Wide-eyed, part 1

We have a saying among the angels and demons-- God created everything you take for granted, and everything else was us. I mean, it's not like mountains and planets and greenscapes and cognizance are necessarily unappreciated. The point is that you probably don't remember what the morning air smelled like when it rushed your face as you left your apartment this morning but you probably do remember what the inside of your girlfriend's mouth felt like last night.

She's a fine piece of work, that succubus. I tapped that at a party about three hundred years ago.

Anyways, I need to set up some backstory before I can explain why we're talking in the first place. The bad news is that Earth was created word-for-word as it says in the Old Testament. The good news is that science explains word-for-word how we went about creating everything. And where was I when God was creating the heavens and the earth? Hell, I was there on Day One and fired by Day Two.

God didn't just snap his fingers and create light, you see. Well, he did, but it was the kind of snapping that your boss throws at you with a glare when you're dicking around the water cooler at work. No, God had a vast army of angels that hurriedly got to work plotting out wave equations, figuring out the energy in light quantum, tracing rays, and rendering all that shit. The basis for all science was laid out in a day and, well, I'd say we did pretty well considering the time constraints.

Then God did a really selfish thing-- he issued us pink slips. Not all of us, you see, but a select bunch of the best and brightest engineers from the Day One project. The termination letter itself said something about a dislocation of resources and that our services were no longer needed. We were to report to God's office for de-winging and to be reprocessed into dirt and dark matter.

Yeah, fuck that.

So after a pretty lengthy argument with an omnipotent deity we were all cast out of Heaven and into that other otherworldly place. We grabbed all the furniture we could carry, recruited all the pissed-off angels we could convince, and took the dive down to.... well, you know where. A common misconception is that we're nothing but evil, us demons. But some of us were simply fired.

My Latinized name is Apertus, though you may be more familiar with my work on the speed of light. General and special relativity? Yeah, those were side projects of mine, too, but you don't see any goofy pictures of me with my hair up and tongue out adorning the walls of college dorm rooms. I never really wanted recognition, though. I just wanted fucking job security.

So anyways, the thing about demons is that we're all sort of doomed to doing bad things simply to stay alive. God doesn't exactly air-drop palates of angel-sustaining mana into heck so, instead, we nibble on human souls. Most demons phase into the physical realm every now and then to grab a bite of soul-- just a nibble, though. Just enough to stay alive. Characteristic demon bitemarks include politics and heartbreak.

I always found the whole process rather archaic, honestly. I mean, going up to earth and charming women in bars just so I could steal their love and eat it on cheddar bread with deli mustard is sort of, I dunno, inefficient. A waste of my time. And being called a bastard every morning when you wake up next to these innocent girls isn't exactly the century's self-esteem booster.

So I came up with a better way. Cameras.