The Black Step: A Theological Thriller

Pari Antony's new virtual reality technology has developed a very strange bug. In the middle of your game, you might just find yourself standing in Heaven . . . or in Hell. And they're not virtual, either. You think it's a game, but it's not.The Black Step is a tour of Heaven, Hell, and the Purgatory we call our world.PTEm virtual reality is unlike any other—no goggles, no headphones. This device writes straight to your brain. You don’t just see the simulated world. You are in the simulated world.But the PTEm beta tests begin to return some very strange results. “The Girl and the Goblin” game simulation is abruptly interrupted when a beta tester flat-lines in the lab and finds herself standing in a beautiful wooded valley watching as a dragon tosses her an apple from a tree at the edge of a dark forest. When she finishes the test, the only thing she wants is to go back there. But the PTEm techs have no idea where 'there' was.Jake Laverol is having fun in “The Innkeeper’s Daughter” game sim until the hardware glitches and he suddenly finds himself in a dark, hot, filthy, corrosive landscape haunted by animated decaying corpses warning him that he had better find a place to sit down fast before his flesh is completely burned away and he collapses, because he is now here to stay. And when Laverol is pulled out of the gameplay, he still bears the scars he picked up in the hellscape.Pari hasn’t revolutionized gaming. She has invented a machine that lets you visit the dead, angels, demons, the saved and the damned.She just wanted to impress her cold and cruel traditional Indian parents, and maybe end up rich, along with her two engineers, Michael Bachman, who loves her so much he’s even willing to go to church with her despite her parents’ insistence they pick out her husband in a traditional arranged marriage, and Coron Lengbridge, who recently lost his young daughter Melissa to illness and now finds nothing to love in this world and can’t imagine there is any better . . . or worse . . . world waiting for anyone, or anything like a God caring about anyone.Of course, others are watching, including the Government. Pari and Bachman and Lengbridge are spirited away to a hidden laboratory run by the security agencies for safe keeping and more experiments, for the Government would very much like to talk to the dead, although Bradley Norris, managing their work for the Government, has plans to end Pari, Bachman, and Lengbridges’ journeys the hard way, and very soon.With Dante, Milton, Lewis, and Bunyan as inspiration, The Black Step takes the reader from a private research laboratory in the Washington, D.C. suburbs on a tour through Heaven and Hell, to end in the only place where such a journey can end—at The Black Step.And sooner or later, you, too, will stand before The Black Step. Read more