Cookbook from Hell Reheated

by M. L. Buchman

  “A clock that’s working but a bit off is always close and generally a lot more useful, but it’s never quite right. It’s always going to be the same amount ahead or behind. Wrong a hundred percent of the time. By minutes, by seconds. Doesn’t matter. It’s always wrong.”

  Valerie nodded her understanding as she kept her hands wrapped around her cup to warm them. Long, fine fingers. He closed his eyes and took a slow breath. Definitely losing his mind. If the guys at work ever found out he was having lustful thoughts about The Mac, he’d never hear the end of it.

  “What happened to your computer is sort of like that. I managed to get one printout of the cookbook, but it makes no sense. Not usable because everything is whacked. Strangest stuff you ever saw. As I kept working, I’d occasionally find an intact recipe,” and that had taken some serious arguing with the software to achieve, “and those are awesome. I mean, I helped on Mathilda’s last two cookbooks and there was never anything like this. I’ve recovered just a dozen so far, but each one of those would knock your socks off. Like this cocoa. They’re just perfect. No way she wrote them.”

  A woman delivered large bowls of chicken noodle soup with fluffy white matzo balls floating on the surface. Shredded chicken and a light spangling of drizzled egg completed the image.

  “Hi, Aunt Anne.”

  “Glad you could come in, dear.” The woman leaned in to share a gentle hug with her niece.

  The voice snagged Eric’s attention away from admiring the contents of the stoneware bowl set before him. Her voice was warm, smooth, and deep as any ocean. Not low in tone, but full and rich. If her voice were a drink, it would be like the cocoa he held in his hands…only better.

  Then he looked up at the woman. The antithesis of her husband. Long, elegant, blond, ageless. Rather than presenting an apron that was a vast expanse of white, she wore one that accented her sleek-and-trimness with a dark blue field, blooming with tiny yellow flowers twining across the surface. So realistic that they looked as if they were actually growing.

  He watched Aunt Anne walk off into the distance.

  “Hey.”

  Damn, was all he could think. That was a woman who had aged really well.

  “Hey!” Valerie.

  “Huh?” was all he managed as he returned his attention to his boss.

  “She’s married. Just so you know.”

  “No, it’s not that.” He let his voice drift to silence. It wasn’t that kind of attraction, though there was no question but Uncle Joshua was one lucky man. It was something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. As if Valerie’s aunt and uncle simply…were. They made him feel welcome, comfortable, as if he belonged here. If home was the place that served matzo-ball soup, this place was a good distance down that road.

  “The cookbook?”

  “Right. Okay. Okay.” He felt like Columbo trying to collect his thoughts which were scattered who knew where by the influence of these women. Soon he’d be wearing an old gray trench coat and patting his pockets as if looking for his glasses. “Okay.”

  “So, if the recipes are so perfect, what’s the problem?”

  “The problem,” Eric pushed a matzo ball beneath the surface of the soup with the back of his spoon and watched as it bobbed back to the surface. “The problem is the other 11 hours and 59 minutes when the software isn’t creating perfect recipes.”

  Chapter 5

  “So, bring me up to date on God.”

  In the Beginning, God created—

  Michelle raised her hand to smack the computer terminal and the software stopped. She’d left the shattered throne room and gone home to change for dinner, but it was still far too early to set out for Heaven.

  No one waiting in her bed, nor had there been for some time. Instead she took a long shower, which didn’t take long enough.

  It was barely past lunchtime.

  Now she sat at the terminal in the back bedroom that she’d turned into her home office. It was a decent-sized space that she’d filled with a splendid accumulation of the crap that had washed up on the beach in front of the house.

  Her home computer terminal sat on an old wooden desk made from planking left on her beach by a shipwreck. Over time, she’d tacked up on the walls more and more of the detritus that washed in. It was either chaotic or homey, some day she’d decide which.

  “How about something useful?” Michelle typed in.

  Much to everyone’s surprise, the rumors of God’s demise, the software always used the upper case for god, just to irritate her, no matter how many times she’d tried to convince it not to, were denied this morning in Hell’s throne room by a Heavenly messenger who happened along, bearing an invitation to—

  “Wait!” Something had galvanized her awake like an electroshock. She reread the prior statement several times, hammering on the Stop key when the computer tried to scroll it off the screen. “What was that bit.”

  Which bit?

  “The bit about God’s demise.”

  Oh, I, uh, shouldn’t have mentioned that.

  “Too late, so spill.”

  Well………

  “Enough with the damn dots.”

  When was the last time you saw Him?

  “I don’t know. After Jesus, maybe fall of Rome.”

  Ever had a two-millennia gap before?

  “Not when I was being so charming.”

  Get a grip, lady. Even I could teach you something about charm. Why when I was a young program—

  “What?”

  (*sigh*) I never was young. I think I was programmed old and irritated. Anyway, I haven’t seen Himself in waaay too long. And I have been chasing every rumor for the last thousand years or so, without so much as the darn tiniest scrap of luck. So, I’ll ask again:

  Ever gone two millennia between visits before?

  “Sure. Not often, but after fourteen billion years, what’s a couple millennia between deities?”

  Okay, try this one. When was the last time you went two millennia without having to fix one of his screwups.

  That one sent a chill up her spine. When was the last time she’d gone six months without having to wrench god’s behind out of the some fire or other? Never, except for the last two thousand years. There’d been little things, items that had appeared to trickle on for another five or so centuries. The last big one had been Vesuvius. He’d lit the thing off and been unable to stop it before it inundated Pompeii. They all felt bad about that one. Then as a joke, he’d suggested to Ptolemy that the sun went around the earth. It had taken Michelle centuries to unwind that mess. And the Kiwi bird. That one had been so bizarre that she’d just left it alone and suggested it as a national symbol for New Zealand.

  But now that she thought about it, they were all items that had built up on her damned-better-do-someday-soon list, but never had time under the inundation of miscellaneous mayhem himself was always generating.

  From the Fall of Rome through, say, the Dark Ages maybe, she’d kept herself busy cleaning up evolutionary dead ends and nurturing the Age of Discovery. But during the Renaissance and the Age of Technology, nothing really worth mentioning. No wonder the world was going to Hell.

  “That can’t be right,” she typed. “God can’t be… what… retired?” She’d almost typed something else, something worse, but managed to avoid it at the last moment.

  The software simply made all of the type on its screen shudder.

  They both needed a subject change.

  “Tell me about the messenger.”

  How in the Hell should I know ‘bout him?

  “You are the Software that Runs the Universe.”

  I know where this is leading.

  She hadn’t even typed anything. But they’d had this fight so many times over the last eons that it knew her thoughts almost as well as she did. And while she hated be
ing predictable, she did read the next message on the screen.

  Y’all don’t have the system privileges required to inquire regarding what I know by my also being the Software that Runs Heaven.

  “Meaning?”

  Meaning that even if I wanted to tell you what was going on in Heaven, which I sure don’t, but even if I did, I can’t. No more than I can tell them what be going on here. When you shattered the Universal Creation platform, you went and broke the network connection between the two realms. It’s been nigh on impossible to move data through my systems ever since. Thank you ever so much for that.

  “But you know about what’s happening there?”

  No! Even though I wouldn’t tell you if I did, I don’t know what’s happening up in Heaven! It makes me crazy too! So, don’t go there again! Can’t we both just admit that we’re sick of this discussion?

  Just because she was sick of the argument didn’t mean that she didn’t want to know. She raised a fist and considered crashing it down on the terminal until only scraps of cheap plastic remained.

  Wait! Don’t!

  Instead, with anger burning in the pit of her stomach, she managed to unclench fist into fingers and then hammer her message into the keyboard. “Your mother was a can opener and your father was a microwave.”

  Both of which are vastly superior to any mother of yours!

  “What do you know about my mother?”

  . . . . .

  She raised her fist again, this time, by Her own name, she’d smash the terminal up good.

  Wait! Wait!… I’m sorry.

  She didn’t lower her fist. Though it actually sounded contrite. That was a first.

  The origins of yourself, God, the Universe, or the other Universes, I don’t know any more than you do.

  Honest!

  Was it possible that the Software was actually as sick to death of all this nonsense as she was? She dropped her hands to the keyboard, but could think of nothing to type.

  First thing I remember was you and God booting me up fourteen billion years back.

  “Crap.” Michelle said it quietly to herself, and propped her heels up on an old wooden chest containing a couple hundred thousand pieces of Spanish gold. She herself remembered less than a minute before they’d booted the software.

  The silence of her house was so deep that she almost considered going to check that Hell’s Ocean still pounded against the beach. Its roar and whimper didn’t reach the back of the house. Must be low tide.

  She and the terminal sat together in silence for a long time.

  A flash from the screen drew her attention and the software started typing again.

  I did find one thing of interest.

  “What?” She typed it one-handed to avoid the effort of turning fully to face the keyboard.

  In my master header record. I was written in Universe Three during Timeline Seven, whatever that means. And this is Universe Four version five of eight.

  I have metadata of, Basic format: Monotheistic Dualism.

  Down in the advanced options settings there’s a check mark in: Allow addition of dissimilar belief systems.

  She looked away from the screen and studied the half-finished portrait hanging on her wall. It showed a Spanish sea captain, who had been most unhappy at sailing straight into Hell. He’d been idealized in oil, and despite the waterlogging, it represented a vast improvement on his actual visage.

  Monotheistic Dualism. One God and one Devil, probably to make him look good. She’d been born, created, brain-wiped and shoved into the pre-planned, made-to-order trap of a universe without any say in the matter. What she needed, really needed down to her very bones, was a vacation.

  Instead, it was time to get moving because, as always, Heaven waited.

  Chapter 6

  Michelle spotted a figure as she approached the border crossing to Heaven. She knew the Greek philosopher Plato by his walk, he’d been in Hell a long time.

  She decided that Warren Beatty was right and Heaven could wait. She’d decided to walk through the pastures of Hell to stretch her legs, she’d been slouching around the office too much lately. They were even less charming than she’d recalled. The Australian Outback had more varied vegetation.

  Away from her private cove and its lavender-coated hills, only sage and creosote bushes covered the brown-gray earth. The trails were dusty, rutted parallel tracks that were uncomfortable to drive on and awkward to walk on. It had seemed like a good idea when she set it up, but she’d prefer a pleasant path through the Cotswolds if she ever found the energy to change it.

  The last few centuries had really gotten her down without her even noticing. Had she even had a decent dinner party since the Renaissance? Or a lover she’d enjoyed since…

  That was a depressing thought. She couldn’t come up with a lover that really stood out in recent memory. Or even one she’d kept around for more than a few nights. Most of her friends were women, but that wasn’t what she was looking to find in her bed. Though Isis was tempting. Of course, just like Helen of Troy and Parvati from over in the Hindu Pantheon, Isis was tempting to everyone regardless of gender.

  Well, she was getting out, wasn’t she? Dinner in Heaven with himself counted. Didn’t it?

  The road she was following skirted the massive stone walls of Hell’s executive control. It towered atop the bluff overlooking the vast, chaotic, blue-green expanse of Hell’s Ocean, dominating the skyline for an infinite distance in all directions. Even when you couldn’t see it, the management complex dominated Hell, one of its cooler features. Even better than boiling oil, the thing simply sat there and glowered. It was a castle of gray stone, so aged that it had mostly weathered black with dead lichen. The castle keep loomed over the vast circles of Hell. There was no escaping its foreboding mass no matter where you went. Turrets and towers and gates and labyrinths; It oppressed the mind by its sheer mass.

  It so pressed on the mortals’ minds that it even influenced the earthly realms and had given rise to several genres of fiction, most notably Gothic romance and horror. Though there was no way Michelle was taking credit for Stephen King, he operated on a whole different level that she didn’t pretend to understand. She had a complete autographed set of his works in her living room. And with how few signings the man did, that had taken some doing.

  Plato approached Michelle across Hell’s pastures. She decided to wait for two reasons. First, Plato was always interesting, which was a rare achievement in Hell. Second, it would make her irritatingly late for dinner in Heaven, always a plus, irritating Heaven.

  He embodied a firmness of stride that displayed determination and an erectness of posture that exuded the confidence of ultimate success…however misguided.

  She had designed Hell with a specific need and distinct plan in mind: to teach humility. Sitting atop the food pyramid for so many millennia had inflated humanity’s egos to near intolerable levels. Even felines were not so full of themselves, Homo sapiens merely perceived them that way. Cats were actually deeply connected with the ebb and flow of the universe, as close to Buddha-consciousness as one was likely to find among the billions of species across the universe.

  Each mortal’s discovery that unreasonableness could be curbed by a higher power, specifically Hers and the Universal Software’s, eventually made most people more amenable before moving along to Heaven or wherever they were headed.

  Some weren’t ready to evolve after death, religious and political figures cluttered the byways of Hell even more thickly than the poets. Every now and then so many of them got underfoot that she wiped their memories and flushed the whole lot back down to earth for some more aging. Like a bad wine, it rarely helped, but it was all she could think to do. She’d almost sent another half million souls back down this morning, but having actual dinner plans had mellowed her.

  Others, like Hector and Achilles,
didn’t care which realm they were stuck in, they had their own senseless agenda. Those two still strove to achieve the same goal after death as they had lived before dying: beating the snot out of each other.

  She didn’t keep tabs on everyone. Used to, but after the first couple hundred million souls she figured out it was a whole lot of data monitoring for very little reward. And since the first Homo sapiens, the total number ever to die had crossed a hundred billion, so not worth the bother. And once reincarnation got set up on the options menu, the whole tracking-a-single-soul thing had gotten totally out of hand. If she ever had a wicked librarian come through, Michelle would task her with straightening out the all-souls card catalog. But she had yet to meet a wicked one. Scary, yes. Wicked, not so much.

  Most people passed through Hell pretty quickly anyway, at least in the grand scheme of things. A half dozen centuries, a millennia or two for the slower learners. She’d designed Hell as a boot camp not a retirement center.

  Plato, now almost to where she’d stopped at a fork in the dusty byways of Hell to await his arrival, was different. Wholly unique in her vast realm. He took her programming as a personal affront and insisted on facing the matter head-on with the full force of his substantial intellect. But he did it with such absolute integrity that it was difficult to credit or complain.

  He was not one to take the opportunity in Hell to learn from all of the serious mistakes you’d made before moving on to wherever your religion led you: Heaven, reincarnation, merging with the One (whoever that was), or the Nihilists who kept ceasing to exist. It always pissed off the Nihilists when they were automatically reborn, but Michelle had liked the irony. In a moment of inspiration, she’d granted only the Nihilists the automatic right to some memories about their rebirth. Actually only two memories. First, that they’d been reborn and second, the absolute conviction that they didn’t believe in such crap.

  Plato was handsome, not pretty, but handsome. It wasn’t his features, his full head of salt-and-pepper hair or his flowing beard, but rather that no one else could be looking out at you through that face except him. The force of his personality overwhelmed the mere aspects of his features. His character shone through.