There now came into view the indistinct shape of some grand structure, greater in extent than even the largest of mountains back in the realm of the living. As we descended, this monumental edifice began to take on the texture of a large beehive or wicker basket of some sort, and from it emanated a faint but steady drone which played more loudly upon our ears the nearer we approached. “After such frightful visions, what could this earthen heap portend?” I asked my guide. “What souls dwell within this great gray hollow? It is the hum of some great activity, but listen—it repeats itself.”

At this, my guide turned to me and, grasping my cloak at both ends, did wrap it about my body. “Take care to cover yourself before we enter,” he instructed me. “The souls you shall see here are keen of vision. They see everything and nothing. If you are not mindful, they will entangle you in their proddings until your soul become the stuff of these great walls we now breach.” I did as he bade me, wrapping myself tightly, as though a pupa in its cocoon, which was quite befitting for this great nest we now encroached upon.

So great was the extent of the interior that we walked for some time, many hours it did seem, before encountering any distinct feature of its structure. The buzz of activity was that of a great chorus, perfectly synchronized. It would proceed for some time in a sequence of pitches, stop briefly, and then play itself again in the selfsame sequence and for the same duration, which I counted out in my footsteps.

After much time walking without encountering a single soul, I turned to my guide: “O great poet, what is this strange music we keep step to? Where are the souls to be found in these depths? I feel the presence of some force which guides us upon a fixed track, but none is to be seen.” At this, he motioned toward one of the walls which had now come into view. “See for yourself the ones who have built this great dome,” he said in reply.

As I drew nearer to the wall, what I saw both astonished and frightened me. The wall, which I had thought to be made of some straw or other earthen fare, was in fact a great mass of individual receptacles, hexagonal in shape. Within each of these was a soul so misshapen, so unnatural that I could not at first recognize it as such. Each had a hunched form, knotted, roped, sprawled about in all directions but with a trajectory that was always parabolic and convex, always pointed downward. Fixed within this melted tangle of flesh were two large eyes, unblinking, alert, watchful, studious from the front, bandaged and bleeding from the back.

From one side of the receptacle, the soul would gaze at some object, slowly extending two long fingers from its deformed mass, prodding and patching at the wall with great confidence and precision, before moving on to another part of the cell, where the strange ritual was repeated. Perhaps inspired by the tenor of those great white eyes, the hypnotic droning that echoed inside this capacious hive, I felt myself obliged to take a closer look. To my surprise, the walls of these receptacles were made of no actual substance that I could discern but rather a series of numbers and geometrical shapes of varying sizes and forms. What deception! From a great distance, what seemed a grand palace built by some ancient tribe was indeed millions upon millions of numerals and abstract symbols being manipulated by these watchful souls.

I had begun to address one of them when my guide interrupted: “I do not think it will be fruitful to tarry in this place for very long. These are souls who in life devoted themselves to what we call the sciences. They prided themselves on their rationality and so regimented their lives in pursuit of perfect order and ultimate knowledge of the universe. Chemists, engineers, mathematicians, geometers, astronomers, biologists. They built great structures, discovered new instruments, saw what their fellows could not, and concerned themselves not with the people or affairs of their time. They scoffed at the notion of the spirit, demonstrating with their works what they took to be the perfect, rational, machine-like provenance of the world. For their hubris, the souls which they hid from their own eyes in life have been boiled down, rearranged, recalculated, and reconfigured much as the matter they manipulated in that other place, until they do take the form which you now see before you.”

This I could not believe. All these great minds, studious and so careful in conduct while living, condemned to this perpetual mechanical toil. How could it be so? My guide led me on to a part of the nest where some of the larger receptacles were located. In one did I see what seemed a round sphere of wizened flesh, wiry white hair protruding from it in all directions. This ball would begin in a stationary position at the top of its cell and then fall in a pattern which I recognized from my books as a schoolboy to be due to the gravitational forces which govern the other place, before coming to an abrupt stop, exploding in a bright flash, and then reconstituting itself to begin its fall anew.

“The one you see before you was known as Einstein while living, whose investigations of energy and blind urgings in its use for the construction of weapons led to the incineration of hundreds of thousands of innocent souls,” my guide explained. So confounded by this, so contrary to all I had been taught about this great man, that I began to look about me for some reassurance that those who made knowledge their sole pursuit in life could not possibly end up in such a place.

As I tried to regain my bearings, the droning which had by this point so taken over our natural rhythms as to become unnoticed now shifted to a high-pitched tone. It was here that I realized this new mechanical cacophony was coming from one of the souls in a neighboring receptacle, who it seemed did wish to speak to me.

So tangled up in letters and symbols was this soul, I could not make out where to address him, but as I made an effort to do so, my guide once more interjected. “This one which beeps at you, do not pay him any heed, lest you be torn between aughts and naughts. This was Turing, the father of the modern computer system, a man who paid more care to ones and zeros than to the salvation of his own soul. His great focus and precision in thought changed the way men see themselves, giving them a machine which would put all manner of vice and evil before their eyes, turning them inward into themselves and away from the regard of their fellows. His tinkering allowed rumor and hearsay to spread faster than he whom the Greeks call Hermes could run, creating great misery and sorrow for many. For this, he is now condemned here to forever tangle and untangle himself in a mass of the coded language which so preoccupied him and those who came after him in life.”

O, what treachery was this. That great invention, the computer, that we had so believed to be the beginning of a new and great era—how could it be known the path you led to was here? Rather than to have my thoughts forever flipped in this fashion, I wished to leave this place, but my guide wished to show me one more of the wretched souls in this den of tedium.

>As we made our way toward her receptacle, there was a sudden loud caw. At once, the southern wall of the hive was ripped away by the beak of a large crow, on whose head were a collection of souls, disheveled but lively, all completely nude, some dancing strange dances, others connected in frenzied coitus, some twitching about wounded limbs that were covered in leeches, others speaking in tongues with stakes of fire in their throats. Such was the energy of this collection of souls that the crow’s head began to sink in from the weight of all the activity. On the right wing of the crow were thousands of child souls, whose flesh was scorched and with tumorous growths in many places. On the left wing, some of the souls from the seventh circle who had taken their own lives, wailing recriminations against themselves.

The sudden rupture into this ordered space of the giant bird and these foreign souls set me and my guide upon our backsides, from which recumbent positions we looked at the breach in the wall. All along the edges, and dangling from the tip of that great curvaceous beak, the souls of those studious men did not stir an ounce. They fixed the white of their eyes upon their repetitious tasks, bodies always bent in a downward curve, keeping the bandaged backsides to the commotion going on all about them. So strange was this juxtaposition, of the haphazard and routine, the living and dead, it did seem to me that we had left the dark place and entered into a strange land. My guide, however, accustomed to such fare, picked himself up and, brushing the dust from his robes, helped me to my feet, whence we proceeded through the breach, the drone of those learned souls following after us.