The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Eighty One Up

[JointStrikeFighter]

Eulogy is a fucking psycho; the Minos gate is controlled by the US led HEA; turns out western sensibilities aren't going to allow eternal torture.

[Eulogy]

Eulogy is a fucking psycho; the Minos gate is controlled by the US led HEA; turns out western sensibilities aren't going to allow eternal torture.

Two problems with that statement:

A) The US DOES condone torture, and aren't likely to stop anytime soon. Remember Gitmo?

B) Lots of people got vaporized, and lots more will be radiation poisoned. Do you honestly think they wouldn't want a piece of the scumbag who turned on them? Do you think that just because the US says "No, you can't torture this guy" that they'll listen? This is a fucker who ruined lives and futures, and left scars. This is a monster who almost caused a fucking nuclear apocalypse, ensuring Heaven wins and humans get tortured for eternity like Yahyah wanted. Even IF he got special protection (which I HIGHLY doubt) it'd only be a matter of time before the people he nuked/poisoned find a way to filch the bastard from wherever he's being held and start having their way with him. And nobody will help the US catch his kidnappers.

Reality is ugly. Being a traitorous felcher when humanity is desperately fighting for its existence will do the exact opposite of endearing them to you. And the wronged WILL want blood.

[CaptainChewbacca]

We havn't been torturing the guys at Gitmo nonstop, I doubt we'll permit the eternal torture of the people behind the nuking of Tel Aviv.

[Shroom Man 777]

Plus, they have to be interrogated to figure out what exactly is going on. An Archangel, that's not Micheal? Who? What? Huh? Where?! When?!

I hope Dumah makes it out alright. She's the Whore of Babylon, a whore, and thus one of God's greatest creations!

[Darth Wong]

We havn't been torturing the guys at Gitmo nonstop, I doubt we'll permit the eternal torture of the people behind the nuking of Tel Aviv.

We control certain key areas of Hell, not its entirety. But they have no suspects yet anyway, and we still don't know how destinations are selected. For all you know, the culprit won't even go to Hell at all.

[Shroom Man 777]

But one of the parts that's also controlled is the... reception area. It seems so well controlled that new arrivals, whose last memories are of their time of death, find themselves on a hospital bed when they first wake up in Hell.

[Darth Wong]

But one of the parts that's also controlled is the... reception area. It seems so well controlled that new arrivals, whose last memories are of their time of death, find themselves on a hospital bed when they first wake up in Hell.

Certain people get that treatment. There's absolutely no goddamned way everyone gets that treatment. Even when we're not in a time of war, the world death rate is 8.2 deaths per 1000 population according to the CIA World Factbook. That means we're looking at roughly 57 million deaths per year, or more than 150,000 deaths per day.

In other words, every day you can expect more than a hundred and fifty thousand people to flow through the reception area. There is no goddamned way that we are providing every one of them with a hospital bed and a nice reception; that is VIP treatment. Most of them are almost certainly shoved off onto the Hell plains and left to their own devices. Your treatment probably depends in large part upon whether you had any money in life, or whether the military has any interest in you.

There must surely be long winding streams of people wandering on foot into the barren plains of Hell, streaming away from the reception area.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, it's not like any of the dead people there would immediately recognize the submarine crew (and immediately go and torture them forever) - except for those HEA people who're on the lookout for 'certain people'. Those submarine guys would certainly be 'certain people' who the military has much interest on. They'd probably get nabbed upon arrival and end up waking up in a dungeon or interrogation room, rather than a cozy hospital bed.

That'd suck, waking up in the afterlife and immediately getting interrogated/waterboarded. If and when those submarine guys get depth charged, that'll totally be the next thing they'd experience. It might be a good strategy, interrogate a person while he's still groggy and disoriented right after arriving at the afterlife.

[Darth Wong]

I can't help but wonder if First World and Third World distinctions persist in Hell. In other words, given the sheer flux of people through the system, do people from Africa automatically get put on conveyor belts, dumped onto the Hell plains, and told to get lost while people from the USA get much better treatment?

[Shroom Man 777]

Ah, that would most certainly suck. Not so much as the poor people automatically end up in a Turd Worlder train/conveyor belt to the Hell plains, but those recognizably American end up getting picked up (thanks to the US government census bureau immediately forwarding death certificates to Hell? ) while the non-Americans or non-Western guys just get left there and neglected.

It would also depend on the time discrepancy between time of death and time of afterlife arrival. And the nature of the "welcoming committee" that's stationed in the "reception area". If it's a UN or multinational thing, perhaps it might not be so discriminating? Or perhaps the US and the other well-off Western nations have a policy of immediately extracting their dead and putting them in some Satanic Suburbua, while the UN/multinational humanitarian effort is left with the "undesirables".

At least providing food and medicine won't be an issue anymore, for those who died of starvation and sickness.

Hey, these potential unequalities could be awesomely ( ) addressed, and perhaps Stuart's pseudo-documentary narrative style would work for it too.

Awesome idea:

Perhaps these neglected Third World dead people, if they have nowhere to go, might end up rooming in with the Baldricks. Now THAT is an interesting story to tell! An apartment block in Hell, with a demon landlord and a jazzy hip and clever human tenant struggling to pay the rent, and other residents like an overcrowded demon family trying to get along with a bunch of dead old people fresh from the retirement home who're now their next door neighbors! Gramps don't like these whipper-snapper demon kidlings! Why, when I was your age...!

[open_sketchbook]

"Our Landlord Bezeelbub" is filmed in front of a live studio audience.

[Darth Yan]

i asked stu which of the 4 chayot (Sal, Cham, Zad, and Az) were involved with the conspiracy, and he said that ONE of them was. Maybe one of these 4 did it. Either way, which one do you suspect it is?

[Stuart]

Certain people get that treatment. There's absolutely no goddamned way everyone gets that treatment. Even when we're not in a time of war, the world death rate is 8.2 deaths per 1000 population according to the CIA World Factbook. That means we're looking at roughly 57 million deaths per year, or more than 150,000 deaths per day. In other words, every day you can expect more than a hundred and fifty thousand people to flow through the reception area. There is no goddamned way that we are providing every one of them with a hospital bed and a nice reception; that is VIP treatment. Most of them are almost certainly shoved off onto the Hell plains and left to their own devices. Your treatment probably depends in large part upon whether you had any money in life, or whether the military has any interest in you. There must surely be long winding streams of people wandering on foot into the barren plains of Hell, streaming away from the reception area.

The way it works is this. The death rate works out at 1.8 persons per second arriving through the Minos Gate (say a maximum of two persons per second to allow for surges and so on). They get grabbed by the Minos gate work teams (originally troops now Second Life Humans working in shifts) and put on a conveyor. That takes them out through the Human Minos Gate to Earth where they rumble across some open ground before going into a second gate that takes them to the reception area on the Phelan Plain. Once in the reception area, they are whisked off the belt by another work gang and placed in a hospital bed to recover. That takes between ten and twenty minutes. Then, when they wake up, their personal details and skill sets are taken down, entered into the computer system and then they are returned to their parent nation for care and employment. The whole arrivals process takes about an hour so the reception facility requires a total of 7,200 beds which is an entirely practical number. Originally the staff of the reception area were First Life humans but as more Second Life nurses and doctors become available, they're taking over running the place.

Now, what happens once they're in, recovered and entered into the computer? Well, the first thing is that those who have made prior arrangements are winnowed out. We saw this happening with Tribune Madeuce, he had everything set up and waiting for him. People who have made a down payment on a villa in the New Roman Republic get put to one side along with others who have made similar arrangements for other new states that are popping up (there's an obvious problem going to develop there). Military personnel are also taken out and set to one side. Then, the skill-sets belonging to each survivor are recorded and compared against the data base of required skills. Anybody who has a desperately needed skill-set is taken and assigned to work using that skill-set. Good examples there would be doctors, nurses, skilled construction workers, etc. That list is virtually endless. What's left (ie people with no discernable skills) get sent to do unskilled labor tasks - colelctively described as working on a road gang since the highest priority task is building proper roads. So, there will be no people wandering aimlessly around, there is far too much work to be done to allow that. Imagine the population and a medium-szied city being dumped into an uninhabited plain and told to rebuild their city. With their bare hands. That's the magnitude of the task they face.

Apart from that, looking after people once they've arrived is a national responsibility (unless the person says otherwise). So each country is building facilities and accommodation to look after their own arrivals. These are refugee camps in every sense of the phrase (building them being one of the "road gang" jobs. They'll vary from the U.S. facilities which would be basic but reasonably comfortable to third world facilities that would be very basic indeed. Obvious problems there. There's a lot of details that need fleshing out here whoch is the subject of the last book.

However, the basic point is that handling the arrivals isn't an impossible task, its large certainly but it's within human abilities. The reception area itself is basically equivalent to three or four modern hospitals with a very rapid throughput of patients. So, everybody gets more or less the same treatment when they arrive, its what happens afterwards that gets awkward. The big redeeming feature is also the same as the big problem - sheer numbers. There are large numbers of humans arriving (plus an even larger number being freed from the pit and that has immense problems associated with it) but that same number also provides a large workforce to handle the problems. That's a key point as well, there's a large workforce but there's also a massive amount of work to be done. The problem is going to come in the future when that workload begins to ease down (the roads and cities and airports etc are all built. What do we do now?) It's rather like the end-game in "Civilization" where the cities are complete, there's no wonders left to build and one's left with cities that have nothing left to spend their resources on.

[Stuart]

i asked stu which of the 4 chayot (Sal, Cham, Zad, and Az) were involved with the conspiracy, and he said that ONE of them was. Maybe one of these 4 did it. Either way, which one do you suspect it is?

Actually, I said one the options you provided was correct

[Shroom Man 777]

Damn. I guess the fact that they're actually using all those folks for labor precludes the, ah, awesome stuff I was going on about.

But I find the sheer organization dedicated to receiving humans in Hell to be really awesome too. Like, very systematic and organized. It should be the subject of a documentary or something, with Mickey Rowe or something.

[Stuart]

But I find the sheer organization dedicated to receiving humans in Hell to be really awesome too. Like, very systematic and organized. It should be the subject of a documentary or something, with Mickey Rowe or something.

Handling and organizing people on this sort of scale is actually something humans are very good at. We're so good at it, we don't actually think about how good we are, we just do it. We see what goes wrong and comment on it but we very rarely see what is going right (simple example - when somebody drives the wrong way down a highway, it makes headlines, the tens of thousand every day who are organized to drive on the correct side of the road are never thought about.)

There is a long-term danger in the system I describe though. One thought I had was that because the reception area is under more-or-less international control (and control by Second-Life humans at that), in the end, the brightest and the best people are going to make their own post-death arrangements which will take priority over national origin. So, slowly, the new states in Hell, (the New Roman Republic and its analogues) will cream off the best and the brightest and the Second-Life Earth-based national states will be left with the remainder. That's going to lead to a lot of conflict.

The documentary idea will undoubtedly happen along with new reality shows. I hate to think what they'll be like. "And now, the season premier of 'Second Life'. Follow a group of new Second-Lifers as they cope with their new existance in Hell. Each week, one will be voted out and sent to a road-gang. And for the last survivor, a villa in the New Roman Republic". I can see Discovery Channel programs about Hell, History Channel Specials on historical events as seen by the people what done them. "Who was Jack The Ripper? - Watch History Channel tonight for the answer and an interview with the killer himself - or herself." Then there will be Google Hell to complement Google Earth - that's already written in by the way. And what will happen to Wikipedia is horrible to imagine. As you will soon see.

[Darth Yan]

sorry. I thought it would be humorous if the other archangels in the chayot top tier were secretly plotting to overthrow Yahweh. I just thought you weren't being clear.

[Stuart]

sorry. I thought it would be humorous if the other archangels in the chayot top tier were secretly plotting to overthrow Yahweh. I just thought you weren't being clear.

They may well be. That was one of the options you offered. We know there are two conspiracies to overthrow Yahweh, Michael-Lan's based around corruption and subversion and another that is a straightforward insurgency. The possibility of others certainly exists.

[Darth Yan]

I talked to stewart, and he confirmed that Yitzach will suffer a fate far more horrible then anything that Euology came up with. and Lemmy will be featured very soon.

[Simon_Jester]

There is a long-term danger in the system I describe though. One thought I had was that because the reception area is under more-or-less international control (and control by Second-Life humans at that), in the end, the brightest and the best people are going to make their own post-death arrangements which will take priority over national origin. So, slowly, the new states in Hell, (the New Roman Republic and its analogues) will cream off the best and the brightest and the Second-Life Earth-based national states will be left with the remainder. That's going to lead to a lot of conflict.

That could reasonably be countered by having the Earth-based national states create similar arrangements. The developed world, at least, could probably create something roughly as appealing as New Rome in their own occupied territories. And from the point of view of the Second Lifer, that has the advantages of keeping citizenship in a nation you may well still be emotionally attached to, and being reasonably confident that you won't be forced to watch Roman C-SPAN or go listen to speeches in a toga on election day because Julius Caesar thought it would be a good idea.

EDIT: Random side note: I don't think it's a good idea for us to start setting a precedent of indefinite-term punishments in anyone's Second Life, even if they did something insanely vile, such as firing nuclear missiles at people. After all, the idea that you can be assigned an infinite punishment for a finite crime (and all crimes that can be committed on Earth are finite, even if they are so huge that no one can fully grasp their enormity) is one of the big problems with the Christian concept of Hell in the first place. If a just God wouldn't do that, a just man wouldn't either.

[Ast]

"O Lordly One, I have news from below. The Fourth Bowl of Wrath has been poured on another human city. The capital of the Israelites is no more."

That stopped Michael in his tracks. "The Fourth Bowl of Wrath poured on Jerusalem? And only one city?"

"Only one, Greatest of Generals."

Please excuse my ignorance, but are these weapons really that easy to intercept that all four of them were destroyed?

If so, am I right assuming that their real danger lies in a short flight time => no time to get interception up in the air?

So, the crew of the sub doesn't get to know what they are shooting at or even how many warheads they fire until the keys are turned and the things take off?
I think it should take them aback that five missiles were fired instead of one.
Unless that's standard procedure: fire none or fire all.

[Kodiak]

I talked to stewart, and he confirmed that Yitzach will suffer a fate far more horrible then anything that Euology came up with. and Lemmy will be featured very soon.

It'll be interesting to see what serving multiple, consecutive life-sentences and years upon years of torture will do to a person.

Also, his name is Stuart - not Stewart. Stewart is the kid on Family Guy

[Mr Bean]

I talked to stewart, and he confirmed that Yitzach will suffer a fate far more horrible then anything that Euology came up with. and Lemmy will be featured very soon.

It'll be interesting to see what serving multiple, consecutive life-sentences and years upon years of torture will do to a person.

Also, his name is Stuart - not Stewart. Stewart is the kid on Family Guy

Incorrect that Stewie, this is Stewart
John

Also there's a Green Latern Stewart (Photo not available)

[Shroom Man 777]

So, the crew of the sub doesn't get to know what they are shooting at or even how many warheads they fire until the keys are turned and the things take off?
I think it should take them aback that five missiles were fired instead of one.
Unless that's standard procedure: fire none or fire all.

When only one missile is fired, it kind of gives away a submarine's position and if it chooses to fire its remaining missiles sometime later, the element of surprise has already been given away and the enemy now knows the sub's general location and will be going after it, thus decreasing the chances of success of the later launches.

If all are launched at the same time, the enemy's reaction times will be shorter, and the enemy has to deal with multiple missiles, so the chances of a successful attack will be higher.

[Blayne]

Would like to point out 'Second Life' is probably a trademark of whichever game company that created the hellish horrible game.