Soteriology

The first manned expedition into Hell was a disaster.
That anyone genuinely believed it would be anything other is perhaps the real surprise.
Not the destination.
Not the fact that we had found an actual gateway to the Underworld.
Not that Hell itself existed.
But that that initial foray of living human beings into that place would result in nothing but ruin.
It was of course classified immediately and all records of it one-way encrypted.
The reasons for the failure were examined, every single detail analysed and documented down to the quantum level.
The results took us almost a decade to interpret.
But the drive to succeed was imperative.
Our reason?
We had to rescue the people trapped there.
How could we not?
How could we continue our mortal existence when we knew, had categoric proof that endless billions of us were the other side of that gate?
Endless, ceaseless torture the kind we could not even begin to comprehend.
So of course, we continued.
The next decade we attempted two more expeditions.
The first of these was a success, and we recovered a single digit of the explorer from our side of the gate.
The left index finger.
The data recovered from this now holiest of our relics told us so much about the place on the other side of the gate.
We learned how to build, from the quantum level up, a suit capable of withstanding the maelstrom.
We learned how to bioengineer its pilot.
To make their skin able to tolerate the unimaginable conditions it would endure.
The psychological training and magickal defences woven into person and machine took seven years to develop.
Finally, we were ready.
Our AIs stitched together the necessary rituals and incantations.
Power siphoned from every reserve we had.
The gate opened.
Our ‘diabolonaut’ as they had been nicknamed stepped through.
One second later they tumbled out and our computers sealed the gate once more.
Before more of Hell could leak into the world.
After three openings of the way, the environment around the gate was deteriorating.
It had been exposed to exactly 1.1614 seconds of direct contact with Hell.
We would need time to decontaminate it before we tried again.
But we had more than enough to keep us preoccupied in the interim.
Medics protected by NBCQ suits rushed to the pilot’s aid.
Bundled them into the containment apparatus.
Where they could be sedated within the suit.
Or what was left of it.
And them.
A full second’s exposure to Hell, the inferno, had ruined both.
A hundred billion dollars of research and development, now little more than slag and flesh.
Fused and welded together in psychosis inducing arrangements.
A year later, we were able to restore the pilot to consciousness.
Albeit to all intents and purposes as little more than a brain in a jar.
Dosed on cocktails of drugs and magicks so experimental as to be little better than alchemy.
But they were alive.
We had sent one of us into the Pit and they had returned alive.
It was proof it could be done.
Our pilot’s testament was startling.
What had been a single second for us was nearly a century for them.
Something was mentioned about extreme gravity as the cause.
But that did not matter.
The suit had been designed to keep them alive for half that time.
Our pilot explained that they had needed to perform diabolical acts of self-surgery to extend the lifespan of the suit.
Carve themself and it with new and unknown knowledge.
Mathematics crossed with magick crossed with quantum physics crossed with ritual sacrifice.
But that was not the worst.
They told us they had been awake for the entire time they were on the other side of the gate.
Hell was not a place where sleep was a respite.
After a week in the inferno the pilot had already used every sedative in the suit.
For the remaining 5,199 weeks, the 36,518 days, the 876,432 hours they endured unceasing exposure to the torture of billions upon billions of people.
After a full debrief, we granted the pilot’s request to be euthanised.
They were given special dispensation from every religious leader across the planet to be allowed to commit this act.
We made sure, even if we could not be certain of Heaven’s existence, that they would not return to Hell.
We moved to a planetary war footing the very next second.
We now knew we could venture into the Pit and return.
The cost was almost unimaginable.
But it could be done.
As with every other phenomena harnessed to our benefit, all we needed was proof.
“We are coming for you,” became the new mantra of our species.
Whether this was intended as an entreaty to the trapped or a warning to their captors did not matter.
Our attack would be two-pronged.
Solve the physical and spiritual problems.
Diabolonaut suits got significant upgrades.
Shielding against the maelstrom extended down to the quantum level.
Probability bent to our will.
Something else.
Our pilots’ minds were reinforced.
Layer upon layer of psychic and psionic defences trained and drilled into them.
The opening of the Gate became far faster.
Now we were able to open and close it in a nanosecond.
Tours of duty could now last for hours or days rather than years.
While our scientists and AIs worked on the material problem, we tackled the immaterial one also.
We had to stop the flow of people into the Pit.
Religious leaders were reluctant initially to cede so much power to the secular realm.
So tours of Hell were arranged for them.
To show them firsthand what their beliefs were condemning us to.
The sight of so many of their pontiffs, archbishops, rabbis and imams in that place converted the majority almost immediately.
We took the win and allowed them their silent hypocrisy.
As to the rest, the fundamentalists, the zealots for even whom the endless suffering of their own was not enough, we shut the Gate behind them.
Only for a microsecond.
Not even an hour on the other side.
And some of us had been there millennia.
The self-proclaimed strongest of them were ruined by a mere handful of minutes exposure to the Inferno.
In less than a day we had global agreement that Mortal Sin would no more be damnation.
We would deny that place any more of us.
Human law would punish human transgressions.
And we would free those who had been condemned.
Take the sanctification for our species into our own hands.
Not for Glory.
But for our infinite mercy.
In less than a year we were ready once more.
Generators hummed into life.
Every spare watt from the global power grid went to opening the Gate for the fifth time.
In a blink the diabolonaut passed into and out of Hell.
In their arms a child.
A girl, teenager.
The cut marks on her wrists still visible.
Before the pilot could lay her down, or our medics rush to her aid, the girl sublimated to nothingness in their arms.
The footage showed a look of total peace.
We had done it.
We had freed one of us from Hell.
In defiance of that place and its previous hold over us, we had beaten it.
Hell held one fewer than before.
The children would be first.
Then the adults as we came to them.
Whatever their crimes had been, we knew enough of that place to know they had paid for their sins.
It would have been impossible to manage any other way.
We had no lists to work from.
No register of the damned.
No atlas of Hell to guide us.
We proceeded cautiously.
We tried to not attract the attention of the ruler of that place.
But in hindsight it was perhaps inevitable that we would.
We were, after all, trespassing in their domain.
It was on our ninth sortie into the Inferno that our pilot found themself facing Satan.
The Dragon, the Serpent.
The datastreams from their suit flooded with information.
Yottabytes of data pouring through our quantum computers, which struggled to keep up with the torrent.
Our atomic clocks whirred, nanoseconds spinning on their displays.
But still the pilot did not return.
Two whole seconds passed before they stepped back into our world.
“They will help,” was all the pilot said.
Two centuries of data crunched and processed said the same thing.
Satan, the Devil, would be our ally.
At first we assumed it was trickery.
We ceased all rescue missions out of an over abundance of caution.
Our stories and legends of this being told us they lied.
But we had to know.
We had succeeded in freeing someone condemned to that place.
We could free them all.
A worldwide request for a volunteer interlocutor was made.
Our emissary to Hades.
Our hope.
The candidate was little more than a child.
A prodigy.
One of our best.
We agonised over the decision.
Were we about to be tricked by the ultimate evil?
Which had allowed us false hope.
In the life we liberated.
Only to willingly give one of us in return?
Our emissary scolded us, shamed us into quiescence.
They would willingly enter Hell.
Abandon almost all hope.
For the possibility.
What choice did we have?
Once more we diverted the planet’s energy to our Gate.
They didn’t even look back.
Whatever may befall them, they would not become a pillar of salt.
A second later they returned.
A signed contract in their possession.
An ironclad agreement between the ruler of Hell and humanity.
Written in every language we ever had.
Unambiguous.
Unbreakable.
“We will not impede you.”
Was all it said.
We gave our finest legal minds and scholars and theologians a single day to pore over those five words.
Their verdict unanimous.
Operations began immediately once more.
A battalion of diabolonauts despatched to the Pit.
Satan remained true to their word.
They had, after all according to our legends, once been an angel.
Our people remained unmolested as they worked.
A thousand souls freed at once.
We went in again.
And again.
And again.
Thousands became tens of thousands became millions became billions.
Became all.
We emptied Hell of us.