bungakertas (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bungakertas) wrote2018-12-10 08:17 am
bungakertas) wrote2018-12-10 08:17 am
Entry tags:
The Transporter Problem
Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): swearing
Summary: Based on this prompt: "Every time you teleport, your body is destroyed and instantly recreated at the destination. Heaven and Hell are struggling to cope with the billions of duplicated souls created every year, so a bipartisan emergency meeting has been called to sort out the problem."
Author’s Notes: The demons in this story are demons. They use the bad words. And blaspheme a little. Because that’s how demons are (actually, actual demons blaspheme a lot, but I didn’t think that was necessary for the story).
*~*~*
Michael and Gabriel exchanged an annoyed glance. Lucifer, being himself, was running late.
He had done this sort of thing ever since his fall, but he’d been particularly petty about absolutely everything ever since a certain empty tomb incident roughly two-and-a-half thousand years ago, by human reckoning.
Michael couldn’t help but smile at that.
“What do you suppose he’ll want?” Gabriel asked.
“Oh, free reign on Earth and at least a hundred souls he can take from Heaven down to Hell,” Michael said.
Ophan, one of two other angels there with them, huffed a laugh. “He can have as many souls from Heaven as he can take for himself,” said Ophan, repeating something God had told Lucifer a long time ago that had become something of a running challenge at meetings such as this. As the angel who welcomed souls of children who died unborn into Heaven, Ophan had been particularly fraught by the current crisis. Only a week ago, in Celestial reckoning, Michael had overheard him mention to Simeon Bachos that he was actually suffering from headaches. Which was particularly unusual for an angel, given that their heads did not generally correspond to something that could ache, and Heaven did not truly lend itself to anything like suffering or pain in any case.
Hadraniel, one of Heaven’s gatekeepers smiled at the comment. “I almost wish he would try.” However, being as he and Peter had been showing signs of actual fatigue dealing with the many, many, many souls—so many more than usual—pressing to enter Heaven, Michael suspected his humor was ironically intended.
Gabriel did not look amused, but then, Gabriel never had really had much of a sense of humor. “He will be displeased when we refuse him.”
“His happiness, or lack of it, is meaningless,” Michael replied. “Heaven will weather this storm. Our only goal is expedience in doing so. Lucifer, however, must have a solution or he will suffer much more than he does now.”
“Threats already?” said a smooth, pleasant voice from the door. “A terrible way to start our meeting.”
Since the meeting was one between the forces of Heaven and Hell, Earth was the obvious choice for neutral territory. Helpfully, since it was also the source of the problem. So, to avoid attracting attention, the angels had cleared out one floor of a human office building in…well, actually Michael wasn’t entirely sure where they were. Humans built and destroyed their little shelters so quickly that he had a hard time keeping which ones were useful landmarks straight. The angels, and the demons, assumed human forms for their meetings, in keeping with the current times, all neat business suits and sharp haircuts, seated in plush chairs around a conference table in a room where one side was a floor-to-ceiling set of windows.
Michael, Gabriel, Ophan, and Hadraniel all wore faces that were attractive, by human standards, but would hardly draw attention.
Lucifer, the Prince of the World, had chosen to appear as impossibly beautiful. He was inexpressibly beautiful, with cold eyes and an arrogant expression that rendered that beauty distant and unapproachable. A face that a human would lust for, but one they wouldn’t dare to love.
Fortunately for the humans, since love confused Lucifer.
Lucifer had brought four attendants, though the terms of their meeting had only allowed him three. His eyes narrowed when he saw Hadraniel, who was easily a match for any three of Lucifer’s many princes. He turned an oily smile on Michael, pretending as if he was not displeased to be outmaneuvered before the maneuvering even began.
Michael cast an eye over the attendants he had brought. Beelzebub, of course, an attendant so close to Lucifer that humans sometimes thought he was Lucifer. Mephistopheles, a demon clever at convincing humans to bargain away their own souls. Asmodeus, the Prince of Lust, whose presence at the meeting was justified only by his high place in Lucifer’s hierarchy. And, of course, Belial, Prince of Idolatry and Horrors.
They’d all been angels once. Michael felt a moment’s anguish over what they had twisted themselves into now.
“Do we need to state our purpose for this meeting, or shall we simply begin the discussion?” Gabriel said.
Lucifer frowned. “Wait…where’s the Big Guy? He ditch you kids to handle the crisis alone?”
“God has empowered us to speak His words, as He has done many times before,” Michael said. “That is our function.”
“For the humans, the little, backwards, half-spirit abortions,” Lucifer snarled. “Not me! Not us!”
Ophan spoke in his usual quiet tones. “Would you really choose to see God now, Dragon?”
Lucifer glared at him. Finally, he said, “No.”
Gabriel sighed. “Very well. We will do this by the forms.” He stood, and opened the leather folder in front of him, reading from a neat printed page in the folder. “This meeting is called to address the issue of human teleportation and the vast amount of duplicate souls this process creates. Each time a human body is disintegrated, it is killed, sending the soul to the next life. Reintegration creates a fracture of the same soul, which is often called a copy. The multitude of duplicates has slowed entry into Heaven and overwhelmed Hell, causing the Lower Offices to demand this meeting in search of a solution to their problems. Heaven, having no cause to object, has sent as emmis—”
“Oh, fuck, wow,” Asmodeus broke in. “First off, dude, you’re boring me to death here, and that’s impossible. Multitude of duplicates? Really?”
Michael gave Gabriel a quelling glance before he decided to punish the demon. He’d never had much taste for jokes or insubordination.
“Second, you can’t tell me that you’ve got no other issues than a traffic jam in the entrance hall.”
Michael’s brow furrowed at the strange turns of phrase before he finally said, “Not really, no. That is the most significant. The souls must be reintegrated, of course, but that is simple enough.”
Beelzebub stared in shock. “Simple? We can’t find anything powerful enough to force them back together!”
Hadraniel looked disgusted. “Force is not required. It is the nature of a soul to be a unified self. Simply place all the parts in the same location and wait. It requires only patience.”
“Patience is a virtue,” Lucifer sneered.
Hadraniel furrowed his eyebrows. “Yes, it is. What of it?”
Lucifer gave him a withering glare. “I don’t have any virtues.”
“Then you will struggle with this,” Hadraniel replied in tone so bland that Michael had to press his lips together very tightly not to laugh.
The five fallen angels all exchanged a dark look and finally Belial said, “And what are we supposed to do with all the extra souls in the meantime. Hell is in chaos!”
“Hell is always in chaos,” Ophan replied. “It is the nature of Hell to be chaotic, miserable, and unpleasant. Begin reintegrating the souls. That is your only way forward.”
“That will take aeons!” Mephistopheles protested.
“Fortunately, we are immortal,” Gabriel replied.
“Look, never mind gluing the damn back-births back together,” Lucifer said. “How the fuck do we stop them from duplicating themselves any more?”
And now they came to the crux of it, Michael thought. The reason this meeting was being held.
Yes, Heaven was inconvenienced by the vast amounts of duplicate souls. And yes, some of the angels and humans in it were suffering temporary unpleasantness, which was something Heaven was not truly designed for and so it created a dissonance in the Celestial harmony that everyone in Heaven could feel. But the dissonance was not dangerous, it was simply unlikable. The souls would be reintegrated. The inconvenience would pass. And because angels were holy, and the humans who had died and been welcomed to Heaven were perfected and sanctified, everyone in Heaven was bearing their inconvenience with good grace, patience, and kindness to one another. Yes, Ophan had been experiencing headaches. So one of the humans, who had been a hairdresser during her life, had worked out a way to give him a scalp massage that had ultimately resulted in his falling asleep, the only time in the history of the universe that an angel had ever slept. Ophan had reported it as a curious experience, but tremendously pleasant. He could see why living humans enjoyed their unconsciousness, and the heavenly ones often recalled it with fondness.
This unpleasantness was an interruption in Heavenly life. But it gave them opportunities to share these little kindnesses that might not have otherwise arisen. Heaven was, as always, thriving.
Hell was overrun. Already a place of suffering and sorrow, souls that had been rent and duplicated were worsening everything and Lucifer had been unable to restore order, even after setting several teams of demons to hunt down all the duplicates and destroy them. No matter how hard they tried, there were always more souls. Particularly since the human soul was an immortal thing, and so the demons could not ever truly destroy them.
Michael had tried to explain this to Lucifer a long time ago, but The Dragon had dismissed this information as a lie.
Without a solution, Lucifer would be deposed. There were only so many souls Hell could hold. It was a large number, but not infinite. For the time being, God had given him the Infernal Realm, so for the time being, the Throne of Hell was Satan’s. He had a right to demand assistance in protecting it.
Still, Michael was not about to say so and cede so powerful a barganing chip to Hell. Instead, he fixed Lucifer with a glare. “I would have thought anything that harmed a human soul would be a delight to you.”
“I will not be driven out of my realm by humans,” Lucifer snarled. “Either we stop them duplicating themselves or Hell is going to be unable to contain all the humans in it. I’ll start sending them back. And I already have a list drawn up of the ones I’m going to start with.”
Lucifer grabbed a list out of the leather folder he had and moved it across the length of the table with a wave of his hand.
Rather than a predictable list of genocidal dictators, Lucifer had chosen some lesser-known examples of the worst of the worst. Shiro Ishii from Unit 731, for example, was the fourth name down. But he was only one example, and hell contained uncountable multitudes of human monsters.
The trouble was, this was an actual threat. Hell wasn’t like Heaven. It wasn’t infinite. It was possible for the souls in it to escape. Sometimes they did.
There was a reason God had made humans with an instinctive fear of ghosts.
Lucifer could release these people. He would do it, too. Heaven would be untouched, but Earth would suffer and simply allowing the Devil to torment humanity unopposed was against the angels’ nature.
Michael sighed. “How would you propose we stop them?”
“Introduce a disease that kills anyone who uses the teleporters,” Belial said. He snapped his fingers and a small, neatly bound book appeared on the desk in front of everyone. Michael opened it and found a well-designed disease, neatly described, and clearly well-researched. It was a wasting, degenerative, dragged-out killer, one that slowly eroded the brain of anyone who used a teleporter. The proposed plan of introduction was by adding a virus to food that chickens ate, and then modifying the virus once humans acquired it to be communicable via sex, blood, or…well, any form of close contact, really. Chickens being one of the most widely consumed creatures on Earth, the entire human population could be infected in only a few years. It would take about that long for the symptoms to be felt.
Gabriel frowned. “This would kill the entire human population.”
“A very overdue extinction, if you ask me,” Belial shrugged.
“We did not. It’s out of the question,” Hadraniel replied.
“Either you agree, or we start letting souls out,” Belial snarled.
“Release all the souls you wish,” Ophan returned. “We will agree to this under no circumstances whatsoever.”
Michael held up his hand. “When did you design this disease, Lucifer?” he demanded.
“Right around the time humans finally figured out how to cure cancer,” he shrugged. “What? I have to give them something to blame on God. Cancer got me a lot of mileage before they nixed it. AIDS, too. Damn, but I miss AIDS.”
“And now you want us to give you an excuse to unleash this,” Michael said.
“I’ll find one sooner or later, whether you give it to me or not. This particular turn of events is…very useful.”
Michael frowned in thought.
Hadraniel looked appalled. “You cannot be considering this!”
Michael blinked. “What? Oh, this? No, of course not, out of the question.”
Hadraniel relaxed.
“But a disease that harms teleportation users is…not a bad thought.”
Gabriel frowned. “It isn’t?”
“It would have to be severe to be an effective deterrent,” Ophan said. “Very severe.”
Michael nodded. “But we don’t need it to be absolutely fatal, or so difficult to detect. If every human who teleported suffered a severe bout of…influenza, for example, for over a month after doing so, that would stop them doing it. There’s no point in traveling somewhere quickly if you have to be laid up for a month after you get there.”
Gabriel frowned. “But why? God did not give humans creativity and resourcefulness simply so that we could come in and destroy all the ways they apply it.”
“This application is actively harmful to them,” Hadraniel pointed out. “Souls can only be reintegrated after all the parts are placed together. Humans who use the teleporters live the rest of their lives with only part of their soul. Even the humans have observed higher rates of suicides and mental disorders among teleporters. Using one even once seriously harms them. We cannot protect them from every bad choice they make, but I think we would be right to severely discourage this one.”
Mephistopheles turned to Beelzebub. “They actually care about the little amphibians. It’s enough to make me want to barf.”
Michael looked down at his hands. Both Gabriel and Hadraniel had good points. Lucifer would eventually start sending souls out of Hell.
“Very well. We will design a disease and release it ourselves within the month. It will not be this,” Michael said, snapping his own fingers and turning all the copies of the horrible bug Belial had suggested into little piles of sparkling dust that evaporated into the air.
Belial glared. “We have other copies.”
“I have no doubt.”
“This changes nothing,” Lucifer said. “And why should I accept this deal? What do I get?”
“What do you want?”
“Free reign on Earth and at least one hundred souls transferred from Heaven to Hell,” Lucifer answered, giving Michael a dark smile as he echoed his words from earlier.
Michael smiled back. “As always, Lucifer, you may have as many souls from Heaven as you can take for yourself. Come for them whenever you please.”
“Free reign on Earth, then,” Lucifer said, knowing that was a losing fight. “No interference. I can do whatever I please, no matter what it is.”
If Lucifer wasn’t placated somehow, he would do something to vent his wrath. Not simply release souls, but he would find bodies for them. People to stuff them into. Or maybe start a war. Or maybe finish one by murdering one side. Finish a genocide somewhere. Something. Lucifer was a spiteful creature and he’d had millennia to think of creative ways to inflict suffering on people.
“One week, beginning now,” Michael said.
“A month.”
“Two weeks, and not one day more. And we will only promise no interference in your initial acts. Any recovery or rebuilding efforts will receive priority assistance as they always do,” Michael returned.
Lucifer gave him a dark smile. “Oh, I can have enough fun with the initial act, I think. It’s a deal.”
He and his demons stood and swept out of the room.
“Two weeks,” Gabriel sighed. “That is quite a bit of time to give Lucifer.”
“He’ll make good use of it, too, I’m afraid,” Michael sighed. “But I think it may be an improvement in the long term. I hope.”
“We’d best start preparing,” Hadraniel said. “Lucifer has two weeks of mayhem ahead of him. He won’t waste it.”
The four of them stood and vanished.
Two very confused custodians suddenly remembered they’d skipped an entire floor of the building, but found themselves very relieved when they saw that no one had even been on it. It took them less than a half-hour to clean.
*~*~*
Author’s Notes: A lot of the things being alluded to or mentioned are actually part of either genuine Christian philosophy, theology, or associated non-Biblical apocrypha. For example, it is possible to make a wholly Biblical case that the archangel Gabriel does not have a sense of humor. (Yes, I know he does on SPN. In an incredible turn of events, Supernatural is not very theologically accurate and never has been.)
The Ethiopian Eunuch is not named in the Bible, but is, in some traditions, given the name of Simeon Bachos.
Hadraniel and Ophan are also not in the Bible (at least, not the Protestant-recognized-canon), but are apocryphal names of angels who do supposedly patronize the things I said they do.
While the Bible hardly covers splitting up a soul a skillion different ways, it’s well within the bounds of Christian philosophy to say that “it is the nature of a soul to be a unified self,” for reasons that I won’t bore you with.
There are references to The Screwtape Letters peppered in all over the place, most specifically, when referring to humans as "amphibians."
Basically, I’m just trying to pack as many allusions in here as possible.
Of course, a lot of them, I’m making up, too. If you want a good source for Christian theology, this story is not it. I recommend the Bible. The actual Bible. Not a Dawkins-inspired commentary on it, either, the actual Bible. You may find it, for free, at The Blue Letter Bible, amongst other places.
Unit 731 was a real thing, though, unfortunately, and Shiro Ishii really did run the place. I recommend not reading about it while you eat.
Warning(s): swearing
Summary: Based on this prompt: "Every time you teleport, your body is destroyed and instantly recreated at the destination. Heaven and Hell are struggling to cope with the billions of duplicated souls created every year, so a bipartisan emergency meeting has been called to sort out the problem."
Author’s Notes: The demons in this story are demons. They use the bad words. And blaspheme a little. Because that’s how demons are (actually, actual demons blaspheme a lot, but I didn’t think that was necessary for the story).
Michael and Gabriel exchanged an annoyed glance. Lucifer, being himself, was running late.
He had done this sort of thing ever since his fall, but he’d been particularly petty about absolutely everything ever since a certain empty tomb incident roughly two-and-a-half thousand years ago, by human reckoning.
Michael couldn’t help but smile at that.
“What do you suppose he’ll want?” Gabriel asked.
“Oh, free reign on Earth and at least a hundred souls he can take from Heaven down to Hell,” Michael said.
Ophan, one of two other angels there with them, huffed a laugh. “He can have as many souls from Heaven as he can take for himself,” said Ophan, repeating something God had told Lucifer a long time ago that had become something of a running challenge at meetings such as this. As the angel who welcomed souls of children who died unborn into Heaven, Ophan had been particularly fraught by the current crisis. Only a week ago, in Celestial reckoning, Michael had overheard him mention to Simeon Bachos that he was actually suffering from headaches. Which was particularly unusual for an angel, given that their heads did not generally correspond to something that could ache, and Heaven did not truly lend itself to anything like suffering or pain in any case.
Hadraniel, one of Heaven’s gatekeepers smiled at the comment. “I almost wish he would try.” However, being as he and Peter had been showing signs of actual fatigue dealing with the many, many, many souls—so many more than usual—pressing to enter Heaven, Michael suspected his humor was ironically intended.
Gabriel did not look amused, but then, Gabriel never had really had much of a sense of humor. “He will be displeased when we refuse him.”
“His happiness, or lack of it, is meaningless,” Michael replied. “Heaven will weather this storm. Our only goal is expedience in doing so. Lucifer, however, must have a solution or he will suffer much more than he does now.”
“Threats already?” said a smooth, pleasant voice from the door. “A terrible way to start our meeting.”
Since the meeting was one between the forces of Heaven and Hell, Earth was the obvious choice for neutral territory. Helpfully, since it was also the source of the problem. So, to avoid attracting attention, the angels had cleared out one floor of a human office building in…well, actually Michael wasn’t entirely sure where they were. Humans built and destroyed their little shelters so quickly that he had a hard time keeping which ones were useful landmarks straight. The angels, and the demons, assumed human forms for their meetings, in keeping with the current times, all neat business suits and sharp haircuts, seated in plush chairs around a conference table in a room where one side was a floor-to-ceiling set of windows.
Michael, Gabriel, Ophan, and Hadraniel all wore faces that were attractive, by human standards, but would hardly draw attention.
Lucifer, the Prince of the World, had chosen to appear as impossibly beautiful. He was inexpressibly beautiful, with cold eyes and an arrogant expression that rendered that beauty distant and unapproachable. A face that a human would lust for, but one they wouldn’t dare to love.
Fortunately for the humans, since love confused Lucifer.
Lucifer had brought four attendants, though the terms of their meeting had only allowed him three. His eyes narrowed when he saw Hadraniel, who was easily a match for any three of Lucifer’s many princes. He turned an oily smile on Michael, pretending as if he was not displeased to be outmaneuvered before the maneuvering even began.
Michael cast an eye over the attendants he had brought. Beelzebub, of course, an attendant so close to Lucifer that humans sometimes thought he was Lucifer. Mephistopheles, a demon clever at convincing humans to bargain away their own souls. Asmodeus, the Prince of Lust, whose presence at the meeting was justified only by his high place in Lucifer’s hierarchy. And, of course, Belial, Prince of Idolatry and Horrors.
They’d all been angels once. Michael felt a moment’s anguish over what they had twisted themselves into now.
“Do we need to state our purpose for this meeting, or shall we simply begin the discussion?” Gabriel said.
Lucifer frowned. “Wait…where’s the Big Guy? He ditch you kids to handle the crisis alone?”
“God has empowered us to speak His words, as He has done many times before,” Michael said. “That is our function.”
“For the humans, the little, backwards, half-spirit abortions,” Lucifer snarled. “Not me! Not us!”
Ophan spoke in his usual quiet tones. “Would you really choose to see God now, Dragon?”
Lucifer glared at him. Finally, he said, “No.”
Gabriel sighed. “Very well. We will do this by the forms.” He stood, and opened the leather folder in front of him, reading from a neat printed page in the folder. “This meeting is called to address the issue of human teleportation and the vast amount of duplicate souls this process creates. Each time a human body is disintegrated, it is killed, sending the soul to the next life. Reintegration creates a fracture of the same soul, which is often called a copy. The multitude of duplicates has slowed entry into Heaven and overwhelmed Hell, causing the Lower Offices to demand this meeting in search of a solution to their problems. Heaven, having no cause to object, has sent as emmis—”
“Oh, fuck, wow,” Asmodeus broke in. “First off, dude, you’re boring me to death here, and that’s impossible. Multitude of duplicates? Really?”
Michael gave Gabriel a quelling glance before he decided to punish the demon. He’d never had much taste for jokes or insubordination.
“Second, you can’t tell me that you’ve got no other issues than a traffic jam in the entrance hall.”
Michael’s brow furrowed at the strange turns of phrase before he finally said, “Not really, no. That is the most significant. The souls must be reintegrated, of course, but that is simple enough.”
Beelzebub stared in shock. “Simple? We can’t find anything powerful enough to force them back together!”
Hadraniel looked disgusted. “Force is not required. It is the nature of a soul to be a unified self. Simply place all the parts in the same location and wait. It requires only patience.”
“Patience is a virtue,” Lucifer sneered.
Hadraniel furrowed his eyebrows. “Yes, it is. What of it?”
Lucifer gave him a withering glare. “I don’t have any virtues.”
“Then you will struggle with this,” Hadraniel replied in tone so bland that Michael had to press his lips together very tightly not to laugh.
The five fallen angels all exchanged a dark look and finally Belial said, “And what are we supposed to do with all the extra souls in the meantime. Hell is in chaos!”
“Hell is always in chaos,” Ophan replied. “It is the nature of Hell to be chaotic, miserable, and unpleasant. Begin reintegrating the souls. That is your only way forward.”
“That will take aeons!” Mephistopheles protested.
“Fortunately, we are immortal,” Gabriel replied.
“Look, never mind gluing the damn back-births back together,” Lucifer said. “How the fuck do we stop them from duplicating themselves any more?”
And now they came to the crux of it, Michael thought. The reason this meeting was being held.
Yes, Heaven was inconvenienced by the vast amounts of duplicate souls. And yes, some of the angels and humans in it were suffering temporary unpleasantness, which was something Heaven was not truly designed for and so it created a dissonance in the Celestial harmony that everyone in Heaven could feel. But the dissonance was not dangerous, it was simply unlikable. The souls would be reintegrated. The inconvenience would pass. And because angels were holy, and the humans who had died and been welcomed to Heaven were perfected and sanctified, everyone in Heaven was bearing their inconvenience with good grace, patience, and kindness to one another. Yes, Ophan had been experiencing headaches. So one of the humans, who had been a hairdresser during her life, had worked out a way to give him a scalp massage that had ultimately resulted in his falling asleep, the only time in the history of the universe that an angel had ever slept. Ophan had reported it as a curious experience, but tremendously pleasant. He could see why living humans enjoyed their unconsciousness, and the heavenly ones often recalled it with fondness.
This unpleasantness was an interruption in Heavenly life. But it gave them opportunities to share these little kindnesses that might not have otherwise arisen. Heaven was, as always, thriving.
Hell was overrun. Already a place of suffering and sorrow, souls that had been rent and duplicated were worsening everything and Lucifer had been unable to restore order, even after setting several teams of demons to hunt down all the duplicates and destroy them. No matter how hard they tried, there were always more souls. Particularly since the human soul was an immortal thing, and so the demons could not ever truly destroy them.
Michael had tried to explain this to Lucifer a long time ago, but The Dragon had dismissed this information as a lie.
Without a solution, Lucifer would be deposed. There were only so many souls Hell could hold. It was a large number, but not infinite. For the time being, God had given him the Infernal Realm, so for the time being, the Throne of Hell was Satan’s. He had a right to demand assistance in protecting it.
Still, Michael was not about to say so and cede so powerful a barganing chip to Hell. Instead, he fixed Lucifer with a glare. “I would have thought anything that harmed a human soul would be a delight to you.”
“I will not be driven out of my realm by humans,” Lucifer snarled. “Either we stop them duplicating themselves or Hell is going to be unable to contain all the humans in it. I’ll start sending them back. And I already have a list drawn up of the ones I’m going to start with.”
Lucifer grabbed a list out of the leather folder he had and moved it across the length of the table with a wave of his hand.
Rather than a predictable list of genocidal dictators, Lucifer had chosen some lesser-known examples of the worst of the worst. Shiro Ishii from Unit 731, for example, was the fourth name down. But he was only one example, and hell contained uncountable multitudes of human monsters.
The trouble was, this was an actual threat. Hell wasn’t like Heaven. It wasn’t infinite. It was possible for the souls in it to escape. Sometimes they did.
There was a reason God had made humans with an instinctive fear of ghosts.
Lucifer could release these people. He would do it, too. Heaven would be untouched, but Earth would suffer and simply allowing the Devil to torment humanity unopposed was against the angels’ nature.
Michael sighed. “How would you propose we stop them?”
“Introduce a disease that kills anyone who uses the teleporters,” Belial said. He snapped his fingers and a small, neatly bound book appeared on the desk in front of everyone. Michael opened it and found a well-designed disease, neatly described, and clearly well-researched. It was a wasting, degenerative, dragged-out killer, one that slowly eroded the brain of anyone who used a teleporter. The proposed plan of introduction was by adding a virus to food that chickens ate, and then modifying the virus once humans acquired it to be communicable via sex, blood, or…well, any form of close contact, really. Chickens being one of the most widely consumed creatures on Earth, the entire human population could be infected in only a few years. It would take about that long for the symptoms to be felt.
Gabriel frowned. “This would kill the entire human population.”
“A very overdue extinction, if you ask me,” Belial shrugged.
“We did not. It’s out of the question,” Hadraniel replied.
“Either you agree, or we start letting souls out,” Belial snarled.
“Release all the souls you wish,” Ophan returned. “We will agree to this under no circumstances whatsoever.”
Michael held up his hand. “When did you design this disease, Lucifer?” he demanded.
“Right around the time humans finally figured out how to cure cancer,” he shrugged. “What? I have to give them something to blame on God. Cancer got me a lot of mileage before they nixed it. AIDS, too. Damn, but I miss AIDS.”
“And now you want us to give you an excuse to unleash this,” Michael said.
“I’ll find one sooner or later, whether you give it to me or not. This particular turn of events is…very useful.”
Michael frowned in thought.
Hadraniel looked appalled. “You cannot be considering this!”
Michael blinked. “What? Oh, this? No, of course not, out of the question.”
Hadraniel relaxed.
“But a disease that harms teleportation users is…not a bad thought.”
Gabriel frowned. “It isn’t?”
“It would have to be severe to be an effective deterrent,” Ophan said. “Very severe.”
Michael nodded. “But we don’t need it to be absolutely fatal, or so difficult to detect. If every human who teleported suffered a severe bout of…influenza, for example, for over a month after doing so, that would stop them doing it. There’s no point in traveling somewhere quickly if you have to be laid up for a month after you get there.”
Gabriel frowned. “But why? God did not give humans creativity and resourcefulness simply so that we could come in and destroy all the ways they apply it.”
“This application is actively harmful to them,” Hadraniel pointed out. “Souls can only be reintegrated after all the parts are placed together. Humans who use the teleporters live the rest of their lives with only part of their soul. Even the humans have observed higher rates of suicides and mental disorders among teleporters. Using one even once seriously harms them. We cannot protect them from every bad choice they make, but I think we would be right to severely discourage this one.”
Mephistopheles turned to Beelzebub. “They actually care about the little amphibians. It’s enough to make me want to barf.”
Michael looked down at his hands. Both Gabriel and Hadraniel had good points. Lucifer would eventually start sending souls out of Hell.
“Very well. We will design a disease and release it ourselves within the month. It will not be this,” Michael said, snapping his own fingers and turning all the copies of the horrible bug Belial had suggested into little piles of sparkling dust that evaporated into the air.
Belial glared. “We have other copies.”
“I have no doubt.”
“This changes nothing,” Lucifer said. “And why should I accept this deal? What do I get?”
“What do you want?”
“Free reign on Earth and at least one hundred souls transferred from Heaven to Hell,” Lucifer answered, giving Michael a dark smile as he echoed his words from earlier.
Michael smiled back. “As always, Lucifer, you may have as many souls from Heaven as you can take for yourself. Come for them whenever you please.”
“Free reign on Earth, then,” Lucifer said, knowing that was a losing fight. “No interference. I can do whatever I please, no matter what it is.”
If Lucifer wasn’t placated somehow, he would do something to vent his wrath. Not simply release souls, but he would find bodies for them. People to stuff them into. Or maybe start a war. Or maybe finish one by murdering one side. Finish a genocide somewhere. Something. Lucifer was a spiteful creature and he’d had millennia to think of creative ways to inflict suffering on people.
“One week, beginning now,” Michael said.
“A month.”
“Two weeks, and not one day more. And we will only promise no interference in your initial acts. Any recovery or rebuilding efforts will receive priority assistance as they always do,” Michael returned.
Lucifer gave him a dark smile. “Oh, I can have enough fun with the initial act, I think. It’s a deal.”
He and his demons stood and swept out of the room.
“Two weeks,” Gabriel sighed. “That is quite a bit of time to give Lucifer.”
“He’ll make good use of it, too, I’m afraid,” Michael sighed. “But I think it may be an improvement in the long term. I hope.”
“We’d best start preparing,” Hadraniel said. “Lucifer has two weeks of mayhem ahead of him. He won’t waste it.”
The four of them stood and vanished.
Two very confused custodians suddenly remembered they’d skipped an entire floor of the building, but found themselves very relieved when they saw that no one had even been on it. It took them less than a half-hour to clean.
Author’s Notes: A lot of the things being alluded to or mentioned are actually part of either genuine Christian philosophy, theology, or associated non-Biblical apocrypha. For example, it is possible to make a wholly Biblical case that the archangel Gabriel does not have a sense of humor. (Yes, I know he does on SPN. In an incredible turn of events, Supernatural is not very theologically accurate and never has been.)
The Ethiopian Eunuch is not named in the Bible, but is, in some traditions, given the name of Simeon Bachos.
Hadraniel and Ophan are also not in the Bible (at least, not the Protestant-recognized-canon), but are apocryphal names of angels who do supposedly patronize the things I said they do.
While the Bible hardly covers splitting up a soul a skillion different ways, it’s well within the bounds of Christian philosophy to say that “it is the nature of a soul to be a unified self,” for reasons that I won’t bore you with.
There are references to The Screwtape Letters peppered in all over the place, most specifically, when referring to humans as "amphibians."
Basically, I’m just trying to pack as many allusions in here as possible.
Of course, a lot of them, I’m making up, too. If you want a good source for Christian theology, this story is not it. I recommend the Bible. The actual Bible. Not a Dawkins-inspired commentary on it, either, the actual Bible. You may find it, for free, at The Blue Letter Bible, amongst other places.
Unit 731 was a real thing, though, unfortunately, and Shiro Ishii really did run the place. I recommend not reading about it while you eat.