Returner Demons Redux

Once upon a time, I wrote about Returner Demons. Like the early Barony angels, I ended up not liking them much - they are too straight forward; their forwards movement through the timeline complicates the otherwise clean logics of temporal transference in the setting. 

Some truths about time travel:

• Only information travels, although 'information' can be complexly arranged into minds, which can remain coherent without bodies. As with Angel Eggs, there are materials in the present can be interfaced with by informational minds (or sub-minds and 'packets'). 
• Information has only ever been witnessed to travel from the future to the present. It is broadly assumed that this has been possible throughout history, and that as such can be assumed to have been taking place for an arbitrarily extensive period into the past. 
• God has, apparently, done things in the past. What this means for the canon setup, in which god is physically instantiated in the future, as a consequence of the directives of angels seeded back through the timeline, is debated. There are those who take is as a guarantee of god's victory over the its enemies (if it sends itself back, then of course it must be victorious in the future); there are those who argue that the 'god' of the making of the world was in fact some species of angel distinct only in relative power (these argue that the making of the world and the wars against chaos would have required vast expenditures of energy, and that as such it makes sense that the angels of the comparatively-tame present day are mundane in comparison); there are those who assert a cyclical structure of time, which begins anew with each instantiation, and which must then be safeguarded by the angels to ensure that the next 'cycle' takes place (this is heretical - if time is cyclical, then the Material Heaven is already-existing or finite); there are those who say that god's methods are mysterious and leave it at that (lots of these, including some in the clergy and the vast majority of the laity). 
• There has never been any definitive proof that travellers from the future are what they say they are. It is not clear what such a proof might look like. There are those who maintain that what the angels and demons mean when they use the word 'future' is something completely other, which no direct relation to time as it is experienced by humans. What has been proven is that all such travellers believe themselves when they make these claims. 

Returner Demons

There are demons who threaten people with travel forwards, into the Material Hell, which is the worst thing that can happen to you. People who spend time thinking about these things are not in agreement as to whether this is possible. Some believe that the future minds who make these claims are projecting their own enormous loneliness into a delusion that return is possible. Others think that the threat of return to the Hell is a psychological weapon or informational technique, deployed tactically and strategically to force credulous human adversaries into material overcompensation against an effectively infinite threat of force - that is, a threat of force materially worse than the threat of death, even death by extended torture. Research into whether the demons believe what they say has been difficult to realise, and inconclusive when it has been attempted. 

The method is formally specific. The two minds - that of the demon, and that of their victim - must travel forwards together, as a single informational 'packet'. This means that they must die at the exact same instant, something extremely difficult to achieve. Even two bodies pressed against the same explosive device will die at micro-instants remove from one another, and this sliver of temporal severance is enough to disrupt the formal logic of return. 

What actually materially comprises a 'returner demon' is access to a specific magic that kills the two minds at exactly the same instant. This spell looks like suicide - because of course, to someone living in the present, it is. For the spell to work, the two minds must be linked, formally indistinguishable, a single, borderless ego in two bodies.

The methods that returner demons employ to break down the ego barriers of their victims are varied. They include torture (of course), but also extremely high doses of psychoactive chemicals, sensory deprivation, and theatrical 'scripts' whereby the demon affirms their sameness with the human, and the human is made to mirror back that sameness. Many returner demons support this long and extremely involved process of ego destruction by making themselves as closely similar to their victims as they can. This starts in a visual register, they might wear the same clothing, makeup, might try to fashion a mask or face like their victim, might maim themselves in the same locations as they have maimed the other, etc. It can get more involved. The demons often practice 'becoming', by which they attempt to think like their victim, to adopt their mannerisms, their beliefs, their convictions, all in aid of eliminating any barrier between the two minds. They try to feel the same loves and hatreds, the same fears and hopes, and they try to become, such that these feelings occur naturally, without any artifice or striving.  

Over weeks and months, the two beings become less and less distinct. Eventually only the final betrayal buried so deep inside the demon's being - the betrayal in the future, the betrayal that is the return itself - keeps them separate. Sometimes even this disappears and both survive, each unwilling to kill the other and now bound to live on in their crudely identical states. 

What is known for certain is that, when the 'magic' happens, both beings die at the same time - whether this is the 'exactly the same instant' in a physics sense is not known, because how would you test that? The physical evidence will show two identical bodies, the leavings of their mutual torture, and also sometimes of their mutual forgiveness, their growing attachment, their unease with one another (is it you or me now?), and their excitement in such a total and uninhibited knowing and stripping bare.

Whether all of this really does amount to travel to the future is, of course, unclear.