A NEW SAVIOR

A NEW SAVIOR
by Kat Hutchson

The smell of ammonia filled Ruth’s nostrils when she entered the room. She couldn’t quite make out if it was just urine or if there was something more to it. A sticky residue clung to the soles of her boots and made every step feel like walking through a spider’s lair.

In the darkness of the elongated room, she could barely make out the shapes of people. Most of them hung like dried-out grapes from the cables of their headsets. If she didn’t know any better, she would have called this place a den. However, everyone else called it “The Cathedral”.

She fought her way through scattered limbs that had not been used in a long time. Parched, paper-thin skin against long bones. Skeleton-like creatures that only slightly resembled a human shape. This was not what hope or salvation looked like.

Although she tried to be careful not to step on anyone in the dimly lit room, bones cracked under her boots. Her insides churned. She had expected a scream but no one made a sound. This made her more uneasy than the look or the smell of this place. She wondered what they were seeing behind those lenses. What kept them so glued to the square and bulky glasses that they didn’t even make a sound when the only reasonable reaction should have been agony?

For a second, she thought about leaving this place behind, abandoning her plan altogether but the way back wouldn’t make her feel any better. She swallowed the taste of bile and continued. The light at the end of the room was her only encouragement.

Time seemed to disappear in the Cathedral. When she reached the glass door leading to the illuminated room she could not tell how long her journey had been.

The metal handle of the door felt cold against her sticky palm. For a second she panicked that it might be locked until she finally pushed her weight against it. The door creaked. The metal of the doorframe scraped like fingernails against a chalkboard and stuck midway. A gush of sweet, warm air welcomed her into the sanctuary.

There he was—the savior.

Hanging from the ceiling were long thick cables that were connected to his extremities and held his body in a floating position. Only a big helmet-like apparatus covered his face and head, leaving the rest of him naked. He was not as thin as the other creatures in the Cathedral. Instead, his body seemed to be filled with a liquid, reminding Ruth of a drowned body.

She touched his thigh. It felt cold and rubbery. A shudder ran through her and left her with a weird excitement. She had touched the savior, the sacrilege of the cathedral. She could do anything to him and no one could stop her. And so she did.

She unplugged some of the cables until he looked even more like a marionette. There was no reaction from the followers in their den or the savior himself. The only thing left was to remove his headset.

It took her a few minutes to find the switch which allowed her to turn off the suction that kept his headset from falling off. She had imagined seeing divinity in person, asking him about salvation, about the paradise in cyberspace. Instead, she looked into an amorphous face. There was nothing sacred about his bloated features, his blank expression, his dead fishy eyes, or his colorless skin.

Her disgust filled her with disappointment, which turned into rage. She punched his soft flesh and sent him swinging in his cable ropes. Ruth had never been particularly religious but this was not what she had expected. She wanted answers, she wanted a conversation but the savior was a lie, like everything else that had been said to grant transcendence.

She was not leaving without answers.

She put on the headset. At first, she saw nothing. Felt nothing. Until a burst of electricity ran through her, connecting her mind with the apparatus, and the den began to scream in endless agony.

Fiction © Copyright Kat Hutchson
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay