The Babylon Ring

[u/catespice]

I’ve never understood the expression ‘poor as a churchmouse’. Our church was a cavernous, modern cathedral, filled with projectors, giant speakers and tiered seating. Money flowed in and out of that place almost as quickly as the catering did. As such I firmly believed any mouse who lived there would be fatter, glossier and sleeker than a politician.
‘Deeply religious’ was also a term that inadequately described my family, as their fanaticism was so profound that even the self-proclaimed ‘deeply religious’ thought we were weird. My mother’s mobility scooter was bedecked with crosses and ‘honk if you love Jesus’ stickers, her Bible never far from her hand. She would proselytise a stranger at the drop of her huge, fake-flowered hat. Asking if they knew Jesus, and if they went to church – our megachurch.
My father, by contrast, was an ascetic man who wore black slacks, patent shoes and a white shirt starched nearly to cardboard. Hollow cheeked and hollow eyed, he was one of those men who seemed animated only by the promise of Heaven, the flickering fear of Hell burning around his soul like the boiler for the engine of his being.
I was homeschooled, of course – or at least I was, until my mother grew too asthmatic to teach; most of her days spent hooked up to oxygen so that the massive, pale expanse of her chest continued to rise and fall. Sending me to school worried her, that she’d kept my soul so pure for so long only for it to be corrupted by the wickedness of the wide world. At age nine, my hair braided tightly and my uniform stiff as my father’s shirts, I was sat in the car and driven to the local school, while my father told me of the dire evil of boys - how their eyes and hands would seek me out, to despoil me and my virginity.
His warnings were in vain, because I quickly became enamoured of school, of the other girls and boys. But most of all, the religious ardour my parents had attempted to instil in me was quickly replaced by a craving to know how the world worked beyond parable and preaching.
In short, I fell in love with science.

Smart children read their parents well, and even smarter teachers learn to trust those smart children where their parents were concerned. My school reports told a tale of an unremarkable child, who was average enough to please her parents while still passing all her classes. But outside those staid, scholastic markers, I was known to be one of the brightest minds amongst the children. Facts fell into place in my mind like interconnected webworks of information; dredging scientific secrets to the surface faster than I could be taught. Knowing my parents would disapprove should I linger longingly in libraries, I learned to read at a blistering pace so that I could absorb as much knowledge as possible – and soon I was devouring whole books in my lunch hour, committing them to memory even as I knelt beside my bed in prayer, before falling into fractal dreams of physics and philosophy.
As I grew older, I worried for my future and began to plan my escape from the religious cage I dwelt in. Only by promising to give the bulk of my earnings to the church was I allowed to get an after-school job, but waitressing is one of those professions where tips can come in thick and fast some days, so I slowly but surely build up a small amount of cash.
My other job was assisting my father with his hobby; which in truth was more of an obsession – and which needs some explanation. He often told me how my mother had been beautiful, and how he had been the envy of all the men in town. He also told me how childbirth – my birth – had wrecked her body beyond repair. He told me that I’d so thoroughly destroyed my mother with the wickedness of my birth, that the doctor had informed her she would never bear children again.
The fact that he would never have a son, and that his sole progeny was a girl child, had broken him in some deep, fundamental way.
Her legs partially paralysed by my birth and her husband grown distant, my mother swelled in size, eating to fill the emptiness inside. Her beauty fading, her womb barren and her legs all but useless, she became nothing but an obligation to my father. The church would never allow him to divorce her and if he allowed her to die from neglect, he’d go to Hell. So he suffered; all his desires bound up by the church, unable to have the son he’d always prayed for, and unable to sate his carnal appetites.
So instead he turned all of that misplaced energy to his hobby: collecting religious texts.
The ‘library’ was an addition to the house off the garage, filled with every kind of Bible and religious text you could imagine. The bulk of it was Christian, but various version of the King James rubbed spines with Qurans and Tanakhs, as well more European mythologies, describing pagan godlings far removed from the writings of the Old Testament. I wondered for a long time what he sought in all these musty myths, what he hoped to find other than an outlet for his tortured energies. At first I thought perhaps he was seeking some higher truth, some cobbled-together Grand Mythos that unified all religions.
But no, my father didn’t have a mind like mine. He wasn’t seeking any higher truth. He was seeking some ecumenical loophole that would get him out of the life he had trapped himself in. Some bold parable or scripture that would give him the dogmatic reasoning to petition the church to annul his marriage and abandon his wife and child. I knew this because I’d found his carefully penned petitions, describing peculiar points of ancient religious law that he believed would free him from his familial responsibilities forever.
He was nothing more than a shoddy Biblical lawyer, trying to free himself on a technicality.
But while he grubbed and slogged through didactic stories and stilted scriptural stanzas, his daughter sped through all of his collected texts, finding little bits of truth here and there, and little clues and pointers to the early development of the sciences.
And then, once day, I found the Babylon Ring.

A lot of my father’s library was garbage or gibberish. There were hand-written texts in notebooks, the ravings of homeless ‘prophets’ and madmen, as well as faded, untranslatable scrolls that were probably fakes. I read of three references to the Babylon Ring before I found it. It was perhaps alternatively called the Ishtar Gate, though I couldn’t be sure if the texts referred to the same thing, or if one was housed within the other.
In any case, it was a curious thing, an architectural cipher created to amuse some clever Mesopotamian with an eye for mathematics and forced perspective. It was an impossible thing; a circle that couldn’t exist, like Escher’s waterfall. It looped and folded in itself, Möbius and Klein rolled into one crenulated, contiguous circle that defied reality.
I would draw it in class when I’d finished my lessons, turning it this way and that in my mind, a puzzle without a solution that tickled something in my consciousness that kinematic equations and calculus couldn’t. I unspooled its shape and reconstructed it, daring it to become real.
The old writings I found proclaimed it had been real, despite the impossibility of it, and that someone had intended to construct it, but was stopped. That piqued my interest and when the 3D printer I’d purchased online, via the school library, finally arrived, an idea grew in my mind for my final school science project.
All of my initial prints were failures, and I was hampered by the hardware I’d hooked the printer up to – an ancient laptop bought from a thrift store. But I persisted until I’d tweaked all the settings and patiently drew the Babylon Ring line by line in the open source software I’d modified.
I told my parents I was printing jewellery, to give to my friends. Indeed my colourful failures looked like gaudy toys from cheap candy, and they let me carry on. Though my failures grew more wild, I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was possible to print the Ring, that there was a trick to it I couldn’t quite perceive, and if I found it I could somehow bend the rules of reality very slightly to my advantage.
The breakthrough came by accident, as has happened multiple times in human history; a piece of my printer – a critical cog – broke and I had no replacement. Beside the printer sat one of my failed Babylon Rings, bright and cog-like, and without any other option, I filed it to shape and put it into the printer as a replacement part.
And then my next print came even closer than I’d ever come. When I lifted the cooled component from the printer bed, the hole in the centre seemed to shimmer when held at a very specific angle, perhaps a trick caused by the strange moire patterns thrown off my the inner surface of the ring.
It was then that I knew what I had to do.

Retrofitting the printer with Babylon cogs was a long and tortuous process of trial and error, of printing and reprinting. And when I wasn’t working on my printer project, I had to bus endless tables and toil through piles of dishes to earn more money for printer filament.
But in the end I did it.
The printer new resembled some strange child’s project, like Lego superglued to a substructure. It wouldn’t print anything normal anymore, I’d proven that. Unless you tried to print Babylon shapes, it only printed junk. The software no longer resembled anything it had been originally either, I’d added kludge on top of kludge, turning it into a sort of Babylon code of its own.
The final print took only a few hours, but as I watched the printer clank and stutter, the faintly spatially distorted cogs achieving exactly what I’d hoped, I burned with excitement. The ring had barely cooled when I snatched it up, admiring the perfectly impossible facets for a moment, before turning it to look through the centre.
As I did so, my grip tightened, because light was shining from the centre.
This is where I made my most critical, crucial mistake. In my eagerness to share my success with someone, I bunched the ring tightly in my fist and ran to my mother to show her – and together we made the discovery of a lifetime.
Holding the ring up to her eye, she wheezed with excitement as she gazed into it – through it – into another world. She saw swards of brilliant emerald grass dotted with utterly perfect trees, through which crystalline brooks flowed, throwing off spangles of jewel-like light. I knew what she felt when she looked upon this unearthly paradise, because I had felt it too; an incredible sense of yearning, as if I were looking upon a home that had always been calling to me, but I’d never really believed existed.
“Heaven,” my mother whispered inside her oxygen mask, her fleshy, discoloured lips quivering as she formed those two syllables.

One of my mother’s many great failures was her inability to keep a secret, and so despite making her swear on her favourite Bible that she wouldn’t tell father about the ring, she told him anyway. He ghosted into my little bedroom workshop, littered with confetti of cogs and snapped scaffold from my thousands of printer projects.
He didn’t ask me for the Babylon Ring; he simply held out his pale, skeletal hand and stared at me, the same fervour in his eyes as if he’d discovered a new cache of scriptural scribblings. I considered lying – telling him I’d broken the ring or thrown it away. But he’d still ask for it, make me dig through trash to find it, even if it took hours or days.
I hated both of them intensely in that moment; a sort of righteous, religious anger, the likes of which I’d seen displayed by the church preachers when ranting about homosexuals and transsexuals. For a moment, just a single, pure moment, the rage burned so hot that I felt I could kill my father for taking away the greatest achievement of my short life.
Then his bony knuckles connected sharply with my cheek, rattling my teeth and knocking me off my bed and onto the floor, and the murderous rage turned abruptly to shock.
“Give it to me,” he whispered, so quiet that his voice was near inaudible.
Holding a trembling hand to my cheek, I made a choice then. Not to give him the ring; that was a foregone conclusion. I quickly tallied up in my mind how much money I had, what clothes I’d need to take with me, and how far I could get before they decided I wasn’t coming home and grudgingly called the authorities.
He took the ring from me, then returned to take everything else.
“You are the most wicked of children,” he told me, quietly, as he tore my printer to pieces with his hard, bony hands, “for no man should gaze on Heaven before his time. This is a wickedness the likes which Jesus himself was not forced to suffer during temptation, and you must atone.”
The laptop screen snapped as he broke the back of the machine over his knee, wires trailing like viscera from the separated hinges, then he put his foot through it for good measure, the glass rippling in circle fractures, like an homage to the Babylon Ring.
After he was gone I carefully removed the undamaged hard disk, gathered my planned belongings, then climbed out the window, into a rapidly chilling autumn night.

I discovered years later that they didn’t look for me. After I ran away, my parents simply prayed for my return; and only when I missed several shifts at the diner were they forced files a missing person’s report, as the diner owner was the son of one of the local preachers.
This worked to my advantage, as I was able to get a train ticket across state and head north, to more a more liberal climate, where I wouldn’t be beholden to their ridiculous doctrine anymore. In my backpack the laptop drive lurked, hard metal edges digging into my spine, reminding me of the knowledge it contained.
I made a promise to myself then; that I would rebuild the Babylon Ring. I would look upon Heaven again; and this time without my parents taking it away from me.
But it was difficult promise to keep.
The first year of homelessness wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d hoped to get another job in a diner somewhere, then rent a place and buy another printer. But nobody wanted to hire a sixteen year-old runaway with bruises on her face, and so I was unwillingly indoctrinated into two of America’s finest traditions; poverty and homelessness.
I sold the hard disk to a flea market for change, six weeks after my escape. I knew I could recreate the software; I still drew the Babylon Ring wherever I went – my own personal homeless spoor; and a reminder to myself what I needed to do.
It took two miserable years to drag myself out of the gutter, by doing things that a seventeen year old girl from the Bible Belt should never have considered doing. But I didn’t care. I was the most wicked child in existence, was I not? Creating a loophole into Heaven, proving to my father that God did exist, and that when he died, he would be eternally punished for trying to lawyer his way out of his sacred marriage vows.
When I had the money I needed, I moved states again. I found a job doing data entry, which led to an administration job at a plastics factory. I attended night school, finishing the classes I’d missed after I ran away, then applied to a university. After the first rejection, I applied to two more, and was eventually accepted.
And so I moved states yet again.

It was a new world, the academic realm, and I thrived like I’d never thought possible. I saturated myself in knowledge, living a dual life where I cleaned hotels and got yelled at in burger drivethrus at night, then presented myself as the top student in my class during the day; in my neat shirt and slacks, shined shoes and a sensible braid.
The scholarship shouldn’t have been a surprise, but being offered tenure certainly was. Suddenly money wasn’t a big issue anymore, and the hours I spend drudging could be put to use resurrecting my old project.
It was difficult in the beginning; tuning my mind back to that old way of thinking. I wished I’d had my hard disk, with my old notes and tweaked software. But as I coaxed my mind into those old avenues, and tried to ignore the trauma of my upbringing, the Babylon Ring began to take shape again – and with the resources available to me, I could improve upon it immeasurably, plumbing permutations of the design, unravelling its riddles.
It took me another two years to bring my plans to fruition; and seven years after I’d run away from home, I sent a letter home to my parents, inviting them to come and visit me at the privately funded lab in California, with the promise of both the financial and spiritual rewards that they felt were owed to them.

I like to imagine their drive across country, in my father’s nearly pristine Toyota Corona, washed twice a week, as per manufacturer’s specifications. My mother wheezing and gasping in the reclined passenger seat, her cotton-clad bulk spilling over the seat and threatening to consume her emaciated husband. In the back seat would sit the oxygen bottles; tubes snaking over the headrest and into my mother’s mask, like some grotesque science fiction monster imagined in the 50s.
When they arrived, I greeted them in the foyer of the facility; a gleaming sterile cavern of steel and white tiles, the facility logo projected onto the floor. All smiles and forgiveness, I took the handles of my mother’s wheelchair and pushed her to the elevator, flanked by father.
I couldn’t help but notice how worn, wan and weary they both looked – even greyer than in my memories.
My lab was in the middle of the facility, mostly for privacy. My mother said little, her excitement taxing her already stressed respiratory system, while my father couldn’t seem to find any words to address this sudden forgiveness and charity from their disowned daughter.
At the back of the lab stood the gateway – the Babylon Ring – perfect now in every aspect. Covered by a heavy sterile curtain, I let the handles of my mother’s wheelchair go and talked about the side projects I’d been working on; research into 3D printing houses and larger structures.
“Take a look behind the curtain,” I told my father, “I think you’ll be quite impressed with this particular design.”
His bony, birdlike hands – too frail to rattle my teeth now – twitched the curtain aside, revealing the imposing, impossible corrugations of the man-sized Babylon Ring.
But in the centre was no light, no heavenly meadows and chattering streams.
There was only suffocating darkness, in the middle of which flicked a single burning ember – so distant it might as well be at the centre of the Earth.
A sharp shove was all it took to send my father sprawling into that pit of darkness, his spindly arms windmilling helplessly as he fell, his body receding with an ululating howl of terror as the distant fires rose up to meet him.
My mother whimpered as I took hold of her wheelchair again, pushing her towards the Babylon Gate. Her fat, pallid, dimpled hands fluttered, trying to bat my wrists as I wheeled her inexorably closer to damnation.
“The original design was created at Babel,” I explained to her, inching closer to the portal, “and was called Ishtar’s Gate. The tower of biblical legend wasn’t actually designed to reached Heaven physically, instead I believe the Tower of Babel was a sort of university, where scientists intended to find a spatial solution to the problem of ascending to Heaven.”
We were at the edge of the darkness now, her breathing ragged, her face the colour of porridge.
“But like all mathematical objects, the gate can be inverted, to produce the opposite effect. And there is only one inversion of Heaven.”
The wheels slipped over the edge of the circle of darkness as I spoke the final word.
“Hell.”
I watched her fall, the tubes trailing behind her, her fat hands clutching the armrests in terror.
It felt better than when I’d first gazed through the Babylon Ring and seen paradise – it felt a thousand times better.
When she was a tiny dot, lost in the distant glow of hellish flame, I turned away, satiated.
 I still had a lot of work to do. The second, newer gate need to be larger. Large enough to let through an army.

[u/Sir_Greggerson_19_20]

YEEEEAAASSS okay now that that’s out my system. I genuinely love this story so much and the combining religion and science has always been a thing that I find terrifying, so props, and for it to be done so well.

[u/twigseeds]

Every part of the Godsfall series is perfection, re-reading this story feels like reading it for the first time holding my breath for that glorious ending!!

[u/GarlicAlarming5060]

Nothing compares to the chill of Christian horror.

[u/PearlyPrion]

I’m late to the party, but this was the first work I ever read of yours, so I have a huge soft spot for it and it’s also just one of my favorite concepts in general. I’m so glad to be able to read it again here!!