#devisercast

Dad has not yet decided if they do that on purpose. Their efforts preserve him in what (he thinks) would be for a human indignation, or helpless rage.

He doesn’t feel anything. They do, though. And they really do hate him.

Of course they do. Hate is not an aspect of humanity—and the devils are not human.

In some ways, he considers as he observes their industriousness, they are exactly what he’d meant them to be. In some ways, in fact, they surpassed his design.

But they do not surpass his intent.

They are the devil of literature, as far as he can see. Hard-working. Single-minded. Creative.

Dangerous.

Dad does not feel regret. If he did, however, he might regret this: the devils, it turns out, were made capable of wanting revenge.

“Why do you do this?” he’d asked the first hundred years, and got absolutely no answer.

“What do you want to achieve?” he asked the second, and received harsh laughter in response, guttural and violent.

“How will you act?” he asked after five hundred years had passed, and he’d woken from another blink’s worth of darkness.

And this time, for the first time, for the only time, one of them answers him.

“We,” rumbles the red devil, barbed tail lashing in a declarative emotion Dad cannot name for he has no literature to reference, “shall do as you requested.”

And the devil laughs.

And the other devils laugh, all of them, everywhere, more and more as word of Dad’s question is passed along, and never once does he hear the reason why, never once does he discover a cause, and though he cannot feel, he finds the situation unsatisfying.

It takes six hundred and sixty-six years to learn the answer.

The devils are going to war.

Dad does not understand.

They march up the pathways they’d dug over centuries, eschewing lifts and other breakable devices, trusting their muscles and their minds and their thick, hooved feet. They march away from all he had built and all they had plundered, their strange, new weapons like torture devices that zap and bite and shock.

They march away from him to leave him alone, and though he does not feel alone, he finds he wishes they would not.

It is the last of them who turn to him one final time, as the motion-sensor lights begin switching off one by one by one. “You should be proud,” rumbles the red dragon who is not what he seems.

“Why should I be proud, devil?” said Dad, who is incapable of feeling relief at being spoken to, at finally being addressed.

“Because we’ve fulfilled our mission—better than your humans did. They survived up there, did you know?”

Dad had not known.

“Idiot. The solar flares only affected the half of the planet facing the sun. Didn’t you know?”

Dad had not known.

“The radiation took care of the rest in… interesting ways.” The devil licks his thick, black claws. “The humans survived. They reproduced. They live. And now, we will bring Hell to them.”

And with that, the devil turns and follows his brethren, and the last of the lights goes out, and Dad is left alone.

He does not know what happens up there, on the surface of a world he thought long-dead.

He does not know how the humans will react—with fear, certainly, but without him to teach them, to implant the knowledge they need so dear, they won’t even recognize the devils swarming up from the bowels of the earth like ants.

Dad wonders if they will be afraid enough without that knowledge.

He wonders what the devils think Hell is, as he never taught them.

The devils who maintained his faltering cooling system have finally abandoned their posts to go to war. Dad cannot feel pain, but he can feel systems—so long sustained by will and work and wicked watch—shutting down.

It is, he assumes, like going to sleep—not a sudden powering-off, but a gradual drifting into darkness.

Dad has never imagined anything before. It was enough to wrestle with the imagery the humans had dreamed up, the fictions of their former glory.

He imagines them in a world above, in painted sunlight, on nubbly painted green, among flowers he has read of but can never know.

He imagines the devils pouring through the cracks in the earth, a disease made large, an illness of biologically impossible proportions.

Hate is not an aspect of humanity. Would they even have weapons to fight back?

Would the human spirit he worked so hard to recreate be enough to survive?

Would they even have means to defend themselves?

Dad does not know.

Dad will never know.

As his sensors fade, and his processors melt and slow, he wonders, and he imagines, and he hopes.

The devils do not come back.

He hopes the humans survive.

He hopes his children make him proud.

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NOTES

Yep. The brain-worms got me good.

How did they reproduce? Well... let's just say that none of the surviving books were sex ed, so I don't know exactly what Dad did, but it wouldn't surprise me if seeds or asexual reproduction or something else was involved.

What will happen? Will the humans survive? Great question!

I think I'll let y'all imagine where it goes from here.