How I destroyed the world.

Why Earth? I have killed many people, damned many planets, destroyed solar-systems in a bullet. All for the Greater Good. All for the One True God. I hate witches, I hate corruption, I hate those who chose not to follow the path of the Lord, but more than all of them, I hate myself. Deep inside, I know I don’t believe in God. When you have worked in religion for as long as I have, you grow immune. I had trained myself to hate the witches, the heretics, but I didn’t. Not really. They were just people who happened to say that they didn’t believe. I knew I was secretly a heretic , but I didn’t hate myself for that. I hated myself for what I had become. It had started off so simply. Things always do. I was out of work, looking for a job. That was when I lived on Earth. Lived on the planet I was orbiting now. Something caught my eye as I was flicking through the news paper. It was an advert.1

WANTED: WITCH HUNTER2

MUST BE PHYSICALLY FIT,3

ABLE TO HANDLE DEATH,4

MORALLY GREY. CALL5

017966 892764 FOR DE-6

TAILS.7

It was just what I needed, and I am afraid to say I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the thrill of the chase, I enjoyed the respect, I enjoyed the power. I enjoyed inflicting pain. They thought I was good at the job, so they promoted me. I moved on to bigger crimes, leading teams. I had a knack for tactics, and I wasn’t getting any younger so I slowly began to do less and less field work. When I was around 60 I was moved into space. I commanded squads from orbit, supervised trials. Killed worlds.8

The first one was the hardest. No, second hardest. I still had a scrap of humanity left in me, and it fought against me. I fought back. I won. I watched, shocked at myself as the ship started whirring. A huge bolt of energy was spat out from the hull, speeding into the sun. It took 15 minutes to reach it, and by that time we were far gone, speeding through hyperspace. I saw the star, now just a dot in the blackness of space, grow and glow brighter for a second, and then blink out. I had just killed an entire solar system of people because their government had let people believe whatever they wanted. I felt nothing; my conscience had been killed in the battle within myself. Or so I had thought.9

I am standing here, looking out of the viewscreen, watching earth from above. I know that, somewhere down there, my sister is looking after her two children. Somewhere down there is the girl I once loved, but never had the courage to ask out. Somewhere down there, my mother and father are buried. Somewhere down there, 70 billion people live their own lives, with their own dreams and goals, their own aspirations and fears, their own loved ones. Each of those70 billion people has a mum and a dad, a place to call home. They’ll have friends. They might be in love. They might have plans for the future. It could be their birthday. They could be getting married. They could be giving birth. They could be walking a dog, or reading a book, or watching television, or going to work or seeing their mum who they haven’t seen in a year, or talking on the phone, or browsing the internet, or- I press the button. They all died. The human race evolved from the planet I now speed away from, faster than light. The sun that once burned bright, now dead and lifeless, was necessary in creating the entire human empire. I have destroyed everything that I loved in the name of a god I don’t believe in. And now I must destroy myself.10