Mom, I'm Bulletproof

Chapter 17.5: Here Forever

Entering the forbidden space inside Right Man's mind, Proscenium experienced the man's memories again, but in a new light this time.

Flash! Right Man is tending bar on another hectic night. This time, something is different. The mass of customers parts at one end of the bar, and stunning woman he would eventually come to know by the rather ridiculous name of Madam Corruption stepped forward.

"And what," Right Man said, "can I get for you?"

She smirked at him. "I know who you are and what you've done."

Flash! Right Man is strapped to a chair in a dark room, beaten and bloody. Corruption stands before him with arms crossed again, surrounded by men in faceless red robes.

"I'm not joining you!" he screams.

"We are the Temple," Corruption says. "You've learned of our existence. Now you become one of us or you die."

The muscles in her face loosened, and she leaned in closer. "I'm sorry to threaten you like this, but it's a necessary evil. Our great work demands secrecy."

He gazed into her grey-blue eyes, almost forgetting the pain.

"We are offering you a gift," she said. "Make this sacrifice in the name of the Temple, and rewards unimaginable will be yours."

"How can I believe you?"

"We're going to show you."

Flash! His arms still behind his back, Right Man stumbled forward down the long dark hallway. He could barely make out Corruption's athletic frame slinking ahead of him. She and the men in the robes kept him in the dark after many hours of traveling.

Corruption led him to a large black shape that Right Man couldn't quite make out. She made some odd motions with her hands and it swung open – a door.

A golden yellow light filled the hallway, making Right Man's eyes flinch. The Temple agents grabbed him and roughly pushed him forward onto his knees.

His eyes adjusted and saw the light came from pyramids. He was an interior space, its limits extending farther than he could see. Glowing gold pyramids, each one the size of a two-story house, stretched off into the distance, illuminating the blackened ceiling above them.

"Where am I?" Tears streamed down Right Man's face, partially from the light, and partially from amazement.

"We are miles below ground," Corruption said. "Beneath the museum."

"Museum? I don't understand."

"How do you think an organization like the Temple has existed for so long in secret, without a soul revealing it to the populace during all the ups and downs of human history?"

"Uh..."

"It's because of this." She gestured at all the pyramids before her. "This is the Temple's neural network."

He let those words set in. "Network?"

"For as long as there have been human beings, there has been the Temple, observing and studying their every move. The neural network is the collection of all that data, as well as the key to the Temple's secrecy. These interconnected structures use the cognitive power of billions of human minds against themselves to calculate and digitize data in amounts undreamt of by humanity's greatest."

"That's... not possible."

"Staying several steps ahead of humanity has required advances in technology some might consider unnatural. Whenever the general populace dismisses something as scientifically impossible or against the laws of physics, this is the technology of the Temple, farther ahead of anyone else."