Random stories

I don’t know what I was expecting my death to be. I guess I fell in line with the modern atheist belief that it would be a lot of, well, nothing. Eyes close, breathing stops, and that’s the end. Even if a small part of me held onto the hope that there would be something more, I didn’t think it would be *this.*

I arrived to a barren wasteland. Dark grey rock stretched endlessly in every direction. A faint red sky, bereft of sun, moon, or stars coated the ground in its lonely hue. There were faint chalk marks on the ground. They stood out poorly enough from the craggy basalt underneath before factoring in the natural erosion of time, but they seem to have once read “Clearance! Everyone must go!” The message seemed to have been stamped in the same chalk at regular occurrences as far as my eye could see. The one next to me seemed to have a rainbow at the end.

And about five feet away from me stood an … imp? Well, it was a *something*, anyway, and the only sign of life that I could see. It came approximately two feet off the ground with cherry-red skin. coke-bottle glasses and two delicate horns nestled into a tangled mess of brown hair.

It looked up as soon as I appeared. “Oh!” it squealed. “Hello! Yes, hello sir!”

I can’t remember the last time I’d received such an enthusiastic greeting. It was honestly heart-warming for someone that had lived--and died--as a shut-in, ostracized from family and former friends.

“Um, hello?” I tested my voice, rough from weeks of neglect. It had been at least a few weeks since I had spoken to Aunt Patti over the phone, hadn’t it?

“Hello, welcome to old Hell! Oh, don’t worry about the disorientation. You just died after all. You’ll adjust fairly quickly.”

“Did you say ‘Hell?’ But … where’s the fire? The brimstone? The hordes of angry demons torturing humanity for eternity? Did we get it all wrong?” I asked.

“No, you’re absolutely correct,” the little creature replied. “All of those things and more await you! But there’s been a slight shuffle-up recently, and a few things have changed. I’ve only been left here to handle final clean-up of any loose ends, of which you’re the first in eight years. Which makes it all the more curious you’re here--you really shouldn’t be.”

“As in I should be in heaven?” I said hopefully.

“Ha ha! No, someone clearly screwed up for you to be here in old Hell, but no one would ever screw up *that* badly.”

“Oh. Are you sure?”

“Sir, do you know how often someone who should have been in Heaven was mistakenly sent to Hell?” the imp asked, peering at me over his thick spectacles.

“Um, frequently, I hope?”

“Once. Precisely once during the entire time we’ve run this place. It was Judas. I mean, he was on the list and destined for endless torture, but someone on the other side made a *really* good case that he was directly responsible for the proselytization of billions over time. That actually, his betrayal of Christ was not only intentionally working towards the side of good, but the single best thing to happen to Christianity, ever!” The imp snorted. “Have you ever heard of such a crock of shit? Still, it worked, we had to let him go.”

The imp leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially. “Don’t believe that nonsense that all lawyers are bound for Hell. I mean, they are, but a fair number of them--the *best* ones--end up in Heaven. I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? They’re lawyers!

“But I digress! My point is--you don’t look like Judas. So let’s get you sorted, eh?” The imp said brightly, shaking a clipboard with fine silvery paper at me. “Jeff DeSantis, Minnesota, 37 years old,” it murmured, flicking through the thin stack on the clipboard. At least, it *looked* thin, but I could have sworn the imp had flipped through significantly more pages than there were.

“Ah, here you are!” the imp announced. “Born in the year 1985, Jeff DeSantis will be committed to Hell for crimes relating to--”

“Um, actually, it’s Geoff,” I interrupted.

“I’m sorry?” the imp replied, slowly, looking at me like I was an idiot.

“You said ‘Jeff.’ It’s actually ‘Geoff.’”

“Um, look, you’re saying ‘Jeff’ a lot, and don’t worry, that is indeed the name I have here.”

“No, but you’re saying it as if it’s spelled with a ‘J-E.’ It’s spelled with ‘G-E-O.’”

The imp’s head swivelled to look back to its clipboard, then back to me. “And you can *tell* that? When they sound exactly the same? Fascinating.”

I shrugged. “It’s not so much the sound as the intent behind the name. I’m used to it; people have been getting it wrong my whole life.”

“What a monumentally stupid way to spell that name,” the imp said, shaking its head wonderingly. “Okay, I think I see what happened here. You didn’t get uploaded properly because your name was entered incorrectly. Minor clerical error, I can get that fixed up right away.”

“What do you mean ‘uploaded?’” I asked. I was a lot more calm than I should have been in this situation; I chalked it up to a side-effect of dying.

“Hell is on the *cloud* now!” the imp said enthusiastically. “Think about it! A distributed network that is infinitely scalable with regular backups just in case we ever accidentally actually *kill* someone.

“The cloud? Like, you mean the internet?” I asked. “Like Dropbox? Google Drive?”

“Yes! It will save us *so* much money over time,” the imp replied, flashing me a page of some charts and graphs from his endless clipboard. I tried really hard not to notice the ‘Deloitte’ and ‘Amazon Web Services’ logos prominently featured at the top right of the page. “And the security is supposedly so much better. The minute we found out this was a possibility, Head Office went and snapped it right up! Not to mention the rep was so dreamy. We just couldn’t say no.”

I shook my head. Before I had been laid off, the company I’d worked for had gotten a similar visit.

“It’s been a pleasure chatting with you Je--Geoff,” the imp said, now making the familiar *why-in-the-world-would-your-parents-screw-you-over-like-that* face that I was so used to seeing. “I’ve corrected your name on the records, and you should have a place now in cloud Hell. I’ll transfer you now. Um, we use something called ‘FTP,’ which as I understand it is a lot more painful than the old way of doing things, but hey, just think of it as a promise of things to come. A teaser of sorts!” the creature giggled a bit at its own joke. “See you on the other side, okay?”

The last thing I saw was the imp’s smiling face as my vision faded once more.

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Submitted by storytimeinsomerset on Wed, Sep 21, 2022 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

When you were sent to Hell, you expected fire, brimstone and hordes of demons. But upon your arrival you found nothing but a barren wasteland and a single lonely imp.