Welcome to Basement Level Nine

Hell Got a Corporate Rebrand

8 August 2026 ~ 3 min read

Dante had Virgil. Seán O’Sullivan gets George Carlin.

When I needed a guide to lead my janitor through Hell in The Morrígan’s Game, the choice was obvious. Who better to navigate the circles of the damned than a comedian who spent his entire career calling out the systems designed to keep people confused, compliant, and just uncomfortable enough not to complain? Father Time pulls Carlin from 2008 because he’d already done a set in Hell in the 1980s. He knows the layout. He has notes.

But this isn’t Dante’s Inferno. The Devil has rebranded. Hell is now Basement Level Nine—a corporate campus of eternal torment redesigned for the modern soul. The stairs descend from wood to stone to bone. An AI orientation system delivers corrupted corporate welcomes. And each of the nine levels reimagines a classical sin as the kind of suffering we’ve actually built for ourselves.

Limbo is an endless co-working space where souls perpetually pivot without ever finishing anything. It’s where every lost left sock in the universe ends up—because left socks are dreams without action. Level 3 is the Brand Buffet, an all-you-can-eat nightmare of Instagram-age consumption where souls devour everything and taste nothing: “Artisanal Truth” and “Deconstructed Hope Foam” served by celebrity chefs preparing molecular gastronomy of regret. Level 4’s Pay-to-Burn runs on a cryptocurrency called DoomCoin. Level 5 is RageCore™—a warehouse of tools designed to fail, where all the Craigs argue about grammar and all the Karens demand impossible customer service for eternity. Level 6 peddles franchised spirituality through thousands of identical Keiths selling Enlightenment Starter Kits on a subscription model.

The deeper levels get darker. Level 7 is a forest of almost-violence, every blade marked with the first name of a potential victim. Level 8 is a networking event crossed with a DMV, where souls exchange blank business cards forever. And Level 9—the bottom—is the Archive of Endings, where everything truly over is stored in boxes that weep.

What made these levels fun to write—and I hope fun to read—is that Seán doesn’t fight his way through them. He’s a janitor. He fixes things. On each level, he uses one of his father’s old maintenance tools—a hammer, a wrench, a screwdriver—to make one small, genuine repair. A nail driven into a wall in a world of endless revision. A greed mechanism adjusted with a wrench. A broken workstation fixed so it displays a blank page reading: “What would you like to create today?” Each repair is tiny. Each one breaks the level’s logic entirely. Because that’s what maintenance does—it doesn’t conquer systems. It quietly makes them work again.

And the comedian George Carlin? He’s exactly who you think he’d be—cutting through every corporate euphemism, calling out every rebranded cruelty, and carrying a flask of holy water that makes nearby demons increasingly uncomfortable. Dante’s Virgil was a poet. Mine is a comedian. Both tell the truth. They just use different tools.

~ Liam