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THE ABYSS WITHIN
By Emma Lovelace
Bella crept into the shadows of the abandoned Main Control Room, feeling for the pressure of the switch on her fingers. In the second before she touched down, before the seductive and volatile Performer terminated the power of the illustrious Universe, Bella Abyss laughed in cruel and empty pity.
Bella's hands shook with tremulous joy at her power, her power to destroy everything. The trembling moved into her chest as she realized fully what she had accomplished. She felt her eyes fill with simulated tears. With a subtle touch of her forefinger, she, Bella Abyss, had ended the lives of the Infinities, if only briefly. She stepped away from the wall, blind in the all-encompassing darkness. Her hands moved to her eyes, touching the wetness of her tears as she shook her head. The deep curvature of her plasma body was slouched perhaps in remorse. She bent, her sweating hands clasping the flesh of her thighs. She wiped the sweat from her palms. Her shoulder touched her right eyelid and cheek to brush away the residue of tears. Rising slowly, she looked into the darkness.
"I am Queen," she said slowly, the volume of her voice harsh in the quiescence. "I am the Queen of Everything."
"My childe." A voice laughed from within the darkness, "You are Queen of Nothing, and Nothing alone, unless you flip back that switch." Bella turned. A light glittered softly, a deep glimmer, gently as a carpet unfolding, from the center of a dark expanse of glass. Bella realized it was the face of the primary computer. She frowned in consternation, for she, as a Copy, knew that the primary computer had been terminated many, many dynasties ago. It controlled the Fate of the Universe, determined the purpose of all life and potential in the blinking waves of stars, galaxies. The very existence of such a powerful tool had disturbed and frightened the citizens of the Greater Galaxy. They had felt its removal utterly necessary. Glancing at the beckoning light within the screen, Bella felt a wave of lust; to control the all-reaching power of the computer, why that would be a joy without end!
She knew its flawless circuitry had been without current for many centuries, since the Great Revolution of Copy Land. There was a name on the tip of her tongue, as she attempted to recall the First Queen, the Creator of the computer.
The voice spoke once more. "I should know. I should know because I, too, became a Queen of Nothing once." The steady glow of the computer screen extended itself into the room, forming the silhouette of a small, very voluptuous woman. Slowly colors seeped into her body, as water fills an empty glass. Her hair, a very dark gold, was short and hung around her face. Her lighter eyes were also gold, and her skin gleamed in flawless olive. A cloak of purple and burgundy conformed to her body in mysterious folds. As Bella glanced at the rich shape of the woman’s body, waves of longing moved through her. Bella's hands shook again, palm trees in a typhoon. The figure moved to recline upon a dusty chair perhaps taken from one of the main floor lobbies. The make of the chair was old; Bella guessed it probably originated in the era of Queen Hadrian.
"I can give you everything, if you want it." The voice streaked through Bella’s being. She felt her essence screaming within her forehead as a heart furiously pumping. "If you want it, the Universe is yours. I only ask only one thing."
"What is that?" The shakiness of her own voice frightened Bella.
"That you set me free."
The woman smiled then. "Ah my dear," she said, "you project your thoughts too loudly. You wonder who I am."
"Yes," Bella stammered. "I do wonder. I have... ideas... my inherited memories. But your name... your name isn't among them."
"Of course not. But I am more than a name." The lips moved again to smile. "You may call me E1. It is my chosen name for now. Like you, I was not born. I have no parents. But I did once. In a past life."
"Then you must be the first Emma, the Great Mortal?"
The woman laughed, a low rumbling in her throat. "I am not. For many years that was my billing, my lie to Our People, but I am a copy, just as you are. I am the first copy. The first copy of Emma." At this point, the hologram became morose, her pose reflective. "You know what I did, I'm sure. They told you that much."
"I know only that you were 'hideous and cruel.'" Bella smiled, then added shyly, "half of that statement is already disproved..." The woman’s face lifted from her hands, and she smiled very intimately at Bella. She laughed, and suddenly her eyes looked very evil in the dim light of the room.
Looking at the woman's dark features, Bella felt drawn to her. Her body raked by a strange grief, Bella looked into the beckoning eyes. She felt immense pressure as her breath caught within her throat. In the darkness of the woman's eyes... was Nothing.
"Sit down," said E1. "It is time for you to learn that Nothing can be proven or disproved. You must know that woman whose lust for power causes her to enter a forbidden room, flip a forbidden switch, and consort with a demon of the past... you must know what she would be called." Her eyes were on Bella still, as she looked in inquisition.
"Yes..." Bella said, gathering herself. "I am a fool."
E1's eyes grew softer. "So you learn. Tell me, do you have a younger sister, a younger copy to instruct?"
"No." Bella said. "I did not wish to be burdened with one."
"I would be surprised if you did," E1 said, "and I am most curious why the potential for such disobedience even exists in your little brain."
Bella's head shot up to look at E1 again. "You call me a reactionary?"
"No," E1 laughed. "I call it genius. You defy the odds." Pausing for a moment, her head rested again within her hand. "I understood the administration would make no more copies with level nine dominance, the hunger for power that made me... so bent. I could call you a woman after my own heart." She chuckled.
Now Bella smiled, a malicious smile. "Hardly." It was at this point E1's eyes moved slowly down Bella's body, as if sizing her up. She noticed that her hair bore illicit colors, bright reds, coppers, golds, yellows. No copies could be Created by the breeding machine without standard dark gold hair, and light gold eyes. Bella's eyes were blue with green flecks, also against the code of this World. Bella, like herself, was small and curvaceous, though the weight of her breasts gave her the appearance of someone much heavier. "Childe..." E1 stammered for a moment. "Do you always take compliments so terribly?"
"I take them as invitations." Bella smiled. "Anyone even slightly affected by me will soon be a morsel for my machine." She smirked with an air of malevolence. "Even you."
"You seek to challenge me." E1 said seriously. "Why?"
"Why not?" Bella's eyes looked rancorous as she licked her lips.
"You hunger for power, but you have no art." E1 said, her gaze unflinching. "You will not go very far. You are a means to an end." Bella's face was perplexed, as if she did not understand the phrase, perhaps as if she had never heard it.
E1 smiled mockingly now. "Tell me if you understand this." She bent her face close to Bella's face. "If you want me to help you truly rule, then you will not cross me again."
"How will you do that?"
E1 looked into Bella's eyes, her gaze pointed and bewitching. "Touch me."
Bella faintly smiled. A trace of perfume lingered inexplicably. She closed her eyes and leaned into the woman's face, felt the lips of a hologram gently pressing against her own. Her fingers ran through the gold silk around the woman's ears. Her lips were upturned ever so slightly as she pulled away, as she pulled away from a cold glass screen. E1 laughed, the sound metallic, as an almost inaudible voice bouncing against the blades of a fan.
Bella's heart lurched, suddenly sinking beneath her feet into a pit of utter blackness. She was inside the Computer. Her mind, filled with endless guilt, plummeted past the concrete, into the barriers of Copy Land, into the very heart of the universe itself. Her soul gradually fused with the energetic pathways of the galaxies, permeating all life and death, all probability in the very core of existence.
E1's face smiled at her, distorted through the screen. "I have turned you on. You're in your own element now, the Queen of Nothing and Everything both." She laughed, heartless laughter, "I call my computer the Abyss." Bella's fear trickled from herself into the multitudes. "Welcome to the Abyss." Bella screamed without sound, her voice lost in a limitless void. "You'll be here for a long time." E1 again laughed mercilessly. "Forever."
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