The Audit of Flesh

The Audit of Flesh

The Administrator was vibrating. It wasn't fear—angels of the Administrative Choir were lobotomized against such inefficient emotions—but it was a severe processing error. He looked at the hole in the wall, then at the clipboard in his hand, then at the seven-foot-tall demon dripping with spiritual toxic waste.
"This is a restricted zone," the Administrator said. His voice was pleasant, like elevator music given a throat. "You do not have a hard-hat. You do not have an appointment."
Mammon stepped forward. The marble floor cracked under his boot. "I am the appointment," he rumbled. He reached out and plucked the clipboard from the angel’s hands.
The document was a spreadsheet. Rows and columns of numbers. Batch #4902. Origin: Earth/Slums. Weight: 0.2mg per unit. Disposition: Filler material for Sector 7 Walkway.
Mammon crumpled the metal clipboard into a ball the size of a walnut and flicked it back at the angel. It hit the Administrator in the chest with the force of a bullet, knocking him backward over a reception desk.
"Where is the production floor?" Mammon asked.
"I cannot disclose—"
Lillith was there in a blur. She slammed a dagger made of black obsidian into the desk, inches from the Administrator’s neck. "Listen to me, you glorified calculator. The train is gone. The alarm is ringing. In about three minutes, the Archangels are going to be swarming this place. If you don't tell us where the core processing unit is, I will upload a virus into your halo that will make you recite dirty limericks for eternity."
The Administrator’s eyes widened. The threat of inefficiency terrified him more than death. "Sub-level 3. The Extraction Chamber. But you cannot go there. The pressure is..."
"We know," Lillith said. She grabbed Mammon’s arm. "Move. The elevators will be locked down. We take the stairs."
They left the Administrator twitching on the floor and kicked open the stairwell doors.

Sub-level 3 did not look like a hell; it looked like a clean room in a microchip factory.
The air was frigid and smelled of ozone and lemon antiseptic. The lighting was a harsh, shadowless white that hurt the eyes. But the sound... the sound was wrong. Beneath the hum of ventilation fans, there was a wet, rhythmic squelch.
Mammon and Lillith crouched behind a row of waist-high silver tanks.
"Look," Lillith whispered.
The room was vast, stretching out for hundreds of yards. Conveyor belts made of hard light moved silently through the air. Suspended on the belts were glowing orbs—souls. They drifted past scanners that flashed green or red.
The green ones moved down the line to a massive glass machine that looked disturbingly like a juicer.
"They’re separating them," Mammon murmured, his eyes tracking a soul—a bright, fiery orange one—as it entered the machine.
Inside the glass, laser cutters sliced into the soul. Not to destroy it, but to prune it.
"He’s removing the personality," Lillith realized, her voice sick. "Memories. Attachments. Trauma. He’s cutting off the jagged edges to make them smooth."
They watched as the orange soul was flayed. Wisps of color—memories of a summer rain, a first love, a moment of rage—were sliced off and sucked into a waste tube. What remained was a dull, uniform white sphere. A battery. A brick.
The "waste" was flushed into a gutter that ran along the floor, a sparkling river of rejected humanity.
Mammon stood up.
"Mammon, wait," Lillith hissed. "There are sentries."
"He is throwing away the gold," Mammon said, his voice trembling with a quiet, terrible intensity. "He is keeping the packaging and throwing away the product."
He walked out from behind the tanks.
Two sentries—automata made of brass and clockwork, designed for heavy lifting—turned toward him. They were faceless, hulking machines with saw-blades for hands.
"Waste detected," one drone intoned.
Mammon didn't even draw his hammer. He walked up to the river of "waste"—the discarded memories flowing in the gutter. He knelt and dipped his hand into it.
"You think this is waste?" Mammon whispered to the room.
He pulled his hand out. The memories clung to his gauntlet like glitter glue. He focused his will, his Greed reaching out to the discarded fragments. He wanted them. And because he wanted them, he gave them value. Because he gave them value, they became real.
The slurry in his hand solidified. It turned into a jagged, multicolored spear of crystal—crystallized memory.
The brass drone lunged, its saw-blade spinning.
Mammon drove the crystal spear into the drone’s chest.
The effect was instantaneous. The machine, built of cold logic and gears, was suddenly injected with the concentrated memory of a woman’s heartbreak in 1920s Paris. The logic processor couldn't handle the emotion. The drone didn't explode; it wept. Oil sprayed from its eyes like tears, and it collapsed, its gears grinding to a halt, paralyzed by a grief it wasn't built to understand.
The second drone charged.
Mammon grabbed a handful of "waste" from the gutter—the memory of a soldier’s berserker rage—and slapped it against the drone’s head.
The machine went paved-road crazy. It spun around and began attacking the conveyor belt, tearing at the machinery with its saws, screaming in binary.
"It’s not magic," Lillith said, standing up and watching the chaos. "It’s data overload. You’re infecting them with humanity."
"I am giving them a soul," Mammon said, standing tall. "They just can't handle the weight."
He turned to the massive glass machine—the Separator. Inside, hundreds of souls were screaming silently as they were shaved down into uniformity.
"Lillith," Mammon said, hefting The Gavel. "How much do you think that machine costs?"
"Billions," she grinned, drawing her blades. "In R&D alone."
"Good."
Mammon charged.
He hit the glass wall of the Separator with a force that shook the building’s foundations. The reinforced glass spiderwebbed. He hit it again. CRACK.
The vacuum seal broke.
The pressure inside the machine equalized with explosive force. A shockwave of raw spiritual energy blasted outward, knocking the remaining drones off their feet.
The souls inside—half-processed, raw, confused—spilled out into the room. But they weren't the polite, paved bricks Lucifer wanted. They were jagged. They were hurt. And they were free.
They swarmed.
A vortex of ghosts spun around the room, smashing monitors, overloading sensors, passing through the walls and short-circuiting the lights. The sterile white room plunged into darkness, illuminated only by the chaotic, swirling colors of the liberated dead.
"The system is crashing!" Lillith yelled over the noise of shattering glass. She was at a terminal, typing furiously. "The safety protocols are locking down the entire sector. We’ve stopped production!"
"We haven't finished," Mammon growled. He was wading through the knee-deep river of discarded memories, looking for something.
"Mammon, we have to go! The Archangels will be here in—"
"Found it," Mammon said.
He reached into the machinery of the broken Separator and pulled out a cylinder. It was the Core Collection Unit. It glowed with a blinding, pure white light.
"That’s the processed material," Lillith said. "That’s the pavement for the Throne Room."
Mammon held the cylinder. It was heavy. Dense. A thousand souls, stripped of everything that made them individuals, compressed into a single battery.
"He wants to build a floor," Mammon said, looking at the cylinder. "I think I will use it to build a door."
"A door to where?"
"To him," Mammon said. "If this is the material he uses to anchor his reality, then it is also the key to breaking it."
He strapped the cylinder to his belt.
Suddenly, the room turned red. The emergency lights bathed the factory in the color of blood. A voice, booming and authoritative—not the Administrator, but something far older and far more dangerous—echoed through the chamber.
"WHO TOUCHES THE TITHE?"
Lillith froze. Her face went pale. "Uriel," she whispered. "The Warden."
At the far end of the room, the blast doors melted. They didn't open; they simply turned to slag and dripped onto the floor.
Stepping through the molten metal was a figure of terrifying geometry. He was twelve feet tall, composed not of flesh or light, but of burning wheels and eyes. He held a sword that was literally a fissure in space—a crack in the world shaped like a blade.
Uriel, the Archangel of Repentance.
He looked at Mammon. The hundreds of eyes on his wings blinked in unison.
"THIEF," Uriel’s voice slammed into them like a physical blow. "RETURN THE ASSET. SUBMIT FOR DELETION."
Mammon looked at the massive, burning angel. He looked at the "Asset" on his belt. Then, he looked at Lillith.
"Go," Mammon said.
"What?"
"Take the cylinder. Go to the roof. Signal the others."
"Mammon, you can't fight Uriel alone. He’s a Throne-class entity. He’ll unmake you."
Mammon gripped his hammer. He dipped the head of it one last time into the river of memories, coating it in the jagged, chaotic "waste" of humanity.
"He is strict," Mammon said, looking at the burning angel. "He follows rules. He is precise."
Mammon smiled, and for the first time, it wasn't a smile of greed. It was a smile of spite.
"I am going to show him how messy the world really is."
Mammon shoved Lillith toward the service exit. "Run!"
As Lillith sprinted away, Mammon turned to face the burning wheels of the Warden. He slammed his hammer into his palm, sending a spray of glowing memories into the air.
"Hey, Flashlight!" Mammon roared, stepping into the center of the room. "Let's see if you can repent for this."