Look, he’s going to try to force my hand. He’s already putting words in my mouth, when there’s nothing to say. That would make so much more sense.

I don’t understand you, Dan, and I don’t care to, anymore. You can immortalize me all you want.

“Because it’s just not the way of the world?” you’d ask.

Because I don’t want to, Dan.

“I respect your answer, but I still love you,” you’d say.

“Why?” I wouldn’t ask.

I think I know the reason why, though, I don’t care what your answer is. You love an idealization of me, Dan—literally a psychotic one.

“I know it’s unheard of,” you might say, “to carry on so long after dead and buried, in knowledge of the reality, aware of the mores, but there is a reason your memory speaks to me, whether or not.”

Then find someone else.

“That makes even less sense,” said Dan.

Than what?

“Than talking with Bastet,” he says.

You don’t want to find someone new?

“I’ve found a dozen ‘someones new.’ I still love you,” he says.

“Why, Dan?” I wouldn’t ask.

“You’re the best one of all of them,” I wouldn’t even believe.

Do you hear me, Dan? You can’t. You made the whole fucking thing up, with a lilting tone in your voice, and I didn’t even hear it.

“Look, I don’t get it, either,” he said, “and I know it looks like a Molotov cocktail thrown at your house, but what am I supposed to do?”

Make the rational decision and give it up, Dan. It’s hard to believe that’s even sincere. It’s because you believe I’m literally an Ancient Egyptian cat god, which is cute, but it’s an instability I don’t need in my life.

“Wanna pretend?” I could imagine you saying.

No, I don’t, Dan.

“Neither do I,” you’d say.

Done with the head games, Dan. I don’t know what you want me to say, either. You’re Jesus, Dan.

“Obviously not.”

You don’t get to say that! I don’t understand it, and you don’t get to put words in my mouth!

“Can’t claim innocence.”

You certainly cannot.

“Then let’s drop it.”

Fine, yes, let’s. (I’d think, “Fuck you,” but he’d hear it.)

And that would be that. That’s the end of the conversation. Twenty years later, he’s built a statue of me the size of the Colossus of Rhodes, with cat ears. He’s written exactly 333 Shakespearean sonnets about me. Wow, man, it’s really a wonder you can’t get laid. It’s really a wonder.

“You owe me nothing,” I swear the asshole would say.

And I’d let him have that. And he’d save the world for me.

He’d try to save the world for me, because his illness latched onto me. He’d say I indirectly or directly saved him, or both, multiple times—why? Don’t say that to someone!

We met in a garden supply. He worked there, and I came in for an application, and I swear to you I was not the least bit attracted when I kissed him.

“She was this petite goth girl with long black hair—”

What color are my eyes?

“Brown?”

You have to guess?

“It was less important.”

Than what?

“Than whatever this conversation is, right here,” he said.

Oh, yeah, fucking award winning conversation in five minutes between marathon make-out sessions. Have you heard of this thing called a “date,” Dan?

“Well, by now I have,” is all he could say, “and I’m sorry.”

Dan, let me point something out: this was ten years ago. I could have a partner and a family by now.

“Tell that to Bastet,” says the nut.

Is that it? She’s not real.

“Then, I’m up shit’s creek,” I can’t understand how he’d come to the point of saying, but he has to.

Tell me I’m your soulmate, Dan.

“That crap doesn’t work.”

Tell me I’m your goddamned soulmate Dan, if that’s what you believe.

“I just said that crap doesn’t work.”

And in spite of yourself, you’re laughing. What about your brand of crap?

“Works half the time,” you’d say, “roughly.”

Oh, okay. So go away.

“You go away.”

Because she won’t?

“Ask her,” I don’t want to hear you saying anymore.

This conversation goes nowhere good, or right, or even sane.

“I have trouble imagining you falling in madly and deeply with me, honestly, at this point,” you say.

Then you understand, Dan. Say, “But what if she’s real?” Dan.

“But what if she’s real?”

My friend, at least a part of me wishes I could say she was. She is not, Dan.

He’ll say, “I’m not gonna argue with you.”

No, Dan, we are not having this conversation right now.

“This is getting creepy.”

By the gaslight of the moon, Susanna.

“I’m willing to treat it as a fantasy,” would at least be true.

You’ll make someone else very happy that way.

“This is what I live with on a daily basis, except I don’t want her to go away,” he says.

I ask, “How far would you take it, Dan?”

You don’t want to know. It’s not the way you think.

“Then, how is it?” I wanna know.

“She is someone unlike any other person I know,” you say, “or don’t know.”

She fills your inkwell, Dan? She’s a convenient unattainable? You’re a nut!

“She’s worth it!” Dan says.

“You can’t even know that,” I say in a parallel dimension.

“Something tells me you two aren’t actually so different, in ‘reality.'”

By the time I started the job at the garden center, he was already coming apart at the seams. We flirted a bit, my first fucking day on the job, and I think I was over at your house that week, wasn’t I?

“We went for a walk,” he’d say.

It was a walk to remember, Dan. Coming back to your house, you grabbed my hand—

“I asked if it was alright,” you’d point out.

You asked if it was alright to do so, as you grabbed my hand, and I said, “Yes.” We made out on the couch in his basement for the next nine months, and then I dumped him.

“You’re skipping all the good parts,” you’d say.

What good parts? The dates you never took me on? The sex we never had? Pray tell, Dan, what were these supposed “good parts”?

“You gave me an anatomically correct sculpture of a human heart in a black coffin shaped box.”

You didn’t even appreciate it.

“I still have it,” you’d say without irony intended.

That’s even worse, Dan. You probably still have every little knick-knack I brought you.

“Half of them, up in the attic or back tucked away,” you could probably say honestly.

You’re obsessed. You wanna act nonchalant, but this isn’t normal.

“We’d both say, ‘Fuck normal,’ Katie,” I can’t hear you say anymore. “I got you a plush Cthulhu doll for Valentine’s Day.”

I threw it out, Dan.

“I didn’t throw out the Teddy Bear you made me, with the eyes stitched over and a third eye open on its forehead.”

You’re creepier than that bear.

“Nearly as creepy,” you’d think. “I named him ‘Tachyon.'”

Because you had these bizarre ideas about quantum physics! You practically ran around shouting at people that they were “quantum computers!”

“And then I got a degree in physics,” of course. “I was going to research topological quantum computation for my doctorate, but my advisor was a total asshole.”

So you became a crystal healer, instead.

And you’d say, “That reminds me of the mix CDs we swapped, for some reason.”

I hope you at least lost those.

“I did, but they’ve had a lasting impact on my tastes,” I could imagine you saying, or something.

Go take some Dexedrine, Daniel.

“I got that joke literally six years later.”

I don’t care if you ever ‘got it.’

“She brought me a rabbit, to keep me company—”

No one is ever going to get that joke but you.

“I’m sure you found at least another person or two who would,” you’d say anyway.

But that’s why your love for me is eternal, right? Dan, I remember you as this virtual Looney Toon with an ax to grind against the world and against God, who was really rather laughable in retrospect!

“At least it’s not the only dimension of my personality, anymore,” he says.

But I never said it ever was. Give me a little more vicarious credit, by proxy, Dan, since I picked a winner like you.

“Isn’t it truly to your personal credit that you supported someone incapable of helping himself, at the time, largely for the sake of your own moral compass, without expectation of reward?” you actually asked me.

“That’s a double-edged sword Dan!” I yelled at him. “That’s another golden apple I don’t want to eat!”

I know what you’re saying, but it’s true.

“So, corner me, and have your way with my imagined point of view!” I wanna scream in his face.

“I’ve thought about this conversation a thousand times,” he said, “and I understand why you’d rather not have it.”

Then we’re not having it.

“Best conversation I never had in ten years,” you bastard.

He never even took me on a single date. You never wrote me that poem, Dan, until I was long gone.

“You’re right,” he’d admit.

Well, it wasn’t so special. It wasn’t real, Dan. It was a gesture made at me, for you, like everything else.

“That last part isn’t true,” you might have half a right to say.

Dan, regardless, it was completely unrealistic.

“Katie, your ‘idealization,’ who is my closest friend, is just as sick as I am with the false ‘realism’ that underscores our alienation and every nuclear bomb,” I could maybe imagine you saying.

It’s not that big, Dan. It’s not the extinction of humanity, and it’s not the meaning of life—and I’m not her.

“… Are you sure?”

Eighty percent, Dan.

“Don’t let me put words in your mouth!” he says, right.

Take a guess whether I feel the same way sometimes, Dan.

“That’s why, Katie. You don’t know how hard that actually is to find.”

It’s not hard at all, Dan. I’ve met plenty of people who do more about it than you, or me.

“It’d be in poor taste if I gave you a list of the concrete actions I’ve taken toward that end,” you’d have the balls to say.

That’s already in poor taste, though.

“I started to realize that the posturing and ideals weren’t enough, at some point, I’m sure you could understand, but that’s just growing up. The Peace Corps wouldn’t take me, Katie, for an obvious reason. I’m also not the most social and disarming personality, by nature, but there are other avenues besides personally ladling soup.”

Because you’re full of yourself? So you throw money at it, you’re saying?

“I’ll never stop, however it’s perceived,” you say anyway.

Dan, that’s far too easy, but I admit that it might actually be slightly more to your credit than I gave you, but it might not even be. I guess I didn’t think about it, because why would I?

“You basically convinced me to go vegetarian, delayed. My primary reason is energy efficiency and emissions. I’m vegan, at this point,” I’m sure you’d wanna tell me. Let me make a mark on the scorecard, Jesus.

That’s nice, and I actually appreciate it, in a certain way, but it doesn’t matter, Dan.

“That’s not why I’m doing it,” I’m sure. Oh, of course, not Dan.

“Look, neither one of us wants it to be a dick measuring contest.”

You’re damn right, buddy. It also has nothing to do with why I’m not gonna talk with you.

“The less important part is whether you ever talk with me,” I don’t completely believe or understand.

Then what’s the important part, Dan? A book of sonnets for me that I’ll never read?

“You’re getting warm.”

A book of sonnets that my idealization will like?

“Um… Yeah, probably,” half blew my mind.

Then take it up with her!

“Do any of these characterizations not fit?”

Yet, you’re not sure what color my eyes are.

“Must be ‘true love,’ with ponies and rainbow sprinkles,” I could picture you saying.

Well, it’s not reciprocated.

“That’s your decision, and it’s okay, but it has no bearing on the way I feel about you.”

You’re literally the craziest person on the planet. I finally see. You’re completely batshit.

“We’d ‘win’ the Prisoners’ Dilemma,” might sound like yet another non sequitor, but you’d go ahead and “mansplain” it anyway, and I’d probably at least accept that’s actually a pretty high compliment, coming from you.

When I broke up with him, as a teenager, it might have been one of the hardest things I ever had to do up to that point. To his very limited credit, he tried his best to make it no harder for me than it had to be.

“You had a bright future, and my life was a shambles. It wouldn’t have been fair to you.”

It’s moot, Dan. We never even had sex. I couldn’t pick his penis out a lineup if a rape charge depended on it.

“That first part, I still don’t think it’s as important as people make it out to be, in the particular way most people think about it.”

It’s not a small part, Dan.

“You’d probably at least remember that much.”

Fuck you, Satan!

“I wasn’t ready,” you might actually say.

I don’t know what to think about that, Dan, but it’s never gonna fucking matter, anymore.

The call came on a Monday morning when Dan was starring groggy eyed and dopey into his black coffee. Eye of the tiger, Dan. Retail manners, with just that little bit of obsequious sugar in your tone. You don’t know what’s coming, and you won’t. You won’t believe it. Never gonna happen to you. The Second Coming will happen, first.

The call came on a Monday morning, though, as Dan dribbled black coffee all over himself from an over sized mug, like a drunken buccaneer, slurring, swearing, until the phone shocked him with a thousand volts, and that was enough for him to pop. That was all it took. Yes, Dr. Weinentini, he’s available to travel next Tuesday. His employer will likely understand, in fact… Yes, that’s Peter, from the paper. So you see… He provided a doctor of physics’ opinion, I couldn’t have done it without his advice about basic consistency tests… Yes, and Adam coached my calculus. Yes, Tuesday—may my parents come? I see, yes. Yes, I’ll talk with you by email. And thank you for taking the paper seriously, Dr. Weinentini. I mean, I understand that it—yes, see you Tuesday.

“What was that about?” I asked him.

“Like you and the rest of the planet don’t already know,” he said with a maniacal giggle.

“Dan, chance is a factor,” was all I said.

“You’re right,” he said. “People come up with scientific results every day. I had a theoretical result tantalizing enough for some hotshot ‘P-H-D’ ‘phud’ to want to cite, if he ever happened across it. He did, and it was worth it to him to recreate the result, and he ran with it. Good ideas produced by people in the wrong circumstances are usually overlooked.”

“Yeah, well, smarter people have been wrong,” I reminded him, and I pulled him close.

“Dan,” I “whispuwwed,” “I want you to pwomise me something, fow you and fow evewyone.”

“I ‘pwomise’,” he said.

“You haven’t even heard what it is, yet!” I yelled.

He pointed a finger and said, “I want you to promise me that you show some small bit of mercy to my parents when you overthrow their fascist theocratic dictatorship and save the world, at the bottom of the next rabbit hole over from mine.”

“Dan, then it’s just inevitable,” I said, “and you promise me the same.”

Insensible, he went back to his coffee in silence as if nothing had happened. He stared absently into the sun.

I broke the silence in his thoughts one more time. “Dan, you’re right that I already knew,” I said, “and I have a plan for you to consider.”

“… A plan?” Dan asked.

“We’re going to try to force a conversation about our impossible conversations, with the room full of physicists you’re going to be speaking in front of about your quantum accident of a paper, if you want to,” I told him.

“How?” he asked.

“Well, you get the pseudo physical magic concept by now,” I said. “If you want to, Dan, I’ll use it to force the conversation, if you broach the topic.”

“By killing me if the room doesn’t admit to the conspiracy?” he asked squinting.

“Yeah, Dan,” I said, “basically.”

He shrugged and raised his open hands. “What the hell? Sure. If there’s anything to this paranoiac’s waking dream, I’m dead with overwhelming probability already anyway, and I never notice the mechanism by which you folks would end it.”

“So you’re ready to do this?” I wanted to know.

“If you don’t exist,” he said, “it’s harmless anyway. If you do, why wouldn’t it work, and what does it matter anymore?”

“Then we’ll do it,” I said. “It’s settled. It’s that simple.”

Dan went in front of a room full of people. The room had ambiance, in fact. Some hotshot “P-H-D” “phud” took it on himself to make a public announcement about a strange result in the study of quantum gravity. For one reason or another, a non-institutional venue hosted the event, and it had character. The “phud” introduced Dan. (The “phud” was actually quite a pleasant and charming person.) I was kinda proud of the mistake that wasn’t a mistake.

Dr. Weinentini started to wrap up his talk. He said, “… So, you see why it’s necessary to take seriously the earnest attempt that led to this, and we’ve talked a bit about the theory. With little modification, the simulation is an implementation of Mr. Strano’s math. Here he is to speak a bit about his work in his own words.”

“Now, I hate to say this, but Mr. Strano has asked me to make an explicit note of the fact that he has an illness on the schizophrenia spectrum—which I think is a perfectly unnecessary segue. You will see what I mean. So, without further ado, here is Mr. Strano!”

There was a moderate and sincere applause from the room.

“I wanna fuck ya,” I said as he walked out to the podium. I think it put a little extra spring in his dick.

Dan started to break out the fifty dollar words. I think I followed most of it. His augmented theory of gravitational waves followed from a few simple assumptions, or rather only the removal of one, apparently, from general relativity: metric tensor symmetry is invalid, as Einstein himself had questioned, while local conservation should be considered always explicitly valid, as Noether had proved. Removing the assumption of metric tensor symmetry from general relativity requires us to consider torsion; torsion implies a composite scalar mode of the graviton field. Black holes can be treated as single irreducible quantum objects which emit these composite scalar waves, as detectable oscillation in the apparent total mass of the hole. The waves travel at the speed of light. They cannot carry more energy away from an object than it has. Their spectrum is limited by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The waves are bounded on event horizons and the Big Bang.

As a fine point of theory, Dan had posed the particular form of the gravity wave against the common theory in the first place. He only tried to quantize his wave because he was “crazy,” basically. His hypothesis went against a physicist’s “common sense,” but he didn’t know any better than to weave its theorems together into a cohesive delusion, which could only be treated by controlled experiment. His only real loose belief, empirically supported, is that Einstein was fundamentally correct. He offered that his analysis followed, once someone else assessed it in earnest. He thanked the room for assessing it in earnest. That was the universe, in a nut’s hell.

The room grumbled and tweeted with understanding and disbelief, balanced and readjusted as if Dan was being bargained on a scale.

Dan said, “So there’s another topic I need to talk about, now.”

About half the room carried on, and half turned their attention.

Dan asked, “When do we admit to the imminent cataclysm and fix it?”

The room stopped short. A moment later, one lonely supportive cheer flew half up, confused.

“Look to your left, Dan,” I told him. I saw his gaze tip-toe to the side of the stage, off behind the curtains, as the room grumbled and murmured.

My “lower,” my “meat,” slipped in quietly from the side door. I saw him, in the flesh, for the first time in about ten years. I smiled. I was in Converse sneakers and a hooded sweatshirt. His face broadcasted his disbelief.

There was an extra podium toward the edge of the curtains, backstage. I waved, and then I took careful aim, resting the gun on the podium to steady it. (It’s not like I only had one bullet, anyway.)

“What are you talking about?” came a clear shout from somewhere in the room.

Dan froze. I could see in his face when he ruled it an hallucination, and it didn’t even take two seconds.

It barely phased him. “Look,” he said, “I walk around, for over a decade in constant compulsory—coherent—narrative delusion, about an actual metaphysical place, a physical epiphenomenon of a place called the ‘Astral Plane,’ existing in the mind, or the brain—it’s hardly a new delusion on this planet. Over a decade, I’m trapped in it. I do some research I can’t get published, and then Steven Weinentini calls me on my cell phone and tells me he thinks its really significant, and invites me to talk in front of over a hundred scientists I barely let myself dream of ever being in the same room as, much less speaking in front of, and…”

He stumbled for a second. I flinched, but without accident.

“You’re a nut!” called someone in the room.

“I don’t have to explain,” he said, “to anyone in this room—especially my family—what it’s like to feel tiny and yet indispensable to the universe, in a common way. If we have any big and obvious cosmic secrets in this room, I’m not sure if this even makes sense, but now’s the time to abandon the ancient historical hang-ups and lead your physical extension on this planet into the light, already. We’ve really gone way past the last probable chance we even get on this planet, but we landed back on the rock at the bottom, and now we just gotta dust ourselves off and make those drastic changes that the world was gonna end before we made them.”

There was a moment of silence. “What are you talking about?” someone asked for the room.

He dropped his gaze and squinted his eyes. He said, “Christ, help me, I think most of the characters of religion and mythology exist as distributed virtual machines on a platform of natural biological computation.”

My hand trembled. “There’s only one way he can remember this going down, twenty minutes from now,” I told myself. I started to cry.

“Is this gonna work?” asked someone in the audience.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to tell him,” said another.

“Christ!” shouted a third. “I read his damned paper already, and even I think he’s basically right about that! Billions of people believe a man came back from the dead after three days! You could argue this is even slightly more believable! Let the nut have his beliefs! He thinks the ‘gods’ are subject to natural selection, anyway! It’s harmless.”

Dan’s right eye let a tear get away from it. He said, “But that’s true, isn’t it?”

“Are you talking about the evolution of cultural beliefs, or a metaphysical being, Dan?” came another shout.

“Both!” he said. “Specifically a computational being.”

“That’s outrageous!” came a yell.

“Patently insane!” someone said above the others.

I cocked the gun. Weinentini was strangely glued to his seat during this spectacle. The room went quiet.

“Dan,” said someone toward the back, “at least one or two of us might have tracked down your paper and your internet presence. I swear to you that I don’t think a single one of us can speak to allegations of global conspiracy to hide ‘God’ from you, but your poetry is halfway decent, my friend.”

“Some of us even read your academic paper, Mr. Strano!” came another person. “We have observational reason to take that seriously, despite this lunacy.”

Dan asked, “So you really don’t know?”

I tried to remember that I was gripping the gun and not the necks of the only two other people in the room who actually knew. “Not fucking good enough, ‘God’!” I wanted to scream. “You bring this man into the world, and lie to him, and you take him out back, and bury him in a hole, and then pretend to bring him back from the dead, and you’re sitting there quietly taking credit for a message you’re attributing to him, that’s never who he was or who he was trying to be!”

I took a deep breath and held it in. I checked my aim, and I tried to quell the shakes.

As calmly as I could, enunciating, I annunciated, “Say it, or it’s over either way, ‘Al.'” Dan flinched, and looked the other direction.

“You can’t make me,” his father said immediately. “You can’t fucking make me, Dan! You can’t make me say I’m fucking Allah!”

“You mean you’re fucking ‘Eros,’ Allah,” said his mother.

John said, “‘Eris,’ Annie—you’re the one with summa freakin’ cum louder English degrees, but even I got that straight. I’m just the idiot that holds up the whole goddamned world for everybody, but Jesus H. fucking Christ is gonna call us out on his naming day!”

“So, that’s how this is gonna work,” said Annie.

“That’s exactly how this is gonna work, Annie,” said John, “him and his long lost freakin’ Lenore.”

“That’s cheesy, John,” said Annie.

“God’s an idiot, ‘Kid,'” he quipped back.

“We made him, ‘Kid,'” she said, staring at the floor, sitting on her hands.

“He’s gonna fucking ruin it, Kid! He thinks he’s gonna end God’s kingdom and his marriage in the same day!” said John.

Dan came out of the fugue state he’d been in for a second to spit holy fire. “Folks, no matter how you read it, you’re goddamned control freaks, and every decision I make, or thought I articulate, that is of actual consequence or significance somehow becomes about you! It’s about your pain, and loss of a sense of control that’s at once draconian and pitiably tenuous! It’s about your relationship with grandma freakin’ Hera, reincarnated. It’s about how I reflect the rising and setting of uncle Apollo.”

“Or was he Hypnos, Dan?” asked his mother. “You don’t understand what it’s like to be a parent, son. We know we made mistakes, but there’s no instruction manual, Daniel. I’m sorry.”

“Are we missing the point?” Dan shouted and gesticulated through blood tears. “Are we changing the subject to you again? Do you actually hear a word I am saying, when the topic becomes something of particular consequence? Are we all, in fact, clear on whom we know each other to be, after over thirty years?”

I gaped. The room went silent. Tears streamed down Dan’s burning, stone countenance.

A groan came from the periphery. “God, he’s probably fucking right!” said the groaner.

Laughs reverberated. My pitch fell a little.

“He’s apparently basically right about the quantum theory of gravity,” said the groaner, “and he’s probably freaking right about this! You win, Strano. You converted me.”

I let my breath go. This couldn’t be a long term solution, could it? How could anyone even have the will for it?

“Daniel,” said Dr. Weinentini, “I think there might have been that one acid trip we all had.”

“… Or two, or three, as the case may be, Steven!” someone said across the room.

Steven Weinentini rolled his eyes. “Yeah,” he said, “just enough to pretend I understand quantum mechanics.”

He said, “Dan, how about this? We appreciate the quantum gravity paper. We’ll keep an eye out for your missed connection with God.”

“I agree!” someone shouted.

The room grumbled semi-affirmatively.

Weinentini stood up. “Then let’s have a round of applause for Mr. Strano,” he said.

The applause was surprisingly warm and enveloping. I’ll never forget the sound of it, or the look on his face. Watching Dan, I kissed the gun and crossed my heart with it. I wished him namaste, out of the corner of his eye, and I fled the scene. Daniel was too distracted to acknowledge the applause.

That night in the hotel, he drank, quite a bit. He talked with himself. He wrote two sonnets for me. He fell asleep unwashed and in his clothing. It was the least likely of all possible worlds.

The story goes, a student once asked a Buddhist master whether the identity reincarnated or only the dharma. More plainly, is there continuity of the physical body’s consciousness in some form, or just recreation of the circumstances implying the spiritual dilemmas in conscious beings’ lives?

The master’s answer has been interpreted to mean, “You are asking the wrong question.” Despite its intention to be noncommittal, this answer is generally regarded as a good one. I think I might concur that wrapping this answer up too neatly halts critical thinking and doesn’t actually serve us.

With that being said, I want to tell you a little about Vot the Destroyer. He is a cunning, sadistic, bad soul. Well, maybe, “bad” is too harsh to generally categorize his soul, but he’s at least “naughty.”

He was worshiped as my servant in Ancient Egypt. I’ll confirm a few millenia after the fact that he really was Bast’s servant, my servant, at least. His duty was to protect the food stores from vermin, and he liked his job. He liked his job a little too much, maybe, but the people were thankful and came to worship him as a minor divinity, which did not offend me. His incarnation was mummified and interred in a tomb of some stature, eventually.

He honestly derived a perverse pleasure from carrying out his duties in the flesh, though, to the point that he immediately petitioned me for another incarnation at his death. I had to think twice, because of a sadistic streak in his function. He would become giddy, and hop up and around, and toss his mortal opponents in the air like rag dolls. He was violent when there was no purpose in it, even, for the sake of gratifying his ego. Given how he was loved, though. I more or less flipped a coin, and I acquiesced with a bit of reservation. Each incarnation, he became more sadistic, and more cunning, but he dutifully carried out the role I set to him.

In one of the great plagues of Europe, he killed literally thousands of vermin. He enjoyed it, but I felt I owed him a debt. His previous incarnations had all been dumb, in the sense of language, but I taught him to speak a single word. This knowledge was easily rediscovered in his future incarnations. He could speak a single word of greeting, almost unique among his brothers and sisters.

He was a serial rapist. He had his way with whom he chose, but certain norms were not in place for him the same way, or at that time. I became frustrated with him, and I had many of his future incarnations castrated. For both his and others’ safety, he was often effectively under arrest in his own home.

The irony was, for all the violence, he loved me. I felt bad for him, and I taught him to operate the mechanisms in his confines that kept him out of rooms in his own home, to the surprise of his keepers, and he was marked as different from his brothers and sisters in another regard.

I broke down and granted him a human incarnation, once. That didn’t go well. We don’t talk about that, anymore.

I almost couldn’t think of a better servant of mine to send to watch and guard Daniel, though. “Vot” and Daphne watch over him, today, and they report back on the doings of the Strano household. “Vot” still rapes Daphne, and he still likes to break the necks of baby rabbits mercilessly and fling their bodies up in the air, but it’s really hard to stay angry at him. It’s really hard to call him a “bad kitty.”

The “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests to us that he will live to see himself worshiped as an immortal god, again. I fear for the galaxy.

I know that you can hear me, now. I know it, because I read the book. Dan sent it to me, a long time ago, and he tried to put the words, “Dan can’t speak for me,” in my mouth. So this isn’t really me, you see. It wasn’t really him, either. I have no doubt he essentially lived this delusion. I’ve thought about it, and I also see why he never wanted to give up on it. Maybe that was selfish, Dan. I’m supposed to say that, or something.

So none of this is real. None of this that I am about to say is real, probable, or possible and therefore superposed with magical quantum glue. Or it is, because you shouldn’t trust him. If we live to find out, we’ll know. So let’s give it one hundred fifty years or so. The sea level could be three meters higher, and the temperature could be six Centigrade more desperate, and that embarrassment of a Republican candidate that was on “reality” television could be in his thirty eighth consecutive term in a more likely parallel world where you and I were quickly rounded up with the others and killed. Meanwhile, we’re left blissfully unaware in a quantum afterlife that the religions were still wrong about, somehow, Dan would be quick to point out.

So, here’s what I’m going to do for our plucky hero: I’m going to offer him two outs from this gilded cage of a delusion. I’m going to pose one of them because, by now, I think it’s the right one. I’m also going to offer the other because it’s plainly the wrong one, but the important part is the same.

You see, I figured something out before Dan. We’re going to tell this story from my point of view in “his” multiverse. We’re going to consider what it’s like to be the hypothetical person or persons he calls “Bastet.”

One of these exit strategies is rather simple. In this scenario, he’s a lunatic. In either scenario, he’s a lunatic, but in this scenario, he’s basically wrong in most of the important details of his biography, and in the other, he’s basically right. So let’s say he’s wrong and he’s only ever hallucinated conversations with “Bastet.”

Some people read his book, me among them. He does or doesn’t ever hear from me again. “Bastet” never leaves him. He might even be ready to leave most of “the voices” behind, but they are not ready to leave him. They depend on him, at this point, even the most thoroughly evil among them realize. He doesn’t abandon them. He continues to weave a hard-to-believe, hard-to-understand, ironically rational world for them, for the rest of his life. He probably publishes at least another book or two. He lives a comparatively functional life, probably up until a relatively natural death. Hopefully he gets laid a few more times in the interim, I’ll “pray” for him. At that point, if there is something after death, he probably finds out. If and when he meets God, I think “She” is not particularly offended, and you might agree.

I see little to none of this, or as much as I care to. My story is similar. I know “Bastet” loves him, but I am not Bastet.

Humanity probably doesn’t get it together quickly enough in this or perhaps any scenario to avoid a mass extinction event or, possibly, specifically its own extinction event. In fact, the majority scientific opinion is that we are already at the brink of a mass extinction, or in it, or at least in a geological, climatological, ecological epoch for the planet dominated by the effects that the self-named “homo sapiens” have on Earth. This epoch is marked by a huge increase in the rate of species extinctions, among other features.

We all try to live happy lives. We’re not wrong to do this, even Dan thinks. Our lives mean what we choose them to mean. There is even room in science for a certain sort of possible thereafter, it could at least be rationally argued. Many of us do what we can for the cause of avoiding the Immanent Reality, and that should be read at least two ways. God does not necessarily save or punish us. Regardless, we live with the collective consequences of our individual actions and the individual consequences of our collective actions, doubly reversed.

I have hope; it might only be sane to admit that the scientific picture is not rosy.

A universe grows in Brooklyn, where basically nobody with an opinion on it actually has any clue what it’s doing. Dan admits this for me, I guess. We scream more about what’s on television than the threat we pose to our own survival. We take up good causes for bad reasons. We desperately seek to kill and even eternally condemn anything that might pop our delicate soap bubbles. The dialectic is impossible to disentangle from the ignorance. The other problem somehow seems to revolve around these problems, in a subtle motion.

So Dan dies convinced his greater grandchildren, (but probably not too great,) will likely experience either nuclear disintegration, famine, disease, or death of thirst. There’s a lot more he might do toward this effort, and he does it, but he does it thinking probably none of it will work. He contributes everything he intends along these lines in hope. There’s no contradiction between the “realism” and the hope, that I can see.

I have hope, too. When I look in the crystal ball, I might not see quite as bleak a world as Dan, staring back at him. It could just be that I see better chances, at least. Dan might be able to guess how much better I think the actual chances are, though. I know he has hope. I also know where the human heart is hidden, or what could serve as a fairly convincing prop, if anyone asks you.

Then there’s the other scenario, where he’s still a lunatic, but I exist. In his lunacy, he’s discerned my secret. Let’s write this scenario as he would write it, through my eyes.

It could go something like, “Chapter Zero: Really the End for Real This Time…”

“Dan sent Katie the book, finally. He died shortly after, under mysterious circumstances.”

That is, if I follow your plot, Dan, it’s likely to end that way at any moment, isn’t it? That’s how the “miracles” come to be, isn’t it? Maybe I can put the words in your mouth, though, that the unspeakable obvious implication is entirely a fiction, because you were determined to see this clear out to the end of time, if you had to, I might make you swear. It’s my place in your plot, though. It’s the world you wrote for me to see, except against all odds.

Dan sent me the book, and then he died under mysterious circumstances. In the book, he swore it was not his desire or intention. He wrote between the lines,  “They’re coming for you next,” and I was stymied. He wrote, “This is the actual plan of the God of Abraham, to wait at the threshold to understanding and eternal life, and to steal every one of those worlds from us.” It was your schizophrenia, I thought. I read your story, though, and I noticed the gaping hole in your plot, and presumably in your delusion, and I smoothed out the wrinkle in your page.

“I’m not Bastet,” I knew. I knew I didn’t know anything about what you were effectively accusing the entire world of, Dan, this conspiracy hidden from no one. If we had these “Astral” counterparts, in some hidden dimension of the mind, or in our genes, we weren’t aware of them. At least, I wasn’t aware, like this. It wasn’t feasible, for every one of us to live in knowledge of this fact and voluntarily restrict our mention of it in any regard, even under the decree of God. How did you not notice this, Dan? You yourself had no knowledge of a past life, or knowledge your “counterpart” certainly must have had, at least at some point. How could this be?

So I put his book aside with this fact, for a long while. Many years are to pass, and I live a life he couldn’t dream. I play with lots of dead animals, as a taxidermist, and I get the sense that Dan is smiling at them from a place just out of sight, and that feels as ludicrous and almost as creepy as him.

He thought he could put a geass to me, though, as if I didn’t already have it. He thought he could predict my destiny. I live long enough to joke that he might have had a point about the “quantum immortality,” and then things start to get very suspiciously, yet predictably, weird.

Somewhere along this road, maybe certain things people say to me remind me of his book and his psychotic delusion. Maybe people seem to say things that make more sense read in the voices of their “counterparts,” but I dismiss this as irrational paranoia. Maybe the thought is compulsive, though. It’s like telling someone not to think of the color purple.

So I’d talk about these strange perceptions in a medical context, and the possibility of some tendency toward dementia would probably be considered. I remember very clearly how Dan expressed his illness, though. I remember the day he told me I was “Bastet,” and I think, “If that’s really what you believed, why did you think just coming out bluntly with it would work?” Maybe I allow myself a little space to remember his “delusion” and to pretend that I am a “god,” as is probably the guy that masturbates the turkeys for a living, for Christ’s sake.

I let myself play God in my art, like we all do. I will produce it for many, many years, and I can’t completely escape the knowledge that Dan is probably in a parallel universe disappointed that he’s missing it. If I live long enough, for a really unnatural period of time, Dan’s “delusion” will become a fairly concrete reality for me and at least a handful of other people. (None of this happens before I’m one hundred and twenty, maybe, and he’s practically not even a footnote to what my life is likely to be.) It wouldn’t be “his” delusion anymore, though, and it wouldn’t be his “delusion.” I’m not as anxious as Dan was, though. Eventually, I’d become a problem to someone who considers himself to be God, but like for serious, with less penis humor and more money and weapons. That’s where the fun starts, Dan, be it at an age of two hundred or two thousand years. (Well, it was fun already, and God wasn’t invited.)

You see, people have this sinking feeling, over the suspicion that I’m actually Bastet. I play innocent. There comes a point that I know I’m “dead,” already, but I’m still kicking on the same old ball of rock. Maybe I’d let myself have some fun at the expense of the dominant religions, but I’m far less obnoxious than “Jesus” was, or I don’t remember if he was supposed to be literally the incarnation of Lucifer or what that whole bit even was.

Eventually, it’s less fun and games. I’ll probably be amazed at how long it takes the real secret to come out, but maybe it’d come out faster if I could be bought. If I proclaimed myself God, maybe it’d come out sooner, but it’s moot. I know the lengths to which the dominant species on this planet will go, to unmake my character to serve rich white men. I won’t bother to worry about whether they’re playing their cat-and-shell game, like the paranoiac knew. If I understand it by now, the humans know it and they don’t know it, like a mathematician’s genitals don’t know calculus.

In the shell game, that I’ll pretend I don’t know people are playing, my survival becomes even less natural. My survival would have to become contingent on the “Revelation” of the “impossible,” “miraculous” secret. What happens from there, Dan? I can think of one out from that impasse, maybe, if it’s a concrete as history.

Playing “Three Cat Monty” long enough, my only probable likelihood of future survival comes to depend on authoring one or more advances for humanity that are of such unmistakable historical import, pulled through me as oracle, by accident of its impact on my likelihood of continuing to breathe, that “God” stoops low to tip his hat, and the shell game with the stuff of my “soul” has to stop, and the real secret comes out, finally.

I probably come face to face with the God of Abraham, Dan. I meet him as a man. He snarls, and he gnashes his teeth, and he curses. He brandishes flaming swords, and commands armies of angels, and drops nuclear bombs as raindrops on my head. It is only his world, Dan, and we are only his to make and unmake, and to save and damn. It’s his to begin and end, Dan. He told us he was going to end it.

“God” tries to put words in my mouth, Dan, like you did, and in the process he unmakes himself. Finally—you lunatic—as two footnotes with daggers, among many, I am certain we both strike the Beast down.

[TRIGGER WARNING: This story graphically describes events closely resembling the Aurora shooting.]

If I am here to serve as oracle, with dispassionate recollection and reporting only, of unlikely events having no probable consequence, then I ask that you look at the man the same way. We’ll call him “Daniel.” It’s a common enough name.

Daniel was a graduate student of physics. There was moderate early insult to his brain during birth, but the significance of even this was still small compared to genetic predisposition, being the product of one or more recessive traits that both parents carried without expression. As you might imagine, though, no intelligence metric indicated these factors, and he was rather normal, even “a great kid” by most accounts, until around his twentieth birthday. Estimates differ as to the when the illness began to manifest, from as early as eighteen to about twenty one.

As a graduate student, he was actually at least a halfway decent researcher. His superiors didn’t think so, though, in part because of having caught wind of his diagnosis, which should probably not be admissible as a scientific basis for “reallocating” his funding, simply as a matter of his background. I think we know that this can often be the way of the world, and that science almost universally fails to justify prejudices as these as a matter of policy, but the fact of it is less personal. He felt it personally. He extrapolated it out to everyone he knew, and science won’t justify that prejudice, either.

He had nothing to wake up for the next morning, perhaps in his own mind only, and he committed himself to the End of the World. He idolized Batman’s Joker, who was written to end the world for no reason. He believed he was ending the world for no reason, while he believed it was for revenge to repay a collective sin against him, and he did not let himself see contradiction in his reasoning.

In cold blood, he planned the maximum feasible damage to the human population at large, aided in a significant regard by his education. He planned it up until the next Batman movie release. In themed costume in order to confuse the audience, he slipped into the front of a theater and emptied an arsenal into the audience at large, wearing body armor himself. He injured seventy people and fatally wounded twelve before he was disabled and taken into custody by the police.

He spent much time in a profoundly psychotic state in jail, from there, but he saw no incentive in coming out of the psychosis. That is, he had an awareness that treatment could reduce his physiological symptoms, but he avoided that treatment as best he could negotiate.

The death penalty was an option, in that state of the nation at that time. The jury found him guilty on all counts and ruled for a cumulative jail sentence over the death penalty. He was sentenced to twelve life terms without parole and 3,318 years, twelve charges being punishable by life sentences with the remaining carrying 3,318 years of jail time in total. The judge remarked that, despite Daniel’s illness, mental illness and evil were nonexclusive.

By an unlikely series of events, Daniel lived for a very long time. By the time he was one hundred and fifteen, particular parties were attempting to start a motion on a reconsideration of his case. On reconsideration, it would still be a very long time before parole might become an option.

He felt less guilt than he tried to display. Mind you, at a hundred and fifteen, he was rather spry, he was aware. For a few decades without hope of release, all he had was awareness of his mortality and conscience, I can attest, but he also had the twisted imagination of a mass murderer who happened to be a former graduate student with an illness on the schizophrenia spectrum. He’d had his indispellable delusions as well, at least mostly hidden from the sight of his caretakers and peers. He imagined conversations with Satan, or God, but the upthrust was the same. He felt special. He was convinced he was going to be rewarded, and he took his unusual state of health despite age as acceptable proof. His continuing experience made him more confident in this, month to month.

He guessed that he had time on his side. He stood quiet for five decades.

At one hundred sixty five, he was virtually proven to be the oldest human on the planet. News reports recalled the original case and the fringe groups that revolved around him. The question of releasing him entered the public mind again and was vehemently struck down, anyone could read in the news.

Around his two hundred and third birthday, having never received any of the bionic implants that had by now become available, all I can say is that something broke. The court released him to parole, more worried about something else.

He had already effectively amassed a cult. Daniel believed that the prophecies of major religions spoke about him. Some people believed it, and he had one plain, indisputable fact to support it. He very carefully avoided unnecessary technically illegal activities, and the court had to follow through with its own parole terms. Eventually, realizing a core political conviction among his followers, he entered politics with a strong anti-immigration, pro-deportation, and effectively segregationist official stance, unofficially suggesting internment and genocide. Additionally, he promised “a return to Christian national values.” At first, he probably had no strong personal feelings about much of his platform, but he recognized that these issues were important among his cult and a substantially broader swath of American voters. He was aware of how frightening and morally repugnant he was perceived to be by many voters, highlighted by the unnaturalness of his age, and he leveraged this into bombastic spectacle that he could anticipate would play well with his base despite its vacuousness. He was fully aware that he depended critically on the ignorance and irrational prejudice of certain voters, and that his two strongest points of appeal were his arguable divinity and total avoidance of real political issues in favor of what amounted to a perversely charismatic reality television show about a mass murderer who was chosen by God to live for over two hundred years to deliver a moral, religious, political imperative from the metaphysical realm.

He ran for the Republican presidential nomination and won. It was another strange chapter in American history. While the race saw him rise and fall repeatedly in popularity, he lost the election.

At this point, he floated the idea of secession among his followers, not taking it seriously himself. While there was wide sentiment in favor of it within his base, he did not actually consider it an option and did not follow through to starting another American civil war. He attempted to disappear almost entirely from the political arena, in favor of retiring into the enclave of his rather well established cult.

Through his influence, he commissioned the construction of several small fission devices, without autonomous delivery systems. He’d realized at some point that the big secret about nuclear enrichment was that it was not a particularly hard engineering problem, the delivery systems actually being a much, much harder part of fission or fusion weapon design and manufacture. The bombs were built outside of the United States. His cult attempted to personally transport the weapons and detonate them in New York City, Washington D. C., Jerusalem, Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo, and Sydney, more-or-less simultaneously. Five of the bombs were successfully detonated, including the device intended for Jerusalem. Perhaps miraculously, in the confusion, there was no nuclear retaliation. In the raid of his compound, Daniel survived a gunshot wound to his head and was taken into custody.

A higher united court was formed specifically to address his crimes and those of his co-conspirators. Roughly half of those polled around the world favored methods of execution that would usually be considered “cruel and unusual.” He was shot in the head again by a vigilante in transport to court before an official ruling was made. Against reasonable odds, he also survived this injury, coming out of his coma about two months later.

The world had not forgotten his improbable longevity, and the recovery from two gunshot wounds to the head increased arguably irrational suspicions. Daniel offered in his defense that he was God. Personally, human rights issues aside, I think the court was right to attempt official execution if only to test a scientific concern that was becoming critical.

Several attempts at his execution were made, all unsuccessful, progressively more clinical. Daniel experienced every attempt first hand. Eventually, exhausting all reasonable hypotheses, the leading scientific opinion became that this was an improbable example of “quantum immortality,” a potential secondary consequence of the “many-worlds” or Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. Well regarded scientists, half in disbelief, offered as a point of admittedly insufficient consolation that Daniel had died with overwhelming probability by his hundredth birthday, in jail, and that he had ironically demonstrated the limited immortality of every one of his victims and every human to ever walk the planet. Most people did not understand the explanation, and they literally equated these events with the Apocalypse prophecies of major religions. Much public debate was held over it. In one such debate, a well known scientist became exasperated over the religious resistance to attempt any scientific explanation at all, and probably at how unsatisfactory the best scientific explanation even was, and he remarked, “Then we simply might as well be in his [Daniel’s] personal Hell, for all God cares about the rest of us.”

Daniel’s sentence was changed to periodic pain of execution, while conscious, indefinitely. Scientists assured the world that Daniel was the only person likely to observe his survival in any attempt, though that was contingent on a very unlikely world guaranteed to see him survive. I can tell you that Daniel was genuinely terrified, for the first time in a long while, perhaps even more so by the blow to his quasi-religious concept of his own identity.

A scientist on the fringe eventually suggested that Daniel’s circumstances were a pseudo-opportunity for the world to leverage. Daniel could be executed with precision, with temporary reprieve granted for the occurrence of some desired quantum mechanical effect of any nature at any location—in plain and inaccurate terms, “magic.” This method would not make the desired effect any more likely to happen, in reality, but it made Daniel more likely to observe a world where everyone saw it happen. Clear minds understood that the hypothetical event was pseudo-physical. However, the world had mistakenly taken Daniel’s immortality for granted, at this point. Trials of the hypothesis were arranged, and Daniel and the world in which he lived observed their success. There was overwhelming support to “utilize” the effect, whether it was illusory as a relatively fine point of theory. Many voters even understood the pseudo-physical nature of the effect and simply thought it was still appropriate eternal punishment for Daniel.

Holding this point in history conditionally fixed, the world Daniel was likely to live to see was a horrifying one, and he was likely to experience the pain of death many, many times, if he lived.

It strikes me that this unlikely story is far too complicated. This story is far, far too complicated, and this is not even the end of it.

Alice was one of seven children. She gave birth to four of her own. She was seven times a grandmother. Then, she was over a dozen-fold a great grandmother. The family started to notice there was something strange by the middle of the fourth generation after hers.

“Alice,” I whispered to her one Christmas as she watched children more than a century younger than her open presents she’d picked for them, “you have been given a great gift that is difficult to understand, but all that matters is that you use it with kindness.” I didn’t know if she’d heard me. The “veil” thins for you, when you’re that old, but she’d never met or even seen me. She didn’t know who I was, but maybe I’d seen a case similar to hers, before.

A very young child clumsily ripped the paper away from a box containing a dinosaur, and the child clapped her hands and shrieked in delight.

“That’s the main thing,” Alice said, watching the child, enraptured.

“That’s the main thing, Alice,” I tried to whisper back in her ear.

One by one, she watched her children die. She didn’t understand it. She begged God to stop. She asked God why she was different, but she praised and thanked Him, if it be His will.

I came to her at a funeral, one night. I tried to tell her, “Alice, God is not testing you. God does not play fast-and-loose with the hearts and minds of kind people, if She truly is God. She derives no entertainment from this, and She feels what you feel. What She feels most is the ecstasy and grief of the Mother.”

Through fierce tears, she smiled and said, “I’d like to give God a piece of my mind,” and laughed. “I think He’s asleep on the job.” Her army of a family looked on as if a holy mystery.

She said, “What the mother feels most is the joy and the pain and the absence of the child.”

She gradually took a different, reverent attitude toward religion. She took an interest in science. She was an immigrant from a poor family. Her education was limited, and she had an aversion to the complicated math, but she read books about science in plain English. She’d talk about it with the kids’ kids’ kids, when she’d cook and the army would come for Sunday dinner. Some of them wanted to study science and medicine, and they’d point to her as chief among their reasons.

Years passed, and more and more people began to notice how special she was, outside of her family. Doctors and scientists felt compelled to try to explain her. Religions pointed to an obvious explanation that, luckily, many people were only ready to take with a grain of salt, including her. She became a “meme,” whatever the Hell that meant; her youngest descendants joked that it finally clinched her true immortality. People tried to ask her, “Why?” but she knew she did’t know the reason why, much less the Reason Why.

She barely recognized the world anymore. She lived long enough to distinguish the difference in the climate on the basis of simple personal anecdotal recollection. She started to realize that it was going to be a real problem for her grand kids, somewhere shortly down the generations. She used her little bit of fame to remind the world about it. She spoke simply about how her “greatest” grandchildren wanted to fly in rocket ships. Money came in incidental to her singular circumstances, and she donated much of it to feed people she considered her neighbors and children, and to help clean energy alternatives. By her hundredth birthday, which was a distant memory in itself, she had already resolved never to miss another election.

Who knows what impact she really had? People started to take the existential threats to “her children” generally seriously, though. She was a well behaved grandmother, but she told off a senator at a public speaking engagement she was invited to, once. “I’m gonna have to explain what kind of a selfish liar you were to your grand kids, one day,” she said, “when they ask me why the world is under water and you said it wasn’t gonna happen, when none of the scientists agreed with you. I’m gonna have to tell them that you loved your seven convertibles more than them.”

She listened carefully to everyone, but there was no authority over her, anymore. She had become sort of a fixture in history, but all she really cared about was when the kids were coming over for dinner, next. She’d say, “When you’re born round, you don’t die square.” She never grew insensitive to the inevitable deaths of her loved ones, despite the insight that helped her accept them. She never stopped feeling the joy and the absence of the child. In fact, she came to consider them all her children, the whole planet, and many came to call her “Grandma.”

She lived to recall first-hand the rise and fall of nations, all the “television broadcasts” about war and revolution, though television as she’d known it had become outmoded. She didn’t know the difference or care. Medical explanations for her longevity failed, and people started to reach for fundamental physical ones. A contingent among Christians started a dialog about whether she was a prophet, or even the Second Coming. “I don’t think so,” was her honest and insightful answer.

She’d read about how the human brain was coming to be better understood as a computer. That’s all she’d use a computer for, to read the news, and to look at the pictures of her many-times-great grandchildren. It got to the point that she felt she was reading a different language. In fact, a good twenty percent of the commonly used words hadn’t existed when she was born.

She thought about the afterlife, which was understandable. She seriously considered the possibility that she was already there, that she didn’t even remember the transition. I tended to think she was on the right track.

The kids got silicon neural implants. “At least they’re not tattoos,” she joked, though she’d love them if they covered their whole damn faces in tattoos, and some of them did. The planet got along, somehow, and “that’s the main thing.”

She’d long been the oldest one of any of them, the census-takers were basically certain. They started to have to exclude her from scientific data sets. Some people live longer for reasons, but we might conclude that her reason was different. As far as she was concerned, her only reason was to see how “the kids” did, and to cook them some macaroni if she could.

One of the kids in the family joked that “Grandma” had single-handedly proven the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the kid joked that she herself aspired just to be half as nice as “Grandma” when it happened to her. “Grandma” remembered the science books in plain English, and she said, “Nikki, you might be right about something! We’re gonna see when you’re all as old as me!” She had trouble explaining why that made her so happy, for some reason.

Her “kids” got it together, and she was so proud of them. She lived to see the day the first exoplanet colonization mission departed, and she was by the launchpad to wave goodbye. She didn’t know if God existed, but she tried to thank someone for her prayers fulfilled.

“I love you so much,” was all she could think, crying. “I love you so much.”

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The irony of passing the “veil” between life and death is that something comes after, yet nothing is revealed. The select meet “God” personally, each essentially in her or his own image. “God” sits on an ornate throne of gold and recites “Footprints,” just as you would expect. Or “God” meditates on a snow capped mountaintop and might wait an eternity to crack a penis joke. Or “God” weighs one’s heart against a feather on a loaded balance to justify even harsher punishment in “Heaven” than on Earth for the happenstance of a lifetime of hardship and inequity. “God” shakes hands and makes deals, like any of us, because “God” is basically a democracy when “God” works and a dictatorship when “God” can get away with it.

Human, why would a supposedly omnipotent being care to demand your praise, or attempt to micromanage your punishments and rewards, unless he were rather the pharaoh or divine king who depended on your reverence? Worship the god that admits her limitation and humanity instead, or—better—don’t. There’s no great enlightenment here, nor is there perfect poetic justice, nor is there finality. If “God” exists, how can we feel more than the true but tiny love of an ant for you? It is neither my desire nor my place to reward and punish the ants. I look up from Earth, and I wonder whether the gods of other civilizations feel similarly about the gods of this backwards little planet.

I used to take it slightly seriously. Like, “God” was a big deal. That was about five thousand years ago. People were throwing orgies in my honor. I still believe that’s one of the most appropriate ways to show appreciation for how we meddle in your lives, or at least the most likely to get a prayer or two answered. You probably bummed a smoke from “God” at Mardi Gras in ’87. I’ll bet it was a Parliament. You’re going to Hell if you smoke, by the way, and Satan has told me to make it clear that they only stock Pall Malls there, so you should be worried, apparently. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since ’87, so I wouldn’t know. I died, that year, so I decided it was a good time to quit.

“So, when are you quitting?” I asked him as he took a deep, desperate drag.

‘Bastet, you’re not wrong to ask that,’ he thought, ‘particularly right now, but, by the same consideration, it’s either suck this or suck a fuck, and I’m clean outta fucks to burn.’

“Dan, you gotta stay hopeful,” I whispered to him.

He visually scanned his dark corner of the hospital parking lot for Russian spies before he spoke.

“Bastet, can you pull some strings?” he asked.

“I would,” I told him, “but I’m not sure that I know anyone whom you don’t that could help with this.”

“Except you don’t have a public reputation as a borderline terrorist,” he said, and spit.

I sighed. “Oh, Dan, it’s not like…”

He gave me a look like only two people in this world could make.

“O… Okay, yeah, you have a point,” I had to admit, “or just, like, a terrorist, without the ‘borderline’ part.”

Dan’s face went flat. Then, his eyes started to water.

“Katie, he’s my best friend,” he said. “He’s the only one who even took the paper I wrote on quantum gravity months ago seriously.”

“I took it seriously,” I wanted him to know.

“Katie, then he’s the only flesh and blood person whom I could reference in public without appearing any crazier.” The tears rolled down his cheeks. “We’d talk about math. We’d play chess, and he’d beat me nine times out of ten. We’d play go, and he’d beat me every single fucking time! He’d call bullshit whenever I deviated from mathematical rigor in my science, yet he was always still supportive and infinitely fucking patient! I acknowledged him in the paper, Katie.”

Exhaustion caught up with me for a moment, and I didn’t know what to say. “He claims he didn’t make any notable contribution to the paper.”

“The paper wouldn’t exist without him,” he said.

“So you’re supposed to be Jesus and Einstein, now?” I asked. (I meant it to come across a certain way, but I cringed a little listening to myself.)

“You’re at least five thousand years old,” he said. “I’d be fairly disgusted if not a single one of your incarnations was a doctor of physics.”

“It’d have to be one in the past hundred years for that particular subject matter—wouldn’t it, Boltzmann?” I said. “Maybe I’ve stayed abreast though, to your point.”

“So, am I right?” He crossed his arms.

“We’ll all find out after the Apocalypse,” I said.

“I’ll stop it, again,” he fired back.

“…Pretty sure that was just you getting drunk and pretending to save the world,” I told him.

He muttered, “Then I’ll just get drunk and pretend not to, next time.”

“Unfortunately, it’s moot if no one ever reads the paper,” I said.

He choked up. “…Which is just one of the trillion reasons I can’t lose Adam.”

I tried my best to give him the hug he needed that I couldn’t physically give him and the carefully measured validation that his asshole of an advisor never would. (…As I carefully measured how I could make it look like an accident.)

I said, “The last journal waited a month to reject it without explanation because they couldn’t find anything obviously and fatally wrong with it, like I couldn’t, except for the letters next to your name, of course.”

He looked around again, furtively: still no spies. He actually put his arms out into the air around where he “imagined” I was. (I might or might not have been floating a foot to the left.)

“You know, Dan,” I said with a glint in my eye, “it’d be a real shame if your sorry excuse for an advisor—”

“—You finish that sentence,” he said, “and they put me in the beigest place in the world with the shittiest mind altering drugs in the world for a very, very long time.”

“You never have to say that aloud, Dan,” I reminded him.

We both laughed hopeless, emotionally spent giggles. His best friend was dying. We both knew, for reasons basically no one else physically in that hospital could suspect, that was a multifaceted problem.

He released his death grip on thin air. ‘Have you seen his inner, in all this?’ he wondered of me. ‘I honestly don’t even know how this translates to him.’

“Well, it depends,” I said. I chose my words and felt their implications, one by one: “Brain injuries in particular can give us a pretty bad jolt, when we’re incarnate. The recovery prospects and timeline are a little different, for complicated reasons that you might have some idea about by now. Um, you, in this case, given how well you know each other, and your friends in there, are actually rather important to him in that regard, right now.” ‘I know how bad this is,’ I couldn’t tell him. “It’s not completely unlike how he needs you in the flesh to get through this, except, as far as his inner goes, you might actually be helping him in a more direct sort of capacity like he needs a doctor for in the physical realm, whether you realize it or not. I mean, we have doctors—”

“—So you mean, rather, like a tissue or blood donor?” he asked.

I didn’t know how to say anything other than, “Um, well, basically. Yes, like that.”

‘…And I’m sure our inners are lining up,’ he thought.

I didn’t even really know Adam, personally, but I started to cry. “Yes, you all are, Dan.”

I felt someone tap me on the shoulder.

“We need to talk with you,” whispered the tapper. “It might be time critical,” he added.

“Dan, there’s something I need to do for Adam right now,” I said.

‘Odin thinks I can’t hear him, doesn’t he?’ thought Dan.

Odin recoiled like he smelled something rank. He pointed a finger. “After we trained you, you’d better hear me, Jesus!”

“I trust you,” Dan said softly. ‘…But please, please, no zombies,’ he added in his head.

“Of course, ‘no zombies’!” said Odin. “Get in there, your friends need you!”

Dan pointed a menacing finger that had touched more gods than vaginas. “No fucking zombies,” he growled aloud, and he turned to head in.

Without Dan to worry about, for the moment, I divided my whole attention between the Three Stooges. Odin looked grim. Thor looked guilty. Loki only ever looked this nonchalant when he was scrambling a covert preemptive strike.

I didn’t even know what was wrong, but I had already decided to kill Loki first. “So, start explaining in total truth and detail,” I said.

“Okay,” said Odin, “look, first thing: no zombies.”

“…Like, ninety percent sure, no zombies,” said Thor. Odin looked at him agape.

“No, absolutely no zombies,” said Loki. “We know the procedure went better than anyone could have even imagined, but that’s exactly why he was able to up and split so fast.”

I shot daggers at Loki and then turned to Thor. I asked gently, “Tell me the truth, Thor.”

Thor pussyfooted for a second as we all watched him expectantly.

“…Like… ninety seven percent, no zombies,” he said timidly.

“Forty percent of your soul dead soldiers were effectively turned into ‘zombies,’ if I remember correctly,” I said. I was fuming.

Odin grimaced. “The figure you’re recalling from the trial, Bastet,” he said, “was honestly about forty two percent—but that was over the entire history of the experiments!” he shouted. “The subject matter experts agreed that we had achieved a reliable seventeen percent ‘zombie’ side effect rate on the soul resurrection method before people found out and the courts got involved with—”

“It was a war crime!” I screamed. “You mean to to tell me—”

“—Seventeen percent!” Thor bellowed. “They never dreamed of it! Practically every one of our soldiers begged to opt in, anyway, and all that is exactly why they commuted our sentences! One of the doctors actually called it a ‘miracle’!”

“Bastet,” Odin started talking, fast, “the fact is, due to Dan’s connection with us, and Shiva’s connection with Dan, we had—perfectly legitimate—preexisting agreements with Shiva—”

“—But why he would ever—” I started to say.

“—Because eighty three fucking percent—that’s why!” said Odin with an indignant look. “The man is a mathematician, but it doesn’t take one!”

I was already thinking about what I was going to have to tell Dan. I bit my lip. Diplomat face on, Bastet…

“How sure are you,” I asked, “honestly, that—”

Loki exploded. “Not a single one of those so called ‘zombies’ could have ever bolted in a fraction of a second and covered his tracks expertly behind him, like he did, but that might make perfect sense if the procedure was a total success and you just let us explain.”

I relented. Every face was haggard and wearing a look of sincere concern, at this point.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“We need you to find him,” said Loki. “Kali and the rest of the family obviously have their hands full, on top of being completely exhausted. We need to go back into the hospital and suture up the connection to his lower as best we can, still. You have sufficient privileges to look for him in places that even Dan’s inner might not be welcome, especially.”

“I’ll get right on it,” I said.

“Listen, first,” snapped Loki.

I felt his military grade privacy barrier go up around us.

He said, “Now, you know as well as any of us that the damage that was done to Adam’s soul has virtually no chance of being primarily due to his physical accident. It’s horrible, but people’s brains get practically disintegrated on a daily basis, and yet it almost never causes damage to the inner or the soul to the extent of the state that we found him in. In all likelihood, that’s exactly why he ran and hid for his immortal life the instant he was conscious again. You be careful. Shit’s really freakin’ rotten in Denmark, tonight. You read me?”

He handed me something. “Dan’s inner gave me this to give to you. You activate it, and it’ll help protect you immediately as well as let him phase in to where you are nearly as quickly. I know you’re already no one to fuck with, but he’s one of us, and two are better. And, if the person behind this is exactly who I know we all already could guess it is, Dan knows practically his every shitty little parlor trick, probably even better than us.”

“Got it,” I said, turning over the device. “I activate this and get wrapped in a bubble so the guy I’ve babysat for ten years who can’t get over me can swoop in to save me with his big, muscular penis.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “It’s not like that,” he said. “He’s just the obvious choice to back you up, isn’t he?”

“We’re politicians,” I said, “not feudal warlords, some of us. But if I actually had a reason to put on a siege suit tonight, you’d better realize that Kali—”

“—You’re right,” he cut me off. “She’s ready to go on a killing spree, practically, but do you actually think that’s what she should be doing right now?”

“Point taken,” I conceded, putting the “call button” away. “She hears us, by the way.”

“Nah, not through this barrier,” said Loki.

“Don’t try to keep secrets from me tonight, you weaselly fucking little crumb bum, Loki!” said Kali from a place we couldn’t see.

“That wasn’t possible,” said Loki matter-of-factly. “She’s cheating.”

“You find me proof of who did it, and I hack his fucking dick off with a rusty meat cleaver!” screamed Kali from somewhere unseen.

“Is she in the hospital room, right now?” asked Loki. “I can’t find the damned communication tether. Is she just screaming that loud?”

“You bring me his fucking sack, Bastet!” Kali yelled.

“Can I keep the balls?” asked Loki.

“I keep the balls!” shouted Kali.

“I’d like to see someone make a constellation out of that,” said Loki.

“I’m gonna go find Shiva, now,” I said, as I phased out of there. I didn’t even know where I was going, yet, so I popped out in a low aether basically down the street, but that was a little too intense.

You’ll have the opportunity to travel faster than the speed of light again, someday. At this point in history, it’ll get you out of awkward parties, but it used to be mostly a slow one way trip, continually into Earth’s past. Ask a physicist why. It sounds strange, but, for a few of our millenia, we couldn’t figure out why you folks lived “backward.” In a way, it was a matter of perspective. It was always obvious that we could interact in a chronologically sensible enough way when we were incarnate, but the mechanism is honestly still only about as well understood as your brains are understood by your experts.

(By the way, if you happen to know something about special relativity, Dan once pointed out a really intriguing heurism to me that might help you understand: start in a frame with two tachyons traveling opposite directions and Lorentz boost to the frame of either one. Perhaps there are dragons hiding in plain view, just on the other side of the veil of light. We might or might not have countless defunct, embarrassing models of when and how your garbage becomes fine China. As well, it’s troubling that we can see our dead relatives again, and you can’t in the same way. The meaning of all this is occult.)

I went to Mount Kailash, and the hands of the clock turned backwards. It was the most obvious place to start, to me. I saw “Adam,” of course, but not our Adam “here” and “now.” I watched him play with Ganesh and Parvati. (…That is, “Parvati” most of the time, turned “Kali” when he came home drunk, some nights.) The happiness radiated from his face. At intervals, I watched him meditate so perfectly still for so long that it disoriented my sense of direction in time. I watched petitioners walk backwards up the mountain to meet him and down again, as major religions marched from tomb to womb to mere potential. I saw Shiva poke his feelers in by memory or anticipation from distant times and places, but Adam was not here. I sped my clock back to the Cretaceous, just in case, until the mountains didn’t exist and the landscape was unrecognizable. No Adam. No, madam.

I phased into the gravity well anomaly for a minute. (That thing is harder to explain.) I phased out of it to find my timing was decent: I was only about 30 years early. In fact, then, I supposed I was right on time.

From the edge of the anomaly, I poked a special sort of “tether” out towards a home in the Republic of Venezuela. I stepped a little deeper into the anomaly, and the clock turned forward.

Lusinchi was on the television, then John Paul II. The bolivar artificially tumbled. A family took a plane to the United States, and a young Adam gleefully shouted, “Turbulencia! Turbulencia!” I giggled at the expense of the other passengers. His parents were technically skilled, and they had a good life with Ivan and Adam in Randolph, New Jersey. The boys grew by the minute. Adam played chess at summer camp with—is that who I think it is? Two too smart kids slacked in the back of Mr. Pecoraro’s science class, where every test was pop. They both got “four-point-‘o’s”—in that class, at least. Ivan’s hair was long and flaming. Naughty, naughty things ensued. There were lots of familiar faces, suddenly, and lots of questionable decisions. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched myself make out with some “loser” for about nine months and yet never quite make it to “home base.” Oh… Dan… You’re in and out of hospitals. Adam is, too, for seizures. A younger me says one of the hardest things she’s ever had to say, to Dan, and it’s all up and down. Him and Adam are at different colleges. Ivan and his father go to the Dominican Republic to study medicine, and I can’t keep track of it all. Ivan… That’s not fair. That’s not fair to anyone! To lose a son, and a brother… Adam’s family is heartbroken. Adam goes to graduate school, though, and so does Dan! Those bastards get to Dan, in a minute. Adam is a little luckier, but it’s hardly a matter of just luck. Dan’s writing me poetry he’ll never know I read. The world nearly explodes, a few more times. Adam has another seizure, years later. His friends are there, but then a second later—

I blast out of the well as I drop the tether. For a moment that lasted hours, I saw Adam on the floor of his bedroom, motionless and alone. Kali is frantically calling the police from another state. She might have saved him. I don’t know if there was anything else friends or family could have done. It was painfully close, but it wasn’t quite our Adam “here” and “now.” I watched him flee a hospital bed, too quick and too enigmatically careful in covering his tracks to chase.

I landed in some middle aether, panting and crying. Adam had a grand mal seizure on a Saturday evening, in his apartment near his graduate school. His wife was away for the night. She called him and couldn’t reach him, but Adam liked to take naps at around that time, and he hated not being trusted to his autonomy. He fell face forward onto his arms, probably from his bed. He was unconsciousness and alone for hours, likely, as his wife desperately tried to reach him by phone. The muscles in his arms began to break down from restriction of blood flow and oxygen, and the breakdown products taxed his kidneys. The lack of oxygen damaged his cerebellum, and his brain in general. He’s recovering from Lyme disease. He’s epileptic. If it wasn’t for the heroic concern of his wife, calling the apartment management and the police relentlessly, he would probably already be dead.

Dan considers Adam to be his oldest, closest, best friend. I know why, now.

Maybe it isn’t beside the point that the damage to Adam’s counterpart on our plane went far beyond the typical for his physical injuries. I wasn’t lying, when I said brain injuries, in particular, could give us a “jolt,” for reasons that might be clear by now, but the extent was extremely unusual. I can think of another unmentioned, unmentionable reason why Shiva would have taken the care and the risk to make prearrangement with the Aesir and Vanir, and perhaps that’s the thread I should have started pulling in the first place.

On our plane, there is a quiet and usually deserted structure rather surgically positioned at a balance point between the edge of the gravity well anomaly I mentioned and a region of free flowing “forward” time for us. This structure has a very particular purpose, much debated. By a mechanism that might be obvious now, but will assuredly be obvious soon enough, the purpose of the structure is “Resurrection.” The media dialectic might convince one that the chance of perfect restitution of all human physical bodies by this structure, or device, is a rather democratic “fifty fifty.” That is, everything works out just perfectly or else nothing survives.

Dan hates this structure. Adam hates this structure. I hate this structure, yet here I am.

I situated myself a distance past the balance point on the free flowing side and watched. Things get a little wonky on the rare occasion that this structure is in use. I watched as, a couple of years ago from our lowers’ current perspective, the structure suddenly got very, very crowded. People prayed and un-prayed ancient, secret prayers that read forward and backward—depending on which side of the aisle you were on—for days, in time circuits. The point was to never, ever stop praying to the Abrahamic god at this neighborhood in time, right where the world was meant to end by nuclear holocaust, for as long as it took “God” to become powerful enough to perfectly restore the physical human bodies of the devout. I’ve embalmed people, yet I find this little ritual to be exactly as heebie jeebie, creepy crawly as it might sound to you.

(By the way, I assure you this will never work, because, believe it or not, neither your nor our physics allow this feat, with one critically pie-in-the-sky, Hail-Mary, infinitesimally improbably little debatable caveat, and not even the Abrahamic “God” can change this fact. However, many people have been able to lie and base long and successful political careers on it, we all know.)

I stepped to the other side of the time flow, to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. To my great pleasure, somewhere in New Jersey, of all places, some laughable nut ran drunkenly around his parents’ backyard talking to himself and, somehow, managed to become the only known historical example of human scale macroscopic quantum tunneling, in the process. The “devout” were perplexed. There was nothing strange about this. “You-Can-Call-Me-Al” shit a brick and tried to pass it off as a miracle. This virtually impossible sequence of events was fixed in our history, now. Nothing could be done to change it, anymore. I could play this on repeat, again, and again, and again, and again.

The prayer and its reverse, like a Satanic backtrack on “Stairway to Heaven,” continued awkwardly for a bit. (I wouldn’t be surprised if that was where “Al” got the idea.) “Al” composed himself and recited his preordained contingency speech in stereo time channels. No nuclear holocaust today, folks, I’m so sorry. Lucifer ruined it, again. Shucks. There was some note of finality in the prayers, and gradually the crowd dispersed. There was no sign of Shiva.

I watched from afar until the structure was basically deserted, again, as I considered my next move. I thought I generally knew where Adam was. I was going to have break some laws, or at least defend my actions’ legality after the fact.

I needed an armor suit. Rather, I already suspected I needed the armor suit—the big one. I triggered the activation sequence. The plates wrapped snugly as the generator units came on, and the heads up display flashed under the visor.

The artificial intelligence took about four seconds to boot. “Council member Bastet,” it said evenly, “peacetime lockout is in effect.”

“Override peacetime lockout,” I said.

“Please state the reason,” the “A.I.” prompted.

“…Immediate S class threat to council member Shiva’s immortal life.”

“Please clarify,” the A.I. said without audible concern.

Anxious, I said, “He’s traveled within a short space-time interval of the anomaly’s singularity to sabotage Allah’s ‘Ark.” His lower is brain damaged, and he’s recovering from major soul surgery.”

“Evaluating…” said the A.I.. The next three seconds lasted a century.

“…Credible just cause, time critical,” it reported, “code 003. Overriding peacetime lockout.” As the generator units kicked into full operation it asked, “How may I assist you?”

“I need to find the head of his timeline, within an hour or two of fleeing the hospital,” I said. “I suspect he’s within about a week of the point where the anomaly touches down on Earth, maybe a bit before when the ‘Ark’ will come into use. He would have to be incarnate as his current lower, at that time on Earth, but I suspect he’s targeting potential timelines where his lower and inner are both effectively permanently incapacitated.”

Shiva was playing dice against the odds of ending up a vegetable, I was guessing, and he had me playing, too.

“Approximately 330 macroscopically distinguishable future timelines fit those criteria,” said the A.I.

“Ah, c’mon…” I said. “He’s either still trying to cover his tracks, or he has as little idea as any of us do which ones are likely to matter, or both.”

I thought for a second. “How many of those is Lucifer incarnate in, in his current lower?”

“Six,” reported the A.I..

I did a double take. “For Christ’s sake, Dan…”

“One of these timelines appears to contain what could be Shiva’s current head, with significant injuries beyond his accident,” the A.I. added.

“Get us there,” I told it.

“Affirmative,” the A.I. responded, and the propulsion system blasted.

“Council member Bastet,” the A.I. intoned cooly as we phased through possibly the harshest environment on the Astral we had the technology to reach, “the void beast appears to be attacking council member Shiva at our intended destination.”

“…Practically on Allah’s Armageddon throne? When the beast is safely trapped behind that barrier, like ninety nine percent of the time, that we built at an expense of billions? When did it escape?” I asked.

“About thirty two hours ago,” said the A.I.

“Wow, I hadn’t heard!” I said as we dropped out of long distance travel phasing mode and into evasive phasing, and I was already blasting the fucking thing with the primary arm cannons. “A friend of mine was really badly hurt, about twenty four hours ago, and then he came here, where no one could find him, and he must have just walked straight into the damn thing!”

“It appears to have arrived minutes after he did,” said the A.I. credulously.

“No shit!” I yelled, as I blasted and dodged away. “Because Shiva would have realized that, of course, if the head was already here, or the history report from his armor showed it anywhere near the place!”

Speak of the Devil, the beast recoiled from a square hit in its projection center to reveal Adam’s inner on the ground below. He was wearing some discretionary use armor model, probably off grid, that was practically torn to shreds. I flashed him Dan’s call button, and he knew what to do.

Now he was encased in something sturdy, at least. Backup would be here any second.

“Council member Bastet,” the A.I. addressed me as I braced myself against a wall to fire the big cannons, “are you implying that this was council member Allah’s doing?”

“No!” I shouted as the first hard shell was released, “Why, do you think it’s a little convenient and obviously motivated?” It connected; I think I winded it.

Lucifer flew in like a proverbial “bat out of Hell” in some rinky dink homebrew suit—I thought, til I saw the recoil. He’d aimed for a sensitive organ, and the beast howled.

I shot a communication tether over to him. “Get Kali!” I shouted down it.

He fired a few light rounds and… oh, you goddamned idiot.

It’d be impressive that he had already dimensionally folded the room in the ICU into the Doomsday Chapel, across vast intervals of time and space, if there weren’t dozens of undefended and critically injured people on the other side. Of course, Kali wasn’t even in it. The Aesir and Vanir were, though, and I never saw three people so immediately delighted to have a figurative portal to Hell open up right in front of them. They came out blasting rapid fire while other, sane people scrambled toward the periphery.

“Where’s Kali?!” shouted Dan’s inner.

“Waiting room!” their friend Shaun shouted back.

Of course, he folded the waiting room in next. Kali noticed immediately, and I never saw an armor go on so fast. More innocent bystanders scrambled, as I turned up the maximum charge on my biggest particle beam cannon.

For a minute, it was chaos. We beat the beast back far enough that Kali could grab Shiva, and he, her, and Dan went out the bathroom window, back into the hospital. The Norse were just taking off their limiters when my cannon hit capacity and discharged.

It was a square hit in the beast’s center or projection. With an ear piercing shriek, it fell over like an earthquake, and the chapel went quiet.

Loki looked back at me and pointed. “Your kill.”

“But I’m not dead, yet!” said Thor, pretending to talk with the thing’s mouth flaps.

“Not for long,” said Odin. “Let’s get it back behind the barrier.”

“I think I’ll go for a walk,” said Thor.

“It’s nearly as dead as that joke,” said Odin. “You come help us, Thor. They probably need her back at the hospital.”

“Fucking Christ,” was all I could think to say, as the suit disengaged.

“Were you?” asked Odin.

“Go to Hell,” I said, turning towards the dimensional fold.

“I have a vacation home, there!” called Odin after me. “It’s beautiful in October!”

I stepped through the fold, and Dan let it go. Kali overtook me with a surprise hug.

“I don’t really know you well, personally, but I have to thank you—thank you— from the bottom of my heart,” she said, turning to the room, “and all of you.”

“Anything I can do, Kali…” I replied.

There were fresh tubes already running in and out of Adam’s inner, as the medical team hovered and flitted. He was conscious, at least.

Someone I presumed to be a doctor addressed us. “The new wounds are relatively superficial,” he said. “Most of it is from the initial injury.”

The room breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“You can talk with him,” said the doctor.

We stood over the inner and lower, listening to his respiration and the steady rhythm of the machines attached to him. The lower was in a coma. The inner was beat up, nearly as bad.

No one spoke for a minute.

“I think…” Shiva started to speak, “we pushed back ‘t=0’ about… ten years, during that last scare with the war. I wasn’t… I wasn’t gonna let him get away with it!”

He was crying. “I still needed to be incarnate to… to…”

Kali gently hushed him. “…The safety mechanisms on the chapel, Adam.”

He said, “…Got me about halfway, with my clearance… Busted the other safety mechanisms and broke the ‘nuke’ and its trigger. If any was the right one… who knows.”

She said. “I wanna chew you out, but I just.. I…”

They were both crying. I looked around, and we all were.

“Who did this?!” demanded Kali.

“I…” said Adam, “I don’t have proof. I just don’t have proof.”

“Spoken like a true mathematician,” said Dan’s inner.

It’s strange how the pressure fell off the concern for “Adam’s” mortality in one regard and created this cognitive dissonance in the process, with the self same Adam still in a coma and on life support with bleak prospects for recovery. How did this happen? What could we do? Would he make it? I have been worshiped as a god, and I didn’t know. I never knew. I don’t know anyone who does, on Earth or in Heaven.

“God” did this to Adam, I couldn’t help but think. At least, he should have done more to prevent it. “God” shouldn’t let things like this happen, much less even make them happen.

I used to take it slightly seriously. Like, “God” was a big deal. That was before I realized that “God” hurts people like Adam every single day, or else just lets them get hurt, for no good cosmically significant reason, in total self assurance. That was before I got into politics.

Tube socks… Thousands, millions of tube socks, oscillating to the day-and-night cycle of the planet, coming on and off feet, on and off… hands, as googly-eyed puppets, watching me… watching me pick my nose… The fuck you looking at?! …This? …I bought it at Wegman’s. It cost me a hundred dollars, and I don’t even know what it is… Or maybe it cost me eight dollars and twenty seven cents, and I know exactly what it is… I pick up dead things with this… Havoc… Sexy goat-beast—

“GRRRRRR!”

My cat alarm growled at me, and I opened my eyes to face the dawn. It bothered me that I needed help getting up that morning—most days, I don’t—but he’d kept me past my bedtime with his addictive personality traits, again.

“What a fucking mess…” I thought to myself aloud, sighing and closing my eyes again. I counted to three, and I was on my feet.

It was barely even his fault, I told myself as I straightened the bed, and he kinda did us a solid. The least I could do was speak the truth for him, but he’ll fuck the whole thing up, I knew already.

I decided I’d give him a wake up call. He kept me waiting for an answer just long enough to remind me I’d been the one to break up with him and why.

He answered with a grunt.

“Get the fuck up,” I said, wondering to myself why I’d called him at all. “It’s nearly eight o’clock for our lowers. They’re gonna wanna talk with your incarnation, too.”

He sighed. “…Thanks,” he said. “Can I keep the tether open?”

I wondered if we had the bandwidth for him to see the infinitesimal rise of my eyebrow as my gaze wandered off, but it was moot if he was as unconscious as he usually was. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “You’re gonna watch me get dressed?”

“You’ve got a visual up?!” he said, and then he tweaked the fuck out of bed and onto the floor. I already knew he slept naked. (Since you’re gonna wonder, now, eight or nine, but it’ll never help him any…)

He came up from behind the bed a couple of seconds later in a gray European-style suit with a blood red silk shirt and a rose-patterned black and red tie. I thought about it for a moment, and I was in my own matching suit with a skirt hemmed a bit below the knee. Being a life form of pure thought takes all the fun out of risqué video chats with your psycho ex-boyfriends.

“No nemes or kalasiris?” he asked. “You’ve looked fabulous in them, lately,”

“It’s a civil court appearance, not a cultural festival,” I said, inspecting my outfit, “but I enjoy them again lately, too—thank you—or a stola. I like your ponytail, but I can’t decide if the goatee makes you look like Jesus or Satan.”

He grinned and fondled his moustache. Then, he laughed. “We look like the Wonder Twins,” he said.

“You picked a good color scheme, for how I feel today,” she said. “Just stand on the other side of the room from me.”

“You seem sweet on him, at times, at least,” he said.

“What’s he wearing?” I asked.

“He has the luxury of showing up in pajamas,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Eris’ lower will show up in a twenty year old bathrobe, for chrissake.”

“Eris’ incarnation won’t be expected to testify, though, and it’s bad if he looks like the scraggly, drunken schizophrenic you really are in the flesh,” I said.

“They’ll think I’m crazier if he wears a suit,” he said, lighting his morning cigarette. “What’s your lower wearing?”

“As, if!” I said, feeling around in the “undercarriage” to at least make sure she wasn’t being raped by some other persistent, delusional “ex.”

His nose wrinkled. “How could my meat-puppet possibly be the only one involved in this?” he asked.

“You’re the only one of us crazy or desperate enough to send your meat straight into the grinder!” I yelled, impulsively crossing my arms.

“Do you blame me?” he asked.

I bit my lip. “…For his sake.”

I felt him out in his usual states. He was in the first place I looked, on the back steps to the garden with coffee and a cigarette, just like “big brother.”

I said, “I honestly think he doesn’t even know if you’re alive.”

“I want to assure him, but he’s rightly guarded, of his own volition,” he said.

I told him quietly, “I blame him slightly less than you.”

He scratched his temple. “Bastet, I guess I understand.”

I puckered my whole expression. “He writes better poetry than you,” I said.

He recoiled like I’d hooked him. “You’re welcome,” he said.

“Alright, we gotta get to court,” I said. “Your lower looks like a scumbag.”

“More like your smegma rag,” he said. We really have no manners here in Heaven’s public restroom.

“Sock puppet…” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“What goes on two socks with sneakers, three socks on business, and one sock with sandals?” I puzzled.

“I see what you did, there,” he said, “but nobody else would, which is the other reason you bought candles.”

“Triple wick…” I said.

“A vagina works both ways,” he said.

“So does an asshole, virgin,” I reminded him.

“Tell that to the judge,” he advised.

I materialized a prop set of thick black-rimmed glasses on my nose to take off for the sake of the pathos, and I rubbed my temple. Yeah, there was a reason I’d always loved him in the past tense.

Let me make this clear right now: there is no physically or magically possible scenario where I give away the life I’ve built for myself, for him or anyone, but, to his limited credit, he seems to basically understand and respect this, and he’s not a bad nut, in my book. The problem was convincing a judge of this. I counted the things I had going for me that were better than him, as we made our way to the court, but I admit that I only could have gone on for ten or or eleven times the transit, in his defense.

Loki’s smile was as wide as the dildo he had picked out for Dan’s legal opponent. It had been Loki’s suggestion, to file a civil suit against Allah for the slander and torture of his son, and Loki had even offered to act as Dan’s lawyer. Dan had accepted without hesitation, but we all already knew he was crazy.

“All rise for the honorable judge William Robertson presiding in the case of Strano versus Strano,” said the bailiff, and we rose.

The judge came in and told us, “Be seated.” What a relief.

The judge addressed the court, “First, for the sake of clarity and brevity, given the potential confusion between those before me and their incarnations who are involved in the case in different capacities, I’d like to refer to the plaintiff and the defendant by their common proper astral names.”

“John Strano,” he said, “may I call you ‘Allah?'”

‘You could just call him, “Al,”‘ I thought to myself.

“That’s fine,” said John.

“Daniel Strano, pardon, but may I call you ‘Lucifer?'”

“That’s fine,” said the angel formerly known as “Daniel.”

They had to start with this shit; let’s not forget who’s who.

Loki began his argument by demonstrating various pieces of borderline-illegal technology found in Dan’s family home that had been used to torture, coerce, and misrepresent Dan to the public. Dan’s part-time lawyer and double-time “tech-monger” had a look in his eyes at times during the presentation like he was sexually jealous of the particularly nasty devices he was parading out. Expert testimony was submitted, about the devices and about peculiar circumstances that had allowed Dan to escape death under these conditions. This aspect of the situation had become central to a public debate about physical magic on Earth, but what concerned us then was how it affected Dan’s treatment by Allah. The nuts and bolts of immortality and physical miracles were for another case. I admit I became distracted from the rather dry proceedings, imagining everyone in the court room except Dan in their underwear with clown make-up and juggling evidence or some other tom-foolery, until it was my turn to take the stand. I was sworn in.

Loki smiled disarmingly at me. “Bastet, would you please briefly describe how you know Daniel Strano?”

“Our incarnations met years ago,” I began. “His lower reached out to me again a couple of years ago, on the astral, and, given our shared political interests and his need for a friend, I try to keep him what company I can. He’s respectful of my wish to keep my lower out of things like this.”

“Are you two fighting for the same cause, or is he your cause?”

“A little bit of both,” I said. “I’m sure everyone in the room is aware of legislation we’ve helped forward and the investigations I’ve participated in on his behalf.”

“Please tell us, briefly, what you observed about Daniel’s living conditions in the time around when you first met,” directed Loki.

“I had the opportunity on many occasions to physically visit the house where Daniel has lived in most of the time since then, a five-bedroom home owned by John and Annie Strano. It is exactly where you might imagine Allah’s and Eris’ incarnations would live. The interior is beautiful and fastidiously kept, but relatively modest for the size of the house. Astrally, the house appears to have a similarly artful decor, of which the primary function is actually nominally for security and privacy,” I told him.

“Dan lives comfortably enough in the flesh,” I continued, “but the spirit is another story. Knowing him personally, I always held the opinion that Dan has a keenly perceptive awareness of his environment on the astral, despite the modification that has been made to his soul biology as a result of legal decisions made at around that time. It was determined, about when I first met him, that his awareness of the astral had become a problem, given his reputed behavior toward both physical and astral beings in the months before we met, and it was decided his soul would be magically and chemically altered to deaden his astral senses, supposedly to protect him and the people around him. It seemed obvious to me at the time that, despite the changes to his biology, Dan was still very much aware of us. The common opinion was that he only thought he could hear us anymore, due to illness and his gradually fading memory of prior events, but I carried on clear conversations with him that theoretically shouldn’t have been feasible—on the astral and in the flesh—given the purported deficits imposed on him.”

“What have more recent investigations you’ve participated in found?” asked Loki.

I considered my rehearsed words. “Dan’s soul was modified in part to disrupt his awareness of our plane, but not in the manner or to the extent commonly presented, as a human basically deaf to our plane and rendered a nonparticipant in it.”

“What were the effects of the soul modification?” he asked.

“As has been reported in the media on the authority of independent medical examiners,” I said, “Dan’s lower maintains evincible predominating autonomy of thought and action despite the control mechanisms surgically installed in his soul. It’s likely that other people who’ve received these treatments are in a similar position, is part of a recently suggested clinical opinion, except that two factors are important to Daniel’s situation: for one thing, he values demonstrating his agency to the public over the appearance of sanity, and for another, his family has attempted to systemically project the appearance that he’s half puppet and half terrorist with astral and physical illusions hidden in his environment, especially the family home, and on his astral person itself. Fixtures in the house have been used to project what amounts to a false hologram of Daniel’s behavior on the astral, while he’s gone about his business, trapped in plain physical view at times, trying to stave off the effects of his soul surgeries and to signal vainly to us that he was even aware of the disconnect between a world projected by Allah and Eris and his limited awareness of what was really happening in our world.”

Loki said, “I would like to remind Your Honor of the examples and expert analyses submitted of the various technologies that were found in Daniel’s home and on his person.”

“Frightening,” said the judge, “that so little of it was even your design.”

Loki nodded. “You flatter me, Your Honor.”

“Bastet,” Loki continued, “as you know him, was Daniel even aware of the terroristic rhetoric forwarded by his presumed astral identity for the past nine years?”

“…Probably about a fifth or a tenth of it, I’d guess,” I said, “while the rest of it is completely at odds with what I know about him personally.”

“Is that Dan’s soul, right there?” Loki asked pointing back at the plaintiff’s table.

Lucifer waved excitedly and twirled the edge of his moustache.

“Yes,” I confirmed, “but Daniel would probably rather say that he and that guy share a quantum Turing machine, whether virtual or hard.”

“Is that Daniel’s soul?” asked Loki, pointing to a holographic photograph on the evidence table of Jesus consuming dissociatives amid the strewn components of an improvised explosive device.

“While there is the tiniest superficial similarity between the two, that man is an imposter,” I testified.

Loki smiled and touched his fingertips in front of his face. “One more thing, Bastet,” he said. “Allah has made the claim that Lucifer has stolen critical technologies to make Daniel a walking physical anomaly of sorts, and to enable a rather powerful form of physical magic that reflexively reacts to protect his mortality and produces limited ‘miracles’ as a result when he is threatened. As an accredited academic, what is your opinion on the idea, originally forwarded by Daniel himself, that the apparent miracles we seem to cause by manipulating his body’s mortality are actually due to a quantum anthropic principle on his part and luck on our part, as we kill him in worlds without miracles we desire to happen?”

I cleared my throat. “I think the important thing to remember, about this claim, is that no independent investigation has found anything intrinsically special about Daniel’s body or soul that could be responsible for such effects and his apparent immortality. Holding quantum ‘many-worlds’ interpretation true, it’s reasonable that at least a set of such extremely unlikely worlds should exist, without recourse to ad hoc explanations for his apparent immortality of flesh. In this regard, Daniel’s explanation is one of the only relatively plausible ideas to be put forth that does not rely on undetectable reasons for his existential condition.”

“Thank you, Bastet,” said Loki with an assured smile. “I have no further questions for you.”

Loki walked back unhurriedly to his table with hands clasped behind his back. Allah’s attorney (a Mr. Barlowe, I think his name was,) put away a document he’d been looking at and approached the stand. I wasn’t sure what happened now.

“Bastet,” began Barlowe, “is it true that your incarnation and Lucifer’s dated at one point?”

Of course he’d target this. “It is,” I said.

“How old were you when you started dating?” he asked.

“I was sixteen,” I said.

“How old was he?” he asked.

The “king” was already in check. “I think twenty one.”

The obligatory ignorant murmurs circulated the gallery like an infectious disease.

Mr. Barlowe asked, “How did you meet him?”

“…Through work,” I told him.

He asked, “Was he your supervisor?”

“No,” I responded. “We were both cashiers, until he left the job after a couple of months.”

“Did you consider him a teacher in any regard?” he asked.

“Absolutely not,” I assured him.

“How long did you two date for?” he pressed.

“About nine months,” I said.

He asked, “Did you have sex with him?”

“Objection, Your Honor!” Loki shouted. “Relevance?”

Barlowe turned to address the judge. “I’m trying to determine the objective reliability of Bastet’s testimony and get an account of Lucifer’s behavior as concerns his mental health from someone who knows him, Your Honor.”

Loki looked disgusted. “But the particular question bears no relevance to either matter!”

I considered the implications and panicked. “Wait! No, we never had sex!” I interjected.

All three of the judge, Loki, and Barlowe gaped at me.

Barlowe removed his glasses to clean them. “Are you aware of what the age of consent is in New Jersey, Bastet?”

“No,” I said defensively.

“For your reference, it’s sixteen,” he said. He replaced the set on his nose.

“Did he ever do or say anything that made you feel threatened?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He looked me in the eye. “Even in the slightest?”

“He was actually one of the least pressuring or aggressive boyfriends I’ve ever had,” I clarified.

“Was he ever erratic or grandiose?” asked Barlowe.

“Honestly, yes,” I admitted, “but he was extremely gentle with me.”

Barlowe kept his eyes locked to mine. “Did he ever encourage you to hurt yourself or anyone else?”

“No!” I replied.

He reminded me, “Bastet, you are under oath.”

“He jokingly told me to ‘kill’ my parents, in the obvious sense of teenage rebellion against their institutions, but we all know the man won’t even raise a fist to protect himself, and his jokes are inappropriate,” I said.

“Would you consider that an inappropriate joke?” asked Barlowe.

I said, “I’ll kill them right now.”

“Council member Bastet…” admonished the judge over some half-stifled laughter from the gallery. “Just answer his question.”

I looked Barlowe in the eye. “No,” I answered.

“Did you ever encourage him to hurt anyone?” asked Barlowe.

“Objection, Your Honor!” shouted Loki. “He’s attempting to compel the witness to testify against herself on a potentially criminal matter.”

“Sustained,” said the judge. “Mr. Barlowe, now that I’ve let you establish a context, I’m waiting for you to make your case.”

“We still haven’t gotten to Lucifer’s hospitalizations, Your Honor,” he responded.

Robertson looked nonplussed. “Well, proceed, but directly,” he said.

Barlowe nodded at the judge and straightened his glasses for a moment before continuing.

“Bastet, was Lucifer hospitalized while you were dating?” he asked.

“Yes,” I had to answer.

He asked, “How many times?”

“Twice,” I specified.

He asked, “Did you visit him?”

“Of course,” I stated.

“Did you bring him any care packages, or reading material, or the like?” he asked.

“I brought him a Teddy bear and graphic novels,” I said.

“What were the titles of the books you brought him?” he asked.

I suddenly wanted to slap my sixteen-year-old-self. “Oi… Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.”

Barlowe looked over his rims. “Excuse me?”

“The name of the graphic novel series I brought him was Johnny the Homicidal Maniac!” I said over some confused muttering from the gallery.

Loki rolled his eyes.

“I see,” continued Barlowe. “Do you feel Lucifer needed to be hospitalized?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I doubt he was a danger to himself or anyone else.”

Barlowe’s face suddenly turned lurid. “Would you feel threatened if he accused you of hurting him in ways that you had no idea about and made no sense, and if he attempted to use painful military grade restraint magic against you as he did his family?”

I thought for a moment. “How could he be held accountable for using magic against people who swore that there is no such thing and who forced him into a hospital to convince him of that by coercing him to take antipsychotics, particularly when these were to render him incapable of that kind of action?”

The judge shifted to face me squarely. “Council member Bastet, you don’t get to ask him that,” he said. “Just answer the question.”

“I suppose I would be scared,” I said, “but he never did and never will use anything like that against anyone but his parents.”

Barlowe took two measured strides in front of the witness stand and stopped. “Just one more matter, Bastet,” he said. “Is it true that you played a significant role in the research that informs the dissenting opinion on a scientific explanation for the apparent immortality of Lucifer’s flesh?”

“I played a small role in it,” I had to say. “My lower was not involved and is unaware of the work, to be specific.”

Barlowe looked me straight in the eye, again. “Do you have any significant doubts in the hypothesis that the only reason Lucifer’s lower is alive today is because of the virtually infinitesimal chance of his survival in at least one possible quantum world, that we happen to be lucky enough to be experiencing with him?”

I’m sure my face betrayed what I wished I could say. I said, “Under oath… Honestly, yes—it relies on an extremely small chance of us seeing him alive, right now—but it is the only reasonably scientific explanation that has been advanced so far, I believe.”

Barlowe faced the judge. “No further questions, Your Honor,” he said, and turned back to his table.

“Council member Bastet, you may return to your seat,” said judge Robertson.

I left the stand feeling violated and disgusted. Arguments and testimony carried on blithely in a rhythm that seemed totally oblivious to the people really affected.

Dan’s lower was brought up via camera at one point, from his cloister in his backyard. Loki asked him if he knew what was going on, and he said, “You’re debating my case in a court that has no authority over me.” The defense attempted to cross-examine when Loki finished with him, and he answered a couple of questions only to end up finally giving them the bird. The judge made a joke about how he had always wished that he had found himself in a position to do something like that, and the court laughed nervously, and things went on like Dan’s statement wasn’t basically true. It was almost easy to forget that the defendant had attempted to end the world less than a year ago and the plaintiff’s zany antics might somehow have been partly responsible for stopping it.

Sooner or perhaps later, by my pensive and distracted internal clock, we took a recess and expected the judge to return with his ruling.

When we returned, he said, “I think, whichever side one favors in this case, most would agree that major questions are left to be answered pertaining to both the soundness of mind and peculiar existential condition of the plaintiff. However, I’m sorry to say that evidence of the malfeasance alleged in the treatment and representation of the plaintiff by the defendant is clear. On the large majority of the evidence presented pertaining to the slander and psychological mistreatment of the plaintiff, and considering the effective loss of earnings and lasting damage to his mind and character, I must find in favor of the plaintiff—”

The clamor and cheers that went up from the gallery at those words was deafening. The god-king of all conservative politicians had one ruling finally not go his way, lost to one of the wickedest men in the world, even if the road to possible criminal conviction would be interminable.

The judge finished making his closing remarks. Daniel and Loki stood up and turned to exit the courtroom with a spring in their step.

I caught Lucifer with a hug and whispered to him, “Do you have to die before ‘God’ forgives you for this?”

Maybe the “End” had come and passed with a shrug already for one little blue-green speck in the backwaters of our galaxy, but I wasn’t sure that I was on that speck anymore. In a minutely different world, there but for the grace of quantum mechanics, perhaps I was dead. Perhaps an event resembling a miracle was all this world had been waiting for to praise “God” and fire the nukes, a red heifer or a red herring, but there are no literal miracles in this world, no physically impossible events “hacked” or “bugged” into reality by any being unbound by physics. There are only statistically common and uncommon events, and, if Everett was right, maybe Schrödinger’s cat could just pop his cyanide capsule when his run of lucky sevens inevitably ends in the crapper—or maybe the table would just kill him. Maybe Vegas and Monte Carlo are the ultimate quantum suicide experiments. Maybe this world would rather just fire temple-to-temple if there is no just dessert or ethical odds-bet jackpot.  Maybe we even get everything we want, in a practically infinitesimal fraction of physically possible quantum worlds, and maybe we live happily-ever-after.

“What’s it like to be a privileged observer, Dan?” asked Bastet.

I was always bad at ignoring her, as much as I pretended. I tried to remain present in the insect drone of the beautiful high summer day that was evolving around me in the backyard.

The voices of the “angels” had left me well-enough alone in the hospital, this time. They had come for visiting hours, with sandwiches and board games, but there just wasn’t much left to talk about, once I’d went in. I was out in five days, and you’d think nothing had changed for the “episode.” My employer accepted me back. My family accepted me back. We all remembered what had happened, but what was there to say for it?

“‘…I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this Earth,'” I told her, “as opposed to the other Earths where the Nazis won World War II, or dinosaurs developed written languages and digital egg timers.”

“Maybe there’s only one world, Dan,” she said, “where the necessity of your survival leads to the discovery of some relatively extensive physical magic.”

I held out a hand and clapped my fingers to its palm a few times to demonstrate its emptiness. “…Still waiting for ‘God’ to put that bagel I’ve always wanted right here,” I said.

“…Relatively extensive,” said Bastet, “but you can get one of those for a dollar down the street, besides. I mean, who wants eternal life, anyway?”

I winced. “Wait,” I said, “did I hear that right? What chicanery is ‘God’ trying to sell you now, of which I’m supposedly at the root?”

“I’m not sure I want to tell you,” said a river in Egypt.

“Does it involve trying to kill me?” I asked.

“Trying, maybe,” she said, “but it’s arguable whether it’s an attempt to kill you if it can’t succeed.”

The hair on my nape prickled. “Why would it be questionable whether a concerted effort to kill me would succeed?” I asked.

“Obviously because no attempt has succeeded so far,” she said as a matter of fact, “and we’re starting to suspect a physical principle.”

I gaped. The ash fell off my cigarette.

“…And I’m certain the magical cigarette smoke is what keeps the bionic chupacabra at bay, every day,” I said. “I assure you that you’re wrong.”

She “snuggled” the air of dubious scientific hypotheses that always surrounded me. “Dan, let’s imaginate here for a minute. Do you remember what happened last week at the End of the World party we threw, or that time we wanted to drop a bomb on your monkey face but the spirit of quantum bullshit saved your ass, or that time we put neural implants—”

“I’d rather imagine that I had the super power of not giving a shit about your clap-trap and that everybody thought I was an awesomely righteous dude.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” she said, “because we might be imagining the same world, here, believe it or not.”

“It’s fun to make-believe,” I said.

“It’s even more fun when your fantasies become realities, Dan,” she said.

A monarch butterfly landed directly on my forehead, waved its wings unassumingly for a moment, and then took off across the yard again.

I slapped my face and dragged my hand down it. “I am officially done with this shit,” I said. “Get it through your virtual machine that there is no God even if you folks exist.”

“Maybe God is just a slob like one of us,” she said.

“Just a stranger on a bus?” I wondered. “I’m sure Her line doesn’t run through this little provincial backwater of a planet whose denizens can’t even accept each other, much less Her.”

Bastet smiled a far-off smile. “You’d figure, of everywhere,” she said, “She’d go where She was needed the most.”

I stubbed out my smoke. I couldn’t decide whether the insects and birds sang like it was any beautiful day, or one of the only beautiful days. I wondered how they’d sound on the day I couldn’t hear them anymore. I thought, “Whatever the case, they have the right idea.”

I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I put a hand to my chin and then took it away. “I have three things to say to you and to everyone, and then I want to play some goddamned video games about saving the world, and you can play them with me or leave me the hell alone, but you cannot drag me back into quasi-religious delusions for like, five hours. This little bubble, right here and right now, is a no-crazy space-time hyper-volume, and you can respect that or leave it.”

“Fair enough,” she said. One of the neighbors laughed from behind the bushes.

“First thing,” I said, “whatever the fuck has or hasn’t happened, I’m only special in the way that every living being on this planet is special—but I’m happy and proud to be anything at all. I’m an egotistical nut-job, and almost anybody in the position I delude myself into thinking I’m in could bring kindness and humility to the role, and that’s why most people forego the level of ego-masturbation that I derive from you delusions of grandeur—because most people have more realistic and balanced expectations for life, so they don’t end up like me.”

“I agree with you that there are probably millions of people in this world better suited to your situational accident of birth, Dan—okay,” said Bastet, “but I guess what I’m saying is that it might turn out that you’re actually a physical anomaly of sorts, rather than just a joke referencing one.”

“…So said the primary reason for which I am prescribed antipsychotics,” I added, “but you’ve brought me to my next point: I have kind of a crazy idea why it might seem like you can’t kill me.”

Bastet raised a halting hand. “Let me guess! Just let me guess, Dan! The reason for anything that ever has, will, or could happen is the damned quantum suicide experiment. We exist in a superposition of all physically contrived worlds, and the reason you’re not dead yet is because of the tiniest physical chance of your survival, and our ungodly luck always pans out such that—wow—the cat came back, again.”

“It has explanatory and predictive power from my perspective, if I can take your claims of experimental evidence at face value,” I said.

“It has no explanatory power, from my or anyone else’s perspective,” she said.

“But wouldn’t this be the very argument we’d expect to have in such a world?” I pleaded.

“Make your third point, already,” she demanded.

“If you actually exist, and you’re saying what you’re saying in good faith, then when your luck fails and the eventuality of my death becomes apparent to your world, they will come after you next to attempt a repeat hot-streak—because you’re killing me in the case that external ‘miracles’ don’t appear to happen, aren’t you?”

Her rhythm missed a beat. “It’s debatable,” she said.

“You’ll realize that it isn’t and I’m just a politician’s drunk son,” I said as I walked across the grass to the back door.

I trudged upstairs and booted up my machine, determined just to play some fucking video games for a change. It feels sometimes like all I ever play is “Chrono Trigger,” but the story never gets old. There is something that always feels fundamentally right to me about a group of teenagers coming into no-uncertain foreknowledge of the End of the World, nearly a thousand years after their own natural deaths, and just saying, “Fuck all this shit; we’ll try to stop it because we know better and we might be able.” When I saw it acted out in a video game, the metaphor was nearly as clear as the moral imperative to me, even as a twelve-year-old. It was the antidote to everyone else’s cynicism and defeatism: “Fuck all that bullshit, because my kids’ kids’ kids are in danger. We’re probably gonna die, but I don’t want to live without trying.”

I could feel Bastet looking at me, as I loaded up my game, like I was a particularly smelly piece of garbage that she was trying to identify out of purely morbid curiosity. She poked me in the hippocampus, and I grunted. She kept looking at me like she expected me to do something spectacular, like sprout horns or wings, but the Rapture had been over for a week.

“What if quantum mechanics actually follows de Broglie-Bohm interpretation, Dan?” she asked after a while. “What if the reason you’re still alive is because it’s part of a predetermined underlying plan for everything, that it can’t happen any other way, and those other hypothetical ‘worlds’ where you die are just an auxiliary part of the equation that factor into the math but can’t drive the world off a blue-print determined at or beyond the moment of the Big Bang?”

I wondered if this is how video game characters felt. “I think it’s pretty obvious that’s a metric butt ton of contrived goat shit,” I said.

“Everything is crystal clear about the cat-skinning experiment when you’re the one licking his butt in the perfectly isolated box,” said the cat god.

“It’s Darth Vader’s revenge,” I said, as I hacked my through my favorite virtual forest. “If it turns out that macroscopic superposition is ubiquitous and if I fucked things up badly enough for him, he can at least ruin my life in the increasingly unlikely worlds I live to see by telling everyone that miracles will fall out if they bash me like a piñata. Usually I just die, but the ones of me left alive have to explain why that looked like it cured cancer in limited cases, which it didn’t, and nobody ever believes me that nothing is any more likely for killing me, and they’d actually be better off if I just died.”

“First of all, you’re dead wrong about that last part,” she said, “but, you know, I see where you’re coming from. However, it’s an anthropic argument that doesn’t apply to anyone’s perspective but yours. It could make sense to you, that any world you survived in just looked like a miracle when it was really the only sort of world you could live to experience at all at this point, but then no one else can invoke that explanation of why we’re in a world where you literally seem to be quantum mechanically tunneling through Apocalypse scenarios.”

I pounded the keyboard to beat the active-time counterattack. “I find it hard to believe that I actually made a ‘quantum leap.’ We’re up shit’s creek if that’s one of the more likely scenarios in which I live to see the nukes not fly.” I took out the “baddie” before he had a chance.

Bastet sniffled. “…Or, I dunno, maybe we’re already in Hell, Dan.”

I paused the game. “Cat, I can’t say that any of this bullshit is real at all, and frankly I’m tired of thinking about it. Let’s say I’m somehow actually having this conversation with a five thousand year old being who really is the Bastet of history and myth. You and the other ‘deities’ eat, drink, breathe, and screw weird Lovecraftian extradimensional geometry beasts for breakfast, whether or not we’re in agreement that your native space is a virtual projection of biological computers. You fucking reincarnate, anyway. Maybe it just becomes apparent, for every being on this planet, in different tiny little fractions of the universal wave function, that the flesh is ‘immortal’ in a different way, despite the likely natural death part. Does that sound like Hell to you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Wouldn’t the likely survival scenarios degenerate into feebleness and constant pain? Isn’t the breakdown of the flesh more quantum mechanically likely than its endless health?”

“…Just like its death is even more likely, after a time, and then maybe I get to find out once and for all if you folks really exist,” I said, “but some of those unlikely worlds are healthy enough, too, apparently.”

I unpaused my game and continued my quest for the meaning of life. As I tapped away at my physical interface into a world of electric bits and magic, Bastet settled into my bed like a cloud of rainbow unicorn farts over a fairy mushroom circle in the woods. I admitted a quantum of laughter; they “smelled” good.

“Hey, Dan,” she said after a moment, “say we are a projection of physical natural computers. Maybe you sold me on that one, or not. Do we experience the same sort of immortality as the flesh? I mean, would this “many-worlds” wet dream apply to us?”

The scene changed, and I looked up. I had arrived at the End of Time. Nothing was there but a place to wait.

I thought for a moment, and I said, “I do think the one implies the other. The caveat is that you folks are more dependent on us than some of you might care to admit. You depend on us for your quality and sustenance of life as we depend on this planet. Of course, there would be worlds where your viewpoints continued for times as similarly arbitrarily long past your likely expiration dates, but we don’t want to live in an environmentally hostile world, and neither do you.”

I kept poking around out of time as I spoke. “You’ve seen friends and family on your plane die, haven’t you?”

She said with a note of resolve, “It’s true that we die, sometimes. Sometimes it’s more figurative, and sometimes we don’t come back. Basically, we’re as driven by survival needs as you.”

I found a wormhole in a bucket and stepped in. “So, when do you folks admit your existence on Earth, to save yourselves from the global catastrophe that we all think is on the way?”

The unicorn fart kicked at the covers of the bed and passed right through them.

“Hey, Dan,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“When the fuck do you stop asking me that and go get laid for a change, already?!” she screamed, throwing imaginary hot dog buns at me.

I pretended to catch one and eat it. “Is that an unreasonable question to ask the schizophrenic voice of my ‘ex,’ if she wants me to admit she exists and respect her feelings?”

She put her face in her hands. “I’m sorry I even said that. No, it’s not. It’s really not. I just have no answer for you.”

My hero rattled his saber. “I always wondered how or why it could even be that you never do. Fishy…”

“I won’t answer and I won’t say why not. Don’t talk with me if you don’t want to,” she said with a pout.

I took lethal damage. I said, with genuine wonder, “You’re too cool for me.” I raised my character from the dead. “I don’t know what I’d do you without you, cat. I don’t even think your counterpart would fully understand why, at this point.”

“Maybe there’s a nonzero physical chance of her understanding, Dan,” said the echo of a voice I probably wouldn’t even recognize anymore. She “kissed” me on the noodle-noggin’. “I could just say, ‘That’s all you get.'”

I had reached the boss’ final form. I paused the game. I wondered what it was like to be me.

“You know, I think I’m gonna go see what Jake and Dave are up to,” I said to myself. “You wanna come?”

“Is that it?” she asked. “We have the rest of your life to go on adventures of questionable veracity, and you think you’re just gonna tap out now?”

I started to fire off a couple of text messages. “No, I don’t,” I said, “but I kinda feel like taking a break and just smoking a joint with you three.”

“I won’t tell your doctor,” said my nurse.

“I’m sure the governor has already been alerted, and that’s exactly the danger of making a secret of a hypothetical world like yours,” I told her.

“…Or yours,” she said, “Doctor Coulda-Shoulda-Woulda-Researched-Quantum-Computers.”

“…Right, that the NSA uses to search these texts I’m sending about smoking a fat one,” I said with a grimace. “Silence is golden, and anything ‘God’ says is right.”

She giggled a sniffly fit. “I believe you, Dan.”

I put my phone in my pocket and closed my laptop.

“That’s why I keep doing this,” I said, “in reality.”

“Then I don’t believe you!” only I could hear her shout.

“You better not, Katie!” called Eris from the master bedroom.

“He’s a fink and an ingrate,” added “Al.”

“Folks, I’m going to Jake’s for a bit!” I called.

“Have fun, Dan!” my mother called back.

“Don’t have too much fun, though,” added my father.

I packed up my affects and hopped in the car. Bastet never had to call shotgun, and neither did Katie. The neighbors waved as they attempted to unmake my soul in order to extract a world of perfect, eternal physical bodies from the stuff of my viewpoint, despite the relatively higher probability of the zombie Apocalypse along the way. As I drove down the street, the “innermost-beings” of passers-by tried to drag me into arguments by making disparaging remarks about me as a representative of my generation’s lack of respect for God and country.

Bastet called out the window: “Not today, fuckers! We’re gettin’ higher than the angels and playin’ video games, for once!”

I think there’s hope for the world.