Heck City

HECK CITY

Heck city, analog of Haecceity

Means the thisness of a thing, but also all things

Heck City is hell, the underworld, the dream world.  In it, when a person closes their eyes and wills it, they enter their own space within this world, like a pocket in their mind.  It's like a computer partition, it's a separate conciousness, that happens to be passively telepathically linked in a rigidly networked fashion.  The Gideon crewmembers view it as like a computer, and explain that its an entire part of their brain partitioned off to use for something else.  They are convinced this explains the infected's supposedly low intelligence, that a chunk of their brain is lost to maintaining their persistent position in Heck City, leaving less brain power for waking life.

It is an organic computer setup in their mind, capable of upload and download between waking life and Heck City.  It's generated and maintained by a web of psychic transactions and facilitated by creatures whose purpose is the taking and giving of this energy.

The more energy possessed, the bigger this mental pocket dimension is allowed to get (by linking and absorbing dream cells/rooms, otherwise known as “schema” (singular: “scheme”).  This energy however cannot be allowed to leave the system once the mind dies.  It must be kept in the system, in order for the system to survive.

This necessitates that the mind must live on and continue to generate energy, and the natives do this by keeping the physical mind alive, and placing the psychic mind in a sort of dungeon, where they are tortured in Heck City to extract as much energy as possible from that mind.  This time served in the torture chamber is considered a debt one takes on to pay back energy used in life, but it is exorbitant.

ADDITIONALLY,

Heck City is arranged as a massive, ever-growing 3-dimensional cubed grid composed of cells that resemble rooms, with a rough structure that is constantly in flux.  In its upper levels, it is composed of ethereal, forgotten realms of dead dreams and legacy lands, populated by mournful ghosts and vengeful demons roaming fog covered moors of StoneHenge structures.  It's geography is barely understood and it is exeedingly difficult to get into, and perilous besides.

The bottom level is Dudaael, the Cauldron, the literal Hell where the energy the system needs is generated.  It is impossible to break into from above, only advocates can get into and out of and travel among its dungeon cells.  As such its geography is also barely understood.

In between and studded throughout are lengthy tubes of "Falling dreams", where a fast traveling seer can step out and fall at terminal velocity to the level and location they they need to reach, but as you can imagine this takes skill to do and is not precise, since the schema (the rooms) are in flux.  Generally the more important the cell, the bigger it will be and/or the more stable its position is within Heck City, but also more vulnerable to penetration and attack for that reason because by nature something invested with so much money is strategically important to people and represents an asset.

This could be an object stored there, or a person hiding there.  Heck City is the realm of information, and its most important and desirable assets are information.  Maps, lists, locations, motives, secrets, gossip, rumor.  These things must be protected, and there are people that will invest effort in bypassing defenses, and there is investment in even greater defenses, a sort of arms race.  Extremely important assets are on 24 hours lockdown, they are a trap, a puzzle, a fortress, impossible to breach.

Either way, these secret missions are carried out in Heck City by seers prepared to engage in combat and evasion, serious ninja stuff.  Scaling walls, hiding out, creeping around.  They are opposed by rival ninja seers hired or employed to locate, hunt, and stop or block them.  If their true identity is discovered, they can be found in the waking world and a simple scrying spell can locate them and they can be captured and killed.  Thus it is extremely high risk.