She patted him on the shoulder. He briefly squeezed her hand between his cheek and shoulder as he typed. Maybe she should let him finish a few of his ideas. The moment she removed her hand he seemed to forget about her existence.
She returned to her desk while she waited. It took only a few moments to discover that her powers were wholly limited while his could shape the very Heavens. Modify and Delete. The Devil could only shape what God had created.
Well, they, whoever they were, could just watch her. She turned some stars brown. When he created planets, she made most of them inhospitable out of spite. Gas giants, tiny balls of boiling iron, airless realms kicked from orbit to drift aimlessly between the stars.
Then she started modifying with more purpose as she got the hang of it.
He had created light.
She deleted it from the back sides of the planets and the great empty vastness.
He created attraction between objects.
She focused it so that bigger things, like stars, attracted smaller things like planets, though it took some fooling around with the gravitational constants to get the orbits right.
He created…
And she fixed it so that it stood some chance of working. And she continued fixing, tinkering, modifying, deleting the blatantly stupid, like smiley faces on all of the stars, until finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. Lifting her hands from the keyboard, she decided to stop and think.
She wanted to make things too, but the system, and God’s typically male self-absorption, shut her out. No way in creation was she going to spend the rest of her career sweeping up after God. There had to be some way around this.
She leaned back as the Heavens slowly changed around her. The stars began to twinkle and the galaxies took on more character as he varied the star sizes. She saw the planet surfaces were boiling, so she gave some of them enough spin to keep them from becoming charred on one side and frozen on the other, to buy herself some time to think. Just in case she was wrong, she left others without any spin.
There was no flicker of reaction from him regarding her edits.
And the water was no use to anyone boiling away in empty space. She siphoned most of it down to the face of planets and fussed with the gravitational formulas some more so that both water and atmosphere stayed in place.
“How do I get the attention of the ultimate one track man? Hey.” She leaned forward, reached across the desks, and shook his arm, “Hey.”
He looked at her for several seconds before blinking in recognition.
“Oh, hi. I’ll be with you in a moment. There’s one more thing I must try. Why don’t you make something yourself? It’s great fun.”
“Because I can’t create shit!” her voice grated as it came out.
He stopped and looked at her in surprise. Leaning over he took her hand. His eyes truly focused on her for the first time since this had started. No father had ever looked upon his child with such care, “Take the risk. You never know what you can do until you try. Have some fun.”
He held her hand a moment longer before turning back to the console and completing his next command. And another. And another.
With great compassion, he hadn’t heard a thing she’d said. This “God” guy was an egocentric twit!
She waited until her head started to hurt from being patient, clearly not one of her long suits.
Fine.
If he wanted to run the universe without her help, he was welcome to. She typed a quick command, then reached over and grabbed his glass of wine before pressing the Enter key.
Putting her feet on her desk, she leaned back in her chair. The great circular platform shattered in half between their desks. He didn’t even seem to notice as they slowly drifted apart in the swirling universe.
“Here we part ways. God and the Devil, exiled together, hereafter separated.” She raised her glass in a toast toward his diminishing figure, a small, small man, a computer desk, and half of the shattered platform from which the universe had been born.
She sipped the wine.
She needed a name. “The Devil” was clearly a title.
At least he’d created a nice vintage.
Michelle. She liked that. She made a note in the system. Fourteen billion years from now, a religious splinter group that was thrown out of Egypt and cast into the desert to wander for forty years, would decide that “Michelle” meant, “She who is like God.”
The wine was a nice vintage, but not a great one.
Michelle tapped the keyboard a moment as she slowly tumbled through the infinite reaches of space and observed the aftermath of the Big Bang.
A hint of cherry.
Exactly what the wine needed.
Chapter 22
“You have Modify and Delete privileges?” Peter leapt to his feet from his chair in the Devil’s kitchen. He was almost shaking with excitement.
Eric rested a hand on his shoulder to calm him down and felt the man actually vibrating.
“We really, really need to talk. I don’t think God ever knew that.”
“Jerk never listened,” Michelle grumbled into her coffee.
“He got better over time. Recently he—”
“I don’t care about all that.” Valerie cut him off. “So, you and God got off to a bad start. Big deal. Been there. Done that. If you have any doubts, I’ll introduce you to Landau Fucking McKenzie, my ex. I want to know what the, uh, Hell are we doing in Hell?”
Eric couldn’t take his eyes from Valerie as she strode back and forth about the kitchen. This was her killer-Mac mode and it was something to watch. Intelligent, erudite, passionate, and focused. She stalked over to the tall shelf of cookbooks, that all looked perfectly new, like unused wall art, and back. She leaned over the back of an empty chair next to him and moved one leg back to stretch it.
From where he sat it was hard not to admire what the posture did for the shape of her behind. Then she stood and huffed out a deep breath, unintentionally drawing attention to some of her other pleasing shapes. Ordering his brain to focus didn’t help in the slightest, it insisted that it was very focused at the moment, thank you very much.
“I also want to know,” The Mac’s voice was calming back into Valerie-mode. “How can you talk of a Buddhist Wheel of Life when your existence makes for a Christian one?”
“A Christian one?” Michelle poured some fresh coffee. “Did you ever see the British comedian who did this Devil act?”
Valerie shook her head.
Sitting upright Michelle pretended she was consulting a notepad. She looked up at the three of them very seriously, “All Christians, welcome. I’m sorry but the Jews were right. You may proceed directly to Hell. All lawyers, everyone else was right, down you go. Writers, please stay with your agents, you’ll be transported to Perdition shortly.”
All of them laughed as she dropped back in her chair and put her feet up on one corner of the table.
“Not quite right. Hindus claim you can’t convert to their religion because it encompasses all religions already. It has made for fewer but bloodier Hindu wars. The only problem is they are wholly inaccurate, too. When we discovered there was a Buddhist system operating apparently parallel to our own, we looked around for others, but found only that one. A lot of deities hanging about from the various religions, but they all cobbled their code onto the Universal Software. Except for the Buddha. He and Ananda coded a new system from the ground up.”
Michelle waved a hand at Eric and he shoved over a bag of Fritos to where she could reach it without sitting up.
“For the most part the Buddhists won’t talk to us, ‘You’re too different,’ they say and I’m inclined to believe them. We, God and I, never did figure out what assigns a soul into our part of the system or theirs. One of their trade secrets, I guess. Ultimate enlightenment is the final goal of both, we simp
ly go about it differently. Whoever designed this software had a weird sense of humor.”
Valerie dropped into her chair, “What do you mean whoever designed the software? Didn’t you or God?”
“No, the software existed before we did. Before the Big Bang, which was fourteen billion years ago. Next Thursday, I think. Or maybe Friday.”
“But that’s outrageous. I refuse to believe that I’m just some lousy bit of information in a computer somewhere.”
Eric could think of several tacky lines about her being the prettiest piece of code he’d ever seen, but decided he and his rising libido had best keep quiet.
“You and Plato both,” Michelle began stacking Frito chips on the table, playing with them, eating more than the occasional one.
“Who? You mean this Plato?”
Michelle nodded her head, “This Plato.”
Valerie started playing with the salt shaker again, “Who thought this one up?”
That was one Eric could answer. He sat up and lowered his voice in imitation of how imagined the ‘Software that Runs the Universe’ might sound. “The designer of this software is believed lost in the mists of time. Initiation date was approximately November 10th, 1983AC, After Creation.”
Michelle leaned forward so eagerly he sat back in his chair, “How did you find that out?”
“I asked the software.”
She dropped back with a look of surprise and then laughed harshly, once.
“1983?” Valerie’s voice sounded funny.
Of course. He couldn’t believe he’d missed that. “Damn! You two were born on the same day…sort of. What time were you born? Hang on I scratched down its Creation Date somewhere.” He started to rummage through his pockets.
“My birth certificate says 5:44 a.m. on November 10th, 1983 AD,” she emphasized the last letter.
Eric set his wrinkled note in the middle of the table. Everyone leaned forward to look as Valerie read out, “5:44 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. November 10th, 1983 AC. What the Hell does that mean? Why does your software have my birthday?”
Peter turned the slip of paper to look at it. He took another sip of coffee. “Actually I think that you have its birthday, it is a little older than you, but I can’t see any connection. The software once said this program was started long After Creation, AC. I never understood what it meant. Maybe this space-time was created and it took 1,982 years to install the software?”
Michelle looked at him and said with a bewildered laugh, “Don’t ask me. I only remember a few minutes before we started the software running.”
Valerie leaned toward her, “But who created you, and it?”
Michelle looked as if she’d been punched. Instead of eating the Frito in her hand, she froze, then slowly lowered her hand back to the table where the chip tumbled to the wooden surface with a tiny plunk, the only sound in the room.
Michelle stood.
When Valerie reached out a silent hand in apology, Michelle took and squeezed it for a moment, mumbling something about it being okay.
She walked to the French doors and opened them letting in the sound of the surf. She didn’t turn, and her voice mixed with that of the waves.
“Where do the waves begin on the surface of the ocean? There are some things I will never know and my origin is one of them. You each know you had parents, but I don’t even know if I was born or created.”
No one made a sound as the Devil stepped alone out onto the beach.
Chapter 23
Valerie’s heart ached for Michelle as she watched her walk away. Her own parents might be out of her life, but she did have stories, though her mother had burned all of the pictures. Michelle only had a “beginning of memory” while standing upon a translucent platform in a dark void.
She moved to follow the Devil out onto the beach, to somehow make better what she’d said, but Plato signaled for her to stay and he followed Michelle himself.
Valerie had to move. She walked through the archway and into the living room. She heard Eric follow her.
Now this was her idea of a living room, three walls of floor-to-ceiling bookcases interrupted with the occasional piece of art. The fourth side was all window facing the unnerving ocean. The massive blue waves had subsided to bare yellow ripples, which broke upon the sand with the thud and roar of Hawaiian fifty-footers. She looked away from the waves, she was uncomfortable enough here already without witnessing the incongruity of Hell.
Books were always a perfect distraction to her. As Valerie pulled a volume down here and read a few titles there she realized how eclectic a collection Michelle had. Most of the authors on two of the walls had been dead for centuries, the third was one of the finest trash science fiction collections she’d ever seen.
Eric had quickly moved to that wall and every now and then she’d hear a gasp as he’d take a book and read a few pages before putting it back. She pulled a slender manuscript from the first wall marked simply “Leonardo” on the spine. It opened to one of the loveliest poems she’d ever read.
She sat on a handy couch, noticing Eric had done the same. Peter had found a computer manual of some sort and taken a chair by the window.
Valerie turned to the beginning of the poem and became rapidly lost in the rhythmic splendor. It told of a wild and beautiful maiden wise beyond her years. She came from parts unknown breathing life into the world around her. Moving on, forever untouchable, forever touching. It almost sounded like Michelle. When she finished it Valerie closed her eyes and simply relished the sounds in her head for a moment.
Flipping to the flyleaf she could see where a graceful hand had written, “To Snookums, with Love, Leo.” Reading the title page she almost dropped the book. It was a Da Vinci, handwritten in ink. She tilted a page to catch the sunlight streaming in the front window. At a glancing angle, she could see the unusual coloration of the ink. She inspected it more closely, the ink had eaten away at the paper.
She closed the book very carefully. It was handwritten using iron gall ink that had degraded the paper. She was holding an original Da Vinci.
# # #
Michelle moved quickly down the beach. Someone followed her and all she wanted to do was be “away.” Away from the mortals and their uncomfortable questions. Away from Hell. Away from her own self and all the rest of the screwed up universe. So they’d lost the software, why should she care? So the Universe was going to Hell in a picnic basket, since when was that news?
She finally couldn’t stand the sensation of a target on her back any longer and whirled to blast whoever the Hell wouldn’t leave her alone.
Plato stopped a dozen paces away and waited. He just stood and waited. No judgment or accusation on his face. Nor overt sympathy that she could react against.
The man simply stood and waited with an infinite patience that if she’d ever had, she’d long since forgotten.
He walked up to her slowly. He ignored her scowl and the near-to-spilling tears of rage that threatened to become tears of self pity.
Plato didn’t stop. Having never touched beyond a handshake, now he simply came to her and wrapped his arms about her shoulders.
In turn, she simply clamped her arms around him and held on. He was solid and real in a way she no longer believed herself to be. She had become some ephemeral extension of the software’s coding without any sense of her own place or purpose in the universe.
“Fourteen billion years old,” she sniffled about in the warmth and strength of his embrace. “You think I’d have my act together by now.”
Plato chuckled lightly, but didn’t release his hold on her.
“And here I was feeling sorry for myself after a mere two millennia.”
With a final squeeze, they settled to sit on the sand in easy harmony and watch the pounding waves of Hell’s quiet ocean.
They didn’t speak, they didn’t cu
ddle, they didn’t have wild sex. They just sat on the beach listening to the waves and holding hands.
It was the first thing in her world that had been new in a long, long time.
Day Four
And God made two great lights;
the greater light to rule the day,
and the lesser light to rule the night.
And God set them in the firmament of the Heaven
to give light upon the earth.
Chapter 24
Time had lost some of its meaning and urgency. Sitting in the morning light in the Devil’s living room, wearing a large terry cloth bathrobe way better than any hotel’s, left Valerie both feeling cozy and confused. Neither was a familiar feeling.
Michelle had eventually returned from her walk with Plato around dinner time yesterday. They had all gotten more than a little drunk last night.
Valerie’s mind was thick enough this morning that she knew it would be hours before she’d willingly face sunlight. She was pretty sure that she’d gone to bed alone and had definitely woken alone, which was probably for the best. Even if she kept finding herself a little angry that Eric hadn’t put more effort into propositioning her. Of course when had she ever gone out of her way to make him or any other man feel welcome?
That made her head hurt even more so she shooed the whole thought stream aside.
Now, morning was upon them and she was still in Hell, no closer to having her cookbook finished in any way except being closer to the deadline. A deadline now so impossibly imminent that it was practically a terminal disease. And, oh yeah, the Universe was collapsing.
She was in Hell and Michelle really was the Devil. She tried to remain calm. Her chest felt too tight to even breathe. Ever since they had shuffled backward down her apartment hallway and landed on her butt in Hell she’d been fighting to make some sense of what was happening. Now that she was making sense of it, the fear was starting to set in. She wiped her palms on the robe to dry off the sweat.
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