The Fallen

The position of virgil had been created as a sinecure. If they had believed people would want to visit or even remember the fallen angels of the brainware civil war sociologists wouldn't have built the blood-black dome of Pandemonium in the middle of the city. The angels had sacrificed their humanity to fight the war on the side of what called itself humanity: they hadn't fallen out of pride or failure, unless their refusal to return to their original forms once the war was finished had been driven by excessive self-regard or uncharacteristic fear.

So Pandemonium was built not to hold but to house. To honor but also to care for those who every year by law were offered a return to neural physiology modern psychiatry worked on — one no longer subject to the old curse of mental illness — and every year chose to remain what they had become and remain in self-willed darkness.

Nobody who lived inside Pandemonium ever left for the city. But many who lived in the latter visited and too many of those who visited chose to undergo the changes that meant they would have to stay.

To be a virgil was to know this of every visitor they guided with superhuman equanimity inscribed onto their brains. They couldn't leave either nor chose to. Talking with humans was all that was required of their duties, old and new. They used cameras, and if nostalgic, windows, to supervise the crews working on Pandemonium's continuous expansion into a city that one day would be another of its many names.

(Originally posted on my blog.)