Asher Nicastro

God's Reinvention Program

I was pretty sure there was nothing beautiful about me.

At least, below the surface.

The name's Asher Nicastro, and if you looked past the exterior, you might've just seen me for what I really was: A demon from the underworld.

I'd been in darkness for so long that I sometimes couldn't remember if there was ever any light in me. You might not get that, but maybe it's because you haven't lived as long as I have. Surely you know how it's easy to forget things with time? Even your most important memories—those with the strongest emotion, maybe—will fade. Now add a few hundred years to that brisk second mortals call a lifespan, and you can forget anything.

I was a shadow being. A corrupt soul.

No, it's not as cool as it sounds.

I could go to the "Surface" when I wanted—the common term for the world of the living—and I could go to whichever time I wanted in human history. I could travel to the past is what that means, but traveling to the future is actually a different story, which I'll talk about later in more detail.

But anyhow, maybe that's one of the biggest highlights of being dead: Unfettered by your physical body, you can travel places you could have only dreamed of visiting when you were alive.

I've definitely taken advantage of that perk.

For me, there was a caveat to being dead, however. And it's just that: I wasn't alive.

I couldn't play the living game.

I couldn't interact with beings of the living world. If Heaven is the world of light, and Hell the world of darkness, maybe the world of the living is a world of twilight. I could see mortals, and follow their stories, and—although it had never happened and I knew it never would, I could even (purely hypothetically) fall in love with them—but I couldn't interact. And, being what I was, I'd never be able to.

At least, that's what I used to think.

As it turns out, Hell had only so much room.

(I'll explain later exactly how Hell ran out of room, but I don't want to overburden you with details from the onset.)

And what a shocker that is, right? I mean who would have figured that eventually, after sending countless souls to a single space for as long as humanity has existed, that same space would run out? Astonishing.

It turned out that we recently exceeded the number of souls Hell can accommodate. Turned out, God mercifully decided to give us corrupt souls a chance to finally escape our condition and enter the realm of light. It was a gracious and compassionate decision, made by the combination of his undying, eternal love for all of his creation, and his infinite capacity for forgiveness and mercy.

That's the way many saw it. How did I see it? That he had no choice.

But since the general consensus seemed to be that Heaven was a pretty great place, I decided that a chance was a chance, and this was a chance to amend my ways and find the light within myself so that I might finally—pardon the pun—get the hell out of Hell.

It was called God's Reinvention Program, with a capital everything. From the beginning, it seemed to me to resemble a plan proposed by politicians of Earth, specifically of my country and time. And actually, there were rumors going around that God could have expanded Hell if he had wanted. They claimed that the only reason he—up in his white castle in the sky—had come up with the program was that he had thought it would increase his popularity with the mortals. After all, their advances in science and technology were leaving less and less people who attributed unexplained mysteries to magic.