So, for many millions of years there had been a network of Afterlives throughout the galaxy, semi-independent from the Real and constantly changing just as the galactic community in the Real changed, with civilisations appearing, developing, steady-stating or disappearing, either changing beyond recognition, relapsing in some way or going for semi-Godhood, sidestepping the material life altogether by opting for the careless indifference that was Subliming.
Mostly, nobody mentioned the Hells.
The moving thing was tiny. Too small to be a person in a suit or even an Outboard Remote Sensing/Engagement Unit, either his or anybody else’s. It was moving at 38.93 metres per second and so was far too slow to be considered kinetic ordinance. It was approximately 3cm by 11cm, round in section, conical aspect to the leading quarter, spinning. He deemed it to be a 32mm mortar shell. He had a lot of high-reliability information on such ordnance. Maximum capability a five kiloton micro-nuke; many variants. It was going to fly directly above where he had been positioned and impact on the bulkhead which had been behind him.
Now his high-telescopic vision apparatus had acquired it, he could see tiny sensory pits on the thing, blurring round as it rotated
(4.2 rps). It flew past him five metres away and started to glitter, giving off range- and Combat Space Topography-sensing laser pulses. None hit him. This was because it had gone past before it activated.
He was still moving, taking one more quiet step as the projectile sailed through the dark space of the hangar. He judged that the ingress of the round meant that an attack might be about to start and that his best choice had become to hunker down here, still five steps away from the Unidentified High-Solidity Object he’d been heading for, opting instead for the partial cover of the nearest Unidentified Medium-Solidity Object, an additional advantage accruing from the fact that a sub-routine assured him his scale and overall shape in hunkered mode would make him look similar to the now Identified Medium-Solidity Object concerned, which was a small, intact but deactivated High-Atmospheric/Low Orbit Planetary Surface Bombardment Unit.
An additional advantage accruing definitely sounded like a good thing. It was almost like an order from inside himself. He’d choose that option. He started hunkering down.
An expert sub-system suggested that should the mortar round detonate where he had been, further additional advantage might be accrued. That sounded good too.
The mortar round was travelling so slowly there was plenty of time to work out exactly where he had been, to target his left upper Light Laser Rifle Unit on the spinning projectile and set himself up for minimal blast-front damage from the direction the round was heading, should it prove to be a micro-nuke.
When it was directly above where he’d been he landed four direct low-power hits on its rear; zero misses or out-splash, which made him feel very good. He whipped the rifle unit back into the armoured nacelle. The mortar round detonated.
Micro-nuke.
The Hells existed because some faiths insisted on them, and some societies too, even without the excuse of over-indulged religiosity.
Whether as a result of perhaps too faithful a transcription – from scriptural assertion to provable actuality – or simply an abiding secular need to continue persecuting those thought worthy of punishment even after they were dead, a number of civilisations – some otherwise quite respectable – had built up impressively ghastly Hells over the eons. These were only rarely linked with other Afterlives, hellish or otherwise, and even then only under strict superveillance, and usually only with the aim of heightening the anguish of the sufferers by subjecting them to torments their own people somehow hadn’t thought of, or the same old ones but inflicted by extra-gruesome alien demons rather than the more familiar home-grown variety.
Very gradually though, perhaps just due to the exact nature of the chance mix the contemporary crop of In-play civilisations represented, a sort of network of Hells – still only partial, and remaining strictly controlled in their interactions – did emerge, and news of their existence and the conditions within them became more widely known.
This led to trouble, in time. Many species and civilisations objected profoundly to the very idea of Hells, no matter whose they were. A lot objected profoundly to the very idea of torture in any event, and the practice of setting up Virtual Environments – traditionally such dazzlingly fabulous realms of unmitigated pleasure – devoted to inflicting pain and suffering on sentient creatures seemed not just wrong but perverse, sadistic, genuinely evil and shamefully, disgracefully cruel. Uncivilised, in fact, and that was not a word such societies bandied about without having thought carefully about its deployment.