The Eye of a Needle (Short Story)

image obtained from Aesthetics Wiki

this story contains discussions of religion and depictions of violence.

Hell had been discovered on Earth around eight months prior to the initiation of the Gate project. Aging miner Wu Chengzhen had wandered off into an unmapped tunnel of Sanshandao Gold Mine, Shandong, China, and struck what at first appeared to be a wall of pyrite only for it to crumble and give way to reveal what he later described to officials as a ‘city of fire.’ The details of Chengzhen’s discovery have been obscured by the CCP in a mostly successful attempt at covering up the event, but through the haze of censorship, certain details from government officials and chatty foreign diplomats have reached the desks of private reporters and their audiences. Phrases like ‘sulfurous rain’ and ‘screams in every language ever spoken’ have come to be associated with what little civilians know of the story, which in itself has mostly been discredited as a conspiracy theory by the general public and subsequently forgotten.

Knowledge of the discovery first reached members of the United States government following the return of an embassy worker stationed in Beijing. The interrogation of a Laizhou journalist, who’d previously been silenced under fear of death, revealed a set of photographs proving the validity of the story. It’s said those who first laid eyes on the photographs were found deceased days later, having scratched their eyes out of their own head, but stories like these lend themselves to wild speculation.

With the presence of Hell on Earth all but proven to government officials, discussions came about on what to do with the information. It seemed like something had to be done, but the discovery was so incredibly unprecedented that even the most creatively blood-thirsty war mongers in the Department of Defense found themselves at a loss. The idea of digging our own tunnel to the underworld and sending in the military was tossed around but ultimately dropped when the question came up of how to overpower the legions of Hell. Deploying drones to carpet bomb the area was also considered, but it was decided the risk of hitting a former president was too great. Other ideas, including attempting to get a census of the area, putting out its eternal flames with a torrent of holy water, and dropping down a very long rope were raised and all inevitably shunned. In the end, there was nothing we could do but sit discontentedly with our realized childhood anxieties and pray the US could be forgiven for all it’d done in the Middle East. Many members of the Cabinet would convert to Catholicism in the weeks following, enough to establish a miniature chapel within the White House with fire-proof flooring. 

It was NASA, surprisingly enough, that first posed the idea internally that if there was a Hell, one that the average person could reach without the previously assumed requirement of death, it would follow logically that there had to be a Heaven as well- one with the same stipulations. The minute the concept was broached, the entire board knew what their next undertaking would be. It hardly warranted discussion. The space administration would allocate its resources into breaching a different kind of beyond, in an endeavor that hadn’t been attempted since the Tower of Babel. We would tear a hole straight through the veil between worlds and reach our hands in until we reached its trembling heart, and we would place a stint within for humanity. The Gate project was born.

The headquarters for the Gate project lies nearly dead-center in the Great Basin Desert of Nevada, surrounded on all sides by dry salt flats and bereft for miles of human settlement or highway, with only off-road vehicles capable of reaching the building. The official story is that it houses highly specialized weather equipment for use by the US government, but due to its nearly invisible location, the possibility of compromise has been deemed negligible. No bigger than a high school, it houses a modest number of labs, offices, facilities for experimentation, and the devourer of its almost $5 billion dollar budget, the small particle accelerator dubbed the Minor Proton Collider. Within the Habika Weather Base, as it’s known to the public, the few hundred employees trusted to the Gate project work for weeks at a time, toiling away in secrecy to the world.

With such little precedent that the Gate project’s goal offers, perhaps it isn’t shocking that there is no standard ‘testing’ that occurs within the building’s laboratories. After all, a successful outcome to an experiment would entail obtaining evidence of a place with no earthly proof of its existence, that cannot be touched, seen, felt or proven in any significant way beyond faith. 

Among the research department’s ideas have included the ‘glass camera’ experiment; in 1989, scientists developed highly specialized technology capable of capturing images without needing to be seen itself. This tech was used in multiple spy missions during the end of the cold war, by placing a microscopic, lighter-than-air device within the eye of an agent that would capture the impression of outside stimulus left on the retina. In an attempt to capture an image of Heaven, scientists with the Gate project placed this device in the eye of a death-row criminal. He was a humble man, a convicted arsonist and murderer who had turned to Christ in his winter years, and seemed as likely a candidate as any for redemption. During his execution via lethal injection, he clutched a rosary and prayed under his breath until the vial emptied. Unfortunately, after death, the camera refused to record further, and repeated attempts at the same experiment would prove similarly fruitless. Other methods were tried; there was an attempt to reduce an adult Bikaneri camel to a fine pulp using a large industrial meat processor, which would be passed through the eye of a needle. Another test which involved the attempted resurrection of St. Francis Xavier Cabrini’s preserved heart, and modern recreations of dark-age-era alchemical spells obtained from the Vatican. None of these would achieve meaningful results. 

Head of research, Lynn Whitaker, headed most of the aforementioned experiments. Heiress to an oil-mining company, she decided at a young age to reject the lifestyle of the idle rich and devote herself to her academics. One of the youngest on the team, she joined the project while her Master’s from Harvard was still warm from the printer, something that at first sparked debate amongst the overqualified and underpaid at the office. Unfortunately for them, their fathers don’t have a dedicated wing at NASA Headquarters.

Heading the entire project was Ted Hughes, senior advisor at NASA, once a trained engineer who now spent most of his days in his meticulously maintained office, flipping through research files. To say Hughes’ office was tidy would be an understatement. It was immaculate, a far cry from the hoarder home he had been raised in. From the moment he escaped his situation as a teenager, he had come to devote himself to cleanliness. He wore simple clothing, all bright colors to easily single out any speck of dirt. He kept a lint roller at hand for when he found any, or a stray hair, or bit of fluff, and would empty his trash can every half-hour. He was a natural pick for project leader, organized, orderly, uncompromising, and of course, faithful to the mission. He had heard the phrase once, ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’, and had come to associate Heaven with his idea of a perfect existence, a sterile paradise, where nothing is out of place, and anything unclean is destroyed in a lake of fire. When the far less manicured head scientist, Sally Reynolds, came scampering into his office, greasy brown hair spilling out of a topknot, blouse wrinkled and untucked behind her lab coat, he’d count the seconds down until she left and ceased polluting his space with her untidy presence. That wasn’t to say he held much animosity towards her, only hoping that the cleansing fire that was sure to come alongside the fast-approaching day of reckoning would make her a bit easier to deal with. His arms-length tolerance of her made him one of her best and closest friends within the facility. 

Head scientist Sally Reynolds, previous theoretical physicist working on NASA’s IBEX mission, was placed in charge of all research pertaining to the Minor Proton Collider. For its nickname of the ‘God Particle’, most experiments with the collider involve the acceleration and experimentation with the Higgs Boson. There’s no reason to suspect the particle has anything to do with God other than with the name, but unprecedented times call for any conceivable measures. She was also an atheist and silently agreed upon amongst a majority of the office to be destined for hellfire whether or not the project succeeded. Though they were cordial to her and showed her the respect the title of Head Scientist demanded, Sally knew she was an outsider at the base. Every time she turned towards the sound of hushed chittering from her subordinates, only to be greeted with stony silence, or her desk chair went missing from her office, she felt it more and more. She let none of it touch her though, no matter how thankless her job was, she felt love and loyalty to the project that had deemed her important enough to stand at its bow. It imbued her with a sense of pride, which was nice, but not something she needed. What kept her passionate about her work was the sense of exploration and discovery, something that had driven her all her life. She often thought to herself that if she had been born centuries ago, she would’ve been an intercontinental explorer. 

Being part of the Gate Project meant being privy to the details surrounding the discovery of Hell months prior, and as a result, many of its participants were deeply, dogmatically religious, a fact that was the major cause of Sally’s unpopularity. For even if they had considered themselves non-religious before, the opportunity to reach the real, honest-to-goodness Heaven had either brought them to believe or strengthened their already present faith. They ranged from Jew to Gentile to Muslim, with the odd Unitarian here or there, and tended to form cliques based on what they believed, and in turn what they expected to find should the project succeed. 

Some anticipated a hedonistic paradise, where all of their base desires would be satisfied eternally, and every moment would be filled with pleasure beyond reason and baths in rivers of milk and honey with naked supermodels. The more Orthodox among them would pray every night for the opportunity to be bathed in the love and light of a merciful God, but not so merciful they’d end up having to share the space with the Hedonists. Others still hoped for a world much like this one, where they could work and study and read every book ever written without the looming deadline of a human lifespan in the distance. If Sally Reynolds had to hope for any of these outcomes, she would prefer the latter. Of course, with her atheistic beliefs, they all seemed equally unlikely. 

Sally’s placement at the front of the Gate Project was a point of contention for many of those who would serve as her inferiors, primarily for her beliefs. Why should they be expected to take orders from a heathen like her? If she didn’t believe they were working towards the goal of a real-life paradise, then what purpose did she serve? It was a question Sally herself pondered once or twice, but she was content to believe that any positive outcome to the project was more likely to prove the existence of a race of highly advanced, benevolent aliens, which was why she was slightly unsatisfied having to carry out experiments that looked at Earthly methods of reaching Heaven rather than looking out into the cosmos. However, with all the confidence of a Bikaneri Camel staring down an industrial meat processor, she was never able to raise her concerns with Lynn Whitaker, who gave her the orders on which experiments to carry out. 

For six months, the Gate Project would not encounter progress. This shook the resolve of some of the more impatient members of the team, but behind them there would always be more seasoned scientists to reassure them, conditioned to the crawl that discovery tended to come to eventually. Things would continue as they always had and seemingly always would, until the first week of March, when Sally tore a hole in reality. That’s what it seemed to be, anyway; during what had come to be standard experimentation regarding the formation of Quark-Gluon plasma using the particle accelerator, the entire facility was awash in a blinding wave of brilliant blue light for a split second. After confirming her and her team were still alive, Sally shut down the collider, forced her subordinates to evacuate the lab in case of residual radiation, and removed a panel on the side that allowed the technicians to check in case of misalignment. Expecting to see a major, deadly defect in the machine that would surely be to blame days down the line during what was sure to be a slow, painful death due to radiation poisoning, she was taken aback to find what could only be described as a hole in space. 

After a brief examination by the base nurse to determine the lab and Sally were not, in fact, radioactive, work started immediately to determine the origin of the hole and its properties. Things started slowly, cautiously, with analysis of what could be seen and felt of it. Though it produced no heat of its own, nor did it seem to absorb heat, judging by the temperature of the air around it, heat signature mapping made it appear to be glowing with obscene heat. Once it was determined to be stable and unlikely to collapse, as some scientists worried it may be a previously undiscovered kind of black hole, they began testing its reactions to various stimuli. It didn’t seem to react in any way to sound or smell, though it was unknown what exactly it would do when it finally did react. A milliliter of distilled water was dropped into the hole from an eyedropper, and it was found that anything smaller than the hole could be absorbed by it without adding to its mass or size. This experiment was repeated on a gram of nickel, two ounces of pure carbon, and the dropped key card which after tumbling out of the breast pocket of a scientist, appeared to hover over the hole for a second before disappearing into it.

For the first time since the Gate’s inception, the dream of reaching Heaven felt truly alive. Scientists hustled from lab to lab like little worker bees, anxious to discover as much as they could about the hole. The communal mess hall, sleeping quarters and toilets were abuzz every moment, everyone exchanging their hopes and fears about what the discovery implied. Ted Hughes’ desk was awash in paperwork every moment, but now, he found himself enjoying it for the good news it was caused by. Sally, previously the site’s pariah, now had her crew rallying behind her for the first time. And again, for the first time, she realized she quite enjoyed having people on her side. 

Lynn Whitaker, however, stood alone with a handful of others as the outliers among the base who wasn’t thrilled about this discovery. She had a healthy fear of the unknown, one she could push aside for the sake of the Gate Project’s goal, but this wasn’t the Heaven she was looking forward to. This was unnatural, and an idea she became increasingly concerned of as she watched it effortlessly consume whatever it came into contact with, and defy all logic with its very existence, unholy. For the sake of the mission, though, she was able to at least temporarily push her anxieties to one side until the situation escalated.

Then, a few weeks later, the base awoke to find the hole had grown over five inches in diameter overnight. Anxious whispers spread quickly, was it headed for collapse? was this because of the agitation during experimentation? But Sally, peacemaker as she had become, was able to quell the worries of the crew and continue on in her experiments and convince them to join her for the sake of progress. Since the hole’s appearance, she had become quite the socialite. Once prone to scampering back to her lonely office after a day of work, she was now rarely seen without a posse of her employees by her side. She had always thought of herself as an introvert, but now that life had given her a taste of the pride that came with being well-liked, she found no need in isolating herself any longer. 

When the hole grew again a day later, she found herself responsible for comforting the collective alarm growing in the hearts of her fellow scientists. She found it came rather naturally to her now, and before long everyone was on board again, all apart from Lynn. It was clear to Lynn now that without her intervention, there would be no stop to the experimentation that was certainly leading to the change in the hole’s size. With conviction in her step, she would sweep into Ted Hughes’ office and demand he rescind his approval of all future experimentation, as well as evacuate the base. She was promptly fired on the spot.

Ted had a fire in him none had ever seen before. His usual stoic, unflappable persona had fallen to the wayside in exchange for a personality his subordinates could only compare to a glacier, cold, and unwilling to stop or move out of the way of anyone and anything he saw as impeding the progress of experimentation. His office often reflected his state of mind, and now, instead of the sterile blank room it usually was, his desk was covered in strewn files, some of which had even been thrown to the floor, a sin he would’ve never stood for before the appearance of the hole. Sally was more confident in herself than ever, but internally, that gave her pause. It was unsettling enough to see her boss in what seemed like such an uncharacteristic display of dishevelment that it was nearly enough to make her second guess the goals of the Project. No matter. It was nothing a good night’s sleep couldn’t fix. And if she awoke to the entire base engulfed in a formless void, then it was the price they would need to pay for progress. 

The scene that greeted her when she woke up the next morning was not what she was expecting. Through the halls, her employees dashed around her, either fleeing from or rushing to the laboratory housing the collider. Quickly, she found herself fighting against the flow of people to reach the lab, mind flooded with worst possible scenarios. Did someone try to enter the anomaly? Were they pulled in? Why was the lab open? She was the only person with access to the room besides Ted and-

Lynn. Sally passed through the door to the entrance to the lab to see Lynn, crumpled in the corner, surrounded by scientists desperately trying to shake some life into her. The only sign she wasn’t dead was her right hand gripped around her stomach. Across the floor spreading out from her body were streaks of dark crimson, little streams of which were oozing from between her curled fingers. Nearby, carelessly tossed aside, a screwdriver was splattered up to the handle in fresh blood. Sally’s stomach began to churn. Tearing her eyes away from the horrific sight she was met with something that cemented her in place, utterly shocked. 

Ted was poised before the portal, preparing to leap in. He had stripped down to his briefs, and his right hand was decorated in a spray of blood that he had made no attempt to clean, instead left as a grim clue to the confrontation that was now building itself into a scene in Sally’s mind. Scientists swarmed around him, some attempting to talk him down, some condemning him, others shouting in fear just to add their voices to the chaos, either way, the insanity of the scene laid out before her seemed to meet at Ted, the eye of the storm that had taken over the base. 

His voice was hard to make out over the noise, but he seemed to be shouting something about redemption and a day of reckoning, something she could hardly parse from the ‘whoosh’ sound the hole made as the current did its best to pull him in. His normally plain, controlled expression was flooded with madness, eyes swirling empty pools, teeth bared in a fearful smile, saliva running down his mouth to his chin. 

Somehow, Sally managed to pull her consciousness from the brink of syncope, and before she could think of what to do, she had taken off running towards the collider. The moment Ted was in reach; however, he flung himself forward, and the hole opened up to accept him. 

There was no time to attempt to pull him out. The moment half of him disappeared into the haze, Sally’s world became an indistinct, monochrome blur. With the wind around her and horrific cacophony in her ears she couldn’t tell if she was buried under rubble or 50 feet off the ground. The world was so bright it didn’t matter whether her eyes were open or closed because everything was the same, shapeless and incoherent.

After the initial shock wore off, she became distinctly aware of cold concrete against the searing pain of what felt like road burn against her exposed skin, which then informed her of the fact that her clothes had been torn to ribbons, and the shreds that clung to her she couldn’t tell from her own shredded flesh. 

Through the blur of smoke and rubble, she became aware of something else that fell amongst the rain of concrete and plaster. They were big, white feathers. Her head lolled back and forth, attempting to make sense of her surroundings, and finally her gaze fell upon the hole, and it was like staring at the sun inches from its surface. She could make out the vague form of a man hovering before her, and as she coughed up dust to attempt to call out to it, the ringing in her ears subsided to make way for words that felt as if they were being bored into her very soul. 

HEAVEN IS FULL. 

Then, another bright light washed over everything she could see, taking her senses with it. Then, she was gone.