“Aaah, that was nice,” Angel remarked with a yawn as she woke up from her nap. There was quite a bit of hubbub going on below her, so she scooched a few inches closer to the edge of the roof to peek over the lip of the building she had fallen asleep on. She blinked in surprise when she saw the street had been cleared of people, leaving throngs of them amassed on either side of it that were standing behind some sort of temporary barricades. “Oh my, that’s quite the crowd. I wonder what they’re all here for?”
[Probably a public execution. Beheadings were all the rage in this region of Earth a while back, if I remember correctly, and I doubt their behavior has changed that much. Your species is really primitive.]
“I didn’t think we were that primitive,” she replied as she shifted up onto her knees to get a better look, “but I don’t think we have laser rifles like the Krae, so I suppose that means we really are behind. Do you remember what country those executions were in?”
[Fuck if I know. You hummies go to war and redefine your little fiefdoms all the time, it’s impossible to keep track. Speaking of, where are we, anyway?]
Angel yawned again, rubbing at her eyes. “Uh, France, I think. Hang on, let me check the Ledger again.”
[Hm, that sounds vaguely familiar… Was it Germany? No, hang on, that’s the country where Mephistopheles tried to corrupt that old scholar. Fuck, what a waste of time that shit was…]
While Lew mused, she flipped the Ledger open and checked the list of targets. “Sr. Alejo Carrasco of Pamplona… Goodness, that’s a weird name. I wonder where—”
A sound like a gunshot went off, and the crowd below abruptly began to cheer. She peeked back over the lip of the roof and saw a huge pack of people had appeared from around the corner and were sprinting down the previously empty road. Further back in the mass of bodies, she saw a person surrounded in a red aura running towards her position.
“Oh there he is!” Angel exclaimed, jabbing her finger towards him even though Lew could see everything she could. “Huh. I wonder what they’re all running from… wait, what?!”
Bulls, of all things, began to stampede straight through the crowd of runners. Some of the people were able to dodge to the side and out of the way in time as the beasts approached, and others got trampled before rolling out of the way. Alejo, however, was gored by a bull’s horn that ran straight through his heart, jabbing into the back and out the front of his chest. Blood spurted everywhere, and the bull tossed its head—perhaps to get the blood out of its eyes, though it just as easily could have been that the creature was vindictive, sadistic, or both and wanted to really ensure the man died—flinging him bodily over itself. This resulted in Alejo striking the ground just in time to be trampled by not one, not two, and not even three bulls. No, he was run over by no less than six more bulls, ensuring his torso was a bloody, pulpy mess by the time the dust settled.
Needless to say, the audience beyond the barricades and even Alejo’s fellow runners—a great deal of whom were spattered with his guts—were all horrified, and there was a great deal of turmoil and screaming.
“Aw shoot,” Angel pouted. “I was hoping I could avert this one…”
Though she truly was disappointed, her reaction was very inappropriately tame in comparison to the keening packs of people below. Granted, that sort of numbness to death by horrible, excruciating means was unfortunately natural given her daily involvement in affairs similar in effect albeit varying in means. As many important minds have said, it is imperative to remember something something the human condition lives by blah blah don’t forget to pick up milk on the way home.
This was not the first bump in the road Angel had encountered since she had personally redefined her job to redeeming targets and, where possible, preventing their deaths altogether. There had been a great many failures, in fact. So many so that abbreviating it as such really doesn’t even remotely portray the whole picture. It would be more evocative to describe the number of bumps she had encountered as synonymous with the pimply face of a child in the deepest throes of puberty, who had either tried a variety of acne protection products and found them wanting or else has resigned themself to making their way through life with a face reminiscent of a page of braille. Evocative though that description might have been, it would be remiss of the narrator to not describe the bumps in Angel’s figurative road using more clinical descriptors. After all, flowery language such as saying the hurdles she had faced numbered greater than the individual grains of sand at a beach only gets one so far.
To be more precise, Angel had failed to redeem or save from death a hefty seventy-seven point seven percent of her targets for the past solar cycle of three-hundred and sixty-six days—it had been a leap year, which meant in hindsight that our protagonist had bungled rule six of the rules of engagement for working through all the offerings of an arcade even worse than previously thought during her visit there one solar leap year ago. To her credit, she was generally more adept at avoiding inadvertent corruption of those cases already bent towards being heaven-bound, but on the other hand, this was likewise indicative of her being really rather shit at convincing people to do good things. This may have been suggestive of humankind’s propensity for being overall dickheads in their day-to-day life, or it might also just be the narrator waxing philosophical unnecessarily while the truth was Angel was just bad at persuading people to not be bad. Probably the latter.
[Yeah, well, I think this was a resounding success!] Lew remarked encouragingly. [Guy went to hell, and we got to see what a hummie’s insides look like when they’re whipping through the air behind a crazed cow! Good times all around, wouldn’t you say, kid?]
“No,” she grumbled with a sigh as she used a portal to depart, popping out onto the dark mountainside where they had first met.
[Don’t be like that. I know you’re trying to desecrate the purpose of demonkind’s oldest profession, and I begrudgingly admit I respect on some level the balls it takes to try that, but you know this all playing the good guy is going to come back to bite you in the ass whenever Repugna finally pays attention to your numbers.]
“Is she ever going to though?” Angel asked, sounding unsure as she dropped her backpack down on a grassy patch beneath a tree and flopped down besides it to look up at the stars, which shone through clearly that far away from the light pollution of the city. “I haven’t seen her once since you and I met!”
[She’s got to at some point… I mean, she knew my numbers were shit, so clearly she pays attention on some level, but I’ll admit I don’t know when.]
“I suppose that makes sense,” she agreed. “What I don’t get though is why any of this matters.”
[Huh? What do you mean?]
“Well, why am I supposed to be corrupting people? Or I guess it makes more sense to ask why you were doing that, since the only reason I had to was because I took over. Are good and evil at war or something?”
[Holy shit, you actually don’t know… I’d never believe it if I couldn’t see what you were thinking. How the fuck has this never come up before?]
She shrugged, the motion awkward while lying on the grass. “I dunno. I guess it never really bothered me until now.”
[Dammit, I guess somebody ought to fill in the gaps for you…] Lew remarked with a sigh not unlike a cat with indigestion after having too much tuna earlier that day. [You better fucking appreciate this, got it?]
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So there used to be a whole lot of nothing. Like, loads and loads and loads of it. This was because God had built this crazy nice computer called The Universe, but he hadn’t actually done anything but outfit it with a bunch of hardware—not a lick of software in sight. In fact, near as anybody can tell, he didn’t have any particular goal in mind, and that was a problem right out of the gate. It’s a bad idea to go to all the trouble of assembling a computer that might not be able to handle the shit you later decide to do. It’s sort of like buying a boat, but then later it turns out you need to travel on the goddamn land, and boats are notoriously not great at doing that solo. But that sort of failure to think things through is pretty much God’s whole modus operandi, and you better get used to it because it doesn’t get any better as the story goes on.
Anyway, he eventually decided to set up a dimension in The Universe, and he loads an operating system called Existence, that he designed himself, onto it. This was a whole new problem because he didn’t bother to patch out all the bugs and exploits, but we’ll get to that shit later—just put a pin in it for now, got it? So there’s God, and he’s all, I’m God and whatever, so surely I can fix any issues in the coding as I go along. All self-assured and unable to resist turning on his snazzy new computer now that it can actually do something, he turns it on.
Wham-o! Instant clusterfuck. See, remember how I mentioned God didn’t have a set idea for how he wanted to use The Universe? Well, he figured he could just put all the features into Existence, that way he could do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. Wouldn’t want to be caught with a whole bunch of dry land to cross when all you’ve got is a fucking boat, am I right? Well wrong! So. Fucking. Wrong! Look, the simple explanation of what happened was Existence couldn’t handle the load of everything he wanted it to do, and everything basically exploded. Now if this were one of your hummie computers, that’d be the end of it, but nope, this is a God-tier operating system. Like demons, God doesn’t live or die—he just exists. Existence was like that too, so when it blew into a bajillion pieces, it just kept on trucking even though all its shit was splattered everywhere.
That’s Existence, kid. A bunch of rubble blown to smithereens because God couldn’t be bothered to figure shit out from the start. Great, right?
Well it gets better. That whole endlessness thing has this little caveat to it, namely that it’s fucking endless. Existence is currently in its ‘blown straight to hell’ phase, which is why all the matter, antimatter, and all the cosmic horrors are expanding away from ground zero of the explosion. Eventually it’s going to get around to the ‘pulling itself together’ phase, and all of the shit God just had to have in Existence is going to be smooshed back together again and reach a critical mass of ‘NOPE’ again and blow again. Then come together again. Then blow up again. An endless cycle of that nonsense just going on for eternity, with the only redeeming factor being the complexity of the blast means each instance is fresh and unique.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Needless to say, there’s not a lot God could do with Existence’s cyclical burst of spontaneity except ooh and aah over whatever random bullshit got generated naturally and play around in it like a big sandbox. Sort of like playing with the entrails of a deer that got splattered all over the highway, except the deer’s still alive and probably doesn’t appreciate you shoving its balls in its stomach. He created a handful of elements with all sorts of variations and slapped a bunch of them together into stars, planets, comets, and all that sort of shit. And sure, there was some life that cropped up in a bunch of places, but nothing to be concerned about— Wait, wait, uh oh! Sentient life. With how Existence kept recycling, God had taken for granted that everything would just reset, but now he had a bit of an ethical concern on his hands, and one with a time limit no less.
Thankfully for him, it had been a couple of cycles, so he’d had some opportunity to learn from his mistakes, and while he still didn’t really know what he wanted to do, he at least knew what he needed to do, which was a suitable substitute for the time being. He made a new partition and installed a different operating system he whipped up called Heaven. Now this little bundle of software he set up correctly, if you consider a place full of nothing but sunshine, daisies, and singing hymns about how great God is to be ‘correct.’ It was, at the very least, a workable, properly limited batch of code that didn’t have the problem of exploding and reforming endlessly, so I’ll give him that.
Anyway, God’s big plan to save the sentient life was to do a data transfer from Existence to Heaven. All he had to do was evacuate the sentient life, and that was the problem solved, if you don’t consider it shitty to lock people in a world where you are hard coded into doing nothing but being a perfect little angel. But whoa now, God can’t let just anyone into Heaven! Only the ‘right’ people—the good ones. Except, what exactly did it mean to be good? That sentient life had come up with bookoos of moral codes and ethical standards, and surprise surprise, basically all of them thought they were ‘good.’ That meant he needed to lay down some ground rules, form up a homeowner’s association of sorts. You want to go to Heaven? You’ve gotta meet the criteria.
So God got on top of that, but lo and behold, sentient life wasn’t too thrilled by the new rules. I don’t blame them either—a lot of that shit was pretty bizarre. Wearing clothes woven together with different materials was apparently bad, and you better not eat those grapes that fell off the vine! You’ve gotta leave that for the less fortunate. Now I can understand God having some weird likes and dislikes because as far as I’m concerned, we’re all weird. Take me, for example. I really don’t care for classical music, and anyone who dances deserves to be gutted and have their entrails arranged into the shape of a big dick. We all like and dislike weird shit, so who are we to judge, right? But no, we’re talking about the criteria for who gets to escape to the Big Crunch and live forever in Heaven—that is exactly the sort of shit that shouldn’t be arbitrary!
And just to make matters worse, almost all of the sentient life that had developed had a tendency to be mortal, and God kept changing the rules to spice shit up or whatever his justifications were. That meant a lot of the finer details of what was good and what wasn’t were getting forgotten or misinterpreted over the course of time. He sent out messages periodically to inform sentient life of the adjustments to the admission standards, but he kept choosing wacky ass ways to do it like communicating with the outcasts of society, making stone tablets on top of fucking mountains, and through fucking dreams of all things—like anybody properly remembers that shit in the morning!
Now we demons, we didn’t take kindly to God’s bullshit regulations. We wanted out of that whole nonsense system, and we spent eons trying to find an escape route, generation after generation struggling to find a solution and dying unsuccessfully… until Lucifer cracked immortality. We exchange reproduction for eternal life, and once we stopped losing our brightest minds to death, we were able to piece together more. Remember those bugs and exploits I mentioned earlier? Yeah, immortality was just the start. Wormholes to anywhere in Existence, tracking for all sentient life, universal translation of language, spontaneous object creation—that’s just the beginning of the shit we started to figure out. We were making breakthrough after breakthrough, but time was creeping closer and closer to The Crunch, and we still hadn’t pieced together the last thing we needed to ensure we wouldn’t be lost to the reset—a way out of Existence.
In the end, we never did figure it out ourselves, but Lucifer rescued us again. See, we had been trying to figure out a rule free route into Heaven, the only place we knew of outside of Existence. But that just couldn’t be done—or rather, it couldn’t be done by us. Lucifer had realized the truth that God, who was the only one truly outside of The Universe, could ferry us to safety. So he played to God’s weaknesses. God cared about saving sentient life—why save anyone at all if he didn’t—but he didn’t want the riffraff in his precious Heaven. Lucifer opened a direct channel to our jailer and offered a deal: Create a place for demonkind to call our own, and in exchange, we would take in those damned by God to suffer death. An accord was struck, and we were left in charge of taking in the unwanted of the world, the sinners who were beneath God’s notice. Taking in those outside of his ‘grace’ into our Hell.
And let me tell you about some of the people we’ve taken in! Remember how I said history gets distorted? Well you hummies have it real bad, let me tell you. Muhammad, Mary, and Jesus—all figures you mortals think of as having been holy and totally heaven-bound—were all damned to Hell. Mohammad, the poor sap, was commanded by God to spread the word about the newest standards for admittance into Heaven, and he nearly got nixed right out the gate in Mecca for doing what he was supposed to do! He and the people he had informed fled to Yathrib. The fun train didn’t stop there though because he had to duke it out with all the people there too. After he finally manages to amass an army of ten thousand people to go back to Mecca to finish what God had wanted him to do, he gets shafted a few years later. He gets sick and kicks the can, and bam—straight to Hell. Why? Well a few people died while he was going about all that business, that’s why! Barely anyone, mind you, but that was enough to revoke his place in Heaven. Absolutely cruel.
And Mary and Jesus, ugh, I think they got it even worse! Unlimited power to shape existence, and what does God do with it? Fuck a mortal lady and ditch her, leaving her to raise the resulting son with this other bastard who took mercy on her and married her. Single moms think they have it tough in this day and age, but those bitches have no idea how pampered they are in comparison. Mary does her best with the cards she’s dealt, and her kid Jesus grows up into this quirky guy who has a natural knack for figuring out the same bugs and exploits we had discovered, only he did it all by himself. That made everyone either pissed off or enamored with him, and in the end he got brutally murdered and strung up on a stick in the middle of an arid desert to rot—it was really messy, let me tell you. They were both damned to Hell, since she had sex outside of marriage and he was a bastard child. Lucky for Jesus he was a prodigious shit, and he cracked how to repossess his dead body and how to sneak into Heaven—not even Lucifer managed that! He told his followers he was off to speak with God about securing his people passage into Heaven, and I haven’t seen hide nor tail of him since. Definitely didn’t succeed though, since plenty of those ‘Christians’ go to Hell.
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[And that’s more or less the story of God, The Universe, and how all its parts came to be. It’s all one gigantic clusterfuck branching out from God’s first, greatest mistake—designing Existence and thinking it was okay to turn it on,] Lew concluded some time later. [Any questions?]
Angel’s hand shot up into the air, and she virtually quivered with repressed energy as she waited for the demon in her head to call on her.
[The fuck? Are you serious, you moron? Just ask the goddamn question!]
“Why doesn’t God just turn off Existence? It seems like it caused an awful lot of problems.”
[You realize you’re advocating for that holier than thou bastard turning off your existence, right?]
“Oh. I guess I hadn’t thought of that. Still, I would have thought he’d do it anyway.”
[Well he’d have you believe it’s because he loves you, blah bullshit blah. Personally, I suspect he’s either a lazy shithead who can’t be bothered or more likely he forgot how to by the time he thought to do it. Now that we’re finished with that—]
Angel’s hand shot back into the air.
[Oh for the love— What?!]
“I have another question.”
[Yeah, I fucking got that.]
He waited for her to continue, and after approximately seven seconds of sheer silence from her, he finally snapped out, [What?! Fucking what?!]
“What is it?” she replied, sounding quite thrown by his behavior. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Once upon a time outside a pub in the United Kingdom, Lew had fantasized about having a body of his own again and how he would have used Angel’s body in combination with a broken off table leg to fashion a torch. While that was certainly an imaginative use for Angel’s body, he had dreamt up yet more horrific brutalizations since that time. There was the removal of her head and shoulders in order to convert the remnants of her torso into a garbage bin, shoving rods down her spine and through her arms and torso to make a coat rack, hollowing out her skull and fashioning it into a combination nest venus flytrap in order to murder passing birds, and nobody could forget flaying her to make the classic humanskin rug to spread in front of the fireplace in his long abandoned apartment. With all of those innovative uses for Angel’s corpse, was it any wonder that demons placed in the top three of imaginative species on Earth? Those leathery Elephant sons of bitches never stood a chance.
“Why does any of that mean demons need to corrupt people before they die?” Angel asked, ignorant of the multitude of murderous musings flitting through Lew’s thoughts.
[Well duh. Who the fuck wants to go to Heaven?] the demon exclaimed, bewildered why she would even ask. [Existence is a shitty prison, but even this doomed place is better than that shithole. Singing that madman’s praises for all eternity? Honestly. We’ve got to free these poor saps from stumbling into that prison by accident.]
Angel’s hand leapt into the air a third time, and Lew pondered how best to go about flaying her alive in order to fashion a balloon out of her skin that he could tie to a stripped piece of her intestines. [Last motherfucking question. Now what?]
“But what if somebody wants to go to Heaven? Your story didn’t cover free will at all!”
[Okay, that’s it, we’re done. Go to fucking sleep!]
“But I just woke up only—”
[Sleep. Now!]
And so Angel pulled out her sleeping bag and tent and set about setting up camp. Fortunately for everyone involved, she was well aware of the spell for night vision and was thus able to accomplish the task without swearing up a storm. Only once she was bundled up inside and awaiting the morning light did she finally allow herself to ponder.
Free will…