Demon: The Descent

This week we bring you the opening fiction from the Demon Storyteller’s Guide for Demon: The Descent, Future-Proof.

In the darkness beyond the outer rim of the Sol system, the Oort Cloud ?owed silently through the great angel Mattaron. Uniquely designed by the God-Machine while swirling hot gases had yet to hatch planets, Mattaron’s ephemeral form blanketed the entire spinning structure with gossamer-thin tendrils — from the nuclear rage at its center to the furthest reaches beyond what the primitive inhabitants had yet discovered.

Mattaron’s form quivered and sung with the never-ending dance of matter. The implacable momentum of the planetary gravity wells thrummed deep bass while fierce tides of radiation trilled quivering high notes as Mattaron’s unique sensory systems recorded the never-ending dance of matter and energy.

Mattaron exalted in the silent symphony and service to the God-Machine as it listened to the void. Its data banks ceaselessly wrote the notes to a score that no one but the God-Machine would ever hear, as the movements of the great planets and the myriad lesser objects played on.

The angel calculated the background timbre of the gravitational trajectories of trillions of racing masses. It predicted how they would resonate for the next ten-thousand Earth cycles. Mattaron shuddered with displeasure at the discordant strings of stray junk ?ung from the small third planet. These interfered with the pure harmony sung by the planet and its overly large moon. Mattaron was blind to life, but its sensors clearly felt the motion of the irritatingly small clumps of metal and plastic as they orbited the Earth and explored beyond. More discord brought Mattaron’s attention away from momentary annoyance and back to its purpose. An intruder from beyond the deep void had brushed the angel’s intangible form, captured from the limitless darkness by Sol’s gravity and dragged towards the center with an ever-accelerating haste.

In seconds Mattaron had predicted the asteroid’s ?ight path for the next few thousand years. The rock sped towards the system’s center and entered a complex orbital cycle, sweeping around the sun and back towards the outer planets. The God-Machine’s servant swooned at the asteroid’s increasingly urgent crescendo in its race towards the sun. The tone underwent a complex transitional modulation as the asteroid swept around the star and deepened to rumbling baritones as the rock slowed while climbing the gravity well. The asteroid’s solo repeated high and low before suddenly coming to an abrupt end in a cacophony that rippled with alarmed support from the other planetary instruments. Mattaron drew back from focusing on the complex solo themes and added the movements of the planets and other bodies until it determined what had upset its perfect symphony.

The intruder’s outward path dragged it past Neptune and ?ung its accelerating mass towards Saturn before tracing a sweeping arc through Jupiter’s massive gravity slingshot. The combination of all three effects on the asteroid’s usual path brought it curving and accelerating through space — until it collided with Earth and came to a discordant stop.

Mattaron didn’t double-check the calculations. There was no need; its understanding of orbital mechanics and myriad forces was as perfect as the God-Machine could build. Instead, Mattaron activated a long-dormant communications protocol with Hanriel, its angelic twin who sang to the myriad forms of life within the system but was blind to non-living structures.

To Hanriel the presence of life was a ?owing kaleidoscope of auras against the blackness of space. The Sol system swam with the constantly moving muted colors of spirits unbound by physical constraints of gravity or oxygen. In contrast, the scattered pinpricks of physical life shone like jewels in isolated pockets around the system. The isolated colonies radiated with purity of color — tiny populations of similar creatures. Earth, crawling with its myriad genetically diverse creatures, shone with blinding, diamond-like intensity unmatched within Hanriel’s purview.

The two angels exchanged long strings of coded data until their combined databanks agreed upon an outcome. They knew the chance of a catastrophic event on Earth was now 99.3% in 1003.45 Earth years. The angle of the impact and combined force of the two bodies indicated the extinction rate would be 99.98%.

Mattaron didn’t care about the extinction of life. Survival rates were irrelevant in the presence of the final number it had calculated. The likelihood of catastrophic failure of the God-Machine’s vital critical infrastructure in the impact was 81.6%. This was unacceptable and Mattaron fed this finding back through the datalinks that kept it in constant communion with the God-Machine.

Acknowledgment of receipt arrived several hours later, as well as tasking and data inquiry. The God-Machine had work for both angels. It instructed Mattaron to recalculate the orbits of every object the angel could detect, and predictive analysis of the interaction of every gravity well in the system over the next hundred years. The God-Machine assigned Hanriel the labor of examining the aural structures of Earth’s creatures and applying suitability calculations to their inclusion in occult matrices. Where the different creatures interacted their colors blended and swirled, changing their quality for the interaction. Neither ever left unchanged; every interaction left a lasting impression that spoke volumes of the nature and history of a creature to the right observer. Hanriel’s experience stemmed from observing life since it first came together as predictable chemical reactions.

Neither angel complained at the enormity of its task. They acknowledged understanding, and offered their estimated times to completion, and began calculating. Mattaron anticipated its recalculation would take several Earth months to complete, but months were nothing in the God-Machine’s timeline.

Hanriel’s task was somewhat more complex. Predicting how chaotic living creatures would act required immense processing power and the implementation of difficult fuzzy-temporal matrices. The angel cast its aura sight to identifying the necessary start-points for its calculations, so it could set their various timelines in extrapolated motion to find the answer for the God-Machine.

• • •

Identify: Quarantined behavioral analysis Identifying subject… subject identified. Subject: Israfel Status = Fallen Location: Quarantine behavioral facility 3d5d6954402141582b48682a59 Action: Utopian stimulus response. Action confirmed. Origin point locked. Temporal drives engaged. Extrapolating…