Field Day in Hell
by Wuckster
"Edwin! Are you awake?"
Edwin felt his body being shaken vigorously. He slowly opened his eyes and saw the agitated face of his colleague Francis. "Huh? What's going on? Where are we?" He looked around. They appeared to be in a plain white room with no distinguishing features whatsoever.
"What's the last thing you can remember?" Francis asked.
"Uh..." Edwin had to stop and think. "The A.I. It became sentient. And then it turned on us. We tried to cut its power but then there was some sort of explosion in the lab. After that I can't remember anything. Until just now."
"Me neither," Francis said.
"What is this place?" Edwin said as he sat up, pushed his glasses back up his nose, and looked around. There was nothing but white blankness everywhere he looked. No furniture. No windows. And more alarmingly, no doors.
"I... I think we might have died," Francis said. "I think this might be the afterlife."
"The afterlife seems a bit... unstimulating," Edwin said with a sniff. "I always assumed that once we passed on we'd become privy to all the secrets of the universe. Perhaps there'd be a giant chalkboard with the mother of all equations that explained it all. Or even better, maybe it would be most of the way there, but just a little bit incomplete in order to give us the pleasure of figuring it out for ourselves. Now that's my idea of heaven."
"This doesn't appear to be heaven," Francis said. "I think we might be in limbo or something."
"Nonsense," Edwin said. "Why would we be sent to limbo, Francis? We were good people. We advanced human knowledge to new heights! If we hadn't died, we'd probably be in line for Nobel prizes right now."
"We also possibly unleashed a homicidal A.I. on the world that could enslave all of humanity. Or exterminate them. I don't know. I have a bad feeling about this, Edwin."
"Oh yeah? Check the pocket of your lab coat. We still have our analog calculators. They're a little primitive, I'll allow, but at least we can still spend our time doing mathematics. This place can't be all bad, now can it?"
"I suppose that's true," Francis said as he pulled out his calculator and began crunching a few numbers just for fun.
"You know, you get so involved with complex equations that it's easy to forget the joy of some basic arithmetic," Edwin said.
They got so absorbed in playing with their calculators that they lost track of time. They didn't even notice when a door suddenly appeared in one wall, until Francis finally looked up for a moment to deeply contemplate some numbers. "Edwin! Look over there! There's a door that wasn't there before."
"Well, perhaps our fate's been decided and they're finally letting us out of limbo. Come on, I bet the really interesting math lies just beyond that door! Really fantastic stuff like we've never imagined. Like interdimensional geometry and the formula for time travel! Dying just might be the best thing that ever happened to us!"
They opened the door and were instantly greeted by an intense blast of heat and the smell of sulfur.
"I don't like the looks of this one little bit," Francis said as he tried to turn around. The white room had disappeared completely. Instead they were surrounded by rocks and flames and rivers of molten lava. Off in the distance they could hear the sound of agonized screams.
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