The tormented soul of Christoph Grable plummeted into the blazing fires of eternal damnation before wrenching to a stop, paralyzed. He watched in horror as a behemoth of shadow and curling flame stepped towards him. He trembled as the vision of hell consumed him, but he had no head to turn away nor eyes to clench shut.
The demon spoke in earth-shattering tones that bore down on Christoph’s very soul.
“Wh-wh-wh-what are you going to d-d-do to me?” he asked, more out of terror than curiosity. The demon turned him towards a wall of flame.
Christoph watched in horror as the flames formed themselves into a scene before him -- then his fear turned to confusion as he watched himself receive the Nobel Prize.
“Wait, that’s my greatest sin? Winning the Nobel Prize? Why would I regret that?”
The demon cackled madly behind him.
Christoph watched the scene play itself out over and over, only growing more confused.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “I won the Nobel Prize for developing the first Heuristic Adaptive Neural-Net. It progressed dozens of fields of science by leaps and bounds in the first year of its existence alone. It allowed for the synthesis of cutting-edge medical treatments, including the first 100% effective cancer treatment using nanobots. If anything, I should have gone to heaven for this.”
The demon spun Christoph around and pressed its face down against his, the flame tongues flicking out of its empty eye sockets.
“Wait, what? That never happened.”
The demon roared with sadistic laughter.
Christoph thought for a few moments.
“I hardly see how it’s my fault, though.”
The demon snorted, smoke erupting from its nasal cavities.
“No, you said that it was caused by technology based on mine, not that it was my technology specifically. You might as well blame Benjamin Franklin for discovering electricity, since my technology was based on that. You can’t blame me for something that someone else did.”
The demon reared its head back a bit.
The demon turned away for a few moments, then came back over to Christoph, flipping through a few documents. It appeared to be wearing small gold-framed spectacles.
The demon lowered the documents and removed his spectacles.
The demon spun Christoph back around and rewound the flames until they were showing his lab assistant expiring on the floor, foam frothing from his mouth, having been poisoned by Christoph just moments prior.
“Oh. That. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.”
