They said that the perfect weapon didn’t exist. Personally, I think they knew it did all along. It’s just they thought it was in the forge of some inner-circle low-and-mighty demon lord who was just too greedy to help a poor hard working government out.

You find that’s a bit of a problem when you’re trying to run Hell. All your co-workers are arseholes.

Some of them had tried to find the weapon, alright. It’s just they didn’t know where to begin after so many millennia of perfectly good personalised damnation. When I started, there was a department for everything. Spiders. Falling. Being Trapped In A Charming Holiday Cottage For Two Weeks With Your Mother In Law. I even found a giant tub once, lost in a labyrinth of flaking corridors, squirming with puppies. Someone must have been scared of them, obviously. Every day off, I wandered the smoke-choked streets, taking it all in while I still could. An after-image of a golden age that had long ago tumbled into half ruin.

Knowing that it was already going the way of the dodo helped me with the guilt of what I had to do. Sure, everyone bemoans the shrinking faith in God and what it’s done to Heaven, what with the jacuzzi rotas they’ve had to put in place these days, but what about us normal sinful folk? It’s been hell for Hell too. As the fear of fire and funny-smelling yellowish rocks gave way to the fear of that camera angle being shit for your tits, the power to give you the unbeatable eternal punishment you deserve has felt the strain. As soon as those damned hippies started spreading their love and happiness across the globe, budget cuts had to be made. Satan may have finally lost his seat on the Penance Board after starting the body factories to confine the spirits in his care to nice easy physical misery, but he was back on the right track, and I actually feel a bit sorry for him to be honest. He had the foresight to do something about the faith deficit, and getting rid of those sixth-dimension emotional immersion things in favour of more thumbscrews was great anyway because no-one understood them and we were starting to suspect we were actually making some of our clients happy. There were lots of buttons on those things in our defence.

The new leaders weren’t too visionary themselves, because they were dragging their fangs in getting Hell with the times. They were rightly proud of the sprawling machine of agony and suffering we had built brick by brick and fingernail by detached fingernail over the ages, but it was an absolute dinosaur. A dinosaur with talons in too many eyeballs. The people of Earth started choosing fun over sobbing sessions in damp old churches, and we were getting more clients and less belief at the same time. Demons were having to work overtime just to get us through the day, and it’s not supposed to be bad for them, poor souls. We had a reputation to uphold and seven-year treks just to get Chantelle the shoplifter to the modified skin-slougher vat that R&D says is guaranteed to give a decidedly nightmarish splotchy tan just wasn’t doing much upholding any more.

The modern age required a trim, sleek, sexy new Hell. A Hell focused on delivering a consistent baseline suffering no matter the background, a rather wonderful approach we stole from McDonald's.

A Hell with the perfect weapon.

That was where I came in. A simple man with a simple plan. Because I knew the perfect weapon before I ever did the things to escape it which led me here. As a client, I braved the piranha pools and the no-shoe Lego runs not just with determination but with interest, because at least they were something. Where I grew up, I would have been thrilled to have a bug-eyed fish joyously chewing through my little toe. It would have made my day.

A poor upbringing prepared me well to lead a poor Hell. And let me say, compared to some of the places I worked in life, this is an absolutely fantastic employer for internal promotion opportunities. Forgive me for the old-fashioned excitement of bundling the entire Penance Board into iron barrels and casting them adrift upon the lava seas of the inner circles for all time. I had to resort to some imagination to win a bit of appreciation with the old timers.

Now, things are done my way.

The labyrinth of terrors is gone. Even the puppies, I’m afraid. Modern death can’t cater to such luxuries.

Maybe you’ll see my empire one day, if you’re unlucky. It doesn’t matter which gate you use. The rooms go on for eternity, and every room is the same. They all contain the perfect weapon.

Perhaps I’ll show you one before we find you your own portion of existence. And as you creak open the door and peer through the gloom at the still, silent, emaciated creature within, maybe you too will understand that the perfect weapon is nothing at all.