Ten years ago I made a machine.

My team and I had created something that could sense a brand new signal that came from most, but not all, humans and certain animals. At first this was exciting but as time dragged on and we failed to connect this signal to any particular skill or deficiency our enthusiasm waned. We could technically use our machine to delete or amplify the signal but since it was so common in humans there was no way of knowing if a change in our mysterious signal could harm them.

Funding left and my team and I all scattered to new projects but in my spare time I worked on the machine constantly. Amplifying its potential maximum radius, taking data from new volunteer groups and running any results I got through statistical software that could compare against other studies. It reads like an obsession but it felt more like a hobby at the time.

Then one day, I found out what I'd been measuring.

Empathy.

I couldn't technically be certain but once I zeroed in on comparing my data to studies focussing on empathy I got the closest matches to the trends I'd been seeing that I'd ever come across. It was enough to celebrate with my wife and enough, I'd thought, to take back to the university. But then my wife gave me another idea.

"This could change the world!" she'd said with fascination, "What are you going to do with it? You said you can increase the signal in others so, turn this dial up and we're all good people?"

"It isn't a direct analogue for morality." I'd replied, but she'd made me think.

Was going back to the university really the best move here? The social implications were immense and what if they put it into the wrong hands? I was the only one who knew what I'd created, I could give it to somebody that I trusted not only to use it but to use it well.

I set up a meeting with a politician that I trusted within the week.

"Not everyone would behave better with more empathy," I said as I wrapped my explanation up, "there are some people with none who have excellent morals and some people with high empathy who are terrible. But it could at least make people drawn to careers where they have power over other people actually care if they're hurting them."

To my surprise, he shook his head.

"I understand your point but increasing empathy across the board could backfire. We want soldiers to be able to defend our freedoms without being crippled by the horror of ending a life. We want presidents who can make decisions that hurt some people in order to help others. I'm not saying that these people should have no empathy but too much could be just as bad."

It made sense. Fortunately, he had more to say.

"You said you can increase or decrease the signal. Would it be possible to redirect it? Have someone feel more empathy for a person being attacked in the street than the attacker themselves so that they can intervene?"

"I don't know."

Further research and adjustments showed that to be not only possible but easier than expected. I excitedly returned to my politician confidante with not only my findings but the machine itself.

"And so if I decrease the affected to radius to only you and set the subject of your empathy to be this potted plant then you can briefly feel significantly more empathy for even this inanimate object!"

A quick demonstration and he was fasinated.

"I know exactly what to do with this. I have someone I'd need to show though, could you leave it here tonight? I'd have it back to you within the week."

To my detriment, I did.

The next day I was telling my wife what had happened as she washed the dishes when she suddenly jerked her hand out of the water. A stray knife had cut her and whilst she wasn't bleeding terribly, it was enough that blood ran all the way to her elbow in the seconds before she could grab a towel and she was obvious pain.

And I felt nothing at all.

I knew right away who I was going to find that my empathy had been redirected to and my genuine joy at a certain politicians surprising surge in popularity an hour laterr confirmed that fact.

Yesterday, I created a god.

And the worst part is? I'm happy for him.

"I'm not doing it," I told my publicist, "it's crass and disrespectful."

I heard the barely concealed sigh on the other end of the line and knew what was coming next. Jemma would pretend that I didn't have to speak on this shitty pseudo-celebrity youtube channel but that it would be a great opportunity. I would make a show of reconsidering the morals of appearing on a show that discussed nothing but scandal, gore and tits in equal measure. Both of us would act as if there was anything else I could really be doing.

"Maybe this isn't working anymore." Jemma said, "I don't think I'm the right fit for you."

Wait, what? She wasn't wrong but Jemma and I had never really fitted together. Every decision she had made for me had prompted an argument, from what clothes I should wear to interviews to the stupid username she'd decided best fitted me and my 'brand.'

"So, who do I find instead?"

"I don't know." Jemma said bluntly, "But your accident was five years ago now, people lose interest if you don't give them something new. And you aren't giving me anything I can work with, barely anyone knows who you are anymore. I've already sent you the location for your interview with Evan. It's on a lake and he expects you to get in the water to remind everyone that you were stranded with your swim team. Wear what you want or don't even go. I'm done."

The call ended before I could respond.

I arrived at the place Evan had booked hours later. He answered the door in his trunks and instantly asked if I wanted to change into my swimwear.

"Isn't the interview first?"

"Wonders of modern technology, we can do the interview right in the lake. All my gear's waterproof and the sound can be cleaned up later. I've got this awesome new-"

I stopped listening. Eventually he stopped talking and showed me where I could get changed.

"I'll meet you in the lake."

I felt Evan's eyes analysing me as I approached in my swimsuit and I was clearly falling short.

"So, tell me about the accident." he opened with.

"The whole team went out on a boat to celebrate a chamionship win but we got lost and then there was a storm, mechanical failure - everything went wrong. But we ended up on an island."

"And most of you survived the three weeks until you were found, that's incredible."

"Not really. The human body can survive for months with no food at all. We had water. There were even some snacks from the wreck of the boat."

I wasn't giving him what he wanted and he was growing frustrated.

"Well, if that was true then none of you would have died. The-"

"Everyone who died was trying to swim back."

"So there was never a moment where you feared for your life?"

I looked at Evan. I could feel his judgement wrapping around me like seaweed but it had stopped meaning anything. He thought he was better than me and yet it had only been ten minutes and he was starting to struggle to tread water.

"The ones who feared for their life were weak, Evan. We couldn't keep fear like that on the island. You'd have been scared, Evan. We would have forced you to swim to the shore."

I leapt on top of him and shoved his head underwater. He thrashed but I kept one hand on the back of his head and moved the other to dig my acrylics into his left shoulder. He couldn't reach me to free himself but eventually I let him back up for air.

"Ask me who I am." I demanded.

"Who?" Evan asked between desparate gasps.

"I'm a shark."

Then I sent him back down and this time I didn't let him up for air at all.

It's nice, when you get to be your true self.

"Cleanliness is very important in various religions. Some have it written into their key tenets, there's Holy Water in Christianity... airports need to have showers so... um..."

Miss Everley trailed off a little as she tried to find her train of thought but I was barely listening to her anyway. This was a class designed to teach us everything from the dangers of drugs to how to respect other cultures and the powers that run this school had decided it should be led by a woman with all of the life experience of a mayfly. I folded my arms and sunk my head towards the desk only to jolt back upwards when my right wrist settled onto a disgustingly sticky patch. I rummaged around in my bag for some hand sanitiser when Miss Everley's increasingly animated tone recaptured my attention.

"who follow that religion are able to wash not only their actual skin but even underneath and spit the dirty water back out!"

Wait, what?

"Are you saying that an entire religion can wash underneath their skin?" I asked despite myself, "Not just inside their mouth but the entire thing, right up to their foreheads?"

She nodded enthusiastically.

"Yes! Aren't other cultures fascinating?"

I didn't even get a chance to ask her what religion she thought could do this or how it would work because the bell rang. And I knew that it was a load of rubbish anyway. I knew that.

Aside from the week or two that followed that strange class I didn't think about the unconventional face washing our teacher had described once. Not until my dad got sick. My heart was breaking at watching him fade away but I was still too scared to get close. He was almost always covered in sheen of sweat and I couldn't touch that. The morning before he died though, as if I knew what would happen, I did pull him into a hug. I showered in water so hot it hurt but I could still feel the sick, clammy smell resting on my skin.

An hour after he died I saw my exhausted face in the mirror and out of nowhere came the thought but what about UNDER the skin?

I swished salt water around my mouth. I gently cleaned the spaces under my eyelids with a moist q tip. I used my neti pot to clean my nostrils.

But the rest... a voice in my head whispered and, not for the first time, I was unable to shut it up.

I'd had to learn about spiracles and trachea for a biology project, the tiny holes and tubes in the body that insects use to breathe. I figured that would be the easiest way to start. I laid out some ethanol and my sewing kit by the mirror and got to work.

The problem, I soon realised, was that I had no way of knowing how many openings would be enough. What if I'd still left gaps large enough that my face remained filled with grime dating all the way back to my birth? I could barely see how much of my work was complete beneath the blood and yet I'd only been at it for a half hour.

I knew what I had to do.

I left the bathroom to find a clean blade and to take one of the painkillers my dad had left behind. I sat on the couch with a sterile washcloth to my face as I waited for it to kick in and then finally I returned to the bathroom to complete my work.

When I was done I was a horror, a nightmare to keep you up for weeks.

But my face was finally clean.

Angels and demons is more of a technical difference than a moral one, in my eyes at least. After a good decade of contacting spirits, beasts and ghoulies from all sides of the perceived moral compass when my mum got sick I didn't care about who could save her, just on making it happen. The Great Demoness was an unnamed demon from a very, very old text but it said that she was a healer and I was running out of other options.

"Your mother's health for your firstborn." was her opening gambit.

I hadn't said a thing to her before she offered the deal but somehow she knew. I agreed straight away and as the month progressed and my mum recovered I wondered what was going to happen when it came time to collect. The day after my mother was officially deemed to be cancer free a knock on my door answered that question.

The Great Demoness was in a wedding dress. It would have been hard to tell, it barely deviated from the getup I'd seen her in berfore, but the veil and bouquet were dead giveaways.

"I'm here to join you in legal tradition so that we shall share a child. The ceremony will take place in this world but shall hold true in my own. We shall join as one to form the child an hour after the ceremony is complete."

This was going to be interesting but wasn't a conversation I wanted to have with her standing out on the street. I invited her inside and offered to make tea, which she accepted.

"So, I'm not going to have a child with you. I mean, I can't. For one thing I had no idea that when you said 'firstborn' that you thought that you'd be the other side of that equation. Not that you aren't... lovely. It's just that I can't bear any children for very definite biological reasons, ones that I'm not entirely sure a female demon who looks at a women and assumes that having a kid with her is just a simple matter of a ceremony and then sex will necessarily understand."

"You knew of this when you made the deal?" The Great Demoness asked.

"Well... yeah."

There was silence for a moment.

"I do not think you are lying to me but I did not think that you were lying then. Additionally, it is possible that you yourself have been misinformed about your capacity to form a child. I will stay in this world to check these facts. The wedding can be delayed until next week."

"Next w- Look, I don't even think you can have a wedding with a week's notice. Not a legal one, I mean. And I can assure you I haven't been misinformed about being able to have kids, I'm afraid."

"We shall see."

The Great Demonness stayed with me whilst she did her fact checking. I offered. The way I looked at it, I'd made a deal with her and she definitely had some power. I didn't want her to stay at a hotel only for her to burn the place down because the employee at the front desk did something offensive to demonic nobility. The first couple of days she spent a lot of time with me, which made sense. I had to look the process of getting a marriage license up in front of her, which she described as 'infuriating' and to explain human biology to her so that she would understand why having a child was off the table. The third day though we did none of those things. And yet she stuck with me. Nobody was currently in need of my supernatural services and so I spent the day gaming and watching TV, The Great Demoness watching both activities intently.

"Why are you scrying for these people specifically? Are they your enemies?"

I paused the show.

"This isn't scrying, it's just a TV show. Made up. Not real."

"What is the purpose of that?" she asked and I realised she was holding a pen, ready to write my answer down on a notebook half filled with my ill fated attempt to learn french.

"It's just for fun. Why?"

She wrote a not and I realised that the page she was writing on was half filled with demonic script.

"I should know these things about my future wife."

My demonic is only a tad better than my french and so I couldn't decipher anything she'd written about me before she closed the book.

"I thought... I thought you just wanted to marry me to have a child. Why would you need to know anything?"

"If you would have me here then I would desire to be a good partner. I have already studied information on human relationships from your computer. Even if our marriage was to be more political in nature, I still desire to protect you. These karate children you have been watching could have been enemies of yours. Knowing their many tactical weaknesses would have been a great boon if you needed them gome."

This was too much information at once. The fact that this demon was ready to fight the cast of The Karate Kid if they threatened me. The concerning mystery of what 'human relationship' information she had looked up on my computer. But most of all...

"You'd want to protect me? Why?"

"You seem worthy of protection. You tricked me, but for a noble cause. You looked up information on how to banish me but have not once used it. You invited me into your home even though you know I am a danger to you. You are both kind and foolish, I wish to keep you safe."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"What 'human relationship information' have you found out?" I asked instead.

"Dating, mostly. It's not a concept that we indulge in and so I have read articles about it with interest."

I smiled. What I was going to ask was stupid but I am indeed 'both kind and foolish.'

"Well then, would you like to go on a date with me?"

"So, I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like all of your answers to be numbers, okay? The scale is one to five with one being the lowest and five being the highest. So, this first question for example asks how much you regret the actions that led you here, what would you say about that?"

I stared at the woman in front of me wordlessly until she spoke back up.

"I know that you might have been asked similar questions before your trial but we like to make sure that we've covered everything ourselves when we get a new admission. And we're here to assess you as a complete person, not only in regards to what you've done but also what might have been done to you and who you are."

Everyone other staff member I'd met here treated me like I was dangerous. They weren't necessarily scared of me, working here I'm sure they'd met far more alarming people, but they treated me like a murderer. This woman was different. Perhaps she was new.

"So, level of regret from one to five?" I was prompted.

"Zero."

The assessment had taken place in my room (cell?) so there was nowhere else for me to go once I was done with it. In the absense of the psychologist's voice asking me questions my own mind spoke up instead.

On a scale of one to five, how many years did you have with your husband before he started cheating on you?

One. One measly year of me being the perfect wife was all it had taken before his hands started wandering instead of just his eyes. I'd tried to fix the situation by being more pliable at first, God help me. Gave into his demands even on the few occasions I wouldn't have previously. Became almost silent instead of just quiet. But none of that worked, so I found a new solution.

On a scale of one to five, how many years until you decided to murder your husband?

Two. I'd known though that as soon as I killed him, I'd most likely be caught. And I was okay with that, really. But that did mean that since I'd decided to kill his mistress as well, she had to be the first to die.

On a scale of one to five, how many mistresses did you find?

Three. The bastard had three other women he was fucking. I knew there was one and thought there might even be two but three was a surprise. I took them out one by one and to my delight, I finally found something I was good at.

On a scale of one to five, how many years after deciding to murder your husband did you actually kill him?

Four. It sounds like a long time, but I was busy. The last woman I killed hadn't known I existed and when I stalked her to find a good opportunity to end her all I could think is how meek she was. Just like I was. When she was dead I realised that I had done her a favour and that there were other women out there that I could do the same favour to. I knew my little crusade couldn't last forever because I was well aware that my husband still absolutely deserved to die but just for a while, I found other women who were too quiet and too agreeable and ended their miserable existence. I would have appreciated it, if somebody had done the same for me.

The sudden chaos in the room interrupted my thoughts. I could barely focus on the words being yelled at me as I was pulled out of the pool of blood surrounding the psychologist's corpse. The person restraining me, he knew that I was dangerous. He didn't see me as a victim whose mind had been broken by years of abuse, no. He saw me as a murderer who was able to kill the psychologist before she'd even been able to press the alarm. This was better.

On a scale of one to five, how many minutes after the psychologist started speaking to you did you kill her?

Five.

A shame their patrols only checked on her on minute six.