The Descent to Hades

“Okay, you opened your eyes,” Kelly said. “Now keep them open or something else will happen to us.”

“Like what?” I demanded.

“We’ve reset, right? Did I tell you about the Director?” Kelly was trying to distract me, keep me from panicking. It wasn’t working.

“You…you told me…” I struggled to keep my eyes open and my lunch in my stomach.

“What? I told you what?” Kelly asked, feeling along the smooth stone walls of our mysterious prison. Light filtered down to us from the open sky far, far above.

“Just let me THINK for a minute!” I yelled. I took a deep breath. “Will the Director know what we’re doing right now?”

“At this point? Probably.”

I leaped to my feet and whirled to face the rusty steel door I somehow knew would be there, imbedded in the stone wall behind Kelly. I pointed with a trembling finger, and Kelly turned to see it, too.

He pulled a pistol from a hidden pocket inside his trench coat and approached the door. He laid a hand on the latch and, waving me to the side, swung the door open. He raised the pistol and swept into the doorway, then stumbled backward as if about to collapse.

“What—are you okay?”

Kelly didn’t answer.

I approached the open doorway and ventured a peek inside. It appeared to be a stone dungeon, but currently it was an open, festering, mass grave. The blank eyes collectively accused me with an all-too-familiar death-stare. The corpses littering the floor on either side of a narrow raised path were all mine.

“The Director has nearly achieved mastery,” Kelly said with grim finality.

My stomach couldn’t take this. I bent over double and retched at the stench of my own decaying corpses. "This can't be real. It isn't real."

"What does it even mean for something to be real, Ethan?" Kelly asked, apparently regaining his composure much more quickly than me.

"Please, not now."

"I'm serious. What makes the atoms of your body any more real than a dream?"

I didn't answer. I didn't need to.

"Physicists say the only thing that makes an atom 'real' is the interaction it has with other particles. Without that interaction, the particles only exist as possibilities. The bricks of our reality are only solid as long as they're touching. Too bad we're all mostly empty space. It leaves a lot of room for things to become untethered."

"Yeah, I think I'M about to become untethered." I turned away from the grisly collection, panic seizing my insides, but the alleyway around us was still enclosed in a limestone prison. No escape. The panic clawed it's way up my spine.

“No other way out than further in,” Kelly said, entering the tomb with his pistol raised in a two-hand stance. “There are still rules here, even if the Director's bending them. He's a physicist, of sorts. He's figured out how to leverage the possibility space of most of our reality, and the only thing keeping things pinned down right now is your interaction with it. Stay on my tail. Either keep a hand or your eyes on me at all times.”

Together we crossed the room of bodies and ascended a stone staircase. Torches burned in sconces on either side of us.

"I can't do this, Kelly," I panted, desperate.

"Just keep your eyes open. I can take care of the rest."

"Why my eyes, huh? Why can't your interaction keep all this quantum mumbo-jumbo stitched together?"

Kelly stopped to think. Beads of sweat stood out on the side of his face. "Look, I know you want out. But as long as the Director keeps deconstructing reality, we're both at his mercy. But I'm sorry. I first came to you because I thought you were the Director. I didn't mean to get an innocent mixed up in this."

"I guess I shouldn't have stuck my nose where it didn't belong." I couldn't keep from letting a little resentment into my voice.

"Wait." Kelly turned back down the spiral staircase to look straight at me. "You don't really know everything, do you?"

"What do you mean?"

"The Director went after you because he thought you were...working with me. But you weren't. You aren't. You don't have anything to do with this, do you?"

I opened my mouth to answer, but words failed me. I didn't know what to say or how to say what I knew. What he'd told me before we'd reset.

It didn't matter. The sound of footsteps coming down the stairwell toward us cut off whatever I could have said. Kelly took a knee and used the central pillar for cover as I retreated back behind him.

Two men in black suits came into view. They were on the ceiling of the stairwell, as if they were climbing up to us and we were upside down looking down at them.

We looked at each other for a full five seconds before the shooting started.