sits in front of the Tulane ROTC building. It's interesting to me, so I thought I'd ask the authority on military stuff.



I'd appreciate the help greatly.

It looks like a 5 inch 51 calibre. They were used as secondary armament on the older battleships and cruisers.

http://www.navsource.org/archives/01/57t.htm

[Stuart]

It looks like a 5 inch 51 calibre. They were used as secondary armament on the older battleships and cruisers.

I agree, 5 inch L51. It could be a 6 inch L53 but the barrel in the picture is smooth from mount to muzzle (like the 5 L51) while the 6 inch L53 has a distinct step near the mount. So, the 5 inch L51 is the best bet.

[erik_t]

It is indeed a 5"/51.

Compare navweaps image to another angle at Tulane.

Also I absent-mindedly measured the bore when I was wandering their campus and it was a lot closer to 5" than 6"

[GrayAnderson]

1) Loved the irony of the virgins waiting in Hell instead. Beautiful.

2) Would I be right in guessing that the US just let a bombing run loose over wherever Uriel was in Hacienda Heights?

3) You mentioned a two-hour time gap between death and re-emergence in Hell. I remember tossing (somewhat off-handedly) a question or comment in about some sort of "switching station" existing further up the pike behind the Hellmouth (which would allow Heaven to take whomever they wanted first...but clearly also offers access to "other interested parties"). Should we expect some exploration of that system at some point in the story? (I ask because...I've gotta confess that the story is great, but working and thinking through the systems involved in how this reality works is almost more fun than reading the story).

3a) There was some discussion about Uriel wiping out the souls of people or somesuch. I can, of course, think of multiple alternative explanations (from them being picked up by some third party to simple non-existence, though the latter is a bit head-scratchy for me given the dynamics of the world), so I'll just ask the easiest-to-answer question: When the people under attack from Uriel die, do they turn up at the Hellmouth?

4) We know now that the demons caused all sorts of trouble through, in essence, electromagnetic interference. Strictly a did-I-read-this-right, but did Satan appear on TV, or am I just misremembering that?

[Guardsman Bass]

3a) There was some discussion about Uriel wiping out the souls of people or somesuch. I can, of course, think of multiple alternative explanations (from them being picked up by some third party to simple non-existence, though the latter is a bit head-scratchy for me given the dynamics of the world), so I'll just ask the easiest-to-answer question: When the people under attack from Uriel die, do they turn up at the Hellmouth?

If I remember right, they actually get sent somewhere else, so they don't show up at the Hellmouth. Wherever that "somewhere else" is is a mystery.

[tortieconspiracy]

3a) There was some discussion about Uriel wiping out the souls of people or somesuch. I can, of course, think of multiple alternative explanations (from them being picked up by some third party to simple non-existence, though the latter is a bit head-scratchy for me given the dynamics of the world), so I'll just ask the easiest-to-answer question: When the people under attack from Uriel die, do they turn up at the Hellmouth?

They verifiably do not turn up in Hell. From Chapter Two:

"Not really Mister President, no. Azrael is supposed to be the angel of death in the Grim Reaper sense. Uriel is more along the vengeance and punishment line. Like a loan-shark's enforcer. There's one really nasty thing about Uriel, he doesn’t just kill his victims, he snuffs out their souls as well."

"That sounds a bit far-fetched."

"Not really Mister President. We have some supporting evidence for it; there have been eight of these attacks in South America, five in Brazil, two in Uruguay, one in Bolivia. They've killed around five thousand people. Not one of those victims has turned up in Hell."

Of course whether they're actually permanently snuffed out or sent someplace unknown remains an open question.

[Eulogy]

I'd hazard a guess that it's easier and faster for Uriel to simply move souls into a different dimension then Hell, than outright destroy them. Given the attitudes angels have towards humans in general, I would not be surprised if Uriel sent the souls he kills to the same place that animals and plants end up in - the Cosmic Dustbin, if you will.

[GrayAnderson]

3a) There was some discussion about Uriel wiping out the souls of people or somesuch. I can, of course, think of multiple alternative explanations (from them being picked up by some third party to simple non-existence, though the latter is a bit head-scratchy for me given the dynamics of the world), so I'll just ask the easiest-to-answer question: When the people under attack from Uriel die, do they turn up at the Hellmouth?

They verifiably do not turn up in Hell. From Chapter Two:

"Not really Mister President, no. Azrael is supposed to be the angel of death in the Grim Reaper sense. Uriel is more along the vengeance and punishment line. Like a loan-shark's enforcer. There's one really nasty thing about Uriel, he doesn’t just kill his victims, he snuffs out their souls as well."

"That sounds a bit far-fetched."

"Not really Mister President. We have some supporting evidence for it; there have been eight of these attacks in South America, five in Brazil, two in Uruguay, one in Bolivia. They've killed around five thousand people. Not one of those victims has turned up in Hell."

Of course whether they're actually permanently snuffed out or sent someplace unknown remains an open question.

Ok. Thought I remembered something like that. Thanks for the refresher.

Also, it's interesting to think about the bit in the last chapter:

Al-Sohl saw strange things, weird shapes, strange colors, indescribable things that he forgot as soon as he saw them. Things that no human mind could ever recall because they were swamped out by the great white glow as the tiny dot in his vision swelled up and filled his vision.

I'm thinking that there's a strong hint of multiple "interested parties" still having access to the pipeline; Elvis vanishing hints at that as well, though I'd also be open to speculation there that Michael just didn't get to his "access point" along the pipeline in time.

I'd hazard a guess that it's easier and faster for Uriel to simply move souls into a different dimension then Hell, than outright destroy them. Given the attitudes angels have towards humans in general, I would not be surprised if Uriel sent the souls he kills to the same place that animals and plants end up in - the Cosmic Dustbin, if you will.

I'm getting images of "Dog Heaven" in my mind, and you did just raise an interesting issue on the nature of the soul in the context of this story: What is necessary? Is it genetic? Is species sentience necessary? Do plants have souls? Etc.

[Simon_Jester]

Soo.... the Happy Hunting Grounds, then?

[Eulogy]

I'm getting images of "Dog Heaven" in my mind, and you did just raise an interesting issue on the nature of the soul in the context of this story: What is necessary? Is it genetic? Is species sentience necessary? Do plants have souls? Etc.

It's definitely based on species. Human embryoes ended up in hell after all, and embryoes don't even have minds (or at least they don't "live" long enough to grow minds anyway).

I'm speculating here, but I'd say that the mechanism that sends humans to Hell was rigged to automatically reject nonhumans and send them to the Cosmic Dustbin. Humans are diverted to Hell simply because humans are most useful to the inhabitants of Hell. Yahweh closed off Heaven and sent the Message because humans weren't as mindlessly servile as he wanted anymore, don't forget. And because humans are the most conscious and intelligent of all Earthly life, they can feel the most pain - and thus release the most energy when tortured. (Demons thought they needed the energy for their afterlife, and why make do with lizards and rats when humans are so much richer? Of course, Satan is just a sadistic twat looking for his jollies, so yeah.)

The idea of torturing a tree or a centipede would be thought absurd to demons, and slugs won't even acknowledge Yah-yah's existence. Off to the Cosmic Dustbin they go.

The problem of determining if something is smart enough to serve as feedstock/servants is that the process of evolution blurs the line. When did the ancestors of humans become useful to Heaven and Hell? And what did they make do with beforehand? What is the threshold of a species' intelligence, for it to become useful? I'd wager that all life has, in context of this story, souls, but it is based on how smart the creature in question is. Plants, obviously, won't yield souls desirable or even potent enough for netherworld creatures to bother with. But plants, being biological creatures, still have souls, and said souls must go SOMEWHERE when the plant in question dies. Off to the Cosmic Dustbin it goes, for it is plain garbage compared to rich human souls.

Hell, even the earliest cell would have a soul. The power of a single cell's soul would not even be noticed, of course, being a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of say, a cat's soul. But like dust, it's still there, and like dust, it's easily swept aside, left to accumulate somewhere out of sight.

When humans find the place where dead ferrets go, they'd better prepare for stegosauri and dodo birds.

[erik_t]

It seems clear that Heaven/Hell discovered humanity some time after nominal sentience, so that there need not be a comprehensive and confusing discussion of at what point their (our) suffering/adulation would be useful to Satan and Yahweh.

[GrayAnderson]

Yeah. From what I gather, there are at least a handful of "civilizations" out there, with Yahweh and Co. acting as a "Great Filter" much of the time. They're also not everywhere all the time, so it is very possible that they didn't even know about Earth until some time in the last few million years. They also seem to be a one-project-at-a-time operation, too.

I also am willing to speculate that the reason he didn't shut the Earth operation down sooner was that he hadn't managed to find a suitable replacement species to start shuffling in to replace the humans...and as a result, should he have not found one with sufficient numbers to replace the humans in time (granted, "in time" is relative, but there's also going to be at least some steady statistical decline in the human population in Heaven over time due to accidents, flare-ups of heresy, and the like, so given a few thousand years a shortage might have come up), one suspects that he and/or Satan would have probably needed to do something to make humans more "usable" so they could go in and get more.

When humans find the place where dead ferrets go, they'd better prepare for stegosauri and dodo birds.

I wonder if they'll also find where dead letters go?:p

[Junghalli]

I'm not certain that what gets sent to Hell or Heaven is necessarily a soul in the traditional sense. Everything about how undeath and Hell and Heaven in general work screams artificiality to me. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out the Minos Gate (and its counterpart in Heaven) is part of some kind of uploading and re-embodiment system set up by a much more technologically advanced civilization, which the present day bubble world civilizations have hijacked for their own purposes. If I had to guess I'd say that the Angels stumbled on the "control room" of the system, hence how they can re-divert souls, but they didn't build it and probably don't understand how it actually works.

If my guess is right there's no reason to necessarily assume consciousness in this universe is anything but a purely biochemical process, with the re-embodiment system rapidly uploading the victim at the time of death and downloading them into a new body created by either a rapid nanoassembler system or something more exotic.

Perhaps the system was originally set up as a benevolent act by a civilization with something akin to Star Trek's Prime Directive. If I had to follow a rule like that it's what I'd do: let the primitive natives have their short brutal lives so their "cultural integrity" is preserved, but afterwards use my advanced technology to give them an afterlife. Whatever the original function, the system was presumably abandoned at some point well before the Angel civilization's origin.

Here's a thought: could the undead's resilience and lack of need for food be because they're not actually biological beings at all but some kind of mechanical* construct? Has anyone tried dissecting/vivisecting one yet, or examining tissue samples under a microscope?

* Note: at the level of technology we're talking about mechanical constructs could easily look a lot like biological systems until you looked at them under a microscope, if you wanted them to.

[Land Phish]

Maybe they're just puffs of Ki like in DBZ molded like clay into a humanoid form. I think there's some kind of ancient Asian philosophy that states that the body is actually pure energy and the physical form is just an illusion.

[Baughn]

If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck..

There are plenty of indications that the undead are physical, if not necessarily human or biological. Given that they act physical to the point of getting wounds and having molecules, I'd argue that there's no real difference between that and being physical, never mind the substrate those molecules are made of - it obviously doesn't matter.

(But maybe I'm misunderstanding. Exactly what does "made of energy" mean?)

[GrayAnderson]

Junghali,
Very interesting thoughts there. I honestly hadn't considered those, but it would explain some of those experiences, the two-hour delay, etc. I'd be willing to suggest that said civilization might also exist on the "third level" (as we've been told, IIRC, that there's at least one more level on each "side" of things). In fact, I wouldn't be averse to the idea that the switching room isn't even on the level of the bubble universes but is, in fact, on the third level and that it's just spitting things back out on the second level.

What it wouldn't explain is why when someone returns to our level they start dying in fairly short order in spite of having a regenerating body. Of course, if these bodies function on the basis of some sort of energy that is native to or only exists in sufficient quantities in the Bubble Universe level, then that would explain said problems.

If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck..

There are plenty of indications that the undead are physical, if not necessarily human or biological. Given that they act physical to the point of getting wounds and having molecules, I'd argue that there's no real difference between that and being physical, never mind the substrate those molecules are made of - it obviously doesn't matter.

(But maybe I'm misunderstanding. Exactly what does "made of energy" mean?)

Well, do remember that "physical" seems to have a bit of a stretchy meaning here. The story may be hard SF, but the hardness is also a bit malleable at times insofar as Stuart has room to fiddle with the laws of the universe due to having multiple universes to work with.

[Junghalli]

What it wouldn't explain is why when someone returns to our level they start dying in fairly short order in spite of having a regenerating body. Of course, if these bodies function on the basis of some sort of energy that is native to or only exists in sufficient quantities in the Bubble Universe level, then that would explain said problems.

The same system the uploads and re-embodies the undead provides them with energy. The effect obviously is reliant on some sort of infrastructure (either inside the Minos Gate or somewhere else in Hell), and when we take them away from Hell they're disconnected from the power source. It might be that they're fed electricity via resonant inductive coupling with a grid of coils buried all over the surface of Hell, or it might be something more exotic.

Honestly, I find this the most plausible idea for how they can survive without food. The idea that the system is natural is a lot more problematic - although less so if you assume the undead bodies are upgraded by the re-embodiment system with special organs to allow them to tap some pre-existing energy field, rather like upgrading a living human with chloroplasts, but better because it actually is feasible for highly active autotrophes to survive in Hell (technically it's feasible on Earth too, but evolution never got around to inventing a solar collector good enough).

An interesting point here will be whether or not you can bring somebody back to Earth after feeding them on a regular basis. It could be that undeads just immediately die when they're brought back to Earth because they've never eaten and have no internal energy reserves. In which case they could survive on Earth easily just by building up some body fat beforehand. If this doesn't work it points to a significantly different basic metabolism, which would support the artificial construct theory over the straightforward recreated human body theory.

[Brovane]

Another interesting thing I thought about. What happens if people start working to take revenge on the people that killed them in Hell. Say somebody was murdered 20 years ago. The murderer eventually dies in the jail. The person that was murdered is eventually rescued from the hell pit. What happens if the person that was murdered seeks out revenge on the person that killed them in hell?

[Baughn]

The same thing that happens if you seek out revenge while still alive, I expect: You get put on trial and punished. I can't see a forcible relocation to hell changing this - well, except that (new, on earth) murders will have to be considered much smaller crimes than they used to be.