The Last Demon Hunt – Tipsy Lit

The Last Demon Hunt

Demons are real.

Curiously, it was science that proved these magical, mythical creatures really exist. It was the invention of hyperspace travel that did it. Our universe is like living on the outer ring of an onion. Traveling through hyperspace was like running to the other side of the onion, but traveling through the much shorter, inner rings to get there. Getting to the star, Wolf 359, took days not centuries. After going down into hyperspace, it was like traveling through Faust’s Nine Levels of Hell except there’s really millions of levels. It was there that voyagers discovered creatures in the chaos of hyperspace.

My sister was scientist, mapping the shortest distances through hyperspace, when she was killed by a demon. I became enraged, and I became an ardent demon-killer. The idea of killing them all would drive me for decades.

On that fateful day, I was hunting Class 11 demons like usual. My spaceship’s hyperdrive was operating, thus opening a door for the demons. I was manipulating the holographic controller when alarms lit up on the display and I knew something was coming through. I engaged the magnetic containment field to hold it while I killed it. I was caught flatfooted when the creature arrived.

It was a Class 17.

I figured I was dead.

Out of 37 hunters who ever saw a Class 17, only two ever lived. Both set off self-destruct nukes before after escaping in a pod. My pod was malfunctioning. I watched the writhing mass of tentacles and mouths and hoped dying wouldn’t hurt too much. Then two tentacles moved exactly like they were typing on a keyboard, and the monster changed. Suddenly, it was a woman in a business suit.

She brushed herself down and said, “Really? In the middle of dinner?”

Not being instantly dead, I felt a little cocky. “Was it meatloaf?”

She cut right to the chase. “Look, you demon hunters have got to stop.”

“No way!” I spat. “Not while you monsters still exist.”

“Monsters?” She crossed her arms. “You still don’t know, do you? Any conscious creature, like you humans, is a multi-dimensional creature. They enter hyperspace, unknowingly, in their sleep. But if you look at something in hyperspace, you’re only seeing part of it. Could you recognize a car if you saw only a single molecule of it? No!” She tapped at her keyboard, and changed into a butterfly. “This is what I look like in your home dimension.” The butterfly tapped, and it changed back to a woman.

“I’ve been killing butterflies?”

“No. I’m a class 17, remember? An alien to you. Recently, we’ve learned a lot from studying your species’ computers. You, Adrien Pilcher, have been killing,” she consulted her display. “Class 11 demons, right?”

“Yes. Killing those evil things.”

“Evil? That’s looking at them in hyperspace where you can’t see all of a creature. Know what a Class 11 looks like in your dimension?”

“No.”

She pointed at me.

I staggered. “You mean…humans?

“Yes…you’ve been killing Human beings in their dreams. Who’s evil now?”
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Written for Tipsy Lit. Each week, Tipsy Lit offers a new writing challenge. This week, each 500 word flash fiction entry must be about something that appears to be good, is actually evil or vice-versa. I hope my piece fits the bill. Here is this week’s original prompt: http://tipsylit.com/2014/04/07/prompted-good-vs-evil/

More great answers to the prompt can be found here: http://tipsylit.com/2014/04/11/prompted-link-up-good-vs-evil/