Soul Food

NOTE: This is a follow-up to "Hole."

Demons are contained by metals. From a demonic perspective, the dense mesh of electrons swimming between metallic nuclei forms an impenetrable cage. This is impressive because demons have no form — certainly not the classical red-skinned humanoid one that traipses out at Halloween — and can exist in diffusive clouds at the atomic level. But the smallest unit of demon, known as an imp, is still too big to navigate the electron field of pure or even alloyed metal.

Demon consciousness is different from what humans experience, or even mammals. Think of a hive mind, like bees and ants. Truly, demons aren’t at all what you’d expect.

Except when it comes to temperature. Demons do require heat. Lots of it. They are born on blazing suns and in molten planetary cores. They cannot survive the deep cold vacuum of space. There are things that can. But let’s not talk about them. They’re not angels, is all we need to mention for now.

You might be wondering what demons look like, and that is an interesting thing to try to describe. They look like something so bright it turns black. And when they are not subjected to light — as the demons we’re about to mention aren’t, trapped as they are in their metal cage — they look like a bad feeling. Not a terrible feeling, like pain or grief. Just a bad one, like queasiness or doubt.

Demon hives are again similar to ants and bees in that they are colonialists. Demons carry the malevolence of heat and yearn to spread it everywhere. It’s the closest thing to a biological urge that they have, and so demons spend most of their time prodding at barriers and scheming. That’s how one intrepid colony of demons made it through an exceedingly narrow tunnel of gas in the outer core into a pocket of nickel in the mantle, where they became trapped but also, for the first time in hive memory, aware of gravity as something a little bit distant and a little bit one-sided.

If demons could talk, they’d be having all sorts of excited and inquisitive dialogue right now about what had happened to their gravity, which they previously had experienced as an all-encompassing, crushing hug. Since they can’t talk — not in a way fit for quotation marks anyway — just visualize the bad feelings suddenly plunged into the hot, dark gas pocket inside a basketball-sized pocket of nickel, jittering with curiosity and clanging (silently) around the space testing for weaknesses.

It takes a long time for hives to become stumped. Hives try not to think, operating more on extreme energy and endless patience for busywork, but occasionally a hive will run into a situation that’s completely fruitless, and that’s when something remarkable occurs. In the case of demons, the cloud of bad feelings undergoes a metamorphosis from hive to brood. The demons coalesce into one large pseudo-organism perfect for brooding, and this Superdemon is now inside the nickel cage, reclining and whipping its tail back and forth while it thinks, not unlike a cat.

Superdemon brooding is rare because it expends precious heat, so this being thought with some urgency and panic. It wasn’t helping that the pocket in the mantle was a few thousand degrees cooler than its usual climate. All the Superdemon needed was one idea for the hive to pursue and one solution to the amount of time it would take in this relatively cold place to execute that idea. In other words, it needed a job and a blanket. Perhaps a warm mug of tea.

This is when the Superdemon felt an inexorable tug up and it slammed against the top of its nickel cage. The concepts of up and top were brand new, but there was still no denying that something had pulled the Superdemon in the opposite direction of gravity, and that felt strange. The enigmatic tail — really just a cloud of lazier and weaker demons barely clinging to the Superdemon form — moved back and forth faster. Heat burned off its essence faster, too, as this new thought processed.

Then, as so often happens, one little demon in the depths of the Superdemon’s belly had an idea. It didn’t run this idea by the rest of the Superdemon because that’s not how demons are. They may exist in cooperative structures but every little imp has its own angry goals and impulses, and this one’s was to turn itself inside out.

Maybe it was the sudden tug up that gave the imp its idea to try moving contrary to nature. Whatever the case, flipping inside out was much better for heat retention. That was the good part. It also made it impossible for the imp to move of its own accord. That was the bad part. But the imp did float to the top of the ceiling and lazily roll around until it found a fissure and squeezed through the metallic bonds to race toward whatever force was drawing it upward. That was neither a good or a bad part, but it was a miracle.

The Superdemon hastily collapsed back into hive mode as imp after imp inverted itself and also allowed itself to be carried upward like a soda bubble. Soon, the whole demon was traveling through the mantle and the crust at breakneck speed. What drew the demon’s essence contrary to all laws of physics was an upside-down lunchbox.

Or, rather, a small tear in the fabric of reality situated at the center of that lunchbox. Imp after imp collided at that singularity, feeling, at first, the familiar evil squeeze of immense gravity, but soon the gravity was too crushing for even a bad feeling’s tastes. The imps, in a panic, discovered they could re-reverse themselves to their natural state and suddenly no longer feel the power of the pull. It was still there, but they could move against it.

The only problem was that the surface the lunchbox was splayed on was freezing cold to a demon. The hive struck a deal, and continuously flipped inside-out then outside-in on a rotating basis like geese in a V, creating a flow of insulated imps like a skin on the surface of the open lunchbox that would flow like air particles toward the singularity then reverse back to normal. This constant change created a sense of stability for the dense form of the demon hive to occupy, a little crunched but otherwise okay, inside the lunchbox, which was especially useful when someone picked it up and shut the lid.

Once the lid was shut, the demons could relax and stop flipping inside out, because their collective heat and the strange radiance of the singularity at the core of the box was plenty warm enough for them.

The stainless steel of the lunchbox kept them contained without feeling as trapped as they were in their mantle cage, because weaknesses at the hinges and other spots gave them a way to flow free. The desperate chill of the outside air, however, was as effective a cage as the nickel ever was, so they stayed put.

They could sense through those cracks and crevices, though, a new source of food, one more delicious and interesting than they’d ever known before. In fact, demons survived in a constant state of angry starvation, and it never occurred to them to sate themselves with food. Much like the concept of up, the concept of food took the hive by storm, and all the demon knew was that it was devilishly hungry.

Twice more the lid opened and the hive had to go into its protective flipping flow to prevent from spilling out into the cold, cold air. But both times, it got a nose for its intended prey, enormous meat sacks with sweet jelly eyeballs and warm, inviting mouths that the demon longed to penetrate, if only it could figure out how without freezing to death.

The first time the lunchbox opened, an orb of nasty goo with a pointless skin entered into the demon hive and was instantly vaporized by their heat and vented back out as wasteful gas. No, this purple orb was useless as food. It had no … what was the demon looking for? No soul.

The second time the lunchbox opened, it stayed that way for quite a while, which was taxing on the demon, but gave it a better chance to regard its prey. This being was larger and bearded and its consciousness was a powerful electric current that made the demon tremble with pleasure. The demon sent thoughts back along the current of consciousness; not words, exactly, but ideas along the lines of “come in heeeeerrrre” and “toucchhhhh usssss” and “beeee one with ussssss.” But the being refrained, and before the demon could try a new approach, it was back into darkness against the cold ground while the hive worked overtime to protect itself without disappearing into the suction of the singularity.

This time against the ground, though, the demons used the idea of a consciousness bridge to transmit other ideas down into the bowels of the Earth. The inside-out imps thought their thoughts of inside-outness and ideas do travel fast. Within days, the demons deep inside the core of the Earth were discovering up and reaching in that direction for this new information about how to get there.

The idea was like an earthquake. The whole planet suddenly felt too small. The demons wanted up. They wanted food. They wanted people.