by Adam Ingle
On their own, these rogue fractions were insignificant, but in a high enough volume over a long enough period of time, they could turn into rather substantial sums of money. This was rarely, if ever, intentionally done, since it was nearly impossible for the malefactor to funnel the money anywhere useful due to various oversights by banks, governments, and the software itself. Regardless, it was a huge pain in the ass to track the source and then fix. Thus, Marcus was overdosing on coffee to keep sharp. One slip of a fraction was just that, a slip. Two wasn’t yet a pattern, but it was definitely a red flag. If he found three, he had to send out an alert to his superiors, which would likely result in an all-night lockdown while the development team went back through every line of code in the software.
In the seven years Marcus had worked for the company, this had only happened three times, and it had always ended up being deemed a fluke. Last time it had taken a group of fifteen programmers about twelve hours to scour tens of thousands of lines of code. Adding to the tedium and confusion was the fact that everyone wrote code a little differently, which meant someone unfamiliar with another programmer’s style would spend just as much time deciphering it as checking for evil schemes to embezzle millions.
After a couple hours of diligent scheme thwarting, Marcus shifted into neutral, having found nothing further out of the ordinary. It was time for a late lunch, so Marcus took a peek outside to check the weather. It was dark grey out, but the rain had held off so far. Constituting one of the day’s major decisions, Marcus chose to risk it and eat outside with Sir Regi. He would stay near the office, however, in case a down-pour poured down. Marcus bought a hotdog and some chips from one of the vendors near the building and sat side-saddle on his motorcycle. Every few bites he would pinch off a piece of bun or a chip and toss it to Sir Regi, who gobbled it up quickly.
“He’s perfect,” said Mestoph as he and Leviticus watched Marcus from a bench at the edge of the park.
“This guy? If he were any more boring and mild mannered, he’d be dead,” said Leviticus.
Mestoph gave him a look that said that was the whole point. Leviticus thought about it; they were looking for someone under the radar, and it didn’t get much further under the radar than this schmuk. Marcus couldn’t possibly be on the To-Watch List of anyone in Heaven or Hell, making him the perfect pawn for their plan.
“So what’s his incentive to do what we want?” asked Leviticus.
Mestoph sighed. “Have you not been paying attention over the last few days? He would do anything for that girl at the coffee shop. He pines for her like I do for an eighteen-year old single-malt.”
“And how do we get her?”
Mestoph smiled. “That’s the most beautiful part of the plan.”
While Mestoph and Leviticus had been talking, Sir Regi had been doing simple tricks for the bits of food that Marcus had been tossing him. He had been standing on his hind legs when the little dog’s ear twitched and he became distracted. He dropped down on all fours and turned to face the two men who were walking by. One of the men, a tall, lean black man with long dreads, turned and winked. At first Marcus thought the man was winking at him, but at second glance he was obviously winking at Sir Regi. The little Scottie let out a low, deep growl. Startled by the unusual outburst from Sir Regi, Marcus looked back up at the passing men, expecting some kind of danger. He saw the black man whispering something to his friend, an olive-skinned man wearing some kind of Middle-Eastern looking robe. The robed man looked shocked and exclaimed “Really?” in response. They looked back toward Sir Regi, and the man with the dreads nodded toward the dog, and then they quickly walked off. Sir Regi still seemed unsettled.
“Now what?” asked Leviticus, once they had gotten a block away from Marcus and his dog.
“Now we need a Prophecy,’ said Mestoph.
“There’s always a Prophecy,” said Leviticus, with a scowl.
“And an Omen,” added Mestoph.
“Fuck.”
When going over the basics of his plan with Leviticus, Mestoph had intentionally left two specific details out of the conversation. If he had told Leviticus about having to steal a Prophecy and an Omen, the Angel would have flipped his shit. This was understandable as Prophecies and Omens were the most protected, valuable, and powerful items in all of Heaven and Hell, respectively. Now that Leviticus had become invested in the plan, he was much more likely to hear Mestoph out.
To understand the usefulness of these two pivotal documents, one needs to understand what they do. Omens and Prophecies are equal and opposite in the way they perform. They both act as binding contracts or personal laws that add predetermined milestones in history: either global or singularly personal. Where the two differ are the types of things they cover. To put it simply, Omens cause bad things while Prophecies cause good things. The lines can blur a bit as some good or bad things are rather subjective.
Omens and Prophecies are used sparingly, at least these days, for two reasons— both involving freewill. As a part of the Ancient Agreement between Heaven and Hell, the two entities, then made up solely of God and Satan, vowed to give humans the freedom of will to make or break their own lives. They would wait until death to be judged and sent on their merry or not-so-merry way. The second reason Prophecies and Omens are rarely used is because of the oversight of Freewill International.
As the battle for the End of Times began to ramp up about two thousand years ago, both Heaven Inc. and Hell Industries began to enact Prophecies and Omens left and right, some affecting drastic, broad, sweeping changes, and many contradicting one another. These unfair and unethical changes came to the attention of highly evolved humans of scrupulous moral character from various religions and walks of life such as Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Larry King. These highly attuned—and usually unbelievably old—humans came together to form the watchdog group later known as Freewill International.
It’s kind of like what would happen if the Justice League was run by the Swiss.
Because they still resided on Earth, whether dead or alive, they weren’t bound by the Ancient Agreement like God or Satan were and could meddle directly in the affairs of humans. This meddling was strictly a last resort tactic as the threat, only realized after their one great interaction, was usually more than enough to keep Heaven and Hell in line. That one great interaction was named Judas Iscariot. Freewill International weren’t big fans of God’s attempt to use his son to try and grant blanket amnesty to everyone in one fell swoop, giving every saint, sinner, and in-between a free ride to Heaven and throwing off the balance. In the end they showed God and Satan what one well placed whisper could do.
Because of the perceived power and constant vigil of Freewill International, both Heaven and Hell put great measures in place to keep themselves and each other from throwing Fate and Freewill completely out of whack. These days it took a considerable amount of wheeling, dealing, and a unanimous vote by their respective Boards of Directors to get a Prophecy or Omen signed. Despite the difficulty of stealing one of each, Mestoph had a plan to make things a great deal easier. In the case of the Prophecy, they would take advantage of the laziness of God and the Board of Directors of Heaven, Inc.
In anticipation of the End Times, when God would need access to Prophecies that were ready to go on short notice, the Research and Development team of Heaven, Inc. had been working on a little thing they called Secure-Signed Prophecies. These were basically form-filled Prophecies that were put on pages of E-Ink paper with a wireless connection so that God could fill in the blanks like a Mad Libs story and then send an email to the Board telling them to put their digital signatures on the Prophecy. This negated the need to call in scribes, arrange a board meeting, and follow the formalities entailed in getting approval to wipe a measly city off the face of the Earth. If the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah had been as difficult then as it would be now, it probably wouldn't have happened at all.
The security for the R&D department was a great deal eas
ier to subvert than that of God's office, where the plain old blank pen-and-paper prophecies were usually stored. Mestoph had a pal who was a Hell Industries spy planted in the R&D department, a lowly administrative assistant that owed him a few favors and was pretty loose-lipped after a night of heavy drinking.
Stealing an Omen would be a little more complicated, but seeing as Mestoph wasn't quite as averted to violence and underhandedness as Leviticus, he was okay with having to take on the greater of the two risks. Unlike Heaven, Inc., Hell Industries had no such convenient project in the works. Breaking into Satan's office was out of the question. The security was far too tight and advanced for just Mestoph to overcome; and he had no intention of hiring or bringing into the inner circle any more people than necessary. Instead, Mestoph would have to find an Omen elsewhere.
Satisfied that they had the good beginnings of a plan, the two shook hands to symbolically seal the deal and agreed to get back together as soon as they could both quietly sneak away from their domains.
Chapter 2
Make your own destiny...or steal a Prophecy
Leviticus sat at his desk and stared at the monitor. He was just one of thousands, maybe even millions of Angels sitting in cubicles at that very moment, working away at the day’s tasks. Most of his coworkers actually seemed to like their jobs. Most of them hadn't been at it nearly as long as he had, but even the few that had still seemed to believe in what they were doing. Leviticus wasn't sure when he had stopped believing, but he knew it had been a long, long time ago. He no longer went out with the other Angels after work to drink and talk about the good work they had done, the little coups they had scored in the name of righteousness. He faked it just enough to stay below suspicion and did his job just well enough to keep it. After all, it could always get worse – even Heaven needed janitors.
Today he wasn't even pretending to work; he just couldn't bring himself to care. Bits and pieces of Mestoph's plan kept swirling around in his head, making it hard to concentrate. All he could think about were Omens and Prophecies. Mestoph had been right: he was tired, sick and tired. Worse still, he was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Leviticus had once been a major player on the world stage, hobnobbing with Jesus and his apostles, doing the work of the Lord and feeling good about it. But the glory days of plotting and scheming on Earth in the name of the Lord were long behind him. After Judas, things just hadn't been the same. With their orchestration of that great betrayal, Freewill Industries had shown that they could play the same games too. And if they so chose they could play them better.
Once upon a time, Leviticus had been Jesus's forward reconnaissance during his Spreading the Word of the Lord tour, checking out cities and towns to see how desperate they were for a miracle, how gullible they might be and how they would react if something completely unexplainable happened. The last thing they needed was to find a receptive town only to have them freak out when Jesus did one of his patented parlor tricks and string him up. Not that it hadn’t ever happened. They’d had to sneak out of Bethphage like thieves in the night because they had been accused of being thieves in the day for stealing a donkey. It seemed that claiming the Lord needed it was not an acceptable form of currency in Bethphage. They did, of course, steal the donkey on their way out.
Jesus was arrested in Ephraim for being a warlock after he made a dead chicken dance—in hindsight they probably shouldn’t have used a cooked one that people had already eaten from—and Leviticus and Judas had to break him out of jail before they stoned him the next morning. The townspeople would have stoned him that night, but they were too busy vomiting reanimated pieces of chicken.
They all had to sneak out of Caesarea Philippi after a string of suicides were attributed to Jesus. He had given a sermon while floating off the edge of a nearby cliff, stating it was his faith in God that kept him aloft. He had meant it to be metaphorical, but when a dozen bodies were found at the bottom of the cliff the next day, it wasn’t hard to find someone to blame.
After they had been run out of enough places, they had realized they had to keep that sort of thing to a minimum or the rumors of his failures would outpace the rumors of his miracles. There were only so many small, backwater towns back in that day that you could wipe out before people started getting a bit suspicious. That was before CNN and the internet, when there were such things as secrets and privacy.
Judas' betrayal was a complete surprise to everyone in Heaven, Inc, and a bigger surprise to Jesus himself. They had been close friends, and he took it very personally. The two of them hadn't spoken since; when he got back to Heaven, he made sure Judas never worked in the upper echelon again. That's not to say that Heaven, Inc. didn't spin it all the best way possible. It had helped jump-start a whole new religion, which to be honest was what Jesus and his apostles had been trying rather futilely to do the whole time. However, let’s not confuse getting most of what Heaven, Inc. wanted with having the plan backfire on Freewill International. They had proved without a doubt that despite the fact that they didn't have divine or otherworldly powers, they could play on our level—and they could play well. It was a big coming out party for them and it set them up for life.
Nowadays Leviticus sat in front of a computer screen and looked for things. Not just things, but things that made sense. He looked for patterns, trends, and shifts in just about everything. He was looking for what he called investment opportunities. He scoured newspapers, local news channels, social networks, and occasionally eavesdropped on coffee shop banter. If he noticed the sentiment toward a particular politician was shifting, or that people were suddenly becoming interested in locally grown produce, or if people were tired of shows about nothing but doctors fucking, then he would write up reports for God to check out every morning and decide where to shift their focus.
God would arrange for a sex scandal involving one politician to draw attention away from another one of his that was falling behind in the polls. God would plant the seed of an idea in a filmmaker’s mind that a documentary about the evils of the agriculture industry was needed, and plant another seed in an organic farmer’s mind who was rather savvy in the art of public speaking and could slip a few “Thank Gods” and “Praise the Lords” innocuously in his interview. Individually they would only count for fractions of a percent gains in the hearts and minds of the public, but a few fractions here and there, day in and day out added up.
Or they would, if there weren't someone in Hell Industries doing exactly the same thing. Some days Leviticus was ahead of the game, and some days his counterpart, whom he liked to imagine was a mind-numbingly boring demon named Carl who had gone to Hell for tax evasion, came out ahead. It was yet another example of the futility of everything they did, and the unending stalemate that had stricken progress toward The End.
Being a member of Team Jesus had gotten him the job he now loathed, but at the time it had been a big win for him. Leviticus had jumped up from ramen noodles to steak overnight. He moved from a small, windowless basement apartment to a swanky, top-floor pad in one of the nicer urban areas near the center of Heaven Two thousand years later, he was still in the same spot, working just hard enough to keep his head above water.
It wasn’t until Leviticus had met Mestoph on one of his rare on-Earth assignments—Leviticus was trying to stop an uprising in Kenya while Mestoph was trying to start it— that he found someone else felt the same way. After weeks in a stalemate, they had met at a Demon bar in the middle of the desert to talk things out since. After a few drinks, they had both been complaining about how pointless their jobs really were. It had shocked him, and at first even worried him, to find a kindred spirit in a Demon, but seeing as everyone else had swallowed the Heavenly Kool-Aid without a question, he couldn’t be picky about where his friends came from.
Thinking of all the times they had bitched and moaned about how much they hated their jobs made Leviticus a bit melancholy and more than a bit angry. Finally, he sighed and jumped to his feet.
Leviticus spent the next hour walking aimlessly through the headquarters of Heaven, Inc. Though he wasn’t sure why, he took a detour by one of the supply closets, where he picked up one of those white, disposable haz-mat bunny suits, a large fire extinguisher, and an a gas mask (the World War II kind with the long hose that had a scrubber attached to the end) and walked with unknown intent but fully protected from any hazardous waste he might encounter when he got to wherever he was heading. He nonchalantly interrupted a department meeting when he used a conference room as a shortcut. The people in the meeting just stared, mouths agape but silent. He wondered if that was what happened when people went postal; they just suddenly found themselves with a gun and a pile of bodies, sparing only the cute receptionist so she could say what a quiet person they were when the news anchor interviewed her.
Leviticus finally realized where he was going. He cursed out loud as he found himself standing in the long, gleaming white hallway that ended in the Research and Development department of Heaven Inc, where the Prophecies were housed. The labs were soundproof, fireproof, bulletproof, waterproof, and Demon-proof. He might as well try and steal the Ark of the Covenant or Mary Magdalene's virginity—although supposedly that had been stolen more than once. The thought of stealing a whore’s virginity brought a slight grin to his face behind his gas mask, but the sobriety of the situation hit him, and his scowl returned. It was the same scowl that had popped on his face the second Mestoph had told him about stealing the Prophecy.
"Steal a Prophecy, Leviticus." said Leviticus, in a high-pitched mimicry of Mestoph's Demonic accent, which sounded kind of like a mix of Creole and South African with a dash of German: in other words, exactly like Klingon. Leviticus wondered how people had described the Demonic tongue before Star Trek. He shook his head, trying to focus. As ridiculous as Mestoph's plan was, it was his only hope for getting out—and hope was something he hadn't had in a long time. He needed a break, even if it was only the bleak hope of actually getting out of the End of the World business. Leviticus took a step toward the door, and then another, until finally he was walking down the long hallway.