VISIONS OF HELL

She hadn’t read Dusty (ok, Dostoyevsky) since her college days. The time had come to downsize after all those years, and should she hold on to the old-fashioned collection of his works on the overcrowded shelf? Aren’t they saying that Russian classics are banned somewhere, maybe in Italy, because of the war in Ukraine?

Decisions, decisions. She reached up and picked out one of the volumes – it happened to be The House of the Dead. If she remembered right, it was about the time (after the mock execution to teach him NOT to read subversives like the French Socialist Fourier) that Dostoyevsy had spent two years in a prison somewhere in Siberia – and then another 7 years somewhere else in Siberia. The Gulag before its time.

It was late, but she started leafing through the pages of The House of the Dead. No description of the Siberian landscape: she was already at the threshold, and Dusty, taking over Virgil’s job in Dante’s story, offered a guided tour. She couldn’t believe it, but the place buzzed with high-tech efficiency. Was it people she was surrounded with, or were they biomedical clones? And yet, unaccountably, they were all wearing masks. She had been handed a mask as well, and felt compelled to wear it: after all, she did not want to contaminate these advanced specimens with merely human germs. But she had trouble breathing.

She was relieved when they came to some sort of opening. As far as the eye could see, she was facing a field of glittering solar panels. In Siberia? Why not, if that’s what it takes. Don’t the Wise Men (and women too) sitting around the latest Round Table in Switzerland know what it takes? They say steel, coal, graphite, nickel, sulfur, copper, lithium, tin, cadmium, lead…?

But then again, to the side, she noticed something else. It was a fence. And pressing against the fence from the other side, were people – crowding all the way from the Global South.  But they were clearly confined to their proper place, which had something to do with the color of their skin: it displayed various shades of off-white.  

But the Wise Men (and women too) in Switzerland must have the answers. One thing they were dealing with was how to solve mankind’s propensity to war. Was Dusty smirking into his beard? Never mind, he took her to see yet another wonder: a munitions factory. She was no longer surprised by the cleansed, gently humming, self-propelled environment. So, this is how they make drones? To save people from killing each other, the drones fly to trouble spots and take out the troublemakers.

Her companion John was tapping her on the shoulder. She was, apparently, making strange, choking noises in her sleep. “Bad dream?” he asked. She started babbling something about Hieronymus Bosch, and that she missed his vision of hell when perfectly familiar-looking devils fried people the old-fashioned way.