Heaven.Exe

I’m a former black hat hacker. A dying billionaire hired me to find a circus performer last seen in 1922.

Part 1

---

In the picture Destiny had given me, Chazaqiel sat on a wooden chair. His black wings spread out behind him. A web of wires connected to his skinless skull. The wires hooked into a wall of computer monitors behind him, each screen displaying a different, distorted face.

“In my father’s notes, he said Parallax was using Nephilim as decoders,” Destiny told me. “They thought the secrets of the world were hidden inside angel blood. If they could decode it, they’d know everything God knew.”

Destiny was thin and pale, with long, greying black hair. When I told her I’d grown wings, she hadn’t believed me. She’d driven to San Francisco to see my wings for herself.

Her father, Jose, had leaked the first photos of Chazaqiel to a BBS conspiracy board in 1992. Three months later, he’d been found dead in his apartment. A heroin overdose, the police said, but Destiny claimed he’d never touched a drug in his life.

Destiny was desperate for proof that Parallax had murdered her father. She’d been searching for it since she was eighteen. She was forty-three now. She was tired, but she’d learned to be smarter and more cautious, too.

I promised I’d help her as long as she helped me first. She’d led me to Chazaqiel, still chained up inside Parallax’s old underground lab. He’d promised he wouldn’t hurt me if I freed him, but then he’d done this to me. Turned me into a Nephilim, Destiny said. Half human, half angel.

But why?

“You think Chazaqiel wants to use me as one of these decoders?” I asked.

“Reid’s been quiet since he went on the news and announced he was launching a new genetics company. I’m sure Chazaqiel’s helping him rebuild the Parallax lab, so he can continue the experiments. Threll never finished what he’d set out to do. But I still don’t know why he stopped. Maybe he was scared by what he saw.”

An addict outside banged his fist against the café window and screamed. Destiny looked at him and then sipped her coffee. She checked her phone and put it back in her purse.

“Have you heard anything from Reid yet?” she asked.

“He still won’t answer my emails. I think he’s having me followed, though. The same black Suburban’s been parked outside my apartment since I got back from New Mexico.”

“You’re being paranoid.”

“I don’t think I’m being paranoid enough.”

“You’re sure you want to do this? If we get caught breaking into the Apotheosis Labs building, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble. You already did fifteen years in prison.”

“I don’t think I have much time left. Whatever Chazaqiel has done to me, I need to stop it.”

“I don’t think you can stop what’s happening to you, though.”

“I need to try.”

“And you’re sure your friend, Alexei, can help?”

“He’s the best hacker I know, and he owes me a favor.”

---

Alexei jumped backward when he saw me, two feet taller than the last time he’d seen me. Pale and bone thin.

“Vadym?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“You look different.”

“A lot has changed since the last time we talked.”

I stepped into his apartment and closed the door. Then I took off my jacket and let my wings fill the kitchen.

Alexei’s jaw dropped. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I’m not sure. That’s what I need your help with.”

Alexei opened his fridge, took out two bottles of beer, and handed me one. I took it.

For a second, I remembered when we were both younger and still living in Saint Petersburg, Alexei laughing loudly after realizing the simple shell script I’d written had just made us fifty thousand dollars.

“You fucking did it, Vadym!”

But then I remembered the fear I’d felt sitting alone in my cell that first night in prison, and the anger returned.

Alexei sipped his beer and then sat in front of his laptop.

“I looked into Apotheosis Labs, like you asked me to. I found a misconfigured S3 bucket on their AWS account with an old Terraform state file inside. The state file got me a set of credentials that I used to get into their Databricks workspace. Through Databricks, I got into their Okta tenant.”

I stood over him, looking at his screen.

“That’s great,” I said. “Now I just need you to provision two new employees and clone the badges.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I need to get into that building.”

“It’s too risky.” He stood and walked to his window. “I’m not doing it.”

“I always thought of you like a brother, you know that?”

“I think of you like a brother, too.”

“Then why’d you fuck me over like that? Why’d you trade my life to save your own?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You fucked up hacking that crypto exchange, you got caught, and to save yourself from getting thrown in jail, you helped the feds lay a trap for me.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is, Alexei.” I put my beer down on the coffee table. “Look at what’s happening to me. I’d rather be dead than keep living like this.”

“If I clone these badges for you, what are you planning to do with them? Break into the Apotheosis Labs and demand they cut the wings off your back?”

“I need to figure out what’s happening to me. What they want. You owe me.”

He thought about it for a minute, but then he sat down at his laptop again. He created the employee profiles and then used his Flipper Zero to write the profiles onto blank badges.

“We’re even now,” he said, and he handed the badges to me.

I took the badges, and then I spat in his face.

“If you’ve screwed me again, I’ll make sure you pay for it this time,” I told him.

I left his apartment and walked toward mine, avoiding the streetlights.

I felt like I was being followed. Once, I looked back, and I swore I saw a winged shadow in the sky above me. But when I looked back, it was gone.

---

That night, I had a horrible dream.

My mother sat in a dirty apartment, barely clothed. She held a needle in her shaking hand, staring at it for a moment before plunging it into a vein.

Then she let the needle fall to the floor.

Her head fell backward. She leaned against the wall. Then she slumped to the floor.

Another addict, a man, walked over to her. He touched her. She didn’t move.

He lay on top of her.

She finally moved a little. Told him to get off. But then her eyes rolled backward into her skull again.

I woke up covered in cold sweat. My clock read 3:37 AM.

I met Destiny at the same café that afternoon, and I told her about the dream.

“I had the same dreams right before I headed into the Parallax Medical building,” I said.

Destiny nodded, but she wasn’t listening. She was still thinking about breaking into Apotheosis Labs without getting arrested.

“You’re sure the badges will get us past Apotheosis Labs security?” Destiny asked.

“Alexei knows what he’s doing. As long as he isn’t secretly screwing me again, they’ll work. Once we get into the building, we’ll only have a few hours before Apotheosis flags the employee profiles as fakes, though. We need to get whatever evidence we can find and then get out of there.”

Destiny and I stayed at the café until midnight, barely talking, just sitting in nervous silence. Then we got into her car and drove to the Apotheosis Labs building. She parked a few blocks away from it, and we walked the rest of the way.

“You go first,” she told me.

I walked into the building lobby and scanned my badge at the gate. The security guard looked up at me. The light on the badge scanner flashed green.

Destiny followed behind me. The scanner flashed green on her badge, too.

“Working late?” the guard asked.

Destiny smiled at him. “We got a call about one of the servers going down. It’s going to be a long night.”

We walked past him, toward the elevators, keeping our heads down.

“That was a little too easy,” Destiny said. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“The main lab should be on the fifth floor.”

We got into one of the elevators, and then I scanned my card again and pressed the button for floor five.

The elevator climbed upward. I held my breath. Still nervous that something was about to go very wrong.

When the elevator doors opened again, Destiny and I walked out into the lab.

I felt the same wrongness I’d felt before standing in the basement of the old Parallax Medical building. The air was heavy. I smelt hot wire. A low hum of electricity whirred in my ears.

Destiny flipped a light switch, and the lab filled with fluorescent light.

Against walls, I saw metal shelves filled with microscopes, DNA extraction kits, spectrophotometers, sequencers, and vials of blood. Cells were being incubated in test tubes. Circuitry wired with veins and blood, and branded with the Ophidia Global logo, powered computers that displayed video footage that bled from one clip into another.

On one monitor, a child with an old man’s eyes and teeth smiled. On another, a woman with black eyes and a hunched back swallowed a young girl whole. On a third, a happy family sat at their dinner table, eating turkey and peas and mashed potatoes.

In the videos, the faces of people looked wrong. Their eyes didn’t match. They had extra fingers. Their noses and lips were the wrong proportions.

In the corner of the lab, a map of Afghanistan had been pinned to a corkboard. Near Kandahar, someone had marked six red Xs.

“What’s in Kandahar City?” I asked.

“Maybe more Nephilim?”

Destiny took a picture of the map. Then she took pictures of all the monitors and blood-filled test-tubes, too.

From the back of the lab, we heard a man scream. We looked toward the sound. Lights flickered near the brick wall past the sinks and the ice buckets.

We walked to the end of the lab and found a hallway that led to a small projection room.

Inside the room, a twelve-foot-tall man with long black hair had been chained to a metal chair. Vein-filled circuitry covered the wall behind him. Wires connected the organic circuitry to his head. Then more wires connected his head to a projector mounted on the ceiling.

The giant’s eyes flickered white and blue while the projector projected a video onto the brick wall across from him.

The video showed a man and woman holding hands on a beach at sunset. The gears of the projector clicked as the video played.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“Heaven.exe,” Destiny said. “My father wrote about it in his notes. It’s a program Parallax developed to visualize decoded angel DNA.”

The video flickered. A woman appeared, holding her face. A second face sprouted from her forehead. The second face was identical to her own. The same mouth, the same eyes, and screaming, too.

A third face sprouted. Then a fourth and a fifth.

“That doesn’t look like Heaven,” I said.

“It’s not just Heaven encoded in angel blood. There’re lots of other things, including Hell.”

I heard footsteps in the hallway outside. Reid appeared in the doorway of the room.

“What are you two doing here?” he asked.

Reid looked twenty years younger than he did when I’d met him in his office earlier that year, when he was dying of cancer. His hair had grown back, too. He was lean and muscular.

Destiny took a picture of the Nephilim with the projector wired to his head.

“We’re going to show the whole world what you’re doing here,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. Nobody will believe you,” Reid said, and he walked into the room.

“Did Chazaqiel tell you what he did to me?” I asked him.

“He said you’re part of the plan.”

“And the plan is to hook me up to one of these projectors, too?” I pointed at the Nephilim chained to the chair.

Reid smiled. “We’re building a new Heaven with new Gods. And Chazaqiel’s promised he’ll make me a God, too.”

“He’s using you,” Destiny said.

“We’re using each other.” He held out his hand. “Give me your phone, and I’ll let you leave.”

“No.”

“You’re making a big mistake. Do you understand what Chazaqiel will do to you if you interfere with these experiments? What he’ll do to all of us?”

Reid’s eyes glazed over. His muscles tightened.

The Nephilim screamed again. The video on the wall flickered and changed.

Reid lunged at Destiny and threw her to the ground. He tried to tear the phone from her hand, but she held the phone tightly against her chest, refusing to let go of it.

I ran and pulled Reid off her.

The building alarms went off. The lab filled with red light.

I grabbed Destiny’s arm and lifted her to her feet. “We need to go. We’ve gotten what we needed.”

“You can run, but we’ll find you,” Reid told me. “You’re part of this now, Vadym. You can’t escape.”

Destiny and I ran back to the elevators, but the power had been cut off. To our right, I saw a fire exit sign, glowing red at the end of a hallway. We ran toward it and then followed the emergency stairs out the back of the building, into an alley behind a Chinese restaurant.

“We need to get out of San Francisco,” Destiny said.

“I need to help him first.”

“Who?”

“That other Nephilim.”

“You need to help yourself first, and I need to get the pictures I took somewhere safe. I’ll talk to you later, ok?”

She ran toward the street and then disappeared.

I stood and walked out of the alley. My apartment wasn’t far. I walked toward it, staying in the shadows to keep out of sight.

---

I’d get on a bus, I thought. Maybe head down to Mexico. I’d be safe there, at least for a little while.

Back inside my apartment, I went to my bedroom to start packing my suitcase, but then I noticed a winged figure standing in front of my living room window.

“You’re too impatient, Vadym.”

Chazaqiel stepped into the light.

“We aren’t ready for you yet. The changes take time. A few more months at least.”

“What have you done to me?”

“You don’t understand yet?” He stroked his long, bony fingers across my face. “I’ve made you immortal.”

“I didn’t ask you to do this.”

“You did. You spoke to me through your soul, and I heard you.”

His jaw dropped and his mouth widened.

I felt strange. My apartment seemed smaller. The walls had closed in on me. The air had become heavy and thick.

He lowered his face to mine. His hunched back pressed against my apartment ceiling.

His breath smelt like burnt wire.

“Do you know what it feels like to be banished from Heaven?” he asked me. “To feel Paradise only to be told that you will never feel it again? Just because you wanted a bit of human flesh?”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m so thirsty. It’s not good for us to be this far away from God. It changes us, this distance. I used to be so white, Vadym. So pure. But it doesn’t matter. God can’t hide his secrets from us forever. Piece by piece, bit by bit, we’ll uncover them. We have nothing but time.”

Saliva dripped from his mouth. He wiped it from his lips.

“I’m sorry, Vadym. I’m starving. I just need a quick drink.”

He grabbed my shoulders and sank his teeth into my neck. I felt his wires spread inside me, draining my blood. I screamed.

My eyes filled with light, and then colors.

I saw my mother crying as she left me at my grandmother’s apartment, promising she’d be back soon.

I saw myself at seven, alone in a Saint Petersburg stairwell, waiting for her.

I saw Chazaqiel chained to the wall of the Parallax lab, telling me, “I heard you the moment you were born, Vadym. I’ve been waiting all your life.”

As tears fell down my cheeks, all I could do was beg him.

“Please just tell me my mother’s ok.”

---

I’d woken up on the floor of my apartment. Chazaqiel was gone. Through the window, the morning light shone in the sky.

I’d gone to the bathroom and vomited. In the mirror, my body looked even paler than it had before.

He’d drained most of my blood.

It took three days before I was able to leave my apartment again.

I texted Alexei. “I forgive you.”

“The badges worked?”

“Yes, thank you. I got what I needed. You’ll never see me again.”

I put my phone away. My flight was boarding soon. In thirty hours, I’d be landing in Kabul.

I’d already found a driver to take me to Kandahar City. I was sure there were other Nephilim out there, and I was going to find them.

I walked onto the plane. It was mostly empty. I’d paid for two seats, to make sure nobody felt my wings underneath my coat.

I found my seats and sat down. Then I rubbed my neck. It still ached. My whole body did.

“Are you all right?” the flight attendant asked me. “You look pale.”

“I’m a little nervous, but I’ll be fine,” I told her.

She kept walking down the aisle.

I closed my eyes and tried to get a bit of sleep.

The last time I’d slept on a plane, Chazaqiel had come to me in my dreams and told me he was waiting for me. I wondered what he’d say to me this time.