 
Insanity Rising

Yonatan Kirby--yonikirby@gmail.com
Chapter 1 - Electrocution

The man dies.

It's the man directly in back of the protester I'd been watching. He collapses in a pool of blood. All tragic, of course. Not only for the loss of life, but also because he's someone famous. And this shot is what starts "World War Three." Which leads to the Revolution of Dulling. Which leads to me. Us. Society and life as it should be. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Who fires the shot? That's what I'm here to investigate.

I had lined myself up just right to observe the small firing window. I knew where the wound was in advance (from past photos and such) so I only had to but glance at the twenty by twenty foot window where I perceived the shot was coming from. I could barely feel the air of the bullet as it careened by, but I could still feel it, as they told me I would. So I knew it was coming from one of six windows.

There was the briefest glimmer of movement from one of the windows--a bright spot in the darkness, a circle about a centimeter across: the gun. Apparently it was that easy, as they also told me it would be. Now all I had to do was catch the perpetrator.

Easy as pie. Assuming they had pie in my time--I had only just found out about it.

"Grab 'em by the pussy! Grab 'em by the fucking pussy!" screamed the woman before she realized what was happening. Then, "Oh, no!"

No time for lingering on the dead man. I had the map of the area memorized down to the smallest conduit (there was no communication into the past) and I acted on instinct alone as I sped my way through the crowd and into the building. But then I realized he (DNA analysis of the blood--he wasn't very careful) would definitely be using either the back entrance or the garage, so I raced to the back. But wait: a window was open! I paused and listened. Feet running down stairs, not slow fast but fast fast--it was definitely him. I glanced up (stupidly, I'll admit) but I couldn't see him. I sure hoped he couldn't see me.

I raced to the stairway exit at the back of the building, trying to keep a low profile while doing so. Copying a common custom of the times, I held my hand to my "baseball cap" (baseball is an archaic and dangerous sport involving small, heavy projectiles that fly upwards of a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour). So that I could keep a low profile in case people were watching me; when you're a time-traveler, you don't want other people noticing you--you might end up in an institution for doing things without explicable reason (you really, _really_ don't want to tell anyone the _real_ reason).

I reached the garage entrance. There were two cars pulling out. But which one was it? Or was one of the cars even him? I needed to know, so I whipped out my vibration sensor--it sensed vibrations in objects and people. This was particularly useful if you needed to track someone who was nervous: when palpitations appeared on a person's skin, the detector lit right up--figuratively. (In reality, numbers just blinked on the screen.)

The sensor showed no matches on either person (a man and a woman--wigs were always possible--, both wearing sunglasses--might as well shoot myself in the head after not getting any id!) I hesitated, always a bad move; the two cars moved up and out of the garage. Which one should I follow? Should I stay here and wait for the next car? I did the smart thing and stared at the back of their cars for an instant, recording their license-plates. Then I waited some more.

He almost didn't come.

Then a black Mercedes cautiously pulled up to the exit. I turned to face my back to him so he wouldn't notice my face and chuckled to myself. I didn't know it would be this easy. Hubris had perhaps crept into my mind, but this job was a path to earning two hundred thousand credits a year, for starters--who knew how much more lay ahead down the road? So I took a quick peek, even though I had a camera at my back--I wanted to be able to tell the story to my grandchildren. And what happened? What else but him flashing me an evil grin, and positively speeding out of the garage and down the parkway like some kind of accursed adolescent (as if those existed anymore). Perhaps he was indeed an adolescent, but I didn't have the luxury of taking the time to wonder. I threw all caution to the wind and activated my rocket-sneakers (I know, it was dangerous, both physically and from a publicity standpoint--I didn't want them

locking me up in a secure location like Area 51 or Guantanamo (was it still open?) and eviscerating me from the inside-out).

I cursed and my head snapped back from the acceleration. I wobbled through the air, roughly twenty feet above of the speeding car (a red Porsche). People gaped at me as I rocketed past, but it was necessary--I needed to determine the identity of the perp. Fortunately I was moving too quickly for a general hubbub to arise. At least, until now.

Some people screamed in high and low voices as I narrowly missed their heads after a rare dip. I struggled with the computer, telling him to let me fly higher but not succeeding in the attempt; I would have to modify him before I embarked on my next time flight. If I made it. I might end up in a parallel universe with no way back. But that's another discussion.

There was a loud _thunk_ as I dropped onto the top of the car. They had prepared me for this, as well; I was given acrobatics training, as was appropriate for what I was doing. What I didn't know was why they hadn't prepared me for what came next:

As soon as I landed in the passenger's seat agily like I was taught, the man grabbed me; or, rather, his prosthesis did, if he could be called a "he" (I'm all for machine rights, but there is still debate within the ethics community/or, there _will_ be debate, as to whether they have gender).

New pronouns abound.

" _So_ ," he said, fixating his unsmiling glance on my rigidly-scared body, "you have found me. This is not the first time, you know."

" _Perhaps_ ," I responded, as was customary, in the traditional tone of voice. "But I don't really believe you..."

"Curses on you!" spat the robot, the android, whose model was discontinued twenty years ago... my eyes widened, then narrowed. Twenty _years_ ago! How could this be possible?

His angry, red, blinking eye flashed as it probed my body. "Unremarkable," it commented after a few seconds, shrugging his shoulders obliquely. "They haven't made any improvements on you, it's almost like they're telling me to not even bother trying. You know, I could crush you like a bug, assuming they still existed, but even that would be a waste." So he just shrugged and kept driving.

The speed kept increasing: 80 km/h, 90, 100, until we were practically driving twice the speed of the other cars. This resembled something called a "racecar," which is an extremely dangerous sport where drivers try and race around a track five-hundred (or four-hundred, or six-hundred, depending on the race, if I remember correctly) times while mercilessly killing the other drivers. Fortunately, most of the other drivers end up surviving.

This has promptly brought a tear to mine eye: in fact, multiple tears. My face is almost all wet as I stare at our impending doom: a rapidly (it seems) closing drawbridge that was now at thirty--no, thirty- _two_ degrees in inclination. I braced myself for impact as the enemy agent (the android, or robot, whatever you want to call him) drove on impassively. Then came his voice again, like a droll, nasal sound-recording amplified up over a thirty-year-old loudspeaker (still wireless, if you can believe that!), reeking of oil and burned circuits: " _Seriously_." Then a pause.

"Well, seriously _what_?" I inquired brazenly, looking at the empty road ahead, which was pointing up ahead like an arrow at the setting sun, shining its blinding rays into my eyes and forcing me to shut my eyes like a woman (that's what they say they did, when they existed) as I

contemplated my impending death.

"They sent a _mortal_ ," declared the robot, laughing maniacally as our car hurtled toward its doom, the deep horn of a ship resonating below, causing the girders to shake and the birds to rise up in a frenzy.

The car rattled and shook and choked as it struggled to reach its final destination; an oil-burning car, or as our teachers liked to call it, a "dinosaur-burning car"--one of the worst inventions known to man (or robot) kind.

But we are getting ahead (or is it behind?) of ourselves.

The car churned toward its bitter finish, and as it was about to cross the finish line, I experienced what might be called a revelation--if I wasn't so religious.

A vision appeared in front of mine eyes. It was of a giant clown--it was twenty feet tall, dressed in yellow and red, with giant black buttons on its shirt, and it was grimacing threateningly while floating in the air in front of us.

The robot shrieked, and though I hesitate to admit it, so did I--and the car ground to a halt...or at least attempted to. What it ended up doing, though, was shirking sideways and leaping into the empty air, tumbling in concentric circles as it went. I prepared for death; no: I thought I had already died; but I was disappointed. The giant clown seemed to laugh hysterically as we neared it, and _passed through_ it like it was just empty air.

As I said, I thought I was already in Heaven (which is a blasphemy) or the null place, where all void things remain. But this apparently was not true, as I continued living and breathing. Whether this was fortunate or unfortunate I leave you to decide, reader. I am telling this twenty years after the fact in order to illustrate an important lesson that I learned (or didn't learn), which is that you should never, _ever_ assume that you have the cat in the bag (which is an old phrase: a cat is an animal that resembles a dog (which only exist on Tau Ceti 2) and it is unknown if they still exist--perhaps they were stowed aboard some of the early settler ships, but those were almost certainly lost.

The car twirled and whirled and fell, us inside of it of course, although I was thinking right then that robots were not in fact beings, but mere spark plugs comprised of random bits of circuitry, with no feelings or motives at all, come to usher us into the lifeless age. That thought consumed me until we struck the water, which jolted us both up to the ceiling of the car despite the fact that we were wearing safety restraints.

"Ow," cried the robot, seeming to even suck in air as he complained about his gruesome mishap: one of his arms had broken off and was copiously leaking fluid.

"Serves you right, fiend," I accused him stridently as the water filled the cabin up to our ankles and the car sank into the depths.

" _Fiend_?" he shrieked, staring at me with the glossy cameras the inventors liked to call "eyes."

"Yes," I replied, sticking to the script. This they had taught me to do when things escalated, but this was very different; still, I persevered. I was going to die anyway, so might as well try my best in service to The Consortium, right?

Right?

"Come on, now, fellow," I soothed the robot. "We're not going to die. If we work together..."

"And what do you think that will accomplish!" shrieked the robot deafeningly. "We will be electrocuted by my circuits in less than two minutes!"

"No," I reassured him. " _You_ will." And then I kicked the dashboard, hard. The expected result happened and the robot was disabled, or stuck, or worse. I elbowed the window and it broke, the water cushioning the impact so no slivers of glass embedded themselves in my flesh. Shivering out the small opening, I swam urgently to the surface, peering back just once to observe the bloated white cushion covering most of the robot's body. Poor robot. Or at least, I _would_ be empathetic to him if he was alive...

Ah, whatever.

As soon as I reached the surface I blew the water out of my aching lungs and gasped for breath. I hadn't expected it to be this close; They had trained me better than this. But then I looked down and saw the reason: something big and dark was weighing down my foot. I kicked at it but it seemed firmly latched on. It pulled me beneath the depths once more, and I feared for my life (if I indeed had one--I had sometimes wondered if I was indeed an advanced form of an android--no more, though). But then it burst into a bubble of red light and I closed my eyes, shielding myself from the brightness and wanting to die.

The pressure was gone. Frantically I kicked to the surface and lived once more. I breathed and breathed and floated on the surface of the water for minutes (it seemed like hours) until I heard a shout.

" _Man_!" a husky man's voice carried over the water. "Grab the lifeline!"

"I'm not a man!" I gasped, spewing up some more water, my voice coming out as a tinny whine. "I am a robot!"

"You're a what?" the man yelled.

"I have circuits!" I spluttered, head dipping beneath the surface again. When I came up, I said, "Circuitry! I have wires!"

"He's delirious," shouted the man. He and two others jumped overboard and began to swim towards me.

"No, I'm not," I spluttered, disappearing beneath the surface again.

When I awoke I was in a cold facility--I attempted to flap my arms for a moment but then I realized I was no longer in the water.

Unfortunately.

Forgive me for being morbid, but it's a taught instinct when you're approaching the age of thirty.

It was a hospital, of course: no other place could be that cold. I had researched well, that was certain--and I had a multitude of locations mapped out in my brain; or, as I thought of it, my hard-disk.

The worst thing about time-traveling was the possibility of getting lost. Meaning that if one stayed in a time-stream for too long, it became impossible to get back to your original time. This, as you might suppose, had me on edge. It had already been at least twelve hours, if not a day, so far--and aliens knew how long it had been that they had had me drugged in this horrid

place.
Chapter 2

The hospital was so cold that it had me shivering. This prompted one of the machines to begin shouting (I don't know what to call it) and a nurse came running into the room. I knew that the AI didn't control the nurses: it was the other way around in this place and time. Pity; I could have used a good AI therapist to calm my nerves--humans were usually too skittish.

AI also had multiple personalities.

The nurse stuck something into my arm, which I realized was bound with a leather (disgusting!) strap to the table. Cold, metal table--no foam, no engineered materials, just plain old space steel. It felt like absolute zero.

"Did you see a clown?" I asked.

"You're delirious," she said, frowning, wrinkles creasing her eyes and the edges of her mouth like dried-up rivers on Mars (we were working on that). We were also working on making Europa habitable, but there were some pretty harmful microorganisms there that we had to get rid of first. If I ever got back to my time....

"I don't have much time," I explained to her. "I have to get back to my own time."

She stared at me with glossy eyes, and I looked down and saw their reflection in the metal table. "Is this a stunt?" she posed, her lips curling back into a grimace, which I took to indicate sexual desire.

"Um," I stammered, out the small window in the door for an ally but finding none. I gesticulated wildly to buy time. After thinking for a while while she stared at my windmilling arms, I started, "I am a Trump... _guy_ ," I faltered, feeling the unfamiliar word on my lips like space food or protein cubes poisoning my tongue.

I saw her nod and frown; good news! "I was... trying... to make people realize... that Trump will still be president in a thousand years time... " I said, increasingly more confidently, incorporating parts of my own story as her eyes widened in recognition of my "mental illness" (hormonal correction deficiency). This was going well, but I didn't like the direction it was going in; I had no desire to be trapped in this time-stream, and time was running out. I had twelve hours at most--I had to connect to a network of satellites and find the tether they had left me, or I would be a twenty-first century Earthling until I died (of old age, how horrible!) or ended it the other way.

She said "hmm," and puttered about the office like one of those old vacuum-cleaner robots--the pre-revolution ones they have in museums. Or, if I was talking like a current idiot, I would phrase that in question format--they liked (like) to pretend questions were (are) statements.

There was a whirring... threatening-like, like some sort of mechanical insect that enjoyed dismantling peoples' nervous systems--you know the illegal ones? That they use for torture? This had me on edge, as you might imagine, and I imagined that I was in the dentist's chair and a hygienist was about to drill into my brain. Hybrid imagery taken from many sources, but all of the sources were nightmares...

The whirring was only a fan she had turned on, near my ear. I feared she would see the device embedded in it, so I uttered quickly, "Um... so you might know my TV show, 'The Trump Report?' You know, on CBS Mondays?" It was a wild gamble, but it might work...

"Oh, of course," she said, not looking up from scribbling on a pad with a pen.

This was very bad news for me; it meant I was headed to the mental hospital. I struggled with my chains (whatever they were) and shouted and gesticulated some more, which just of course added to my stress and plight and deepened my already-preordained fate. She of course just stared at me until I calmed down, which took about twenty seconds. I thankfully bit back another comment about having to get back to my own time,

I was wheeled out into the lobby of the tiny clinic, which, thank the aliens and their bright faces, was warmer and more plush--I, of course, had to remain bound in my bed, but I managed to coerce an attendant to let me sit up a bit. I heard and saw the broadcasting service projecting an image of the president into the air: "Trump has repeatedly said that he has no connection with the Russians, but the same definitely can't be said for his campaign associates and aides..."

"Change the channel," roared a surly and disheveled men of about fifty (shocking, I admit)--they should have terminated him long ago, but obviously he had many "children," which added to his "income"... Socialism was on the rise, though, a sign that the revolution was nigh. Another hundred years or so, if they kept me alive that long.

I hoped I would not become a vegetable.

Someone changed the channel, and something called "FOX News" came up. "The liberals and the left try to paint all Republicans as extremists, and unacceptably so," a woman was saying.

"There are many Christian Republicans, and there are also many atheist, even gay republicans, and they all are forming one coherent whole within the Republican party..."

"Despite the fact that Pence once joked that he wanted to 'hang all gays?'" interrupted a thin man of African heritage.

The woman, who had deep black hair that was cut to the shoulders, flipped back her hair nonchalantly, which was an obviously extremely sexual gesture. It meant, "you can't get this, but if you try hard enough you might have a chance..." Thank the aliens there were no more women...

If I could ever get back to my own time...

I was growing increasingly desperate. Sweat, which was common in these days since they didn't have any drugs to control it, was palpitating on my arms and back, and my neck was convulsing uncontrollably.

"A side effect of the medicine," the nurse reassured me, her voice conveying a mixture of pity and disdain. She should have been subject to correction, had she not already been extinct--such emotions are harmful to one's health.

Extinct species sometimes make comebacks. I doubted women ever would, though.

I then remembered something extremely important: the casing in my anterior-right molar. I could break it. And so I did.

At the foam poured out of my mouth seconds later and a mother with a snoring baby screamed like one of those "apes," (an old term for a predecessor in the evolutionary train to homo sapiens) and pointed to me hysterically with a wagging finger. Her baby, unnoticing, suckled at her breast (mammary gland) as I lay dying. They used to call this the "circle of life"--women tended to overdramatize the issues of the day, like abortion (fetal termination for cosmetic or health reasons--disgusting,I know--I had better hide this manuscript well else they will crucify me) or womens' right to make the same amount of tender as men (even though they

also desired a full six months of leave after childbirth). This served mainly to give them a platform for their financial independence and personal rights, even though the pendulum of politics in the last two hundred years before the final revolution hardly moved from the center of the spectrum Idue to political deadlock--I'm probably boring you, though. As you can see, I tend to prattle on about ancient history, a predilection that has, thank the aliens and all their bounty, has never landed me in tight spots--but has certainly brought me close to danger. But this is boring.

I'm not sure what happened, but I was lying on something cold and metal again, perhaps it was the same table, I had no way to know. There was no buzzing this time, which was good, but I felt a prickling in my ear where the implant and been planted. This was not good. I was not sure how much time I had left (or even if I had any left whatsoever) and thus I panicked--but not outwardly. At least, not yet; I had learned _that_ lesson. I didn't want to end up in a padded cell (where they put people who are due to be severely hormonally corrected) until the end of my days.

If there _were_ any more days.

As you know, the revolution started with that bullet piercing that donor's brain (recounted at the beginning of this log). Now I didn't know _what_ would happen; I had changed the course of events just by being here, and perhaps I was stuck. I sighed and accepted the obvious; there was no way I was getting back to my own time--not with these restraints, not with a maximum of three hours left and a minimum of minus-twelve, or more.

I wondered how long it would take for me to die.

"You will die in precisely thirty years and two days," said a small, snide voice in my ear.

"Jarvis! Is that you?" I cried. Thankfully no nurse came running into the room.

"Thou art but a small little creature, with nothing to lose or gain," whispered the voice. I wondered if this was a consequence of being so long surrounded by other mental patients, but as far as I knew, schizophrenia wasn't contagious. "No," repeated the voice. "You are not suffering from schizophrenia. I have just looked into your thoughts and read your mind."

" _You are god_?" I spoke, unwillingly, fearfully.

"No, not God," the voice seemed to laugh. I looked around as well as I could, and saw that no one was paying us any attention. "No, they cannot hear us," said the voice. "This is just between you and me. You and _us_."

"But..." I faltered.

"God is extinct," he said. "Or, at least, as far as _I_ know. God is a theoretical concept, neither proven nor disproven. That is its definition."

"I thought God was gendered."

"I _am_ God."

Chapter 3

"I _am_ God," said the man, or whatever he was.

"Yes," I faltered again, my tongue seeming to twist in circles and knots. When I finally got it under control, I said, "What are you? I have never encountered..."

"I know," the voice said shortly. Then, more gently, it said: "I have been waiting for you

for some time now. It has been an eternity."

"What?"

"I said that it has been an eternity," said the voice, echoing into my ear and down through my mind like the collective whispers mothers (when they existed) told their children down through the eons. It was strangely comforting in an eerie, rootless way, like some long-extinct seeds of an unnamed flower floating in the wind, attempting to seed itself in the ground to perpetuate its own doomed line.

"Wake up," snapped the voice. "I was telling you, we seeded your world long ago so you could develop into our predecessors. A sort of genetic precursor to ourselves. Except that we reached down through the millions of years, which necessitated in the creation, or discovery, of a parallel universe that we could manipulate in order to ensure our existence. We searched and searched and finally found you."

I frowned. "This sounds like a children's fairy tale."

"It is and it isn't. The clown you saw was the beginning. The beginning of us and the end of you."

"You're confusing me."

"You're confusing yourself, hapless mortal," said the voice in my ear.

"But..."

A nurse came running. "He's delirious again," she said, and injected me with something that caused my mind to go aflame and my eyes to shut and open again in rapid succession. It felt as if I was flickering in and out of existence, but I knew that wasn't really happening: it was impossible. Unless...

"No," I gasped.

"Yes," said the voice simply. "It is true. You must accept it. You are stuck here, and now you are stuck with me. With _us_. We have found _you_ , and it is _you_ we have chosen to create ourselves. You are the beginning of the end for your species and for your planet. We will come and take over, any moment now.

"When?" I said fearfully.

"A few million years from now. Give or take a million. Go figure. That doesn't matter for now. What matters is that you begin right away to engineer us by splicing current humans and..."

" _What_? That is impossible."

Right then a nurse and a doctor (he was male and sort of menacing, so that's what I took him for) started wheeling me into a dark room.

"This doesn't look good," commented the voice.

"I know," I said.

"He's been talking to himself again," said the nurse worriedly. "In fact, nonstop."

"About what?"

"Some sort of time-shift discrepancy. Whatever that is. They tend to like to talk about that."

The doctor frowned as I stared up at him. For some reason I was unable to move any part of my body but my eyes. I blinked rapidly a few times in succession, trying to clear up some dust that had settled on my right cornea. The doctor stared at me. "Is he having a

seizure? Get him up to the CT, stat." He said it with relative calm, as if he had seen this all before and knew the solution. The nurse nodded gravely and started wheeling me down the long cold hall.

"Go get the syringe," the voice ordered, almost deafening my eardrums.

"Ouch," I said. "Not so loud!"

"Sorry, dear," said the nurse. "I know the wheels are a little squeaky, but there's no budget to fix them! They thought to give us some last month, but that ended up going to the research department, which ultimately ran--"

"Time it right," urged the voice. "You won't have long."

"I know," I gritted, waiting for the moment when she would untie me and transfer me to my cell.

"Wait!" said the nurse in my ear. But it was different somehow, I struggled to put my mind on it.

"Excuse me?" I whimpered as the nurse was untying my straps.

"No, do it now!" screamed the voice in my ear. "Get up, get to the storage room and get the syringe!"

"No!" screamed the nurse, with full force, shattering my eardrums (or at least, that's what it felt like). "You shall not pass!"

Strangely, I thought I had heard that phrase before. Perhaps something from the pre-time-travel propaganda inculcation, but I wasn't sure. Regardless,

"Please stop talking," I whispered to the nurse.

"You can go into your cell now," came her voice, strangely different than what it had been before. Dark hands (darker than normal--the nurse's hands were lighter than normal)--once I got my hands on that syringe I would have to inject them both--but that was for later).

She left me there on the cold bed. No mattress, but there was padding on the walls. This was what they prepared me for: the worst case scenario.

"What did I tell you?" said the nurse's voice once she had left me inside the cell.

"Excuse me?" I responded, attempting to roll my eyes upward to see but only managing to move one eye to the side. The other one drooped a bit and settled into a lethargic state.

"Don't listen to her," said God's voice in my ear. "She means you harm. They sent you here on an ill-advised mission, in order to thwart us, the true inheritors of destiny."

" _No_ ," hissed the nurse in my other ear--who I was starting to realize really wasn't the nurse. "It is not true. Don't listen to him. He means you ill, and you must complete your mission. We might be able to get you back."

"Devil?" I whispered in wonder. "Is that you?"

"You finally realized," said the nurse's voice snidely. "Here, is this better?" The voice became lower and more smooth. "This is my real voice. You have heard it before. Now you will know when I am talking to you. Now, don't listen to this other one--"

"No, _I_ am in the right and _he_ is in the wrong!" shouted God. "Thou art wrong! We are the creators! The creators of ourselves! You will all bow to us! We! Us! _Now_!"

"Alright," I said to nobody, my voice reverberating off the padded, cushy walls. I imagined the sound waves spiraling out of control like my mind was right now. Except for the fact that it wasn't; I was merely experiencing the time-reverberations (ie communiques from the

future). But I had never experienced two at once!

"Fine," I said to both of them. No doubt the doctors had recording equipment in this cell, but I wasn't worried about that at this moment. "You, Devil: recognize your foe. And that goes for you, too, God! Just make peace, or I will talk to none of you."

"Fine," said both of them at the same time, like firecrackers (an old kind of poisonous explosive originally used for ammunition)

"We will cooperate," said God.

"Yes," said Devil. "I agree with him. Or whatever multispectral multidimensional being he or she may be."

"Five dimensions," boasted God's voice proudly. "At least, in near future. They came back and told us how. Now the only link is you: we need _you_ to make our destiny apparent."

"We need _you_ ," mimicked Devil, my handler. "Don't you realize that this... _infidel_... is manipulating you to think that _his_ version of the future is authentic, is moral. Don't you realize how he puts women on a pedestal? You _do_ have women, do you not, God?"

"We do," God admitted, his voice seeming a little nervous and a little excited in the process, if that was possible in the post-natural age. "We re-engineered them to resist the plague of 2027."

"The _Revolution_ ," hissed Devil. "You are a _heretic_!"

"And you are deluding yourself. Women are not evil; they just tempt us. We tempt them too, you know."

"Lies!"

I visualized myself stepping between them and holding out my hands. "Listen, my men..." I started, then paused to think. What would I tell them? What could I possibly say to convince them to hold hands and work it out? There were too many variables to accurately predict the outcome. So I decided to take a chance:

"What would happen," I started slowly, gathering my thoughts and continuing, "if I was to inform both of you that we are stuck in this timestream and that there is nothing any of us can do to get out?"

"What do you mean?" asked God.

"I mean that we are all stuck here, all three of us." My voice was shaking, despite my obvious efforts to keep calm. I hoped they thought I was just "tripping" on the medication (which in reality was just causing me to see colors at the edge of my vision, a common side effect of the hallucinogens of the day).

"Explain," ordered my handler ("Devil").

"Well," I proceeded, very, very, cautiously... "Well, we have entered a new universe, correct? One that didn't exist before. I mean, with me being stuck here."

"Yes, yes, get to the point."

"What I'm saying," I continued, "is that since I am trapped here, you both are _also_ trapped here. Here with _me_."

I didn't know if this line was working, but it was all I had. I took another deep breath and continued: "There have been no cases of recovered timestreams in recorded history, and most scientists theorize that doing so is impossible. It is definitely safe to assume that all three of us, therefore, are now trapped together--since _I_ am." This was all purely conjecture, but I thought I

believed it.

"What?" exclaimed one of the voices, it was impossible to tell which. I could hear the sharp intake of breath from the other.

"Yes," I said. "It is true." And even I was growing more and more sure of it.

"It can't be," said Devil--I could practically feel him perspiring next to me. "I'm still in the future. _Your_ future. I still exist. Even the smallest change in rotation of a single quark would have changed the world irrevocably and I would have ceased to exist. What you're saying simply isn't true."

"The barbarian has a point," said God.

I cleared my throat: "But I am the one who engineers the revolution," I said.

Chapter 4

"What?" said Devil. "How many hallucinogens have they given you? You know, they are not close to what we have in our time."

"He has a point," said God.

"Shut up, God," said Devil. "Just because you're more advanced than I am doesn't mean you can tell me what to do."

"It is inevitable," said God. "You lead into me."

"Enough!" I said. I held up my hands even though they couldn't see them. The current president (dictator) had said that men who have big hands have big reproductive organs... in fact, there were rumors that some rich men were having coatings of gold (a material produced in neutron stars that used to be found in the Earth's crust) applied to their organs, but of course this was completely unsubstantiated--news outlets were notoriously slanted-- _are_ notoriously slanted, pardon me--in this day and age, because there was no centralized party like in the developed countries (which actually _had_ dictators). Talk about being backwards--the concept of mob rule had always depressed me, and the fact that the current (or past) world had pitted this evil concept against the unification of all peoples had especially depressed me--this is why my tone is so morose as I write this.

Boring, I know, but necessary.

Revolution _was_ necessary.

I had finally realized it: I was The Progenitor, The Originator. This was evident in the choice I had to make, the choice between God and the Devil.

Of course, I chose the Devil.

"Excuse me?" I pressed into the intercom. "Nurse? I'm suddenly very hungry. Might you have any scraps of flotsam to nourish this poor, feeble soul?" It was a stretch, but then again insane people usually tended to stretch the truth.

Not that I was insane: I wasn't. I was just a bit fractured... in _time_.

The nurse approached the door: my ears still worked, even if theoretically my mind did not. Her footsteps sounded like the horse's clopping women's' strides were typically characterized as back home; Short and clipped, like terse commands barked to soldiers from a bossy mother's mouth. Of course, the word "mother" was prohibited, and thus this book technically cannot be published in the twenty-third century. We shall see though if it makes it there--I am running out of time as we speak. Oxygen supplies aren't what they used to be--or,

rather, what they are going to be.

The door opened. Of its own accord, it seemed, but of course there was a hand--a _woman's_ hand--behind the motion. Laden with rings, it clinked against the door like some long-buried treasure recently unearthed by excavators in the Danger Zone. Which, of course, meant most of the world--obviously, there weren't many habitable places left. But what was most disgusting about the display was the sheer ostentation of it... all of those precious metals and diamonds could easily go into more useful applications, like mining, or spaceships. Especially spaceships; we needed those, badly--habitable planets were far, far away and of course it took many generations to get there. Memories could be implanted with not much difficulty, but each time you cloned yourself you developed more problems. They were working on better technology, but it wasn't available as of yet. Which is an obvious point when you're talking about technology--that was the point of it, wasn't it? That it wasn't here yet?

The nurse stuck her hand through the opening to unlatch the door. I was ready: I grabbed her arm in a vicelike grip I learned as a child from my podmates and she fell screaming. Very unfortunate: not the falling part, but the screaming--it was distracting and it attracted attention. I had about ten seconds before I was ripped apart by big black hands (the underclass--who had stopped fighting for their rights because the "Republicans" had oppressed them).

I shoved the woman's (disgusting!) face into the ground with my "shoe" (organic boot) and walked out of the cell. I was weakened by the medication but I crushed a compound in one of my other teeth: this one consisted of pure adrenaline, and would last for ten minutes. But afterwards I would be dead.

"Fine," I told myself, preparing for the onslaught of big black people (people with a lot of melanin--white people were at the other end of the spectrum, the albinos--we resembled Middle-Eastern people most of all, which is probably why they locked me up in the first place). Middle Eastern people believed in a thing called "God," which was an evil creature who told you to do things like cover up women and blow up buildings.

Which was debatable, of course. But we didn't need God to tell us to do that when we ourselves could do it on our own!

Whatever. I stole into the room on the right and grabbed a few syringes. No guns here: just fists--so I had the advantage. When those four big black men and one albino man came at me, I was ready.

It took about five seconds. I was on adrenaline, after all. Now I had nine and a half minutes left.

I had not noticed which drugs I had given the black people and the albino, so it was a bit surprising when most of them started convulsing, but it wasn't all that jarring. After all, a mental hospital is a mental hospital--too bad I couldn't just put them down here and now, it would be the humane thing after all...

I checked the contents of the gene-therapy drugs: adequate, if not perfect. But it would do. Each drug would take about ten seconds to begin to take effect, but then they would definitely take effect... it was hard to predict what would happen because I wasn't familiar with all of the current names... they had all evolved into official names of standardized drugs (including the time-travel-inducing gene, of course) and the old names had been lost to antiquity.

Or at least that's what they say.

The nurses rushed at me: I moved as a blur, hardly registering on their antiquated cameras which only recorded light. I was ready. One of them rushed at me with a syringe but I ducked under it and snapped her arm back, breaking it in two places while she writhed on the ground. Two of her friends then came at me from opposite directions, trying to catch me in between them with syringes in both hands like a pair of old "scissors" (primitive metallic knives shaped in a criss-cross orientation which were used to cut down trees in a barbaric attempt to make "paper"--a long story). But just then something expected happened:

The first downed nurse rose up from the floor, semi-animated like one of those cyborgs they were trying to create that were only just in beta. I doubted she still had consciousness (if that even existed) but she definitely had _something_ ... the virus controlling her was manipulating her neurons in a deep way known only to a few scientists in all of known civilization. Viruses, as everyone knew, were the progenitors of the universe itself, the first structured beings, despite the fact that they couldn't independently reproduce.

Reproduction. It made me sick to my stomach.

The virused nurse cast herself upon the other two, stabbing them repeatedly with the same syringe I used on her originally. They screamed, of course, but it was just like movies I had seen while sitting immobilized in the waiting room, it was exactly the same thing, so I wasn't shocked at all. I just watched the carnage--after all, I was trained for this.

"Your thoughts are disorganized," somehow came the sibilant whisper from the lips of the nurse who had previously been trained for this. The other two nurses were now dead; but in the meantime they had managed to grow gills and a snout. Now _that_ was quaint! I would have to sample their DNA to bring back to a museum--if ever I got back.

Well, now that was a thought! Interesting!

Now that I knew what each virus did, I injected myself with just the right amounts: I grew a snout for increased oxygen intake; I had gills just in case I needed to go underwater; and I had a virus which enhanced my abilities and perceptions, not to mention making my face a darker color than it was before so that I resembled one of the guards. Not of my own accord but acceptable.

The inmates were milling around in the absence of a plethora of armed guards. Most weren't making any sound, however, though a few were moaning softly. I threw some random drugs at them in the hopes that it would ease the pain of their antipsychotics, which caused headaches and restless autoambulation. "Perhaps your god will save you," I told them, sure that some of them at least would hear me, and perhaps survive long enough without the drugs to make it into the post-revolutionary era.

"Now what do I do?" I paged God and The Devil through our subspace connection.

"What do _we_ do," stressed The Devil, sibilantly drawing out the syllables to express a certain sense of intimidation or danger.

"I included," added God.

"Shut up, nobody asked you, heretic," hissed The Devil.

"Enough!" i held up my hands, but it didn't work this time: two opposing voices vibrated my eardrums mercilessly like an endless chorus.

"We have to go underground," said God.

"Where are we going?" asked The Devil.

" _I'm_ supposed to ask that," I said.

"To the pits of burning fire, of course," replied God. I could almost see him lounging in his armchair of polycarbonates, next to an artificial flame, which was burning synthetic gas.

"You mean..."

"Yes," continued God, smiling in his armchair as he smoked a pipe made of recycled steel. "Your birthplace, where you were spawned. Actually, that's a lie they made up two thousand years ago but I don't want to put my people in mortal peril so I didn't just... _oops_!"

"Oops indeed," agreed The Devil ironically. "I don't think I lead into you--I think you lead into _me_."

"And we all are going to hell," I completed. "Are you serious, God? I mean, we all are crazy by now, but _you_? _Hell_?"

"It exists," God admitted. "I had my doubts about it, but they say it exists--"

"In the Inner Earth," completed The Devil.

"This is all mythology," I said. "You can't be serious. I am closer to the past than you are, and we in my time say--"

"Actually, you come from _my_ time," interjected The Devil.

" _Obviously_ ," I said. "But right _now_ \--"

"They are barbarians," both God and The Devil said at once. "They don't know much," said God. "They eat dead animals, worship non-existent beings and think the world is only five thousand years old."

"He's right, for once," said The Devil.

"I have no gender, fool," said God. "I am but a humble computer. Like the movie _Lucy_."

"Then you are definitely going to Hell."

"How do we get to Middle Earth?" I said.

"Inner Earth is located at the entrance to the tomb of Adam and Eve, in Bethlehem," said God--"But it is currently a war zone. So we will have to go around."

"Around _what_?"

"The world. Of course."

Chapter 5

" _What_?"

"I thought your earpiece was working correctly, Agent. Didn't you hear what I said?"

It was obviously a joke, and obviously also not funny. But I didn't respond because it was God.

"In a spaceship," explained God. "A chemo-rocket. One of the old ones."

"You've got to be kidding!" The Devil exploded. "The risk of explosion is--"

"Minimal," finished God. "You will do as I say. It is our only hope for success. I just hope that we won't die.

"That _I_ won't die," I said. "Everything rides on me. Wish me luck, or probability. Now where do we go?"

"Airport," said God. "We are going to a place called Cape Canaveral, Florida."

"That's almost as hot as Hell."

"Not nearly," reacted The Devil.

I looked around the lobby of the ward, which everyone called the "Living Room." There were of course comfy animals chairs scattered everywhere, with surprisingly little vomit--actually, there was exactly zero vomit, despite the many mops and brooms and dustpans dotting the room.

We were in Orlando within three hours and at the Space Shuttle in another two. God had wired some funds from the future to the present, and they worked splendidly in convincing the Russians and the Americans that I needed a 20 million dollar ride. Of course, we were going to hijack the rocket, but that was none of their business.

"Come now, sir," the darker-skinned man who talked in an Indian accent said to us as we traversed the narrow metal walkway hundred of feet above the ground. "We shouldn't keep the captain waiting. He's Russian, after all, and you know how they get when the vodka sets in."

He was joking, of course, and the captain wasn't even a Russian (he was Estonian). But we did only have minutes to spare. I had my little sack that I liked to carry on my shoulder (since I had bought it at the airport five hours previously) and thought I might as well make use of it) and it jangled on my shoulder, filled with little knick knacks which weighed it down like a bunch of stones (carbon deposits, such as those found on the moon).

There was something called "Facebook," which was a primitive version of the Cybernets, which caused the analog receiver in my pocket to vibrate, a curious sensation reminiscent of the vids of the revolution. It spoke: "Such a joy to come home to!!" it said in a robotic voice which was trying to imitate a female who was aroused (the horror!). I retrieved it and glanced at the screen: there was a picture of a baby (shocking, I know). I didn't think it really would be such a joy to come home to if I were in his situation, but if he wanted to boast about it on the nets then it was his prerogative... but come to the twenty-fourth century and you will be put down!

They strapped us in: me, the pilot and a technician; I guess they didn't really think my security was of paramount importance. Unfortunate but I would have to live with it--or die by it.

The flight was bumpy but unremarkable: we rose into the air, almost getting squashed like bugs (I told you what they were before, I think). And then I orchestrated my heist, aided by my trusty companions from the future (mainly God, of course).

It was over quickly. But then we were falling.

"What do I do?" I shouted over the wail of the engines and the screaming wind.

"What do _we_ do," God shouted back.

"I never knew I would be seeing my birthplace again," said The Devil.

"Isn't that a bit premature?" I responded.

"Prepare for a vertical landing," instructed God. "You know what to do, your handler trained you for this."

"A _what_?" I gasped. "Don't play me for a fool, God--this plan is insanity: even The Devil wouldn't have thought this up."

"Oh, but I might have!" protested my handler. "If not for God being more technologically advanced than--"

"Impact in five..." said God. I prepared to "die."

But instead the impact never came. "Am I dead?" I gasped. I assumed that one had trouble breathing when not "alive." It was the logical thing to think, after all.

"Quiet," said God. "I'm concentrating."

"I thought you were all-knowing," taunted The Devil.

"We are passing through the upper crust of the Earth," continued God. "Soon--in about five minutes--we will be slowing our descent, Nothing Willing, and will be landing in the only spaceport in Middle Earth. In a few million years we will be seeding the Earth with the first human life, and then this cycle will begin yet again. Perhaps in a different permutation, but it will be similar all the same.

"Nice speech, Master, but when will we be landing?" taunted The Devil.

"That's for Mr. Thadbolt to answer and you to contemplate," said God. "Even I don't know what will happen in this time period."

"I think we're slowing down," I managed to stutter. "I mean, we're slowing down, and I know that cause the blood from the bodies are floating into the air in front of me..." and it was disgusting.

"I'm still alive!" came a tinny voice from the front of the cabin.

"Come now, friend, you're even starting to talk like them!" said The Devil, who must have heard the dying man's summons, I thought. "Once we get you back here we're going to have to put _you_ down," he emphasized. "This is very unhealthy."

"I outrank you," said God.

"I outrank both of you," I said. I felt like I was about to "throw up"--thank Nothing I had not "eaten lunch." I pitied those aboard the colony ships of the future that had to conform to new "reevolution guidelines," which of course forced everyone except the ships' crew to pretend they were cavemen again. And the prospect of _women_ existing again (once they landed on the planet)... well, we have said this already.

There was an elevator--a great irony, considering the effort the ancient scholars had put into the myth that technology was somehow a new thing. I imagined the elevator went down into the depths of the Earth for nearly an eternity. But it was not so--as we stepped into the elevator, it lurched like an old dinosaur that had just been reanimated without the kinks worked out, and we dropped slowly for a half a minute and the doors opened once more. It was that simple: Hell in a Handbasket; or, rather, in someone's "basement" (area used to collect floodwater).

The doors opened and it was hot. This was expected, of course, as the mythology of the time period described it as hot--of course, the progenitors of this era would have set it up to correspond to the myths--or the other way around, it didn't matter. But there was something awry here, it just didn't seem right.

The landscape consisted of red sand, of course, as it was meant to resemble Mars, which is the original name for Earth II (hardly anyone knows that anymore). There was an artificial sun, or at least it seemed that way--perhaps it was a large mirror, I wasn't sure; we hadn't developed that technology yet, but apparently God's successors had. There were also many cacti (an old Earth plant which thrived with little water), which was a bit out of place,

because the rest of landscape consisted of miniature volcanoes which spouted every few seconds. I assumed these were just for show, but I was soon going to be proved very wrong...

There proved to be a building in the distance. It looked squat one second, round the next, hexagonal the following moment, which seemed to be an illusion of some sort, perhaps a hologram, though the purpose of this facade escaped me. "Shall we go?" I wondered aloud, followed by queries from my two companions in either ear. I explained the situation and they both agreed we should approach the building.

It took a few moments to approach the object, and then it began to resolve into a solid shape: an arch.

I explained what I was seeing to my companions.

"What!" exclaimed The Devil, perspiring (or so it seemed) on his forehead and overalls. God was not far behind in his condemnation: "Impossible!" he said, his voice spouting forth like the famed mythical fountain of youth, which was in some garden somewhere (a place where people used to grow starchy vegetables before the advent of protein pills). "Arches are from the middle ages, they don't exist anymore, except for in museums and the like." Saying this seemed to calm him down a little, like some kind of new slow-working sedative which they developed in place of the old ones which caused unhealthy side effects (ie thoughts of reproduction). In the olden days of religion, they recommended that one recite prayers over and over again in one's mind when it was necessary to have sexual relations, so that one would last longer before the end and perhaps even cause the woman pleasure (a horrid thought but logical perhaps in those times).

Regardless, the arch was not supposed to exist: it was an abnormality, foreign and strange, a blot on the perfect world of this hell. This blot was reddish-brown in color, made of old-style mortar, which featured prominently in the creation myths of the time as blood was red (at the time) and shit was brown. Shit is a word used by locals for excrement, and I enjoyed employing it from time to time, rolling it off my tongue like some sugar cube, which caused a disease called Diabetes. You know, I really should stop boring you with my descriptions, because you might think I actually like this time-period on Earth. This is false.

Of course.

We passed through the arch and instantly the landscape changed. There were multiple squat buildings, and many religious symbols made of wood sticking up from the ground. These symbols came from many religions--they were Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Shinto, Maya, and many others. They were all made of wood for some reason: perhaps because plant life represented rebirth and the hope that a "God" existed.

There were people nailed to the various symbols, and they were in various states of life and death, and degeneration and decay. I recognized one of them: a short clipped mustache on a face that was somehow soft and hard, womanly and manly at the same time: it was Hitler, someone who championed racial cleansing and murder about a hundred years before the revolution. He was nailed to a cross, and was moaning pitiably (although I had no pity for him), saying something in German.

"He's saying, God wanted me to do it," translated The Devil. "Did you, God?"

God didn't answer, instead preferring to dwell in silence like some

Monk who was ascetic enough to talk only once a week, and only to his superiors.

"Hey, what about me?" said another guy, slightly taller and slightly less healthy-looking. He had red sores all over his body and was nailed to another cross.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"You've never heard of me?" he said. "No one ever has. I'm the person who killed ten million Black Africans, thirty years before Hitler--but no one seems to remember me."

"We both regret what we did," Hitler said.

"Obviously now you do," I said. "Moving on..."

We moved on past the two men to an array of "Jewish Stars (footnote ibid)." There were a few people nailed to these wooden six-pointed objects, which must have made the punishment that much more terrible.

"Who are you?" I asked them. All of them started talking at once, at least the ones that could.

"Stop!" I held up my hand.

"What is going on?" wondered The Devil in my ear.

"I'll explain later," I said. Turning to the unfortunates, I queried them: "Who is your leader?"

"He's the rabbi," an old man pointed to a bearded man, covered with blood and very clearly dead, who was lying beside on of the stars.

"He can't speak anymore, can he?" I said. "Who is second in command?"

"I am," said the old man.

"What did you do to end up here?" I demanded. "You all don't look that bad!"

"We have no idea," said the old man. "One day we were on a boat and the next we were here! Can you please get us out?"

"He lies," sighed one of the ladies, who still looked pretty healthy despite undergoing extreme conditions.

"Seconded," said another lady, whose legs seemed to be broken in several places. Half of her face seemed to be in extreme pain. "I'll tell you what we did..."

"No, it has to be me!" shouted the old man.

"Hello? Welcome to the twenty-first century," spat the broken woman back at him. " _Women_ wear the pants here."

"Actually, this place is outside the normal space-time continuum," began the old man, only to be shouted down by the two ladies, who would have torn him to pieces with their hands and teeth had they been free to move about. He backed a few paces away from them, at least tried to and failed.

"The reason we're here is not because women have pants; it's because we did something else," said the first woman. The second one shifted her head to try and rid herself of a swarm of flies but was unsuccessful.

"What, then?" I insisted. The old man was covering his face with both hands (or at least was trying to.

"He is our protector," explained the first lady. "He makes sure other women don't come by and insult us." I didn't know how this could be, as they could hardly move their stakes an inch, but they all seemed to wiggle closer to their protector somehow.

"It's pretty obvious," said a new woman, who seemed to have multi-colored hair. She

was breathing heavily and had multiple puncture wounds in her upper body, and it didn't look like she would make it much longer. Seeing my expression, she replied, "Oh, don't worry you future time-traveler; it's just aesthetic. The pain wore off long ago. Long, long ago."

"So what did you do?" I demanded. I wished to get out of this place as soon as possible. God had specified that we had to go underground--to hide from something, I was sure, but I didn't know what.

"God!" I shouted. "Why in all the Hells are we here?"

"Who are you talking to?" said one of the ladies.

"My computer!" I said hastily, trying to pretend that I never said anything. "Why are you all here, then?" I asked them all.

"We only received a two-thousand year sentence," complained the lady.

"Shut it, or you'll receive more," threatened the old man, wagging his index finger at her. "Now, where were we?"

"The reason we're here," began the woman, "is because we talked slander. About others."

"Everything has its place and time," I shrugged. "Can you be more specific? It's alright to talk badly about someone in some situations, right? I mean, like to warn someone that a guy's going to kill him. Or _her_." The word felt tasteless and bland in my mouth.

"You speak Standard like _they_ do," said The Devil.

"Women, you mean?" I asked him. "Anyway, why don't we get you all out of here? I mean, you've suffered enough.

"Impossible!" declared one of the women.

She's right, for a start," said the old man.

I noticed the old man was sweating buckets. So I said, "Why don't we go and take a swim? It's pretty hot out today, we could have a good time, you know, bounce a ball around the pool, and--"

"Feeble attempt at a joke," declared the old man. "You see any pools around here? But in our day we called it 'baths.'"

"Next!" announced God. "We're going on to the next exhibit."

"Why?" I said. "These people are pretty interesting."

"They're not pretty, but they definitely are interesting," put in The Devil.

"Who are you talking to?" demanded the old man. "And do you have any water? I haven't had any for a thousand years."

"Go get your own," said one of the women, her blond hair looking like wilting grass in the desert wind.

"Moving on," said God. I felt my feet start to move, but it wasn't of my own accord.

"Could you please stop that?" I demanded of God after we were out of hearing range.

"It makes me feel like I have no free will."

"You, too?" yawned God, stretching out his limbs on the edge of the armchair.

"How many times do I have to tell you, no feet on the furniture!" screamed The Devil, his voice suddenly becoming very high and "bossy."

I am a sexist, didn't you know?

"How long are we going to have to remain down here?" The Devil whined, continuing his monologue of futility.

"We go next about twenty of your kilometers, to a refugee camp of indiscriminate size," God announced.

"What the Hell?" asked The Devil, his voice full of incredulity. "So we're running from the people on the surface of the planet, who want to commit us to a psychiatric hospital, correct? We are going to another sparsely occupied locale where people are suffering. How is this different from the typical crazy house?"

"Well, you wouldn't want to be up there, would you?" God retorted, as we walked on the dusty red sand that resembled Earth II. A couple of rocks protruded from our path and resembled old dead husks of animals that had died in the sun. I worked my way around them carefully, my shoes collecting dust as I strayed off the "road" (for there was a road, and though it was hardly recognizable at times, it stretched on for kilometers for both ends. Perhaps it was formed by some rogue travellers, although why someone would want to travel through Hell on a journey to someplace was beyond my imagining.

"What's next?" I asked my invisible companions, wishing I had some water myself.

"We are going to something called a 'concert,'" said God. "We learn valuable lessons for Heaven's sake. Jen qui."

"Oh, come on, that's just plagiarism," complained The Devil. "Flagrant!"

"Did you say you wanted to be flayed? Or flogged?"

Since I had no idea what they were talking about, I took the opportunity to scour the landscape for possible water sources.

"There's water a few kilos up that way," gestured God, somehow reading my thoughts, though I didn't have a notion where he was pointing.

"I assume you mean up that cliff," I said, looking Northwest at a cliff that suddenly presented itself, with actual orange clouds beyond it.

"Yes," God coughed, after a few seconds of consideration. "Say thanks, I just made that cliff a while in the past, it took a while, sorry..."

"You mean in that short time you actually went back and then returned to our time?" scoffed The Devil. "Could you please teach me and your teacher's pet here how to do that?"

"Not in a million years," concluded God.

"But after?"

My feet padded tiresomely on the sand, which seemed to want to turn into a series of sinkholes at every moment. "I'm burning up," I said. "Or, at least, my feet are. And I hardly have the energy to go ten more paces. Can't one of you just make it precipitate or something?"

"Bad diction," cautioned God, his voice staticing in my ear from ten decibels down to two and back again.

"We're about to go where the sun don't shine," said The Devil, seeming to read God's thoughts this time. "And I seem to have morphed into one of the downtrodden... Hell, everyone needs a representative and I am happy to represent those in need."

A solitary cloud, accompanied by a hot breeze, made its way over from the cliff nine kilometers distant to us. Me, I mean; it was hard to classify these things and whether or not I was one, two, three or more than that. Or Nothing. But of course, who really cared?

It started to precipitate; excuse my Standard, I am just exercising its proper usage. I stuck out my tongue to try and catch the fat droplets, and I caught some: perhaps a handful, five or six.

"Did I make it rain? Are you drinking?" God asked excitedly.

I ignored him and kept on plodding toward the cliff. Eight kilometers now, but I abandoned caution to the winds and activated my rocket sneakers: seven kilos, six, five...

"What's that vibration I'm feeling?" asked God, his voice a little unsteady. "Don't tell me... Oh, no!"

"I am approaching the cliff," I said, and right then wished I had a helmet.

"Be careful," warned The Devil.

"I always am," God said.

"So am I," I said. I left the rockets on and dove for the edge of the cliff, and then over and down...

Chapter 6

At first there was total blackness as I fell and fell, seemingly into eternity. Then details began to resolve themselves: a blue patch here, a grey patch there, a hint of red, of purple, pink and all the colors in between. Where the water was I didn't know, until suddenly...

I was looking down at a landscape that was one thousand meters distant, right beneath me. "What in the seven--" I began and then simply gaped at the vastness of it, the patches resolving themselves into forests, farmlands, roads and such items of civilization.

"Is this what is below Hell?" I wondered, shaking my head at the scene despite the wind of my fall resisting my efforts. "An agricultural paradise, a haven?"

"What are you seeing?" The Devil demanded, his head shaking this way and that, trying to catch a glimpse of what I was seeing. "Nothing, I wish I had installed a visualization system into the time-capsule, this puny feed is worthless..."

"He is seeing the next level," God replied calmly, his eyes fixed on the rapidly-expanding landscape and our impending doom.

"Of what?" The Devil wondered.

"I think of Hell," I yelled over the roaring wind, hoping they would hear me. They did not.

"What did you say?" yelled The Devil. I couldn't even make out what God was saying.

"I am about to be crushed like a very small creature in about ten seconds," I yelled at them, my "life" flashing before my eyes. "Any advice, please!"

"You should have had a question mark there," noted God. "Open your parachute, please."

"Now," added The Devil--I could practically see him smirking behind his mic.

I felt behind me and located the chute: it wasn't there last time I checked but it was now. God must have sent it to me somehow, perhaps through The Devil along the way. Whatever-- there were many possibilities, too many to comprehend, lest I die within seconds.

I opened the chute.

When I woke up I was on the "ground," staring up at the cliff that was there but was rapidly fading away into the "sky". Soon it was gone and I was wondering if I was still in the psych ward and they were giving me a particularly nasty chemical intravenously.

Many complicated words, from a complicated time: I hope the translators of the day convey it in a balanced perspective--in whatever language has evolved instead of the one I grew up speaking.

If there still is language at all.

Pessimism tends to set in when society starts to rot. But I am boring you again, let me get back to the action:

It was a valley, obviously: despite the fact that there were no visible mountains and the landscape stretched from horizon to horizon, we had just fallen from a cliff, even a nonexistant one, and I considered that to be real even though other denizens of this Hell had not--at least, I think--

\--But I had no time to think: I had to explore this land and its inhabitants, even if it was too much for me, for I had to find some way to start the revolution. And what better place to do it than the Center of the Earth, the place equidistant from all points on the perimeter?

Assuming the Earth was round.

I found myself in the middle of a Hamlet. There were people milling about me, like holograms, except perhaps this time real. I approached one of them.

"My god, you look strange," he said in a deep, drawling voice. He had an albino face--one that seemed to sneer at me and pity me all the same; but it was still kind. Somehow--I did not know. But kindness was possible, even though the races hadn't been integrated yet.

"I am from the Middle East," I informed him, but of course that was exactly the wrong thing to say.

"Hmm," he said, eyeing me from toe to head. "You an Ay-Rab?"

"I am Christian," I said, "like you, my sir." My diction still wasn't perfect.

"You sound it!" He chuckled, and I relaxed reflexively. Perhaps I was not going to be burned at the stake in this iteration of Hell.

"Why don't you come with us to a rodeo?" he said. Some men and women were starting to gather around us. They all had "Cowboy Hats."

"Hey, it's hot as Hell out here, why don't we go inside and get a drink?" another man suggested. I looked around the scene: the clock tower, the stone fences marking the town commons, the various pubs and inns scattered about the area, the perspiring women fanning themselves while tending to the future. It must have been a "Sunday," because the sun was in the middle of the sky and there was no school. Men and women tended to go to Church (Organized Religion) on this day. It was a day of community, congregation, and eating dead animal matter together. Conversation tended to happen when people eat together--although it theoretically was a bit dangerous to talk and eat at the same time.

I agreed to eat with them and then come to a rodeo.

"So you're a newcomer, eh?" growled one of the men, peering under his cowboy hat at me while a bunch of other men and women observed me in a similar fashion, albeit more openly curious with their expressions (some of them with wide eyes and others with their mouths in a slightly gaping expression).

"I am indeed," I said cautiously, trying not to overextend. "One could say I fell from the sky."

That prompted a few chuckles. "You an alien?" asked one of them excitedly. "I hear there were tons of lights over Mexico City not a few days ago."

"I was an alien," I admitted. "At least until a few days ago. Or perhaps a few moments ago, I'm not sure. But certainly I have produced no lights."

Silence. Then: "You think you're pretty smart, don't you?" A menacing voice, for sure.

Silence on my part. Then: "I suppose I had some schooling," because I wasn't sure what else to say.

I felt a hard blow to my back, and I almost fell over. "No worries, son," came a loud booming laugh, then a bunch (an expression) more. Laughter surrounded me like rolling boulders (large rocks) cascading down an unstable hill.

I untensed and relaxed. "So, what is this?" I motioned to the white solid on the table, which was decorated with multi-colored plant reproductive organs.

"Mashed potatoes," munched one of the men, whose mouth was filled with the creamy stuff.

"I made 'em myself!" declared a woman who was enclothed in some kind of coarse blue fabric.

"She's my wife, so don't even think about taking her," added the munching man, clapping me on the back and causing me to choke for a moment, until he came over behind me and punched my stomach multiple times with a curled fist.

"'Ere, ain't that better?" he crooned. "It's always tough when you're fightin' while eatin'."

"Shan't we go to the rodeo now?" I mimicked his accent, after what seemed to be an appropriate pause.

We got up after a few belches and walked down the dirt road about a half-kilometer. There were flower (ibid) patches scattered by the side of the road, and infrequent scenes of mothers tending children and children tending chickens. The chickens were squawking and interrupting our conversation.

"So you say you're from out of town?" the initial man was saying, staring at women and children indiscriminately, which I took to mean he was checking for visible firearms (he had told me it was an "open carry" and "stand your ground" state). "I was relieved personally to learn you're a Christian, and a redneck like us to boot." More laughter from our companions.

"I don't have a pair of boots with me," I managed to say, after "checking out" the same families he was mentioning with my own eyes and finding nothing to immediately cause concern.

"Boots don't matter," he said, laughing as he kicked a rock out of the way. "Ouch, that hurt!"

We were approaching a massive building made of concrete (still in use today, if you can believe it!) and it was truly gigantic: a dinosaur (or two!) could have fit inside it. We entered through a miniscule door in the side and were greeted by loud raucous cheers from inside, both low and high in tone (as opposed to the happy medium we have today) from the many concrete benches lined in ornate rows up and down the curved plaza. Cheering in general made me uncomfortable, as it was directly tied to Feel-Good-Meetings (commonly known in the past as "orgies") and that was the only time when we were allowed to cheer----in a tone of voice almost directly in between the low growls and extremely high-pitched squeals (from _women_ , nonetheless!) that came from this naturally-engineered spectacle of excess. It is still the same reaction every place I go: when I hear squeals and shouts, I immediately turn into an android from fear (in the past they called this kind of person "autistic").

Regardless, there were many people there. No one even looked at us while we found our seats--they were all focused on the spectacle on the field (primitive explosives) which was creating a large amount of chaos.

After a few minutes, in which we consumed yet more food (this time they were oblong brown dead animal carcasses, smothered with cheese, tomato paste and some kind of poison derivative), there was an announcement on the radio: "Ladies and Gents, we are pleased to announce our surprise guest.... Annabelle Johnson!!!!!"

The deep voice, reminiscent of God's supposed baritone, reverberated around the stadium several times, eventually finding a fading death like some echo of the long-forgotten deity of the Christian religion which people also thought voiced a villainous character on a classic space drama. I know it's confusing, but please bear with me.

Whoever this Annabelle was, everyone but me knew who she was. She wore something called a bikini, which covered her reproductive organs, anus crack and mammary glands while accentuating the curves of her body. Everyone got up on their feet: the men roaring and the women pretending to be excited.

What happened next is too complicated for me to explain on the pages of this book. Or perhaps it was too simple--I'm not sure. For future unfortunates in training to become professionals who are being forced to write persuasive essays on this work, I apologize for my lack of contrition.

"We are done here," God suddenly said in my ear, causing me to jump five feet in the air, causing the woman to the left of me to spill her "onion rings" and "beer" (caffeinated beverage)

"Where to?" I finally managed to say, trying not to choke on my own saliva.

"I think we might just skip to the seventh rung of Hell, the lowest one," continued God, as if he hadn't heard me. Where was the Devil?

"The Devil is indisposed at this moment," said God as if he had heard me.

"The Devil was _eating_!" exclaimed The Devil, bristling at the suggestion that he would have less power than his Master. "And won't The Supreme Being tell his badly flustered servant why we have to descend into these multiple levels of Hell?"

"Well as you know," God responded calmly, like a schoolteacher Robot who forgot his "animated" setting, "we came down to this level because we needed water. We have since obtained that needed ingredient of life."

"Stop being poetic and say what you mean," spat The Devil, chewing on some moldy teriyaki jerky and spitting most of it out onto the asphalt. He coughed weakly and waited for an answer.

After a long while, God said, "We need something else."

"And what would that be?"

"Red Bull."

"Excuse me? Why a long-extinct animal when we could simply grow our own soft muscle? Or could you possibly be referring to the Red Heifer, a mythical structure of the false religion that spawned all the other false religions? _Choose_!"

"I mean that we need Red Bull in order to descend into the Seventh Level," God explained patiently while The Devil ground his teeth in frustration.

"And why are we descending?"

We were walking out of the stadium. I scarcely noticed, as I was listening to their conversation, and God (or The Devil) had apparently taken control over my body. My body jerked as it walked, as if I had some debilitating nervous condition. It felt like I was "dancing" (courtship with other humans), but I had never danced before...

"How are we going to descend?" I suddenly blurted out. I had no idea if it was God or me.

"And why?" added The Devil. I was walking over some uneven ground on the dirt path, and his interjection caused me to stumble nearly fall.

"Keep your comments to yourself, Master!" I roared, losing control for some reason. Now I landed face down in the dirt.

"What happened?" said The Devil innocently. "I seem to have heard a crash!"

"Crashing is normal," God answered promptly, as if he knew what The Devil was going to say.

"Stop, stop, _stop_!" I shouted, losing control again. Perhaps I had crushed another of my teeth by accident; accidents did happen--Nothing always had a plan. But there was always an antiplan.

Or was there?

"We have to find _something_ to do while we wait for them to stop hunting us," God pontificated, as if on a dais and preaching to a discontented congregation of insane God-fearing people. "There are no alternatives to action. Direct Action is the only course, and we must change ourselves before changing other people: that is the only way."

"The only way for what?" The Devil taunted. My feet slipped again on the path and threatened to kill me (as if I had a life)

"Whatever," sighed God. "Are you ready?"

Chapter 7

"I thought we needed Red Bull?" I queried.

"Forget it, we have The Devil," he said. "He's even better. Now hold on!"

The sky seemed to darken--clouds appeared at once and started showering us with rain.

"Sorry," God admitted. "That was a bit abrupt." He turned off the clouds and it got warmer suddenly.

"The clouds are still there, God," I told him.

"What is happening?" asked The Devil.

"This is where _you_ come in," God sighed, and leaned back even further in his armchair before his warm, cozy fire. He stared into its depths as if straining to unlock the mysteries of the Universe, then turned away as if bored or tired. Tired he was not, nor bored either, but appearances were meant to be kept up, and he had a long night ahead of him. He sighed again and clinked his tiny metal spoon inside of his tea mug. He was so lonely.

But that was also a facade.

It was getting warmer.

"I think I forgot how to turn off the heat," God announced nervously, as if he had emotions.

"That's just the sun, isn't it?" asked The Devil nervously, his voice quavering from falsetto down to tenor-baritone. I could practically see his fingers twitching.

"Partly," God replied calmly.

I felt a sudden sinking sensation and the world blurred--like it was going out of focus slowly, my vision going from 20/10 to 20/300 in the span of five seconds. Which wasn't such a long time, if you thought about it.

Life suddenly got a lot hotter. My surroundings were blackness now, and I saw spots at the edge of my vision, though I didn't know how that was possibly short of what they used to call a "lobotomy." Ancient medical practices still confuse me.

I awoke (for I must have been asleep) in a black chair, which was warm, though not as warm as I felt: I must have had a fever.

I was inside a room with white walls, though patterned here and there with white drapes and dark furniture which made the place look like an old photograph. And there was a man.

He was staring intently at me as if he was studying a woman (ghastly!) or a report he couldn't understand.

The air smelled of some kind of air freshener, though it was not concentrated enough to be an aerosol. It must have been one of those sublimating solids which people used to employ to clear the air of a stench before (and after) they learned the solids were carcinogenic. Like those on Beta Minor who still employ women to give birth even though it is known the presence of women cause errors in judgement. Ingenious insanity.

I surmised this was a "therapist."

A therapist was a human version of The Correction Program. Nowadays of course we don't subject ourselves to human error, but one time human error was all we had: it was like some perverted beta version of reality.

"So why are you here?" he peered closely at me through his square, black, narrow, thick glasses.

I fidgeted on my couch; what was I supposed to say? My back slid forward and caused my head to lose altitude and my whole body slowly careened towards the floor. But, of course, it was very slow, so the net result was just a slow-motion capture of futility as I lost an inch every ten seconds, and then another inch. In the meantime he was talking:

"You contacted me because you said you were experiencing pain in the head," he was saying. "Is that correct? Is that what you contacted me about?"

"You repeated the word 'contacted,'" I pointed out in an acerbic tone.

"Interesting," he noted, and scribbled something on a pad of paper (ibid).

"What are you writing?" I asked.

"Oh, just some notes," he smiled through his glasses, which left him looking a bit like an owl and a bit like a penitent churchgoer from pre-revolution times who finally has realized there is Nothing.

"It's nothing," he was continuing, continuing to click his pen as he wrote. "A little here, ad dash there, and the recipe should be ready for cooking."

I suddenly remembered what cooking was.

"So how long have you had these feelings of anxiety?" he asked me, peering even closer. He and I stared at each-other.

"Uh," I was saying, unsure of when I had started talking.

"Yes," he soothed, scribbling again on his pad of paper (it must have been very small handwriting).

"Excuse me?" I asked suddenly, poking my head above his gaze to the open red drapes behind his still, pristine body (which smelled of diesel and leather, both disgusting contaminants).

"Are you feeling lightheaded at all?" he asked me, lifting his head slightly so he intercepted my view of the parking lot beyond.

"Excuse me?" I stammered again, saliva building up on the roof of my mouth via an autonomous response to sensed danger.

He scribbled some more. I suddenly felt uncomfortable. "Can I leave now, please?" I asked nervously, twitching several different limbs at once despite not ordering them to move.

"Oh," he commented in an offhand manner, pretending not to notice my tics and leaning forward in a faux-concerned pose. I felt like a lab rat (small primordial mammal used in experiments and tortured to death).

"You win," a deep voice announced. The world went black.

"Level two!" announced the voice.

The room returned to its brightened state: but this time it looked a bit more pasty, a bit less lifelike.

The psychologist was sitting in a different chair. He also looked slightly different, and it was moments before I realized it was an entirely different person, and a "she" (damn my luck). She had very short hair.

"Why hello there!" she cooed, although her voice had a slight edge to it that reminded me of bitter chocolate for some reason (chocolate was an antioxidant known for its soothing properties).

"Hello," I managed to grumble, surprised at the meanness of my own voice. She smiled, mostly convincingly.

"May I know where I am?" I said.

"Why, don't you remember where you are?" she cooed again, as the fan whirred its alternately soothing and discordant tones into the seemingly absent air that supposedly filled the dead room.

Supposedly I was supposed to have companions on this journey, but God and The Devil seemed nowhere in sight, or at least in hearing range. I tested it, subvocalizing as silently as I could while trying not to move my jaw, but it was hopeless: she detected it.

"What is that you're doing with your mouth?" she inquired subtly, as if testing my resolve with her words but knowing she had all the power in the world.

"Oh, just fumbling around," I managed to stutter unconvincingly: she wasn't convinced I was serious.

"You are having reactions to the medication?" she asked sweetly, inviting me to take in her face and body in all its sodden glory.

"Uh, no..."

"Maybe it's just a nervous tic..."

"Yes... any suicidal thoughts?"

"Not yet," I said. The red drapes behind her reminded me of what blood used to look like.

"So you do have them," she repeated.

"I guess." My feet managed to touch hers--she didn't pull hers away. I actually was beginning to like this.

"Like what?" she read my mind. I froze in place, as if time had stopped, but she was still fluttering her eyelashes at me.

"I asked like what?" she said, unwavering in her focus and adoration of me: someone who "needed" her.

"Um," I said, inadvertently mimicking the women of the era, who stalled for time as the men fawned over them, "I have feelings sometimes of..." I had to make up something, so I said, "I am nervous sometimes. Afraid. Of things." Lame but acceptable.

"Of what?" she responded, eyes alight with passion, as her legs inadvertently (or intentionally, I'm not sure) stroked my own.

"You," I blurted, actually meaning it this time, as my mind started working in ways I never knew existed (well, perhaps in the past as we were evolving from the unicellular organism, the mice and the apes).

"Me?" she gasped, her voice suddenly becoming even higher in pitch than it was before, like a broken high note on a piano. "Do I look scary? Do I need to lose weight? Do I come across as... as..."

"Aggressive?" I suggested evilly, taking pleasure in my own cleverness as the woman for once squirmed in her seat at what I thought of her.

Descriptions were never my forte.

But insults were. And still are. So I upped the anti when she said her next comment

"You really are angry, aren't you," she purred, leaning even closer to me. I felt my sweat and saliva glands start to work of their own accord.

"Maybe--uh, yeah," I managed to respond while hiding the sounds and feelings of my own body. But apparently they weren't as quiet as I would have them be.

"You seem nervous," the psychologist cooed--I had a vision of something really strange and inappropriate as she leaned to within inches of my body. Well, it wasn't a vision: only something "real" (Thank Nothing!). This level thing had to be made up, it absolutely _had_ to be: why else would anyone exist like this? Even in Hell! I mean, I knew there were people stuck down here (according to the myth--but I didn't believe in myth, now did I? Just that some alien race had created this place for the purpose of helping me have a safe place while the pre-Revolution chaos reign on the surface a thousand kilometers from here.

"Ready Level Three!" announced the deafening voice that came from the sky ( religious people might be offended by this, if there were any left on the outer planets). For his voice came from all points in the sky as well as vibrations from the ground below. Probably they were just transmitting from many satellites. Although we have not yet figured out a way to do this, I'm sure we will somehow, someday. It's within our grasp.

"What is Level Three?" I wondered out loud, not caring if the aliens understood me or not.

"Nothing you will pass," sneered the voice. "At least right now. But until you succeed you will be stuck here, in Hell."

" _Why_?" I wailed.

"Because you lost! Of course. But someone may come down to rescue you.

"Really? Who?" I was perspiring at the thought of my foreordained suffering. Would they make me walk in fire for the rest of my life? Would I have to endure this for all eternity? "Who?" I repeated. "And when?"

"You will know when you are consigned here. If you don't pass. That's a really good reason to try your best, now isn't it?"

I wasn't sure how to answer that, so I simply kept my mouth closed.

Which was a good idea.

I blinked, and suddenly it was cold all around me, and my lungs felt ready to burst. I opened my mouth to speak but no sound came out: just a sorry gurgling which filled my lungs with fluid.

_Where am I_? I managed to think.

Ah... sneered a deep voice in my mind. "Now you realize that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Or at least a light behind you lighting your way. Cause you are now... _spared_!"

It was suddenly very warm again, but I was soaking wet. "I am back in Hell, I presume?" I coughed, after ridding my body of water by shaking for several seconds like a dog.

"Yes, your presumption is correct. In fact, you never _left_ Hell."

"Never left... Who _are_ you?" I stuttered. "The designer of this video game?"

"More like the designer of this hologram," said the voice from above again nonchalantly, as if this was obvious to everyone else but me.

"Could I please get Level Three?" I chattered, wishing I had a towel and not a hot-air-bath for once.

"A towel you will get, just put your finger in this outlet," instructed the voice. An outlet suddenly appeared in the air in front of me: there was the open desert all around me and there was an electrical socket hovering in the air in the middle of it.

"Isn't this a bit weird?" I wondered to noone, before realizing that God and The Devil were still hanging on every word I said.

" _You're_ weird," amended The Devil.

"He's right," said God in my other ear. "This is _your_ Hell. This is what you have to pay back for all your sins in past worlds."

"I thought there was only one world?"

"Nay, my good sir," said The Devil in a passable imitation of an Irishman. "There are many, and I'm not going to tell you the names of any you don't already know, because I want to revel in my own knowledge that you, Mr. Earthling, do not have! Hah hah hah!"

Even God was chuckling a little bit. "I think what he means," he said, after The Devil had finished his shrieking laughter (it took several minutes) is that is that you don't deserve to know the names and locations of all the worlds. After all, you're only a lowly Earthling who has sinned the normal amount of times...

"I am no Earthling!" I yelled, and this time it was I who was shrieking. Water was still dripping from my clothes onto the scalding hot sand below, evaporating for the most part once it touched the ground.

"Are you ready for Level Three?" demanded the huge voice from the Heavens. I could actually feel the vibrations in the air from this horrible and awesome phenomenon.

"Who are you!" I screamed.

Chapter 8

"I am the other god," screamed down the voice in return. It was like a million birds screaming at once, and I felt like I died and came back--twice! But it kept on happening and I kept on dying... Finally I screamed _Please! I'm sorry_! I wasn't sure whether I vocalized it or it was just a mere thought, but the voice in the Heavens must have heard it, for he finally stopped.

"Better?" he asked, his voice reverberating through the planet and causing it to shake like an earthquake.

"I guess," I said. "Now, we--I mean I--want to know: when do I pass this test?"

"That's part of the test," answered the voice in the sky promptly, like he knew what I was asking even before I asked it.

"You are impossible," I cried, since I had no energy left to yell. "When does Level Three start?"

"It just did," the voice said, slowly fading away into nothingness and leaving me dripping onto the desert sand. "Well," I muttered to myself, "at least I'm getting dry quickly."

"Excuse me, _what_ just happened?" said The Devil in my left ear.

"Don't you know?" taunted God, sipping a bit of fresh coffee from his oversized mug and placing it again on the table.

" _I_ am not omniscient," complained The Devil.

"Neither am I," God said--"At least, most people don't think I am."

"Then who's the voice in the sky?"

"My brother," God answered.

"But..."

"Fine!" God roared in my ear, causing me to jump a full meter in the air involuntarily. "Ah, sorry about that, my child, but I had to respond to The Devil, you understand..."

"Perfectly," I squeaked once my feet touched the blessed sand again in the exact same spot (so that I didn't get burned by the untouched sand). "Now when does level three start?"

"I told you, it already started!" said the voice in the sky.

"Wait, I was talking to God... but are you God or God's brother?" I asked, yelling slightly in the process so the voice in the sky could hear me.

"I speak English, you know, you don't have to shout!" exclaimed the voice in the sky (God's "brother") and God at the same time.

"Wait..." I said.

"Sorry! Just a problem with the transceiver!" exclaimed God and his brother at the same time once more. "Why can't I get this to shut off? I'll have to reboot... Drat!" Meanwhile the Devil was laughing hysterically in my other ear.

Strangely enough, I was almost dry now. "Um," I said in the wavering manner common to twenty-first century America, "Could you please tell me what I'll be facing now? For Level Three?"

"Ah--you're not going to catch me in a slip up _that_ easy," purred God from both the sky and my ear at once. "But behold, it comes now..."

There was a distant rushing sound akin to a roar, although there were no animals present in any of the four directions--only sand dunes and a green cactus here and there.

The roaring edged closer, until it was almost on top of us. "What is this?" I yelled, covering my ears with my hands because the roaring had also whipped up a fierce wind. "I still cannot see it!"

"Don't you love invisible monsters?" cackled The Devil.

"Wait, you know what it is?" I shouted over the wind. The sound was practically on top of us now. Sand was eddying up to the Heavens in miniature tornadoes, causing me to cough and hack in the struggle for life. Some life.

"I can't hear you!" shouted The Devil back to me. "If you're asking me what it is, though, I have no idea--ask God!"

"I never answer," God laughed, a deep-throated belly laugh.

It was then that I saw it. It was big, and it was red. It splashed over me in a wave, completely drenching me (us) with a metallic taste that forced itself into our nostrils and mouth and ears like some cure-all experimental treatment where you're bathed in the stuff. But one caveat: I had no breathing mask. The onslaught lasted almost ten seconds, but I had no way to be sure.

I was left gasping and coughing up the red syrupy liquid onto the sand. Then I felt my feet sliding... down!

"Oh, no," I said, unintentionally mimicking what I had said the day before with the Killer Android.

"What is it?" God said innocently in my ear.

"I'm sinking!" I exclaimed, frantically searching for something to grasp onto as first my feet, then my knees and finally my torso slid into the wet sand.

"You are?" exclaimed The Devil in my other ear. "Do something! We can't go out _this_ easily!"

"I _know_!" I responded, some sand splashing into my mouth as only my neck now was above the surface. "Please, God!" I never thought I'd be saying this, but I continued, to my own inner turmoil: "I have sinned! You are the Right, I am in the Wrong! Please spare your servant!" My words echoed across the endless expanse of sand that stretched out in either direction into infinity.

"I will, this time," said the Voice of God both from the Heavens and in my ear, at once.

"Wait, so there isn't two of you?" I said, bewildered at the notion of two voices speaking at once. "Or are you 'schizophrenic,' like me?"

"All people who think there is something other than pure and raw Nature are by definition schizophrenic," said the voice from the Heavens only. The voice had somehow changed: it wasn't menacing anymore so much as it was snide, like someone who assumes failure will occur with all of his endeavors and thus does not try very hard at all at anything in this "life". For some reason this bothered me... but I do not know why, even though the same philosophy is taught to us from birth. It is even softly played in our growth chambers (obviously before "birth").

"How do you know this?" I asked in a wavering voice.

"I was never God," said the voice. "I was just a test for you... and you have failed. Perhaps you will gain parole in a thousand years. That is all." And the voice was no more.

"He's right, you know," said God's voice in my ear, much to my chagrin, as I spat out some more sand and heard The Devil, my handler, speaking unintelligibly in my other ear.

"Right about what?" I managed to croak through the sand now whipping at me, carried by the insolent wind.

"Ever wonder why you hear voices?" said God, the Ultimate Future. "You have to create the Revolution of Dulling, which comes when we finally exit this Lowest of Hells and ascend to the surface. So you have to have both my voice and the voice of your handler, Mr. Devil, or whatever his name may be.

" _The_ Devil," corrected my handler. "And I will ultimately best you, Mr. God. What a foolish name."

"We will see," said God lightly. "Now, it is time to experience the second plague."

"What?!" both I and The Devil shouted at once. I continued: "You can't be serious."

"We have to do _something_ while we're trapped down here."

"But _ten_? Ten _plagues_?"

"Hush, now," continued God. "This won't take long. Maybe a week or so. Or a month. I forget how long it's supposed to take."

"Don't you have it on disk somewhere?" prompted The Devil. "I mean, everything is stored on disk, or in the cloud. Or whatever you call it in the future."

"That is irrelevant," said God obliquely. He was leaning on the transceiver in a relaxed position, as if waiting for his work shift to end so he could go to sleep, or perhaps just take a nap.

"What is irrelevant?"

"Devil, you'd never understand. Only I can. I am incomprehensible. Now, shall we move on to the second plague?"

"I'm not sure I'm going to like this," I murmured.

"No one does," God said brightly. "That's the point! Now be ready... in Five, Four, Three..."

I counted down the seconds while trying not to imagine what the second plague would be. But then I realized something: "Hasn't this happened before?" I asked God.

"I was wondering how long it would take you to realize this," God responded with a hint of sarcasm (his voice was back to its previously omniscient state). "I thought you were well-versed on the local mythology."

"Well, excuse me," I sputtered, both from frustration as well as the insistently blowing sand, "You haven't come into existence yet, you--, you--"

"Non-Entity," suggested The Devil.

"Oh?" laughed God. Why was he always laughing?

"When I first came to your planet," God said, "I-- Well--trying to tell you is futile, you wouldn't understand anyway. Just be ready for the next plague. Here it comes!"

I heard a far-off noise, if could have been the whirring of a fan or of cicadas (a common form of insect). "Ha!" I shouted, suddenly jubilant. "A whirring noise is all you can conjure! My animals, you are pathetic indeed! Ha ha!"

"You think animals are funny?" God said sinisterly.

"Well, they're extinct, obviously, that's why the expression goes how it does," I tried to explain.

"How's this for animals," God sneered as the first wave came down upon me (us).

I suddenly couldn't breathe. Whether this was from something solid covering my face or from some kind of "spiritual" phenomena I didn't know, and didn't care to speculate as I was in mortal danger.

I gagged and swallowed something, then swallowed something else that seemed to be a living creature. It squirmed and wiggled inside me like some kind of oversized AI crammed into a little delivery system, and then the pain started.

It was like a little drill boring into my skin from the outside in; it felt like it did when I had my initial conditioning and they had the pain inflictors under your skin and down your throat (that part was discontinued, obviously) and when you spoke or thought an incorrect answer they would activate a random set of pain inflictors in various random or not-so-random locales. But this time it was with real organisms.

After the first two bugs died in my esophagus I was able to start breathing again. Of course, I didn't register what had happened until a few minutes later--when my head once again rose above the swarm and I was able to breathe again. "Like that?" God shouted gleefully. "Want to see that happen again? We're not nearly over!"

"Don't answer your own questions," said The Devil morosely. "It makes you look like a--"

"I'm tired of this," I finished once I had spit out all the insects (I thought). "Do we really need another demonstration of your power or can I please have a breather? For _real_ , man!"

The vernacular comes out sometimes when I'm stressed. Lack of conditioning cubes, you know.

"Whatever it is, it is," sighed God into my right ear. It tingled horribly and I was reminded of the fact that one is supposed to take a woman and naturally inseminate her, against the laws of nature and time and math as they were set down by the Nothing. Even one of the two largest religions of the time-period, Catholicism (which was soon to go extinct), agreed that it was evil to have sexual relations, and banned all its priests (slaves of the invisible god) from ever marrying. Naturally, they became one of the largest religions in the world and blossomed into the ultimate moral authority; and even other religious mutilated reproductive organs of both men and t

women to prove this point. But hedonism ultimately prevailed.

There was one particular religion which claimed to be the oldest one and the original, although of course none of that is true, religions are just a manifestation of the collective unconscious as we evolved from small mammals into the apes we are today.

Who cares, though: that's irrelevant. What I wanted to know was why God put me through all these tests: was it just because I happened to be on the lowest rung of Hell? Or perhaps because he thought I had been a bad person during my lifetime (assuming stories of the afterlife are true and life is something extra-ordinary). Perhaps he thought I had played too many video games in my life and deserved some _real_ video games, for instance psychiatrist visits and plagues. But none of these options sounded plausible.

What really was plausible was that I was undergoing a nightmare in one of my scheduled reconditioning evaluations. Was I strong enough to pass this test? I had never experienced a conditioning session that was as long and as vivid as this one.

I remembered that I was in Hell, so I said, "Time for a change. I'm going up now, I don't care what any of you people think."

"Having a tantrum?" God suggested, in a very fresh manner.

"No, just a bout of common sense," I replied shortly, inclining my head downwards despite them not being able to see me. "It is time to take some risks."

"Eh," God said. "It's mostly over anyway, so I guess it's time we move to the surface."

"To do what?" I said.

"Yeah," said The Devil. "You can't trick us _that_ easy."

"I just want to push both of you on the road to _me_. And the rest of us gods living without a care in the world.

"Wait," said The Devil, massaging his red horns, which were still dripping blood from his breakfast. "How can you be manipulating events in _your_ past? You don't even exist yet!"

"I could ask the same question of you, Noble Devil," said God, throwing his cigar into an ashtray and grabbing another. "You are admittedly in the same situation that I am in."

"Could we please just cut it and get to the surface?" I interjected urgently--there already was another sound on the horizon. "I hear something. Maybe the next plague? Or just the second wave of bugs?"

"I think it's a mixture of Rhinoceri and Hippos," The Devil smoothly stated while drying off his now-clean horns.

"You idiot," raged God. "I--"

"Just please, get me out of here before I die!" I wailed to both of them. But especially to God.

"No, Rhinoceri are extinct for hundreds of years now!" The Devil was saying blindly to God. God responded with silence. Then, after five seconds: "Both of you are screwed. I'll see you on the other side."

"Bad language, God!" I screamed, as the band of animals came upon me and I was crushed into nothingness.

Chapter 9

There was blackness all around, and I assumed that I was in The Null Place with a bunch of other losers of consciousness. But The Null Place, I was told, was white and not black; perhaps they had changed the style sheet for it or something like that. Or perhaps black was the result of my eyes not seeing any colors at all. Yes, that was probably it.

"God?" I tried. "Devil? Are you guys there?" I was sounding more like a pre-revolution devolved human by the minute.

It smelled like roses. Roses were a type of flower, which is a type of plant that used to grow on Earth. It had beautiful red petals and sharp points extending out of its stem. But besides that, it was also the flower most used to express "love"--which meant that a male human gave it to a female in order to entice her to procreate with him. This was the custom in almost all the cultures on the planet.

Of course, it was a disgusting smell that I found repugnant and reminiscent of recycled urine-water that is still necessary to drink on long-range starships.

"Roses are red, Violets are blue," sang a far-away voice.

"Excuse me?" I tried to speak and genuflect, but it was of no avail; my lips were locked and I was paralyzed. Which is an old word for being in stasis sleep, I think. Whatever.

Obviously, there was a point to this childish babble, and I intended to find out what it was.

But I was still paralyzed.

The voice got closer. It sounded like a little tinkle, very high-pitched, like a female who had not yet reached maturity. It was saying something different now, and I strained to hear it:

"Thou art close, thou art close," the voice whispered now, like a person speaking to another in a silent room and the listener can barely make out what is being said.

I felt myself inadvertently moving closer to the voice, although it was impossible to tell how fast I was going or the direction.

"Are you thinking about me?" the little voice tinkled, as her body drifted into view.

It looked like a giant balloon. It had different colors in different stripes, which apparently were painted or grafted onto the balloon's body. It was approximately twenty feet long and fifteen wide, with a diameter top to bottom which approached ten feet.

Feet were attached to the bottom of it, as was a tiny head with even tinier features to the other side (facing towards me).

I could only conclude that this was someone's bad dream that I was stuck in, and that he was refusing to wake up. Regarding the balloon-person, who was a woman obviously (because of her huge dress),

"Do you like my outfit?" she giggled, moving her tiny hands up an inch and down another inch in her glee. Her glee of actually talking to someone from the future, and a man, like me.

"I can't breathe," I mouthed, because suddenly it seemed like someone was choking me and doing it slowly and painfully.

"I matter too, you know," purred the balloon-girl.

"But you can still help..." I gasped, and then the blackness swallowed me.

My worst nightmare was now my everyday existence: I had to face the creatures which scared me the most and thus could torment me into submission and oblivion. I also had to bring the Revolution at the same time.

I forced God to bring me back to the surface: I didn't care, I would hide out there instead of cowering in the same space my worst nightmares existed.

So I was living in something called a "hotel," where people who have many credits go to spend the night and reproduce. It was something called a "five-star hotel," which means that there was a gourmet breakfast for no charge, as well as free laundering and something called a "bar," where people a certain aphrodisiac poison which caused them to become inebriated and sex-starved.

I had assembled a team: I posted ads on the Web asking for people who had nothing to lose; this way I wouldn't feel unethical when I asked God and The Devil to take over their bodies. Of course, there was only one body per entity, and both of course were also male, as we did not want emotional outbursts to offset our conquering the planet.

There were many applicants to these two positions: of course, both had to be male, and I weeded the females out right away (they magically vanished).

After I had cleaned up after them (too bad there's no postmortem self-clean method) there were about twenty candidates left, of various ethnicities, heights and sexual-orientations. I was drawn to the homosexual ones at first, of course, but I learned to rein in my objectivity a few moments after injecting myself with morphine (just a small dose). So I didn't immediately pare the group down.

Instead, I had them congregate into a large, oblong circle (you couldn't blame them, they had smaller brains back then, particularly the women). Everyone was now visible to everyone else: they all could even see me, as I wasn't hogging the limelight in the middle of the circle, rather just hanging around the periphery waiting to see what would happen. This was also called "people-watching."

There were other nuances as well: and here I will recount my story to the exact detail:

"So," I purred to the class, which consisted of mainly twenty-somethings who had nothing to lose and wanted to become movie stars; "so, who has ever become pregnant?"

Several girls and several guys all raised their hands; in all it was about eight or nine people.

"You've got to be kidding me," I laughed, talking to all their faces in turn and wishing I had said the word "women." Then I cleared my throat.

"Are you--" I started before realizing that all the boys who said they were pregnant were forming an inner ring around me. "Excuse me?" I asked. "Is there a problem?"

"Oh, we don't have a problem with _you_ ," one of the boys said.

"Yeah," said a second, who was wearing a red hood and blue jeans which made him look like some superhero of old. "Not with you. It's the girls we hate."

"Are you serious?" I said, aghast. "I do, too! I'm just like you!"

"Really?" the first one peered up close to my face. The entire class was listening now, even those females in the farthest reaches of the circle who were vainly making sweeping movements of the head in order to cause their long hair to tumble down their bodies and thus arouse the men. "As we know, the horrible biology of it all is self-evident."

"Is that why you're homosexual?" I asked. It really was intriguing to come face-to-face with an early version of the social theory that sparked the Revolution.

"Why do you think we're homosexual?" asked Superman. "I mean, we didn't really give you any clues...except for the fact that our voices are high, sort of. But _his_ isn't!" he pointed to the second speaker.

"Sexual orientation is irrelevant," spat one of the girls. This one was actually still pregnant.

The other students in the room were still standing in the broken circle, fidgeting. I was suddenly reminded that I should hurry ahead with the next phase of their integration: the "whiteboard."

The Whiteboard was the code name for an exercise they had us do before we travelled to different periods in the past. It consisted of something called a whiteboard, which was essentially one of the old tablets except without a computer behind the screen; and a magic marker, which allowed transcription onto the whiteboard. Oh, I almost forgot the easel, which was the stander for the whiteboard.

I had the young adults present (I had let all of the women go, obviously) drag chairs from the periphery into the center of the room, in order to better absorb the lessons I was about to give.

The women came back into the room. "We don't agree with gender discrimination," the leader said, focusing her greenish-grey eyes on me in an expression of determination and absolute certainty. The other femmes mirrored her and spread out in a line, like a bunch of Enforcement Officers about to subdue a non-conformist with brute force. I was actually scared for my "life" at that point.

They were all wearing yoga pants. All of the young males in the room were staring at those pants. "So, you are bi?" I asked them.

"No," responded one, with a pink shirt and green pants. "We just like dressing in an interesting manner." This mode of speech caused all the girls except for the leader to burst into uncontrollable laughter--apparently, speaking formally just wasn't in style.

"But it's in style!" complained another boy, who was wearing a shirt which exposed his bare belly-button as well as pants with many synthetic holes in them.

"So... you're not like me?" I asked, greatly saddened by this revelation. "You have... desires....thoughts towards girls?"

"Obviously," he said. "And girls only."

"Then why do you talk like--"

"Girls?" He shrugged. "It's the only way to get them. _You_ know."

"I know _what_?" I responded with anger, not realizing that all the girls as well as all the guys were staring at me with a mixture of pity and loathing.

"Oh, you've never been with a girl?" the boy said quickly, bowing his head and retreating to the edge of the circle. His face turned red as he realized his error.

There was a strange, monotonous noise coming from all around the room. It was a few seconds before I realized the sound came from everyone in the class clapping. "What is the meaning of this?" I yelled, to no response except for louder clapping. It felt like a deluge of acid rain was falling on all of us, except for the fact that the year was too early.

_Way_ too early.

"How would you like to learn?" I asked the class once everything had settled down. I was standing next to the whiteboard with the writing implement, poised to take notes on what the applicants (students) had to say about the potential job.

"How about the job we came here to perform?" suggested a girl.

"Okay," I clapped my hands loudly, which meant that everyone should focus on me. "I need one of you that's really bad, and also another one of you who is really, really good. Could you please sort yourselves out, then? Best to worst, in order, make sure you're in the right spot in line."

"Okay," chorused the group, as they proceeded to organize most of the chairs in the room back-to-back, like a popular game from the time.

"Eh, excuse me," I coughed, bringing up phlegm along with air. "We're not playing whatever this game is called--"

"Musical Chairs!" sang an especially short and wild-eyed young girl, who couldn't be over sixteen for sure.

"Are you sure you've satisfied the age requirement?" I asked her speculatively, raising an eyebrow in the process.

"And no gender discrimination!" pronounced the boy with the visible belly-button. "Fuck that! We have better things to do."

I agreed with him and moved the whiteboard to a place where everyone could see. My task was still to find out who was the best and who was the worst, and then kill everyone else so there would be no witnesses to the mind-swap. So I began by asking each one of them a series of questions.

"So how's it going?" The Devil said randomly to me, interrupting my train of thought.

"I am _about_ to _try_ to _ask_ one of them a _question_ ," I emphasized.

"Then do it!" he shouted, directly into my cranium like some kind of manually-operated sledgehammer trying to crush my bones down into dust for the next protein pills (the calcium part, anyway).

"Did you hear that?" asked one of the applicants, pointing in my general direction.

"Never mind that," I snapped, barely holding myself back from chastising the young man because the Devil had done something even more idiotic than normal. In preparation for The Choosing (which is documented in the Book of Names, Chapter Three, Verse Fourteen), I started to spin around in a circle, slowly at first, but then more rapidly, until I was moving so fast that my sneakers were squeaking on the hardwood floor and some girls were already calling 9-1-1 (Drug Police), hoping to stave off some random deaths via a

magic marker in someone's eye. Not that it was actually magic, but it did have its function--like everything else in the Known Universe.

"Stop!" screamed one of them. She had large, thick, black-rimmed glasses and was at least a few centimeters taller than anyone in our time: eating meat and fresh vegetables I guess had its benefits for someone hoping to be so gargantuan a specimen.

"At least I know now how to manipulate you into being scared," I stated, confident that my powers of acting "normal" would reassert themselves. "And now... the first question; I will ask it to each of you in turn: It is, 'Are you male?'"

I really hoped that all the women had come back from the outside; if even one escaped then I would have quite a problem hunting down and aborting her--after all, pre-revolution people weren't really people, were they? I'd have to get a blender I could use to mix kale with all the baby parts that were still alive, including the head. But the brains I would have to dispose of first, of course, as they had a slightly metallic aftertaste. After all, protein shakes had turned into protein pills, and everything needs to be recycled.
Chapter 10

Regardless, all the women in the room were dead within a dozen seconds once I unleashed my fury upon them: and what was the fury? The plague, of course--the plague, which still existed in our time and which I had stored in one of my teeth. I had released it thirty seconds previously, and it began to work its magic just now. Of course, I won't bother you with all the grisly details, but let's just say that they all had stomach problems. As in, large, lobster-like creatures eating their way out of their intestines. It's alright, because they were born that way... or, rather, they were _almost_ born that way.

However much you worry about semantics, there is always one more thing to say.

"What?" yelled one of the men who fancied himself "masculine." "You just killed them! I won't let you do this ----..."

I did some martial arts on him while the others watched (they were all so _passive_!) "Do you want me to break your arm?" I said, twisting it to its breaking point. "Or just a clavicle?"

"Neither!" he huffed, and I let him down. The other males in the room (for there weren't any females, except for dead ones) shivered in fear. A couple of them even made complimentary shrieks.

"Now," I said, remotely locking the door. "Two of you must be selected to house God and The Devil. Which of you gain the ultimate prize will be decided in a reality-TV-style demonstration of survival inside this tiny enclosure. Because..." and then I switched on the force-field and continued, "you will never get out--at least while more than two people are still alive. The casualties will all be incorporated into our upcoming protein shakes, which we intend to sell one the open market once our IPO launches. Now, to work, all! Chop chop! We haven't got all day, you know!"

At first no man made a move; they were all eyeing one-another. Then one long-haired, grizzled veteran of the streets pulled out a knife and all Hell ensued (even the part I hadn't experienced yet). He managed to stab four people, three seriously, before he was taken down by the rest.

The floor was filled with blood.

"I think we will need a mop, now," I said to no one and everyone at once, trusting in Nothing to sort out my situation. "One of you needs to go get a mop and a bucket filled with water. If you fail or if you alert the authorities, I will kill the rest. Understood?"

I was met with horrified and acquisitive faces.

"Good!" I proclaimed. "Now which one shall it be?"

Two of the six remaining men bolted at the same time to the door, which apparently they thought was magically open again. One of them cut down his friend in a neck-twist on the way, adding to the carnage already perpetuated by these savage pre-revolution almost-humans. He punched at the door, as if intending to open it in one hurl. But of course he fell flat on his back.

"Well!" I screamed at the rest. "What are you waiting for? Kill him!" and I pointed at the near-unconscious form on the floor (the one that didn't have any blood still leaking from him). Needless to say, it didn't take long for him to die.

There were five people left standing now, plus the one who was still unconscious on the floor. Of course, I took the liberty of ending his life; to not do so would have been inhumane.

"Five people alive now," I announced to the fidgeting people who had now committed a murder.

"Only four, actually," said one man, stepping between the rest of them and me. He was wearing blue-jeans and had a marked scar on the left side of his face in the shape of a "heart" (an illicit symbol). "For I am your nemesis."

"God?" I gasped before the thing rushed me.

"Yes," it said once it had pinned me to the floor, quite an easy thing for itself, I must say.

"Actually," I said to the robot, who had metallic stripes on its arms and metal braces on its legs, "You're just his emissary. I know that because the _real_ God is talking to me in my ear."

"You fool," the robot hissed while smiling savagely at me, something only a robot could to: "I'm a _later_ version of God. Improved. Less violent, more tolerable. And tolerating. The crux of Human and Godly Perfection."

"My imperfection is your perfection," I managed to gasp.

"Whatever you say, retarded imp," slammed the robot with its metallic, amplified voice directed full at my face. "But I will kill you now so you don't mess me up."

"Wait, that's against the rules!" said God in my ear. _My_ god, obviously.

"There are no rules!" screamed back his future self, somehow hearing what his earlier counterpart was saying to me.

"You are both heretics," I pronounced, not willing to favor one above the other. But enjoy your fate, Future of Future God. I worship Nothing."

"That's also one of my names!" cried the robot as I picked up a discarded water bottle from the floor and forced it through his open mouth.

The failure was sudden and late: at first the robot seemed to think it was some desperate ploy of a dying man, but when it realized the truth it was too late--way too late. He was frying from the inside-out, and not loving any second of it. Fortunately for him, it took

Only about twenty seconds. And during his long, slow (or fast, depending on how you count) death he managed to croak out one phrase:

"God is The Devil," he spoke in a low rasp, like a choking rattlesnake that had swallowed more than it could handle. The commentary on this phrase I will leave to the philosophers and theologians.

There were four males left. "Anyone out there still want to rebel?" I challenged them, fists raised (they taught us how to do that). Needless to say, none volunteered.

"So!" I proclaimed again in my loud and powerful voice. "We will put God into one of you, The Devil into another, and two other finalists in the remaining two of you."

One of the men, who was obviously completely insane, posited this question: "What if we could dual-boot people like we do operating systems?" He had a long nose, huge, blocky glasses and an unkempt appearance.

"I don't think so," I said, perfectly calm and reticent. "We'd have to update the bios, and we don't know how to do that yet."

"You mean you government people have been engineering this for decades?" the glasses-man declared. "I _knew_ you were hiding _something_!"

"Okay," I said reluctantly, wanting the drama to go on a while longer but realizing these people were scared out of their minds by the impossibility that was before them. "Okay. We will just put God and The Devil in two of your bodies, and the other two will be occupied by Order and Chaos. Agreed?"

All the men except Glasses-Man started to cry. "I don't want to do this" sobbed one, who had red marks on his face from grease in an animal restaurant. "I really, really don't!"

"Look at them," I said, gesturing to the dead bodies on the floor, both men and women. "Do you want to be like them?"

"Sorta," he said with choked breaths.

'"Well, I don't want you to," I decided with force, and the man took a step backward involuntarily, and he slipped on the copious blood that was covering the floor and had to right himself against one of the walls.

"This wall is broken," he told me, as his hand had somehow smashed through the plaster protecting the concrete underneath. It had also bored a hole in the concrete that was a quarter of a meter across.

"That's weird," I mused, thinking that ancient construction techniques couldn't have been _that_ bad. But I had other rocks to fry.

"Here," sounded a voice that was larger than life and came from all directions. Myself as well as the four other men cowered at its sheer awesomeness and we all ended up on the floor because of the slippery blood.

"I will do it," continued the Voice. "No fancy computers needed. Just one diety required."

"You're fucking advertising yourself!" I shouted to no one and everyone and everything. "Stop being so selfish!"

The Voice ignored me and said, "Abra Kadabra, Alakazam!" and all four bodies of the living souls were raised up from the floor by some great force.

"Um," I said with uncertainty, "God, what are you doing?"

"Done!" God declared in an offhand manner, as if waving his hand nonchalantly in a gesture of supernatural power.

"What has been done?" I wondered.

The answer was immediately apparent: There were no longer four men standing before me; there were only three, and there was a problem with one of them as well.

He didn't have eyes.

Instead, he had portals. That was the only way to describe them, for they simply looked like black holes sucking the life and energy and light out of everything that was close to them: there were not even dark circles under them. There was nothing.

There was a crashing sound, then another. "Hide!" I told the three deities, not sure who was who as of yet but very concerned for their safety.

The door broke to splinters and the splinters came crashing inwards. A man stood in the entranceway.

He was wearing red and blue. And even a little yellow, at the organ site (the organs used to be a lot larger, as they actually used them back then). His cape was flying behind him, even though there was no wind inside the building.

"Ah!" I declared. "You must be Order."

"No, I'm God," said the Masked Man. He puffed out his chest like one of those airbags from the old movies where they still had ground-moving cars.

"Where's Order, then?" I asked, bewildered. I had expected to know the outcome of my spiritual experiments.

"I am he," said one of the men, a rather ordinary-looking one (shorter than average by our standards, of course) He had on a normal-looking plaid shirt and some stained trousers--what can I say, in that era they made workers wear clothing that equaled half their days' wage. It was an oppressive time.

"So you're Order because you are what the Capitalists like to control," I mused, finally understanding the riddle. Now there were two to go.

"Come, let's go out of here," announced God, as he magically sprouted wings and flapped with some effort out of the newly-opened wall.

"I thought he could fly just by himself," muttered Order as he gingerly stepped over the sharp parts of the wreckage and made his way out to the street.

It was only me, a very short man and a very large fat man (fat used to be a word describing obese people) who were left. I stared at both of them, wondering how each one had extended or shrivelled his bodily proportions to equal this final result. Finally perplexed into action, I said, "Who cares who i who, we have to leave! Now! This building is collapsing!"

"Really?" argued the short one, displaying yellowed and cracked teeth to me as he spoke, like a mortar wall that has been stricken with a sledgehammer. Which one was he, though? The other man was extremely tall and lanky and was somewhere in the middle between albino and African. His hands and body were smooth even though he was covered with hard muscle. Who was he? Ah, I was soon to find out:

But first, the appetizer.

We raced out of the room and shortly thereafter the building. Then suddenly my head hit the ground and everything turned extremely loud.

I was face-down in the snow. Big black hands were all over me, but not because of skin tone: because they wore gloves. The "they" in question were members of an elite police raiding party that wore masks and bullet-proof vests that said "SWAT." I think I know what it stands for (something to do with bugs, I believe) but I am not completely sure.

I saw that God and Order were already handcuffed and were being dragged into separate vehicles. Black-clad hands touched me all over my body as I patiently waited for the officers to disarm my needles. Then they forced my mouth open and removed six of my teeth; I guess nothing lasts forever, right? Give credit to them for disarming a technology which was so old that it existed in their time-frame.

" _Six_?" exclaimed one of the officers as he pulled out the last tooth. I tried to respond but all that came from my mouth was a gurgle.

"Six is a lot," commented his partner, who definitely looked like he took adrenal alternatives, and not just for aesthetic purposes. Of course, it could have just been padding.

"Not if you're talking about fucks," muttered the first one as he flashed his friend an evil grin. And when I say evil, I mean universally evil. As in sexuality with women evil.

Speaking of the Devil, he was no longer in my ear. Neither was God in my other ear; they both had seemingly vanished into the nothingness they came from and disappeared to the senses. I hoped fervently that they had taken complete control of their new bodies.

But there was no more time to lose. As I groaned in the back of the truck I formed a plan: but it was rudimentary and sketchy at best. But it was a plan.

"Listen here, SWAT commandos," I shouted, as they had left my mouth unbound. This caused both of the officers in front to turn around and look at me, though the one who was driving turned his eyes back to the road and his phone after a second or two.

"You are in the wrong!" I managed to shout before they bound my mouth with a carcinogen. I continued shouting at them even with my mouth bound, spittle flying out of various orifices in the carcinogen like water from an ancient, crumbling dam. Which beavers, another long-extinct creature, used to make naturally. But of course that is irrelevant.

There was a twenty-minute delay, and during the delay we moved. The serrated metal I was sitting against rubbed against my back in all the wrong places, but all I could do was make a muted groan. Excuse me, _groans_. Dictating this to the small computer in the primitive pod I find myself is quite the chore. It is cold here, and getting colder.

My companions are here as well. Not doing so well, but they are all here: God, The Devil, Order, and Chaos. We are on a hopeless journey in space and time.

But coming back to the present, or at least where we are in this story, let me just say that my incarceration was short--for the roof was violently torn off by some force I couldn't comprehend--at least, at that moment. For it was God in his beautiful beatific state, flying in and snatching me from my captors.

"Where are the others?" I asked him as we flew over the city at a low altitude; the wind whipped at both of our clothing and far-off car horns honked at his blue, red and yellow uniform. Obviously the yellow part was the most important component, being about twice as wide and three times as long as the average organ, and roughly the same color as The Devil's amazingly-messed-up teeth. It is possible they were related.

That was a joke, or at least an attempt at one. Insert emoji here.

If you want, that is.

"Where are the others?" I yelled to him over the roaring wind. "Could you please set me down? I think I'm getting hypothermia!"

"How would you know?" sighed God, and blew on me for some reason.

I gagged as there was a stench of a dead animal, fresh from the slaughter or shooting-sport. And I suddenly couldn't move.

"Thedius?" God was saying. "Can you hear me?"

Of course, I couldn't respond.

"Oops," admitted God. "This new body has some getting used to! Here, try this:" and suddenly I could move my arms and legs and mouth again. "Warmer, isn't it?" he smiled at me.

"How did you do that?" I managed in halting breaths, my staggering breaths all turning instantly to snow in the low atmosphere.

"Who do you think I am?" laughed God, the cold beginning to encroach on me once more.

"Who?"

"Superman, of course," God boasted, taking the time to clap me on the back with the hand he wasn't using to carry me. Then we started to drop rapidly.

"Oops, again," God winked at me. "I forgot I need at least one hand for flying." Our flight leveled again. "They are taking all three of them to separate facilities," God continued talking. "The Devil, your former handler, is going to a top-secret facility in the Alaskan wilderness--"

"What?" I laughed. "You can't just do that to him. He has a life, people who care about him, people he cares for... "

"It will be a nice vacation from the heat where he usually spends all his time. At least, according to the Christian religion..."

"I'm cold," I complained. "Again, I'm sorry. My extremities have turned numb and I think I'm about to throw up.

" _You_ , a genetically-engineered super-slave?" God laughed. "They should have edited that out of you. What a shame. Alright, I'll use my heat vision again. But just this time."

I murmured my thanks and saw that we were now flying over the countryside instead of the dirty, crowded city. There were hardly any sapiens in this land, I perhaps caught sight of one dwelling per several kilometers. If that. The fact was that I had no idea where we were heading. So I asked.

"Eh, we're just going to pick up The Devil, my long time partner or underling, depending on which religion you choose. They like us to be pluralistic these days, don't they?" And at his prompting, a cloud in the near distance changed shape. "You see that, of course," he pointed to the cloud, which we were rapidly approaching. "That is our flag, in the future. Your future as well as this world's future." The cloud abruptly changed color, or I should say "colors"-- there were now many spots of color, varying from deep red to dark purple, populating the cloud's surfaces.

I was of course perplexed. "What is this?" I asked God, amazed at his drawing skills. "In this time I would ask you if your toddler child made it, but this is about six thousand kilometers above sea level, so I know it was you who created it."

"Interesting question," God answered to my prompt, actually scratching his beard for a moment in between sentences. "Well, it's interesting to someone from your time, a time where many of these people got executed for being the wrong skin color, sexual orientation, gender or birth-status. You might be offended. But that right there is the flag of _my_ people, the Gods.

"You mean there's more than one of you?" I choked, suddenly fearful that a revolution of gods would overturn my own civilization, the one I intended (impossibly, I might add) to return to.

"Never mind that," said God. "And never mind the cloud, too, which is a representation of our flag, a symbol of tolerance. I'm going to speed up this process. Instead of talking, we are going to be _doing_. Now, I am about to snap my fingers, even though we're currently flying at many hundreds of kilometers per hour, and we will be at the North Pole. No, Santa won't be there either. We are picking up The Devil.

"Are you trying to lambast an entire religion?" I commented, snidely I must admit. "If they've placed any listening devices on us we're toast. Can you teleport through iron bars? Excuse me? God? Are you there?"

The flying man in the blue cape turned back to look at me: but it wasn't the same man.

He clicked his fingers and the air around us disappeared. The demon bared his teeth and laughed as we set down on an icy plain.

"See?" God laughed, a very sinister sound coming out of the demon's mouth, but it was the same voice. "I control The Devil. I caused him to land here, where he could cool down and not be such a hindrance to us. He peered around the icy wasteland.

All around us there was nothing but ice. I tested my shoes against the ice in front of me and the ice appeared to hold: for now.

"Don't worry, it won't thaw," God promised, reading my mind like a book. "This is actually where I go in order to talk to my father--you know, the original one who came from a different planet? The one that starts with a 'k?'"

"Even I know that one," I scoffed, not believing he had the audacity to copy from that particular bit of popular culture.

"But it's true!" insisted God/Superman, spittle flying out of his mouth and freezing immediately into gumdrop-sized hailstones. Some of them struck me and I flinched at their sharp edges.

"Where is The Devil?" I said. "It is cold, I want to get out of here." God stared at me, and I added, "Please."

God snapped his fingers again and The Devil appeared by his side. The Devil was clawing at some non-existent object above him and gasping for air. "Oh, no," he kept repeating to himself, over and over. Then he fell down on his backside on the ice. "Ow!" he cried. Then he opened his eyes.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"What? Oh," God said, and switched back to his normal face.

"Gadzooks, I thought you were one of my brothers!" The Devil exclaimed, attempting to wipe his forehead but failing in procuring any sweat.

"You mean podmates," God said with a wave of his hand. "So, I take it you had fun drowning?"

"I fell in," explained The Devil, "and I couldn't get out: I had forgotten my wings."

"You have wings?" I burst in. "I thought they were supposed to be attached to your body!"

"This cretin will never understand," The Devil told God, shifting slightly on his feet a few times in order to keep the warmth inside his body. "Besides, why are you Superman?"

"Because I am all-powerful," God said gently. And I could ask you: why are you such an ugly, short being with cracked and yellowing teeth?"

"Well, they stopped engineering teeth about fifty years ago, with the advent of protein pills and intravenous Oxygen-therapy," explained The Devil, talking a bit faster than normal and biting his lip eagerly. "There were--"

"Yes, I know all this," God interrupted him. "Do you think I am not a student of history? Do you think I know nothing, have relegated the universe to automating itself like some car that is left running in the driveway while I go inside to make some coffee? Perhaps with some biscuits, or how do you call them, cookies? Oh, wait, you don't eat much when you come from... you really have to enjoy life a bit more than you're already doing. I sure do enjoy running the world, even though some people don't like the way I run it."

I started to shift my own feet. "What's the matter, we can't get out of this horrid place right now?" I cried. "It's so cold!"

"Oh, I forgot, they didn't engineer people yet," shrugged God with an offhand wave. Suddenly we were on the side of a mountain, looking down into a mass of forest below.

"Ahhh!" I cried.

"I forgot again," God slapped his forehead powerfully with his wrist once, and then twice. "You don't have the mental faculty to make the jumps: we have to fix you soon.

"Okay," I shuddered.

"Listen," said God with authority, "We need to find Order as soon as possible so we can go find Chaos, and then we'll be done. Good?"

"Good!" said The Devil instantly,

"Not good," I said, finally starting to warm up from the icy Hell I had just come from. "Are we going to another place that is several decades below zero? Excuse me, I meant decimals....or.... What in all of Nothing am I saying? The cold has addled my brain!"

"Oh, it's just another extended camping trip!" God responded enthusiastically. "And don't worry, it's a little warmer down there."

"A _little_?" I exploded with to force of an anvil. "We need it to be a _lot_ warmer."

"Hey, you did it," The Devil broke in. The prosecutor. Death. "Death is universal," he continued. "But some people bring it upon themselves earlier than others. Through bad deeds, et cetera."

"What in all the Hells are you saying?"

"The initials are GW. And it's not Bush."

"I feel like an old time prophet, trying to decipher the riddles of the cosmos. Are we going or what?"

"Going where?"

"Down the mountain," God said, and he retrieved a pair of mittens from his pocket and gave them to me. "Here, take these; it'll help keep you warm."

"How about a coat?"

"Don't be fresh. Now, we have to figure out a way to get down the mountain." He paused for a moment, then said, "Oh, I know! I'll just _bring_ us there!"

He snapped his fingers.

And suddenly we were in the forest.

I assumed it was the forest below the mountain, or at least one of them. It was warmer, at least.

"It's warmer," I announced.

"Very good, my little baby," said God, laughing as he appeared a few feet from me, followed by The Devil. "Sorry, there's a little lag in this program. We need to upgrade our memory."

"No worries," I muttered, borrowing another expression from the locals. At least I had stopped shivering. "Where do we go now?"

"Right there," God pointed, and I could see a far-off brownish structure rising above the treetops toward the setting sun. "Quick, it's almost time for afternoon prayers, we mustn't be late."

We followed him at a hurried pace through the three kilometers' worth of hiking it took to get there. On the way I became irritable, because there was a plethora of "mosquitoes," an insect I had never encountered before, and which also drank humans' blood. But my two companions admired my wounds as well as the mosquitoes themselves, as a "joke." I didn't see the humor of it.

We arrived at the building: it said "Congregation Sharei Tzedek," which God told me meant Congregation of the Gates of Justice. But I didn't see any gates. Perhaps the local savages had torn them down in their religious ecstasy, but if that happened then shouldn't they also have rebuilt them? Or perhaps they were in the process of planning their redesign.

Whatever the situation, we opened the double doors with great effort, for they were quite heavy and bulky, and had strange inscriptions carved into them in an ornate pattern which made one want to stop and examine them as one was opening the door. I apologize profusely for the extensiveness of this description but I really feel like I need to make myself clear: about the exquisiteness of the exterior versus the happenings on the inside. Not to say the inside was _very_ bad--it wasn't. It was just a little bad. And mostly good. Of course.

Ahem, let me clear my throat. Thank you, I needed that. Now we will enter the building.

God was ahead of me and The Devil behind me, so it took a few seconds for me to peer past God's profile and see my surroundings.

There were many padded benches. These benches had a sky-blue background with multi-colored dots adorning their surface. There were people sitting on these benches.

I suppose I have described the general background of the room, which was enormous, and filled more than halfway with people dressed in identical garb: a black hat, black suit, black hat and tie. What this means is irrelevant; I'm just telling you now because everyone seemed to have the same job: learning the Law.

What the Law is is yet another discussion, complicated yet simple. I will spare you the details.

The room was buzzing with emotion. How did I know, was I psychic? I, but a fool, knew that this was impossible, because the emotions I felt weren't really emotions: they were voices. And the voices threatened to drive me insane.

The voices weren't in my head, of course: I know everyone goes through that phase where they are classified Unworkable for a few months, then see the good of the CEO and his Company and the Nothingness that awaits us after life. I went through it myself, of course, but this was different. It was many voices at once, and they were all arguing. The room buzzed with them.

"This is how people learn Bible together," explained God. Several people turned our direction, and some of them smiled.

Then there was a loud noise, like a thunderclap. All three of us jumped, even God, who said he had been here before. Then came the noise again. And again.

"What is that!" I hissed, covering my ears. The sound shocked me to my core.

"Prayer is starting," The Devil said. "Even _I_ knew that."

Everyone in the room started humming in a different pitch. It was strangely discordant and beautiful at the same time. But I could not make out what they were saying. "Why don't they pray together?" I asked God and The Devil.

It was The Devil who answered first. "I'm not sure," he said, shrugging in a way to confirm that he had absolutely no idea. "I don't know how long this has been going on. Their roots are in Russia and Eastern Europe, so perhaps they had many pogroms or little Holocausts that forced them to pray more quietly....."

"I'm sure," I said, perhaps agreeing with him, I didn't know.

There was a young man in the corner nearest us, perhaps three meters away. He kept opening and closing his prayerbook and drumming his fingers on the table. "Is that him?" I pointed him out.

"No," confirmed The Devil, his many yellowed and hollow teeth showing as he grimaced or smiled, I wasn't sure. "He is too impatient. We're here to pick up Order, not Chaos, remember that."

"He's not stupid, you know," scoffed God.

"Shhh!" said at least a dozen people who were seated or standing close to us. They thereafter continued buzzing.

"Where should we go?" I asked the other two, my eyes scanning the rest of the room and finding identical-looking people.

"Well," said God slowly, "I guess he would have to be the person who is most-trying to be part of the group."

"Hmm," said The Devil. "It can't be that kid, then." He pointed back to the child drumming his fingers on the table while excitedly pressing tiny little buttons on an electronic device below the public view with his other hand.

"No, definitely not," I agreed with him.

"Did we solicit your opinion?" God asked in a nastily sweet tone.

"Shhh!" said a subset of the previous people to us, pressing their fingers to their lips.

"Let's get some prayer book so we blend in," decided The Devil. "Then, we can catch the guy."

"Maybe it's a girl," God suggested. He teleported us to the women's section.

"Whoa!" I exclaimed.

"Follow the rules," The Devil commanded me. "Or else you're toast. Because I can show you how hot my realm is."

"Don't make things up, my son," God told him gently. "That's not the way to teach. Or accuse."

"J'accuse!" The Devil yelled. "I speak French!" Some more "sshhhs" came from the men's section. God snapped his fingers and we were back there, again.

But in a different location.

"God, please!" I begged him in a whisper. "Too many jumps at once! Too many jumps!"

But he wasn't listening. "There!" he pointed to another corner of the room. "That guy! Let's go over there!"

As we treaded our way carefully among the faithful, being sure not to draw any stares or smiles or frowns, the room grew slowly warmer. For some reason the automated temperature controls didn't seem to be responding as they should have.

We reached the man. He appeared to be in his 20's, near the end of his life by our standards. And he appeared to be attacking a non-visible object.

Perhaps that was his god? Certainly he resembled the other men in the room, who were swaying back and forth at various angles and degrees of difficulty while mouthing an almost-silent prayer.

But this one was swinging his fists back and forth, as if trying to attack the air. He turned around to stare at us and all three of us looked away to the other members of the congregation, who paid us no heed. Then the attacking man turned his attentions back to his god and continued swinging his fists at the invisible entity.

"So is that him?" I asked my two partners, completely flouting the rule we had set out immediately before. For once, they looked at each-other and didn't come crashing down on me.

"It's possible," finally conceded The Devil, yet refusing to look me in the eye. "But there's another possibility." He pointed to someone sitting not two seats away.

"What about him makes you suspect that he is Order?" I asked. Nothing about the man seemed circumspect. Perhaps he was a little shorter and a tad bit wider than most of the others in the room, but that didn't deter my skepticism.

"Look at how he's praying," The Devil told us. "It's like he's trying to punch God."

"God?" I asked the keeper of that name. "Is this true?"

God shook his head. "Obviously I have no physical form, but he does look like he's trying to hurt me. Doesn't he as well know that I don't have a body?

"He's just trying to fit in here, and this is the only way he can," said The Devil. "He's trying to keep order of himself. Thus, he is Order."

"If you say so," sighed God. "Let's pick him up and get out of here, I'm already starting to hallucinate and hear voices."

"Ours, naturally," I tried butting in. The two deities, or at least the one and his servant, both ignored me. And for good reason: I was being rude to two of the most powerful forces in the world. Now that wasn't polite, was it?

One of them took his hands and the other took his feet. It was several moments before the rest of the congregation realized what was happening and started to intervene--apparently, each man was concentrating on his own prayers to the exclusion of everything else.

We grabbed hold of the punching man and God teleported us a few kilometers from there.

The praying man kept on praying.

"What is this guy doing?" I asked my two companions, fearing that the man would punch them both and thus void whatever chances I had of escape out of this world and time. Then the man started to take a few steps back.

"Watch out!" I cried to the others as the man's path became unpredictable. I took a panoramic view around us for the first time: We were in something called a "parking lot." Some cars were entering and exiting and we were about to be run over by a--

"Stop!" I cried once more, and flailed in the direction of safety, dragging The Devil along with me as we dove for cover behind a parked green Toyota.

I feared God was dead.

There was lots of toxic Carbon Monoxide smoke as the vehicle we were fleeing finally came to a halt. Doors opened and some people went out: "Mama?" shriled a little boy or little girl's voice. "Can we get the new Pokemon game? Pleassseee?"

"Don't bug Mommy," replied the mother absently, leafing through something in her purse, presumably. "Momma can only spend two-hundred dollars today, hun, I forgot to put money in my checking account. Still no Direct Deposit, sorry!"

"No you're not!" screamed the child. He started crying.

"Yes, I am," and I imagined the woman shrugging as she started walking, dragging the crying child along with her.

I paused to brush the dirt off of my bleeding face and made a "quiet" signal to The Devil despite his objections. For there was more to come.

"Come on, Abby," came a complaining male voice about two meters closer to us than the mother and son originated. "Let's just get this over with and be out of here. Didn't you want to go to that concert? It's the Heebee Jeebies! For Christ's sake, Abby!"

"Yah!" came the voice of an even younger child. "I wanna go, too!"

"Sorry, Brat," kidded the father, presumably dragging this child along as well. "Once you turn eighteen, I swear it."

"Brad, you're going to have her smoking cigarettes before long the way you're going," shot over the mother.

"That's why we need to have more kids," the father replied nonchalantly. "I thought I've told you that." Neither of the children had any response to that jibe, so I assumed after twenty seconds of minor noise that they had all vanished into the toy store (see, I am very perceptive, as my training requires!)

"God!" I screamed by myself, alone in the Universe, as if I didn't care that everyone within miles could hear my frigid shriek. "I will avenge your death!"

"What?" exclaimed a voice not five meters from me. "I'm alive, fool! Come over here! Stop being lazy!"

I came over, with The Devil not far behind me. We looked dumbfounded upon the man who called himself "God."

He was laying on the ground beside another man, the seemingly unconscious religious man who was called Order. "See?" said God, gesturing weakly to the man on the ground, dressed all in black clothes. "He saved me!"

"I suppose we should be careful," I said in response, "even though all of us are by now past our Deathdates...by far."

"What did that have to do with saving me?"

"Just that he was careful," I replied. "Even about someone who has just abducted him."

"He is irrelevant," The Devil said, picking up a large stone. "Permission to bash his head in, sir?"

"He is not to be bashed," said God, suddenly coming to his feet, his Superman outfit miraculously clean. "We need him."

"It's always about the _Revolution_ , the _Revolution_ ," spat The Devil with force. "You are never going to tell us your real purpose, are you? The Revolution leads to my time, but you are definitely going to do something else once we're there in order to get to _your_ time."

"Well, that's after you die, now isn't it?"

"I don't care _who_ you are, you can call yourself God or Jehovah or Allah or whatever you want, but I am not going quietly into the night, I assure you! I do not ever plan on dying!

"Who are you? Why am I here?" the black-clad man opened his eyes.

"Quick, put a rag over his mouth or something, get him back unconscious!" yelled God, and both The Devil and I scrambled to do his bidding.

When we were done, we threw Order's body into a nearby dumpster. "It's necessary," explained God. "We can't have him stirring up trouble while we search for Chaos. It'll just be for a few hours."

We evacuated the area. But in order to do that we had to play a trick--of sorts.

"This, here, is going to be the center of the circle," instructed God, pointing to a parked Oldsmobile Alero whose owner was obviously still in the toy store. Then God pulled a few colored pieces of Calcium out of his pockets and handed one to The Devil and one to me. "Here," he said. "Help me draw this pentagram. Please."

I stared at the chalk I was given: it was pink. Notably suited for someone from my original time, but not for someone in my current time. I sighed and began to work on carving out the symbol.

God had a purple piece of chalk (which could only signify kingship) and The Devil was equipped with chalk that was yellow. Why my handler, who was from the same time-period I was from, has the misfortune of using an ambiguous color like yellow was beyond me. But it wasn't my job to criticize any of God's choices, so of course I kept quiet.

We were done after two minutes. It became necessary to scribble on two different cars in order to complete the image with the resolution we required (after all, we were going to transfer three people from one of the outer worlds into a world on the opposite end of the wheel (i.e. Order vs Chaos) so we had to make it extra large. Of course, it could be three dimensional if we wanted it to be, so that's why the cars didn't present a problem).

Wheew! That was a lot of dictation to describe quite a small range of time.

We blew into a small room. All the carpets were gray and all the walls were white. "This used to be a dormitory," God whispered, for there were other people in the room, and they were watching a spectacle. They were all sitting in a semi-circle around the presenter, who seemed to be a smallish young woman with hair dark as midnight (apologies for the ancient epitaph). She was standing patiently beside a whiteboard, writing down certain phrases the audience said. The audience consisted of a haggard bunch of students ages eighteen to twenty-three, some of them with skullcaps on (the males, of course) and the women all eyeing the man.

"So in what kind of ways do we want to modify our glorious religious organization, which provides comfort and equality for all?" asked the young woman by the whiteboard. Her lips were pursed in a hideous expression consisting of part pity, part exultation and part hatred. "Do you think we maybe could add a little bit of _inclusion_ on the part of _guests_?" she asked them, and she had all of their eyes on her: the males' on her body and the way it shimmered with the different color lights permeating from the sun's rays reflecting off of several pairs of glasses;

"What do you mean?" asked the rabbi, the only married person in the room.

"Well," she responded in her high,tinkling voice, which all the males hung on like it was one of those old contraptions used to hang people. But without the gurgle; or, rather, with only unintentional gurgles: more than one boy's stomach rumbled and that exact moment.

"We have come to pick up Chaos," I burst out. I didn't intend on saying anything, but the words suddenly just tumbled out of me.

Every head in the room, including Chaos's turned to meet us. "Excuse me," said Chaos, "but where did you come from? None of us here undergoing Wakeful Hypnosis can figure out where you appeared!"

"Good question," God cut in, stepping in front of both me and The Devil. "Because I can tell _you_ that it wasn't an easy feat." He pointed at Chaos, who was appearing as a solitary, "attractive" college girl, and then at a few more people besides. God waited a few more pregnant moments, then announced, "We have come to kidnap you, girl. To bring you to a better place, as we stage a revolution both grand and awkward, both Good and Evil, both wrong and true. The revolution will last a hundred years and will be full of war and the spoils of war. Don't tell me you're not interested in _that_!" To The Devil and me he whispered, "Alright, we snatch her on three! One... two... "

Three dirty pairs of hands reached out in haste to grab the poor unfortunate girl. But the problem is, they passed right through her.

"How is this possible?" God wondered as the girl kept on teaching her lesson.

"Now who knows what causes fights?" the girl, Chaos, pursed her lips and extended the whole of her body so that everyone could see. All the boys took a guilty stare or two at her entire body and wished themselves to get her attention, even for one second.

They all started talking at once.

"Patience, my friends, said the girl with a whining superiority that sounded like if one of them displeased her, she would have him expelled from the university in minutes--and if one of them pleased her, he would become the ultimate slave to the ultimate hottie (a local term for attractive woman) who would take him on sexual rides he would never forget--and never escape.

"Now what causes fights, my children?" she repeated. "Can't one of you figure this out?"

"Um, some kind of anger thing, I think?" stated one boy, who unabashedly was taking in her entire body, head to toe, while she looked on approvingly.

"No," she said, tapping him on the shoulder sort of, but not really. "See, I don't touch guys at all," she purred, keeping the attention of every male in the room and some of the females as well.

"Why not?" asked the male she had almost touched. He wore his skullcap rakishly to one side.

"Because it's too physical," she replied with a little curtsy, her body framed in the tight black dress and straining to break out of it. Even some of the boys turned their heads away at this; it was simply too much to bear if you weren't in "the bedroom."

I cut in: "As you see, my friends, the revolution has a purpose."

"What are you doing?" The Devil hissed, his fragrant spittle flying into both of my eyes and temporarily blinding me.

"What I mean," I said more loudly, standing up and thus drawing attention to myself, "is this: The only reason you boys are all here is to watch this girl, Chaos her name, gesticulate and move her pleasant body around the room while carrying a magic-marker.

"Is because you are waiting for me to kill her." All the people in the room, both men and women, flinched at that suggestion, so I modified myself: "Okay, fine, you're waiting for me to _imprison_ her, not expel her," I conceded, and most of them looked like they were at normal temperament again. Thank Nothing.

"Now," I continued, and motioned for God and The Devil and Order to stand before me (Order was covering his eyes because of the women--at least _some_ of us were doing things right). "God, bring over the sack," I commanded him in the tongue that was yet to be, so only he and The Devil understood me. "Devil," I said, motioning to him, "please us your fireballs and your guilt-inducing rhymes to subdue the others." I paused, and then addressed Order, who was fidgeting with the two-foot-long locks of curls that adorned the side of his head.

"Order!" I shouted at him.

He looked once my way, but then returned to fidgeting with his sidelocks. I perceived that his lips were moving. "What are you saying?" I challenged him in front of all the students, who could actually understand what I was saying this time.

He took a look at me, shrugged, and kept on mumbling.

"He's buzzing, then," I said, copying Order's shrug. I thought Order might be a help when conquering Chaos, but apparently I was mistaken. "He's buzzing out of his whatever," I continued, unintentionally borrowing a line from the current Fearless Leader.

We dragged the poor hapless Chaos into our vehicle. The other students were scrambling to get away as the pepper spray descended on them like another plague not yet manifested by the hand of God.

"You know," said God as we drove off in the white van (traditionally used for kidnapping people). "Oh, dear!"

"You're professing your love for someone else?" suggested the muffled voice of Chaos, whose head was still covered by the black sack.

"No, not yet," God said, braking the van to a complete halt while turning it around at the same time (I had no idea what that maneuver was called--exigencies of war were not taught anymore). "We've forgotten Order!"

"He's so easy to lose, isn't he," commented The Devil as we sped through traffic lights back to the Hillel House. "I mean, he has this massive profile, he keeps on jerking around while mumbling loudly and he is dressed almost entirely in black. And everyone wants to stand far away from him. I mean, who could be less conspicuous?"

"You stupid guilt-ridden fiend!" I scolded The Devil, my handler, without even wanting to speak. Don't you hate when that happens?

"Watch who you're talking to!" he roared, not taking his eyes off God. " _Now_ , how will we break in again and steal him out?"

God shrugged. "Hey, I'm all out of energy and ideas: I can't teleport us in there... I'm all out!"

"Can you teleport just two of us there?" The Devil pressed him.

"Well, yes, I suppose," God started to say.

"Let's do it, then!" I shouted, to make my voice heard.

" _Yeah_!" cheered on Chaos, who we had tied to the seat with heavy rope. You see that's all they were good for?

God abruptly stopped the car. Thankfully Chaos, our soon-to-become ally, would be spared any concussive symptoms; me, not so much. Hardly anyone from this particular time where I had spent the last few months actually fastened their seat-restraints--a foible not only exclusive to this time, but to the times before and the rest of the time before the Revolution.

We were in a grassy knoll, which was right next to the Hillel House. A few dozen yards away from us some young couples were diverting by attempting to climb a huge oak tree. They waved at us when we walked up to the patch of grass opposite them. We didn't wave back. Because Chaos was in the car still--I hoped she wouldn't suffocate or overheat--and she was the only one who would actually wave. Something about "being cute," which of course was forbidden completely.

"Come," said God briskly, his superman-outfit attracting some but not a lot of attention from the tree-climbers. He handed us different pieces of chalk. We started to draw on the grass.

"Excuse me?" a young woman came jogging over to meet us, followed by two of her lovers. "Do you guys need any help?"

I looked away, God looked at her face and The Devil looked at her body. All three of us shook our heads.

"Maybe one of them is having a seizure," suggested one of her male companions, who was wearing the same outfit she was: short shorts, a tank top and crocs.

"Maybe not," countered the other male. They stared at each other and the woman touched both of them to stop the cockfight. They both started to suck their thumbs and eye each-other suggestively.

"So why are you guys trying to draw a picture on the grass?" asked the girl again. "I mean, it only works on concrete! Or asphalt!"

I looked to God for help but of course he was busy drawing. The Devil shrugged. Perceiving the matter was in my own hands, I said: "Don't you have something better to do than hang around losers like us painting up some grass?"

"Hey, man," said the first guy, the one on her left, who was of very lanky stature and had a misshapen beard growing out of the side of his face. "I've got some ganga if you want. You don't have to pay or nothin'. Just take it." He held out his hand, which contained a minute quantity of hallucinogen.

"I got more!" said his friend, the other suitor.

"You gotta choose soon, girl," I said to the female, imitating a laid-back way of talking.

"Nah," she said. "As long as each one doesn't know about the other. Oops!" Her face turned red.

"Don't believe her, she's just joking," I commented to her two male suitors. Turning back to her, I said, "We need help drawing our pentagram. Would you 'guys' like to help?" The word sounded dry and unusable in my foreign mouth, but I still had found a way to use it, somehow.

"Well I've never gotten into that Paganism shit," said one of the guys. "But as my daddy always used to say, there's a first time for everything!" This display of machismo earned a playful punch from the young woman.

When we were done drawing the pentagram (it didn't take long) we started our incantations. Then God spit on the ground.

"What?" said The Devil.

"I forgot to bring a lighter. Does anyone here have one?"

"Does a fire-extinguisher work?"

"Probably not," said God. "Okay, whatever, I guess I'll expend some of my valuable energy now. But Devil, next time it's you!"

"I feel so threatened," sneered The Devil.

"You should," said God. "I have more power than you."

"Okay, let's just get this over with," I said for once, and The Devil and God both nodded glumly.

The three youngsters were frolicking around at the edge of the pentagram. "Hey!" God called out to them. "We're about to start the chant."

"Again?" said one of the male suitors.

"Yeah!" said God. "And if you all stand on the edge like that, you'll get fried!"

We finally started the incantation. It continued for two minutes until God made his hand-signal, which meant we were about to be transported.

The world started to alternate, turning very hot and then very cold and then very hot again. Then we all began to spin--in more than one direction, and in more than the three dimensions visible to the naked eye. Within moments our feet touched ground--a new ground, a different ground. And given the background noise, I surmised we were back inside Hillel House again.

Somehow, Chaos had gotten transported with us: She again was standing in the middle of the room, armed with several magic markers.

"Um, did everyone just see that?" said one boy, the one sitting closest to her.

"Eh, I forgot to wipe this one's memory," God said offhandedly, and a yellow burst of light came from his outstretched finger. "There, all better," he said.

"But why--" I began.

"Shhh," God whispered. "She's continuing her presentation!"

"Now," Chaos was saying, "Coping skills are good for us but we each have different _styles_ of coping. We each like to do something different! For instance, maybe Joshua here likes to go boating, or fishing, and Rechavam here enjoys travelling to the aquarium! Wow!" And with that exclamation point, she pivoted her body in a few different angles so that all the boys could see her, and stretched her body languorously.

"Man, that should be rated 'R,'" said one of the young men from outside to the other.

"More like rated 'x!'" the other young man retorted. The girl in between them, as well as all the other girls in the room, looked very sad and deflated.

The rabbi was watching with alacrity. "Very good!" he clapped his hands. "And since I'm supposed to be the main guy here, and since this extremely attractive girl has taken over the proceedings, I should leave now, as I should not be party to such prostitution. Good-bye!"

Everyone pretended they hadn't heard him.

"Hey, where's Order?" cut in The Devil. "Isn't that the reason we spent all this time coming back here?"

"Ahh, I forgot again," said God. "I must be getting old. He's in the bathroom. Thedius, would you please go get him?"

"Of course," I said, rising from my folding chair and striding off down the direction he had indicated.

"Can I come, too?" asked The Devil.

"Only if you bring a camera," God said. "Or a cell-phone--I had forgotten these new gadgets exist in this decade. Very well. Go now."

"Why a cell phone?" I asked The Devil as we walked down the circular hallway.

"They're afraid of light," explained The Devil as the bathroom came into sight. "Order and Chaos are elementals, which means they are descended from Demons. And demons get hurt by artificial light."

"Really? Like from a television or a cell-phone!"

"You're too clever," snapped back The Devil. "Ah, here." We had reached the door to the bathroom. It read, "Gender Neutral Bathroom." The faucet was open, and we could hear the intermittent splashes of the water as it grazed a surface on its way down to the bottom of the sink. The Devil pushed the door open. There was Order, washing his hands again and again and again. I believed this was a symptom of a common disorder called "Lack of Dictator," less commonly called "Lack of CEO." It was characterized by frequent assertions of free will (as if any existed--what can't be corrected with chemicals nowadays?) as well as high-energy levels usually accentuated by disordered thoughts. It was as if there was no penalty for doing wrong and no reward for performing good works. The Company always gave us what we needed, punished the wrong and rewarded the right, as well as cutting off the Accused's genetic lineage. So trust in The Company as well as The CEO/Dictator/Whatever you want to call him is ingrained in us from the time we first inhale air. What we were all witnessing here, in the pre-Revolution time, was OCD gone unaided: This man had so much indecision and so much fear of his deity that it clouded his judgement: what if what I do is not what my deity wants? How will he take it? Will I be punished? If so, how? And how long will I be punished for? Will it hurt? And if it hurts, will it be worth it to just kill myself so that the Earthly punishment doesn't continue? Because you know he's going to torture you in Retirement.

We put a bag on the poor man's head and turned off the tap once we had gotten his body free of the hardware.

It was a quick teleport back to the van (leaving Hillel House is always easier than coming in) and we were reunited with Chaos. Strangely, we might have been arrested by the authorities if Chaos had been less than six years old--but no one could see her anyway, since she was hidden in the back. White vans, as I said.

"So what are we going to do now?" I asked God, beating The Devil to the punch. "Blow up some bombs? Is that how The Revolution starts?"

"You will see," he said ominously, cupping his fingers together and wiggling them like an evil pre-Revolution matchmaker. They are second-lowest in all the Hells, beaten to the punch only by Psychiatrists, who advocated horrible medicines to people in order to make them come back with even worse ailments.

I am talking here of the old kind of matchmakers, of course, where they used to connect you to a woman (disgusting!) who has similar interests as you so you could birth your DNA to the next generation, as Evolution mandates. Obviously we are not speaking here of our own matchmakers, who zealously in the name of Nothing bring us together so that we may share companionship and fraternity. There is obviously a very big difference.

\------after ocd-----

"Everyone hold on," God commanded. "We are about to travel three-thousand miles. And then some. Did everyone remember to pack their shorts? Sunscreen? Oh, no, I think I forgot my camera, please forgive me." And then he vanished.

"This always happened," sighed The Devil "I once had to wait a full twenty minutes for him to exit the house, because he had forgotten toilet paper."

"You two travelled without me?" I gasped in astonishment.

The Devil ignored me. Presently, God was back. "It takes a lot less time for me to do something than it does other people," God explained with a smirk upon seeing my expression.

"Whatever," I said back to them. "Where do we go?"

God opened the van door. "Out, both of you!" he barked to Order and Chaos, shoving them rudely onto the asphalt sidewalk like they were mere sacks of potatoes (a plant whose roots contain ample carbohydrates). They fell to the ground but didn't even make a peep. Perhaps they were afraid of God punishing them.

"I thought we were going to take the van--" The Devil began.

"No way!" exclaimed God profusely. "Not to where _we're_ going!" Then he looked around. "Where did those kids go?"

I shrugged and said, "Perhaps they went to take a nap, or go to the bathroom, or something. You know, most of these humans haven't yet been genetically-engineered. It is even a question whether or not to refer to them as 'humans'."

"Cut it, smarty-pants," The Devil cut in, undermining me. "I'm the one here who is the deputy, not _you_. You're _third_ in command."

I nodded mutely and continued: "Look at this pentagram. It's almost invisible now! Who caused that?"

It was then that I received a punch in the head by The Devil: a light punch, but still a punch. I staggered from the impact this way and that, pretending somehow that I had tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, because I didn't want God to see I had been overwhelmed; me, overwhelmed by my _handler_? They had trained me and my kind for this kind of action, and just prepared (and engineered) his kind for logistics. I had been careless, that was all--I thought he was an ally.

Next time, I would be the one to hurt _him_.

"Anybody around?" shrieked The Devil. "Anybody around to help us finish this pentagram? Again?" He scanned the area with his eyes and neck moving in so many directions.

"I don't think they heard you, sir," I said, aiming a kick at his backside. He doubled over. He _definitely_ felt that one.

"Now we're even," I smirked.

"As I was saying," God was speaking, "We don't need the entire pentagram, or even a shape at all."

"What, there are other _shapes_?" I gasped in disbelief.

There were a couple of walkers, a male and a female, who were drawing close to our location on the side of the road on the grassy knoll. They were holding hands, a practice I found disgusting. I mean, why hold hands with the Udder that fed you as a baby, the woman whose only purpose is not to be "a helper to oppose him," as the philosophers of the current time would have you think, but instead is only a distraction; a nuisance to be tolerated and embarrassed from, an ugly Necessity that derails you from logic; a young witch who grows into an old crone, to be despised and avoided. Nay, readers from my own time, we must keep this horrible Necessity dormant, for it is no longer a Necessity--Nothing gave us the tools to erase women from our lives, and we must, for it is the only way for Civilization to continue to advance--the alternative is an abomination. We must never let God win in this regard; our civilization will remain true to our core values.

"Come on!" The Devil was yelling, flecks of spittle launching from his mouth like the old booster rockets, except this time there was no burning up in the atmosphere: the disgusting substance was fully intact once it reached its destination. Which was the curb several yards behind the walking couple.

"Oh, come on, Brad, you could help them!" squealed the woman incessantly. I covered my ears from the noise.

"But I don't want to," complained her partner. Before long it would be outlawed to have an opposite-sex partner, I knew. That is, if we completed The Revolution on time.

The woman eventually got her husband (or boyfriend, or something else) to help, and they went on their way.

"We're almost done," declared God. "Just one more part of this pentagram and we can take it all the way to California."

"Oops, did you just say our destination?" mocked The Devil, always ridiculing his superior. "What, we need more work? Why didn't you tell us before? Then I could have made those two ancient-humans work for us a little longer!"

There was a group of five males approaching us now. Most of their heads were not visible--instead they wore hats with different area-codes printed on them--for baseball, football and basketball. Of course, I'm simplifying things a bit, but something like Sports isn't easy to explain in one sentence, or even in one book. It was simply too archaic and irrelevant to our modern sensibilities. Plus, it caused competition and hatred towards others.

Now The Devil changed into a beggar: "Would you please help us?" he drawled. "We need to draw some lines in the grass with chalk. It won't take too long."

"Really? What are you doing?" asked one.

"Ah, just transporting," said God.

"Using a pentagram!" I added helpfully.

"Hmmm," said the one. Turning to his friends, he said, "Isn't that what they use to call up Satan?"

"I think you're right," a man with a green hoodie said.

"Nah, man," said the first men. The others echoed the same call.

"What the ----," I started to say, but The Devil beat me to the punch: "You hoodlums think you're so cool," he hissed. "I would never have you over for dinner, Shabbos or otherwise! Now get out!"

\------after rejection----

The Black people just laughed and walked on. The Devil seethed in his fury. God waved his hand at the Black people and the Black people waved back. "Sorry, he's an asshole," God told them. They gave us all a thumbs up, even The Devil.

"Now that was a _positive_ social experiment," noted God.

In the meantime, Chaos had been on her hands and knees, and had finished drawing the pentagram as they spoke. "I'm ready!" she announced. "Are _you_?"

We all hurriedly found our places. "Do you know how to initiate the engines?" God asked her.

"I already have," she said, staring directly at God with a wicked grin. The process was starting, I felt it now. Since it was five-thousand kilometers, give or take, it would be amplified. And there would be much noise, both in the ranges we could hear as well as the appended frequencies and even down into Radio. Elephants (large, grey animals valued for their tusks) would be able to hear this half a continent away. Which was good, for they were all captives in zoos and would not be allowed to trample anybody.

There were, however, many humans in between our current location and our destination, and they would not be so happy to hear a great whining sound, coming from a place both near and far, interrupt their lunch or whatever they were doing for a full minute. The Experts of the Time would classify the phenomena as a mere hypersonic jet, and that would be that.

There was a sudden whoosh of wind. We were there, somehow. I had never come on a trip this far in so little time. What's more, in a spaceship there is no drag; In this instance, however, I felt like I had walked a thousand kilometers. Which of course was impossible, but you get the idea.

I somehow arrived a few seconds before everyone else came. But come they did: first God, then The Devil, Order and Chaos.

Where were we? That was the question. We were all standing on sand, with a light breeze coming in from the South (I could tell by the position of the sun) and there was little to no plant life around us. The sky was blue, as always in the life-rich place, and a few rounded-disc-shaped clouds dotted the skyscape above us.

And it was hot.

It was so unbearably hot, that The Devil immediately set about to complaining (not a surprise, but still): "Oh, come on, God, if you wanted to take us to a place where we will die, you might have well taken us to Disney World! Because this is where we die!"

"I'm not sure everyone heard you, Devil," God answered politely, procuring a white handkerchief from one of his pockets and dabbing his forehead. A twenty-ounce bottle of water appeared in each of our hands.

"Oops, sorry," said God, and he made a slight gesture. "Now that's better."

"Interesting," I said, peering down at the ice-cold drink that had just manifested itself into my possession. "What is the meaning of this?"

"Why must you always ask that question?" sneered God, putting his face inches from my own. "It's to get us through the desert to where we're going, of course! I mean, _duh_!"

The Devil was saying something. I strained to listen over the ramblings of Order and Chaos, whose black hoods had been removed and were now in various stages of mental breakdowns.

"--is not fair, God," The Devil was saying insistently. "I always get picked on, I always get the bad rap. Can't you change it back?"

"No way," God sneered, turning his face from me back to his Terrible Servant. "Get used to this, it's going to happen more and more often, until I slay you, fiend."

"But why can't I--"

"What's the problem?" I stepped between them. "Perhaps I can act as mediator to this conflict."

"This conflict," God said offhandedly, "is none of your business. Keep it on the Earth where you belong, little creature."

"He's not allowing me to drink it from my right hand," The Devil said morosely, his yellow teeth showing in an expression of utter disgust. Well, self-disgust, I should say.

"Why not?"

"It's a matter of honor," God said. "Or at least, a manner of rightness. Because Mercy is the right hand, and Justice is the left. Justice ranks below Mercy."

"What?" I exclaimed, baffled to my core. "What kind of Demon Religion is this?"

It was still hot, except the sun was a bit more in the center of the sky than it was before, so it was now even hotter. The cruel Breeze of Death blew sand into our eyes and noses and mouths, threatening to bury us from the inside-out. God dragged Chaos and The Devil carried Order on his back with faltering steps, and we all started walking toward what God said would be our destination.

"How do we know when we've reached there?" Chaos said, panting despite not having to walk. "I mean, this guy who is carrying me, he's sort of creepy. You know? He's like really ugly, and doesn't have good habits."

God shrugged. "Your problem, lady." Then he straightened up and said, "There! There it is! You see that? It's only one or two kilometers off."

I squinted my eyes, the first time I had ever had to do so, and thank the Engineers they left that one in. Otherwise all the dust would have blinded me, and we all know, despite the dearth of blind people in our society, that it is mildly inconvenient to be blind.

"You see that?" shouted God, for a sudden windstorm had erupted at that moment, causing us all to protect our faces with our hands while ducking to avoid the possibility of being toppled over and buried.

"See what?" yelled The Devil. God flipped him a pair of binoculars. "Oh!" yelled The Devil again, sucking in enough air to spout many different kinds of swear words in a very short amount of time. "Why do we have to go there? You're not serious!"

"Oh, but I am," chuckled God, wiping his forehead again with his white cloth. "This is where we will get noticed." And he snapped his fingers. "Here," he said lightly, chuckling some more while drinking a second bottle of water he had conjured in his other hand. "You're not so hot anymore, are you?"

There was much noise. We had suddenly arrived at the side of a freeway and there were cars and trucks roaring past. Both Order and Chaos "freaked out," meaning they immediately started howling and jumping in circles. "Too much!" Order screamed. Chaos seemed to agree with him--her eyes were wild and she eventually ended up curled up in a fetal position (never mind what that is). And she was sobbing profusely, which was a great annoyance. Why did they have to be so emotional? Remember this, friends. Tell it to your successors. We must stop God from arranging his future. And excluding us from it.

"Why are we here?" I shouted at God and The Devil. "Don't you guys think this is a bit much?" This, as a car whipped past it stirred up a dust cloud that rendered me unseeing and gasping for breath.

" _Fine_ ," God proclaimed in a profoundly annoyed tone. He then snapped his fingers again. We were now indoors and the temperature was much colder. "Here. This is the Hyatt Regency in LA. I was just _hoping_ you guys might _want_ to see an actual tourist attraction! Curse the World and its Inhabitants!"

This time Order and Chaos didn't convulse as much.

"Am I in Heaven?" Order asked. "Because I think I deserve to go to Hell."

"I definitely think _I_ am going to Heaven," said Chaos, not seeming to hear what the finely-dressed religious Jew had to say.

"Why?" I asked her. We were standing now in a circle in the smooth-floored lobby, not far from the revolving doors where guards lurked on the other side.

"Because I'm nice," she said simply. We did not talk any more on that subject.

"Who cares?" God butted in. "I wanted to show you the Hollywood sign but you guys are no fun. I _tried_ getting us to hike a few kilometers to the sign, as a warmup, you know? To build anticipation. But _you_ guys were like, Fuck that, let's get out of here!"

" _God_!" Chaos gasped as she heard the profanity from God's lips. "You shouldn't be saying that!"

"I can say whatever I damn well please, woman, and don't you forget that," he said.

"Well, so can I," she snivelled back at him. "And you _don't_ want to get into a profanity contest with _me_. Thedius, _why_ are you recording this conversation?"

"Wha--What?" I stammered, unable to come up with words. "Wha--I mean, can you see it? It's supposed to be invisible!"

"You mean the _mic_?" yelled Chaos. People were starting to look at us now, and it made me a trifle uncomfortable.

"Excuse me," said one man sitting not five meters from us. "I'm trying to read the paper."

"Read it online!" blasted Chaos back at him.

By that time I had slipped away from her clutches and was hiding behind God. And the receptionist was approaching us.

"Excuse me, I don't care if you're in high-school or college, but you're going to have to stop that," she said to Chaos.

"Stop _what_?" she said, and was about to launch into another tirade when The Devil came up behind her and put the sack back over her head. Then we disappeared.

\-------escape ends here

We reappeared in the parking lot of the hotel, about two hundred meters away from the front entrance.

"It's hot," Chaos complained.

"Is there a _shul_ anywhere near here?" asked Order. "I mean there are many words to describe what a _shul_ is, namely: House of Prayer, or also House of Gathering, which translates in Hebrew to _Beit Kenesset_ , which also--"

Order was continuing to talk, but no one was paying any notice to him. "So what are we supposed to do here, God?" put forth The Devil.

"Dude, are you retarded?" snapped God back at his erstwhile servant. "This is just a _parking_ lot. for goodness' sakes!"

"I think what he meant was What are we doing here in LA," supplied Chaos, her lavender dress ruffling in the wind.

"Oh," God sighed. "Sorry. Sometimes I get really angry and then it's like a biblical event. You know, I'm the old codger who's always drunk and physically abuses his wife and kids." Why don't people switch to Jesus already?"

We all stared at him, even the OCD Order, who stopped talking to himself while looking at his book for a moment to take in the present and what was happening.

"Ha, gotcha all on that one," God laughed. " _You_ know, I do things to weed out the believers from the unbelievers--you know, pretend I'm a human, or pretend that my most holy artifact is a big, black box. You know it's not polite to insult other religions, right? I hope no one comes up behind _me_! "

"They will now," said The Devil ominously. "I can help that."

"Only if I want you to," God said forcefully. He then scratched his head. "Which way's Hollywood?"

"Which studio do you want?" asked Chaos. "I've been on all the tours, LA is like a second home to me!"

"How about Universal?" God decided. "They do lots of TV shows, right? Those would be the easiest to infiltrate and eventually become cast members."

"Why would we want to do _that_?" exclaimed the energetic young woman named Chaos.

"To bring about the revolution, of course!" said God. "Isn't that obvious?"

"But through TV--"

"Everyone in this country only averages five hours a day of that, don't they?" pressed God.

"They can multitask, though," explained Chaos, flipping her shoulder-length hair back around their head with a wave of her head. "For instance, they--or, rather, we--can smoke weed and do homework at the same time the TV is on."

"Was it true that women were better than men at multitasking?" The Devil asked hungrily. "There is a lot of potential in gene-alteration for this!"

"We're getting sidetracked," God said, transporting The Devil three meters outside of our circle with a wave of his hand. "What we need to do right now is someone who can make us a TV show. Prepare for transport. Everyone inside the pentagram. Now."

We all clustered inside as accordance with God's will. "Now hold on!" screamed God.

For what? I was about to say, but then there was a loud whoosh and the world swirled and a very loud, unidentifiable sound roared in my ears.

\-----transport ends here

It was the sound of many voices screaming. "Ahhhh!" several times over pulsated through air and off the walls of the small room where we had suddenly appeared. The women, of course, shrieked in a much higher tone. This caused even more confusion, because, as you know, women are confusing to someone who has never talked to them.

"Where the fuck did you come from?" screamed one man, who was wearing a baseball cap but was also obviously balding (past Death-Date).

"Well," I tried to explain. But God interrupted:

"Um, I think maybe aliens abducted us," he muttered, barely loud enough to be audible. Then he got something out of his pocket as quickly as lightning strikes, and triggered a few bright flashes. Everyone except those in our team fainted for a few seconds, then got back on their feet groggily. "Hi!" God said. "Can anyone please tell us where we are? We seem to have lost our way."

"There are roughly twelve studios in this vicinity," said the hatted man with a slightly apologetic tone.

"Did anyone hear anyone else saying the f word?" God queried the room. He received only puzzled stares and shakes of the head.

"Who are you?" one young woman holding a pad and pen said.

"We have come in peace," God began.

"In order to conquer," The Devil interrupted him. There were some worried glances among the filming crew thus assembled.

"And to heal," added Chaos. "Through sex and suction, while we accept our fates as b's and h's."

"Hey, bros before hoes!" Order said triumphantly. "That's why it says on the marriage contract that my wife has to support _me_!"

"Am I supposed to add something?" I added.

"What are you, some travelling comedy troupe?" asked the director (with the baseball cap) with half a grin. "Because it really isn't funny. You need to get the hell off my stage, right now."

"We will leave," God announced presently. "But first, would you please tell us what your TV show is called?"

"Sluts Kill Vampires and Werewolves Fuck Hoes" the director spit out reluctantly. "Now, would you please leave?"

"Sounds like a fairly commonplace TV show," Chaos noted.

"Is that why you wear a dress? Huh?" the director suddenly became aggressive as several women frowned, but then perked up as their Fearless Leader spoke. "Might as well be wearing a brown paper bag, it makes no difference. You're still going to be an ugly, dirt-poor bitch who likes to hoe herself to big dicks like me." And he flashed one finger on each hand.

"Why do we work for him?" said one different woman who was also carrying a clipboard.

"Because we ourselves would like to become directors," replied yet another woman two people to the first one's left, who was wearing pink all over her body.

"You look like a female version of Peter Rabbit," Chaos informed the pink lady (or b or h, choose your pronoun).

Order, he of the black outfit, shaved head and black hat, added: "It does look like she is wearing pajamas. She looks like an oversized version of my six-year-old daughter, whom I shun because other people are not supposed to talk to her."

"What? What the fuck are you saying?" the director responded. "I'm calling 9-1-1. Right. Now." His fingers were twitching and were closed around his mobile phone.

God took out his blinker.

He flashed it.

"What are you doing?" he shouted two seconds later to the director. "Get back to work! Brush Chaos's hair, _do_ something! You're on _my dime_!"

"Uh, yessir!" the former director scrambled to say, getting up from his chair and running from the room.

"Now," said God, presiding now over the TV show, "Let's put some of those Werewolves in the center. _There_. Now, all you women get axes," he pointed to the corner of the room, where some large, red white and black axes almost the height of a man had appeared.

"Gosh, those weren't there before," said the pink woman.

The Director returned, huffing to a stop in front of God. "Here!" he held out the hairbrush. "Do you want me to brush their hair right now?" For some reason, he seemed eager and willing to please.

"Yes, please brush the hair of that pink girl right there," God directed him. "I mean, whore, or bitch..."

"Lady will do," said the Pink Lady.

"Lady, then," God decided.

"Why not just put them behind a curtain so they can have some modesty?" Order butted in.

"Okay, while you're brushing that girl's hair, how about _this_ girl stands on that side of Pink Girl longingly, like she's looking for me to actually answer Order in his comments or prayers or OCDs, whatever you want to call them. But of course, she's disappointed cause I mostly don't answer them and instead I just send some thunderbolts or something. Yeah, so just be disappointed.

"And you!" God continued talking while pointing to one of the werewolves. "You are stalking her, about to eat her. Start by opening the door to the room, see, that one," God pointed at a battered-looking door made of aged wood which was part of one of the walls of the set. "Then creep up behind her. Hey, what's that?"

"What's what?"

"Those... over there. Those are organisms?"

"Excuse me, sir?"

"They are some type of animal, am I correct?"

"What, the dogs? Sir, are you sober?"

I actually took the initiative and crept up behind God: "They are dogs, your divinity," I said softly in his ear.

"Don't call me that," he whispered back, equally softly. "We must pretend to be one with them if this Revolution is to occur."

" _You_ need to know what dogs are," I told God.

"Bring those dogs here!" God shouted. "And bring some more girls, too!"

"But why, sir?" asked a lackey from a huge mounted camera.

"You'll see. Now queue the music!"

A very angry Black male started to talk very loudly to a beat about how he was going to 'burn' other people.

"No, something different," God mused, rubbing his soft downy beard and then staring at his own hand, for some reason. Now, the speakers were playing a song about a boy who couldn't stop fucking a girl. Which was, of course, the reason for the Revolution. This song seemed to me the one that God was going to pick.

But he didn't, in the end. "Next song!" roared God, a clear note of disappointment in his voice. "How about something about coming together to do good works?"

"No such song exists, sir," answered the Pink Bunny Girl.

"These dogs are obviously supposed to be wolves," God noted. "Is that correct?"

"Yes, sir," said the Pink Girl.

"Bring one to me."

They brought him one of the dogs. It was panting and had a happy expression.

God stared at it.

It stared back at God.

"What, it doesn't talk?" asked God. "What a waste."

The dog barked.

"Is it a he or is it a she?" God inquired of The Pink Girl.

Pink Girl shrugged. "Could be either, sir. Want me to have a look?"

"Please," said God. "We don't want any... _mistakes..._ do happen on this show."

"I don't think the females are in heat, if that's what you're saying."

"Yeah, I don't want them dripping from their whatever. You know? So check 'em now, please." God obviously was trying here to put in a laid-back affectation, but it didn't seem to be working by the expression on the rest of the crews' faces, as well as on Pink Girl's face. It was hard to tell their expressions because I had never seen this expression before.

"They're all female," Pink Girl reported back after a few moments. "Is this alright, sir?"

"Well," God said, stroking his beard tenderly like someone would do before letting a random expression "accidently" fall out of his mouth, "I guess that's acceptable. We need some volunteers, though."

"For what?" she asked curiously.

"Well... " paused God. "Well, we need some male volunteers in order to do something special. Don't worry, you won't be actually doing it."

"Is he saying what I think he's saying?" said one of the clipboard-holders to another.

"Let's wait and see," said the other.

"Okay, we have to set everyone up," God was saying. "You, blondie, go there," he pointed. "Brunette short guy over here..."

"But I'm not an actor!" Brunette Short Guy said. "I'm a scriptwriter!"

"Eh," said God. "Now you're an actor."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"First, take off your glasses," God instructed. "There. Good. Now, do a split. Can you do that for me?

"I can!" said a beaming young woman.

"I wasn't asking you, Uterus," said God.

Insolance ends here

The woman looked shocked and disgusted: "What did you just call me?"

"You're all _natural_ ," God said, imitating the woman's tone of voice back to her. "You should be back in the kitchens, raising the children there so that they don't get cold because the other parts of the house are subzero."

"What? What do you mean?"

"What he _means_ to say," cut in The Devil, stepping in front of God so he could address the female, "is that the only reason Evolution, one of the Minor Nothings, developed the female genome was in order to create more males. The proof to this lies in the simple facts of Biology, another one of our minor Nothings, and continues--"

"He's wrong," God said, this time stepping in front of his enemy. He was standing now only two meters from enticingly desireful young woman. I'm sorry, I have to say it here: they are irresistible. Now I know why Men subjected them for so long: they simply play with our minds. Their voices are enticing to the infinite degree, and every single movement or non-movement is like an orgasm to us. Because that's what we imagine, of course. No, not _you_ \--I'm talking to the you _without_ the meds. Or the hormones. Or the--Nothing, there must be a million ways to say it. I guess that's good advertising.

And a good diversion, as well.

"There are two futures," God declared. "Well, actually there is only one future, but two sounds better. Doesn't it?" He looked around at his colleagues. "Two options are better than one, don't you think?" Quite a few of them actually clapped.

"But in reality," God continued, "there is only one future. The Devil's. And mine. Because mine comes after his. And so I have to help him."

"How?"

"By werewolves fucking hoes," trumpeted God in his deep voice, throwing his hands in a sweeping motion around the room like a windmill whose rotors had gone awry.

"You're telling me that's going to sell?" said one woman who was part Caucasian and part African. She was in the back of the group but her voice was full-bodied and it carried.

"You and your kind are persecuted in this time," countered God. "Maybe we can put you up there and see if we can make this movie a bit more diversified."

"Even if it were, the actors wouldn't agree to have sex with the dogs," said an albino male wearing a LA Dodgers cap. It was a blue head-covering, and it covered his eyes so that he appeared as one of our primordial ancestors peeking out of a dark cave; you couldn't for the life of you see his eyes.

"Are you an actor?" God said. "Do you speak for them?"

"We won't do it," said a man who had obviously exercised his arm and chest muscles excessively.

"Why?" God asked, stamping his foot on the floor for emphasis. "We'll give you a lot of money. How much do you want?"

"The purpose of these dogs is to substitute for wolves," the part-Caucasian and part-African lady said. "The men are supposed to have sex with the female werewolves, yes, but not while they're in wolf form. Do you understand?"

"I obviously know the law," God admitted. "As I know everything. But don't you think a little change ought to be made until we actually become an equal society? I mean, in my time we have elevated dogs to sentience, and we may do with them what we please. Shouldn't we also elevate _these_ poor unfortunates? I even know the genome sequence of the drug by heart! Don't you trust me?

"Dude, we already got bitches," said one "werewolf," whose skin tone was darker than most. "We don't have to elevate _these_ dogs. _Do_ we? Men?"

The rest of the werewolves, all seven of them, made committed noises. One said, "You know, there's a _reason_ we call them bitches." All of the males nodded their heads in agreement, even the one who had more African heritage than the rest. "They are skanks to the core. Now why would want to fuck these _actual_ bitches? I mean, for one thing it's illegal, and for another thing they always break up with you and cheat with someone else, doesn't matter the gender. Isn't that right, boys?"

What started as a general acknowledgement ended a war chant.

"Exactly what I had assumed," God said, licking his lips in anticipation while watching the fists that punched toward the sky and the feet that stamped like a Homo Erectus trying to stir up dust at a family gathering. "They desire change. And I am going to be the one to do it."

"You think they want _you_?" challenged The Devil. "It's _me_ they want! _My_ time comes first! And besides, it's _me_ they're channeling in order to start the Revolution!"

" _No_!" I said, jumping into the fray, despite the fact that somebody--or some _thing_ \--else had taken control of my lips and legs. I jumped into the massing riot of male energy and proclaimed at the top of my lungs: "Here me, Frustrated Males! The Female will no longer outdo is at everything from being a Boss at work and having children through her natural body! No way! For now, the tables have turned."

They actually seemed eager to see what I had to say, and stopped gyrating for a moment to stare at me.

"Yes, you hear me now!" I crowed. I no longer cared that I was being controlled by something else--I simply revelled in each moment of supposed "life" that came and went in front of my eyes. "You see these bitches? They are all alone and defenseless, they have to have owners! _Right_?"

" _Right_!" they all chorused in unison.

"Do they deserve to be fucked?"

"Yes!" cried one of the men over the others. "Much more than those bitches we live with deserve to be fucked!"

"Should you fuck them?" I shouted in query. But of course I knew the answer I would get back.

"Yes!" all the males roared, launching themselves at the defenseless dogs, who had been bred for only two traits: passivity and their proximity to wolfdom. Wolves still exist on one of the outer planets, I believe. Their primary evolutionary use was to keep the deer and elk populations low, as well as obviously for their subsequent human-assisted evolvement into the common dog.

The women all screeched as they saw their male counterparts dive onto the poor dogs, who ran for their lives. The female humans also started running from the building, to one caveat:

"The doors are barred!" they shrieked. "Who did this?"

"Bitch, get over here!" one of the male humans shouted. A couple of women ran to heed his call before they realized what they were doing.

"Why are we running _toward_ the problem?" one woman asked another.

"I guess we're just used to being abused," shrugged the other. "That's why we are less than men: because we let them do this to us."

"We should be extinct," said a third woman, who had been overhearing their conversation.

"I guess we should," agreed the first two, and they started doing something even God, The Devil, or even I could have anticipated: they started barking.

"You're not bitches!" yelled one of the men running past (no doubt to a different dog, for the new experience). Then he saw them on all fours and stripping free of clothes, and said, "Aw, what the heck. We can always cover 'em up with fur once we're done."

The scene continued for a matter of minutes. Once everyone was done, they lay in a tangle of men, women and beasts, some alive, some dead and some in various stages of in-between.

"What do we do now?" wondered one of the men.

God stepped quickly in to fill the void. "Here," he gestured to everyone in the room, including himself, The Devil and Myself, who were actually wearing clothing. "Didn't you enjoy what has happened here? Your motto up to this point has been work by day and "let go" by night. Shouldn't you have the opportunity to let go all day and all night, nonstop? Imagine the possibilities!"

"Yeah!" shouted all the men. "That felt good! Who cares if it was women or animals? Dogs are a man's best friend, anyhow! And you can't even tell if they're male or female, you have to actually look!"

"What does that make a difference?" God said cooly. His eyes surveyed the fallen crowd like a judge over some convicts.

"We are the spark that will light the beacon that will carry us through the Revolution of Men!" they all responded in unison. Ah, I saw it! It was the Unison of Revolution!

"What does that mean?" said God.

"It means we will dispose with all the women so we can be assured in our dominance!" shouted all the men. "We will not be able to look upon women now, because they will not exist!" "All they do is get in our faces and boss us around! The Counter-Revolution of Men has started! Even in this stupidly-left-leaning district!"

"Why do they distract you?"

One of the men spoke for them this time: "We... feel..." It obviously pained him to talk about this subject. But God's gentle face prodded him to speak more: "Every time I see one, I want to just stick my dick in there! It's not me! It's my dick! I have no control!"

God procured a gun out of midair and aimed it at the man. The man shrank back, covering his face and chest with his hands, as if that would do something against a gun. "No," God said. "You are not the one who will die today. Nor these bitches, for it is also not their time. But for the women... or, at least, the surviving ones... it is their time."

He carefully handed the man his gun, which had not existed moments earlier. "Now, my true child," he whispered. "Now is the time you prove your worth."

Let us say that he indeed proved his worth in that moment.

\-----subservitude ends here

"Bitch, get over here!" God called. All the dogs lined up for him.

"Now," he continued, "I need you all to kill all the women. Do you understand, you dogs? Or, rather, bitches?"

They all presented their rear-ends to him. All of the cast and crew in the room, all fifty of them, gasped in wonderment.

"No worries, bitches," God spoke in a slow, soothing manner. "I have but one task for you: slay your owners."

The dogs all looked questioningly at God, as if to ask, "Which owners?"

"All the women in the room, of course!" God snapped at them. "I can't believe what I was saying was unclear to you. I mean, you may have little animal brains, but even those can understand basic language! Now do your jobs!"

All the women in the room started to cry.

Another question from one of the dogs, who was looking in a pleading manner at God.

"Fine," God conceded. "Don't kill any women upwards of the age of fifty" (I gasped upon hearing such a huge number). "Just rip out their reproductive organs. It shouldn't hurt that much. See? I am a pragmatist! I have made a compromise!" All the males in the room clapped.

"But sir," said the selfsame man, who had the audacity to talk up to a god, "how shall we convert the rest of the world to our reality? You know, sir, it is a very large world."

"That won't be a problem," said God assuredly. "I have something called a 'virus.' What it does is unleash a plague upon all women, so that not one exists on this Earth, save for these women here in this room who have had their womanhood removed." Men, rejoice at your outcome, for your cup runneth over. The King has finally arrived. Meaning, _me_."

"But won't all the males be heartbroken?" protested the man.

"Who are you, Abraham?" God barked, spittle flying from his lips onto the floor before the man. "Besides, Abraham was a long time ago. Learn not to question my decisions!"

"They won't be heartbroken, either," The Devil cut in, his yellow teeth and red horns clashing tremendously but fitting neatly enough into the pandemonious room. "Cause we will kill anyone who objects to our rule. And besides, our propaganda will create a new kind of human, who does not worship The Female, The Uterus. It will spread like wildfire throughout the world. For it is our Manifest Destiny!"

"Devil, why are you talking like God?" I asked him. He pointedly ignored me. Or perhaps it was a nonchalant type of ignorance, I wasn't sure.

"Do you mind if they slay you?" God asked me in an aside--which means that everyone else was listening. "You're no longer necessary here," he said, by means of explanation. The Devil will cover for all your responsibilities. So you have a choice: _they_ slay you," he gestured, pointing at the panting men, who by now had taken off most their clothes and were devouring the dogs snout-first.

One man didn't eat his dog, though. He instead lay down and raised it and lowered it using his arms, as one does with a dumbbell (arbitrary weights that men used to use to develop muscle before steroids became mainstream).

"Dude, what are you doing?" said a sweaty man who had walked up to the bench-pressing man. "We're supposed to kill the bitches, not exercise with them!"

"Aw, man, can't I enjoy my bitch before I kill her?" the offending man complained.

"Whatever," said the accuser with a sigh. He readied his fists for one last fight.

" _Yessss_ ," hissed God. "Fight, man against man, to the death! Just like they do in some Latin-American countries with male cows and female chickens!"

"Why is this desirable?" I asked both of them.

"Because might as well get it over with, right?" shrugged God. He rose a few inches off the ground, lost in thought, and it was then I remembered his costume was the same as an extra-terrestrial immortal race known as Kryptonians in popular media. Why had none of the applicants questioned him on this?

"My own opinion," Devil said as he gnashed his teeth together in contemplation, "is that it is preferable that those who are in power stay in power. And thus, because I am working to establish my _own_ birthplace, I believe that I can prevent God from establishing his. Because _I_ will be in power then.

"Interesting argument," I noted as the two shirtless man began to gash each-other mightily. "Fruitless, but intriguing."

"You would like to fight me, here and now?" challenged The Devil.

"No," I said. "Because God will sooner or later grind you into dust. Into nothing, Devil. You mean nothing."

"A bit sentimental, aren't you?" asked The Devil teasingly. "You speak of Evil having no home, when it does here and now. It exists and will continue to exist. And you think your former handler will have pity on you when his day comes? Go, hide behind your god, for I will spare you no mercy now. Goodbye, sweet pupil!"

The Devil charged.

All the men, now done with their bitches, stood to watch the spectacle. Unexpectedly enough, though, they all appeared to be on my side, rooting for me. They were chanting my name and hooting and hollering (one required a large Adam's Apple in order to do this).

The Devil suddenly changed into a very tall, blonde woman. The woman/devil still had horns, but she was lacking something: namely, clothing. "Do you like this?" he/she said, moving her hips in a suggestive way and then giggling a surprisingly high-pitched giggle. "I learned it by watching their television. You know, they kept some media in the old databanks. Do you really want to do as God says? Because protecting women means that we will be _slaves_."

"What are you saying, man?" I shouted at him, parrying a stroke of his/her arm, which seemed both as soft as silk and hard as steel, both biting into me and caressing me, like I had seen so many times on the street or in rooms where this action was supposed to be private (only one person in a room), or in the library, or on the train.

."I have seen you turning," he/she said, turning her own body so that all the men in the room could pretend to admire the curves and angles, hypnotizing them as long as their eyes were glued to the spot. Which was forever, of course: they were all scared of The Devil: would he curse their families, would he torture them for months on end with cruel implements?

"Okay, enough, Devil," said God quite calmly, and we were all able to hear him over the tumult somehow. "You've had enough fun. Now _cease_!"

The Devil stopped hard in his tracks. It was like it was before, but this time even his eyes were not moving.

"What?" God extended a hand to his own ear and cupped it readily. "Ooh, Devil, I can't hear you! Oh, well! Now cease to _exist_!"

The Devil promptly disappeared.

"Wha--- _what_?" I said, incredulous. Chaos started to scream. I thought she sounded like a teakettle. What that is is for another time.

"I don't speak English," mumbled Order, his sidelocks swaying as he shuffled both feet into the ground, kicking up some dust. "Only Yiddish."

"That's the holy language!" Chaos perked up, her little face contorted by the huge smile on it that enveloped all her features. Now here came the hard part:

"Women don't speak in the presence of men," snarled Order. "It is _immodest_."

"Coming from the mouth of Modest Mitch, huh, guy?" she snarled back.

God stepped between them: "Not productive!" he tsked, looking at one of the parties and then the other several times, as if he was having some sort of seizure (too many hormones). "And to get it right, my servants, French is the holy language. By far. It doesn't even come close."

"Why?" argued Chaos in her little tinkly voice. She was pouting with great exuberance.

"It is the language of the Morrocan Jews, of course," God said offhandedly, as if the was information was common knowledge.

"So..." slurred Chaos.

"I mean, it's self-explanatory! You go there yourself!"

"Go? Go where?" shouted Chaos, wringing her hands. She started to walk away.

"Come back," God said. Suddenly she was on the opposite side of where she was, now walking towards us.

"Not fair!" she tantrumed, stomping her little feet, which scarcely made any sound. She then advanced into a run, swooping past us, situated just feet away, travelling much more quickly than seemed to be possible for such a small creature because her legs were moving so fast. I know, her dress was too short (it ended at the calves).

End of Chapter

New Chapter:

Now let us fast-forward to the important part:

The women had been exterminated. All of them.

"What do we do now?" Chaos asked Order. I wasn't sure why she asked Order in particular, but i shrugged my shoulders and let negatives be negatives. It's not like Nothing wouldn't pay me back for this suffering later.

"I talk to him because he needs it," she answered with a strong, albeit high, voice. "And he's also an elder of my religion, despite the fact that he's OCD." She sighed. "Lots of them are OCD, they just don't have jobs."

"Excuse me?" I asked her, pretending I wasn't intending to shout. "Why do you speak to me, a male, when not prompted to? Hmmm?"

"I'm the last remaining female," she remarked snidely.

She was standing from her perch inside her cage. She was in the cage because she was not allowed to come out and interfere. One of either God, The Devil (he had been reinstated) Order or me had to be watching her at all times, though--because she was a witch, as all women are. She was able to do thing with her mind and body that none of us men were able to do. Doesn't that ring with a small amount of truth?

There was a parade later this afternoon. I'm not trying to absolve our actions before the parade, during it, or after it, but needless to say it will be, or has already been, documented in history books the atrocities that were committed. But who could blame us, she was the one remaining woman! We had to show off how she could affect us! I don't know how many of us had nightmares that night, but it was certainly a big chunk of the population. All photographs of that occasion, the last ones of a woman for a long time, were burned after three days or drunkenness and revelry. You couldn't blame us, they just hadn't manufactured enough Fentanyl.

After the showing, she was supposedly chained to a post somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean and left to die of the elements, but of course we had other plans for her: namely, her helping God converting this, The Devil's time, into God's time, which was supposedly much better. And it's not like anyone knew or pretended to know the place in the middle of the Pacific where we had put her; everyone was drunk on that day so no planes flew and no satellites (the ones that were left after the fighting) were being monitored.

"So what do we do now?" The Devil asked God as we lounged in the sitting room on God's spaceship up in the Heavens (code name for the edge of the orbit between Earth and its moon). "We have the one woman. How do we get to your time? You said it was supposedly better than ours? How can anything get better than this?" And he motioned to a few of the screens, which were sending up images of people drunk and half-naked in the streets.

"You don't know how this ends," God said ominously. "Let us fast-forward a bit." He waved his hand theatrically and the room became bathed in a kind of white light that was extremely bright. Obviously, God had much better technology than we (The Devil and I) had in our time of origin, which enabled him to travel through time and be at the same infinitesimally small point as a different one (and all ones, really) at the same time.

The ship suddenly jolted hard astern and God cursed. "Red Alert!" he shouted to nobody. "Shields at maximum and initiate evasive pattern Delta Four!"

"Isn't this a little bit cliche?" said Chaos from her cage. Now she was doing pull ups out of a loss of anything to do--she said it was to strengthen her for the fight for the World to Come when the time arrived.

"Life support has expired!" shouted The Devil back at God; The Devil was God's First Mate.

"How much time do we have?" asked Order, who was still dressed in his ceremonial gown from the previous day--too many clothes are a sign of vanity, is it not?

"Just under an hour," The Devil exhaled as he said down in his chair. Not adorned with anything, mind you.

"Thedius, how are you doing?" asked God.

I turned to face him and shrugged. "You know, the same thing, sir. Nothing has changed."

"Are you..." started God. "No.....no way!"

"What?" shouted The Devil. "Did you think of something?"

"No," lied God, grinning back at his servant. "But now, even as we have arrived at the end of the Time of Devils, we shall overcome our collective follies and function as one to eradicated the barbarians from this planet."

"What's he saying?" I asked The Devil.

"Thedius actually said something!" The Devil mocked me. "I'm impressed!"

"What I do know," I told The Devil in reply, "is that God is saying he intends to eradicate us and our kind. Even though we lived earlier than the catastrophe occuring."

"What is occurring?" Order asked, lifting his eyes from his book.

'"Just the annihilation of our species!" The Devil shouted at him, pieces of foul-smelling spittle transferring their locations from his mouth to his victim's face.

"Is this true, God?" The Religious Man cried. "What have we done to deserve this?"

"Your kind is far away from here," said God to Order gently. "On the outer rim of Civilization."

"But they have Jerusalem!"

"That will be settled when the time comes," God reassured him. "And besides, when we eradicate all life that remains on this planet, we will spare Jerusalem from the proceedings."

Order somehow looked a little happier after hearing this.

"I sure look forward to seeing this," The Devil said, striking God with a blow to the head: his fist passed right through like nothing was there (don't confuse this with Nothing). "What is this sorcery?" he cried, more spittle flying out of his mouth.

"I can't afford any distractions, sorry, this is a critical time," God said while playing with some levers on the control panel. "We're almost out of air."

"Oxygen," I corrected him, thinking back to my days in the Academy and at Training. "The ratio of Nitrogen to Oxygen in breathable air is--"

"We don't care, Thedius," God said, punching a few more buttons, which blinked different colors and prompted different screens.

"I know," I said, smiling my best "Knowing I'm Going To Die In Four Years According To Schedule smile. "But at least you listen to me and respond."

"Friends do that," remarked God. "Whoa, I think it's starting to work!"

"What?" I exclaimed, beating The Devil to the punch. He started scratching his own back in response.

"Life Support Restored," growled an angry young man's voice, piercing the solitude of our few comrades on the small ship.

"Drat!" I shouted.

New Chapter-after Extermination

"Um, Thedius?" asked the extremely pretty little Chaos. "What's bothering you?"

"I just released my memoirs!" I gasped in shock. "I sent them over the radio waves to the entire universe for them to read, as well as all the subspace channels!"

"What? Why?" God shouted.

"I thought we were going to die," I said meekly, wishing I could die and be recycled at that very moment so I wouldn't have to go through any more humiliation.

"Oh my goodness," said Order, looking up from the book he was reading (for once). "This is not very good, is it?"

"Just that everyone will know about this journey all of us have taken," I said morosely, reflecting on all the potential implications: maybe we would be invaded by the Pod-Aliens (we dissected them do learn how Pods create viable adults) or by the Green Alligator People, whose farthest outpost was but a mere ten light-years from Earth. Our species hadn't even colonized a world beyond our solar system--yet.

"What are the implications?" God said, copying my own thoughts.

"I'm not sure," I admitted. "Beyond the possibility of alien invasion, it might share a story of a lost universe: the one The Devil and I are from, and the one you, God, will create for people like yourself."

"Yes, and it is about to start," remarked God, pointing out the window to the planet, which looked the same as it had before.

"It has started," corrected The Devil.

"Yes, whatever. It has started now that we have arrived."

"What do you mean?" I asked. I was curious as to how warfare would be waged upon my own people, who had deviated from their mission and course. Now, if the new kind of reader wants to know what that course was now that he or she must be from God's time instead of my own, crippled and unaware time, let him note that my own people, the ones who were about to be destroyed, had pledged in their charter to bring back women within fifty years. _Why_? you ask. Well, the answer is the same as always: the immortal leaders had consolidated their positions and did not want to give them up. This has happened throughout human history, but just not in _ours_. And by "ours," I mean by the ones who had just died, or who were about to die, because of their identity, their ideology and their parents evil deeds: namely, the eradication of Womankind. By their fathers.

"How will they be destroyed?" I asked God, who was presently leaning back in his chair and smoking a cigar.

"I have revived some women," he said contentedly. He took another puff. "Soon they will all be dead."

"But I have heard, My Lord, that women are far weaker and inferior to us," I said. "No offence to Chaos, of course."

"Your people have developed their ideology to the point where, if they see a woman, even an alien one, they are commanded to immediately commit suicide," God explained while studying me for any sign of adverse reaction. When he found none, he sat back again and sighed.

"So you have revived some women?" I pressed him. "How many? What do they look like? Could I perhaps meet them? I am interested in the studying of relics, it's why I was selected to be a Traveller."

"They are not relics, if that is what you're saying," God told me. "It is natural in any society to have fifty percent women, and the other half men. We were designed to be monogamous."

" _Some_ say that," Chaos corrected.

"Whatever," God said. "Moving forward, we have the problem of how to re-seed our world now that it's free of humans and perhaps most other higher forms of life."

"No trees?" asked Order, sadly. He wept into a handkerchief he had pulled out of his pocket.

"If you want to count moss, which grows on everything, I guess you could say there are a few hundred quintillion," inserted The Devil.

"Ha, ha, very funny," simpered Chaos. She swept her hair back with a regal throw of her head (with very little brains in it, I supposed).

"I'm not interested in women, sorry," spouted The Devil, shaking his head in the same manner as Chaos had done, except that instead of hair that was being swept back, it was a garland of onions and garlic. "I took them from the set," explained The Devil as a clove fell and hit Order, who was standing next to the red-tailed and horned creature. "I decided to give myself a makeover as well," he said in explanation, a little abashedly.

"Ahem," God said, clearing his throat. "What happened in the history books was widely altered, so I really have no idea how we are supposed to reseed the planet and re-engineer women back from extinction."

"Um, I have an idea," Chaos said, raising her hand.

"Yes, young lady?"

"Well, concerning the women thing, they must have stored the DNA somewhere, right?" she asked. "I mean, maybe in some kind of vault that is either at the North or South Poles..."

"Boy, you're an intelligent one, are you?" sneered God. "I guess we'd better check out the South Pole, then. As the North Pole doesn't exist anymore, unless you are armed with a submarine. Come then, let us all join hands."

"What, no pentagram?" The Devil asked.

"I like to change it up a bit, every so often," God replied. "Oh, dear: there's another error: our ship is about to enter Earth's gravity well."

End of chapter Descent

Excrament? lol

"What kind of shit-faced engineer designed this thing?" The Devil roared.

God was about to snap his fingers.

The Devil was silent.

"There, that's a good subservient angel," God said without a hint of anger in his voice. "You were born and bred to follow rules, weren't you?"

"Nothingness is way too much for me," The Devil muttered. "I don't want to go back there, not in a million or a billion years."

"And who says solitary confinement doesn't work?" God crowed as the ship yawed sideways. "Alright then, you don't even have to join hands, just prepare yourselves for--"

And we materialized in another place.

It was much hotter here than on the ship, and the surface of the ground as well as our entire surroundings were covered in a rich, dark shade of green.

"Where are we?" Chaos breathed. The women always liked to be at the forefront of the conversation.

"Antarctica, of course," God said, waving his hand around offhandedly. "You see, we weren't able to go to the North Pole."

"Why not?" said Chaos. "I thought you said you had a sub--hey, what is that?"

A green, tendril-like thing stood on the ground before her, although it was hard to tell how it kept itself upright as it only have one muscle: itself. It was shaped like a ring of metal, but it seemed to be liquid in some form or another as it changed shape at will. It hissed, showing two pairs of sharp, needle-like fangs. "Watch out!" I managed to say before the snake struck.

Immediately after it struck, God was there, holding an impromptu sword, and sliced the snake's head off from the rest of its body, which shuddered and collapsed to the leafy and moss-and-ant-ridden ground. The snake's head didn't take much more time to fall off either. It lay on the ground like some imitation hat we used to wear on Victory-Over-Animals day, when we celebrated making every single animal of the world into trophies (A trophy was an animal that didn't exist anymore because of our noble efforts during the Revolution).

And at that, Chaos collapsed on the ground.

"Oh, drat, why does it always have to be me," God muttered. He set to sucking on the wound of the girl, located near the back of her ankle, which was green and dripping with pus and poison like one of those early birth-videos we were forced to watch.

"Why must you save her?" The Devil cried, wringing his hands in frustration. God put one of his hands up in the air and put his thumb and middle-finger in ready position. "No, no, I relent!" cried The Devil, dripping tears onto the lush jungle floor even as the young woman was dripping poison out of her lethal wound. "But you must find a substitute! A substitute for women!"

God was almost done sucking out the poison by the time The Devil had finished talking. "You mean your butt?" he said, spitting the greenish poison onto the exquisitely green and fertile blades of grass, where a pile a few centimeters of poison had gathered itself.

"We can make artificial women!" The Devil panted, jumping up and down in the ecstasy of disappointment and impossible hope. "And besides, she's Jewish and the venom sapped her system so she's probably going to have retarded children, is she not? I mean, we'll have to abort them, and you know abortion's not good, isn't it, God?"

"That, as well as killing them at the clinic once they come out. But since there's Nothing, wouldn't you be _pro_ -abortion? You wouldn't have expected me to not have an answer for your every question, would you? I can out-debate you in every category. And the correct term is 'intellectually disabled,' for your information."

"Everybody has their own opinion," said The Devil.

"Wow, that did not taste good," God said, spitting out the last of the venom from in between his teeth. "Like rotten apples. From the mythos."

"Yes, indeed," I said, grabbing a branch beside me and breaking it off its trunk, because that was all I had to do and I actually had something to say: "Why did you let it happen, God? Why all this suffering? You should have kept the world perfect so that we could go straight to your own time! Isn't that a righteous grievance?"

God shrugged and looked around at all of us. "Well," he said finally, "I can't really tell you all the things because you're not ready yet. Sorry! I have no choice."

"That's laughable," said the girl, Chaos. "But thank you for saving my life."

God was scanning the scenery. "Not much to look at, here," he said. "More like a lot of monotony. Lots and lots of trees. This was the only place where your people, Devil and Thedius, allowed trees to grow."

"What?" I questioned. This really didn't fit with what they had taught us during training (or implanted in our minds, depending on which theories you believed). "Everything is desert, including Antarctica. Why do you think they named it that way? It's because the only thing that existed here before it was desert were the ants!"

"Whatever, keep blabbering," said God. "I know I hid it here somewhere."

"What?" asked Chaos. Order was desperately trying not to look at her as she spoke. In fact, he had started walking--away from us!

"Now where are you going, my worshiper?" said God in a sing-song voice. Order immediately rematerialized in the middle of our circle. Facing Chaos.

"No!" Order moaned. "No, please, God! Please make it stop!" He had curled up in a fetal position (too complicated to explain now, apologies, readers).

"Whatever," said God, and he snapped his fingers. Order was now upside-down and standing on his hands. The poor creature started moaning again.

"Why is it, my faithful servant, that when I give you a chance to redeem yourself you simply shrink away from the challenge? You have to _face_ your demons, not flee from them. Otherwise you are controlled by them. Do you understand?" He was looking full into Order's vertically-reversed face. His sidelocks were the only part of him that were facing the Earth in the right direction. Finally, he flopped to the ground, shrieked and stumbled to his feet. Chaos also shrieked, in her prettily-high soprano (like our tenor, but higher) voice.

\---end of chapter Torture

"Okay, enough," said God. "Come with me; I have a compass, I know where it is now."

"Where _what_ is?" grumbled The Devil, like a child (birthling) who would never learn how to behave even if he was slapped on the wrists a hundred times. I had a feeling that God didn't actually mind this.

We began to walk. God had magically procured nets that we wore over our heads and bodies, in order to protect us from what airborne pests remained in the post-Revolution time-period. Our feet crunched on live and dead things, and things that were in-between. The forest was hot and humid, even steaming, like one of those old water-heaters you can find in a museum with just the hole in the center of the cover. Which, of course, alluded to our Revolution before it began. One of hundreds of such references in the times one hundred years before the blessed start of our era.

There were plenty more snakes in our way, in many different colors and making many different threatening sounds.

God suddenly held up his right hand: we all stopped promptly. He held a finger to his lips: and after we had all stopped making noise by brushing all the plants with our nets, we could hear them talking:

"Should we kill 'em?" asked one male voice.

"Nah," disagreed a second, minutely-lower voice. "I say feed them to the snakes. They'd have a good time."

"Who, the snakes?" mocked the first voice. "Or the people? You do know, they have a woman with them, and we don't have protocol to deal with that. With 'her.'" He practically spat out that last word, like a predator spitting out a particularly annoying bone of a creature it had just devoured. "We have never seen one before, we don't know what kind of witchy powers she may have!"

God suddenly stepped out in the midst of them: "Here me now, foul knaves, cowards who fled the destruction of your own planet by its righteous inheritors. We offer you parley. And that is it: if you don't agree then we will smash you into smithereens."

I was in viewing mode now: I stared through all the plants at at the faces of these two interlopers in God's plan: they had puzzled looks on their faces as they stared at the strange-looking old African man who confronted them without so much as a weapon. They both looked at each-other, shrugged, dropped their weapons and rolled up their sleeves.

"Oh, _no_!" Chaos suddenly cried, and emerged from the forest in front of the two interlopers, who promptly backed away from the small human of the opposite sex and fled in the other direction, leaving their packs and food behind. From far away I could now hear the two men screaming and splashing as they were likely devoured by some vicious creature of the water that found their flesh very appetizing.

"Ah, here it is," said God with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. He turned back to face us: "See this?" he said. "I've been looking for this for a very long time. Almost as much time as you've been alive, actually. Isn't that amazing?"

He was holding a controller to what looked like an electrical system or a starship, but in reality it was a controller for an ancient gaming system called "Nintendo 64." It was purple, as was appropriate to kingship, as God was king over all of us. Now God pressed a button, and a great whirring sound, like some kind of huge mechanical system, began to fill our ears. It grew louder and louder until we had to cover our ears with our hands, which was illogical since we already had dampeners implanted there for such occasions (at least, The Devil and I did). I stuck my hand in that orifice and found nothing instead of what I was looking for.

"Don't worry, it'll be over soon!" yelled God over the incessant toxic whirring, and true to his words the awful noise stopped a few seconds later. "Good timing, eh?" said God, flashing a grin and looking for all the world like someone who had run into a million dollars (barter/exchange system) and burping suddenly. "Mmm, that was satisfying," he remarked, and sat down in a leather armchair that hadn't been there the previous instant. "Care to watch the football game? It's good to wind down from some violence with some lesser violence, don't you think?" He spread his hands in a welcoming gesture and more chairs, albeit smaller ones, appeared to his right and left.

"How about the whirring?" I asked.

"Are those chairs dangerous?" The Devil said, eyeing the leather chairs like someone inspecting some kind of futuristic weapon whose trigger button was nowhere to be found.

"Only if you're evil, like you," he pointed to The Devil. "And some others that I shall not name at this moment. Here, I'll tell you what: we can bring my time and _then_ we can enjoy the fruits of our labor by watching a bunch or oversized men limit each-others' sentient period of their lives to forty or fifty years. Agreed? Now which woman shall we bring back to life first? Please, do board this elevator here to my left," and he kicked aside one of the armchairs, which managed to move a couple of centimeters. "Ow," he proclaimed.

A great cavern was opening to his back. The flattish ground holding its trees and animals to either side simply folded on themselves and one could see previously-hidden stairs leading into the blackness beneath. It reminded me of many thrillers that I watched in my time during the early twenty-first century.

"Come on!" God shouted, hopping on one foot toward the staircase and the mystery that lay below. "Let's go!" He mounted the staircase, whose top step came within two meters of his chair. "Shall we?"

\-----end of chapter emnity

The Devil followed, then Order, then me, and finally Chaos, as Order did not want to be directly next to the woman. We trailed behind the limping God and into the cavernous interior below one of the folded-up forest surfaces (the trees didn't seem to be very happy now, although this comment is moot since you've never actually seen one in real life).

Our surroundings became darker and darker, until we could see nothing behind us but a bit of yellow haze in the distance, and ahead of us just a black wall that seemed to let us ever deeper into itself. Strangely enough, there were walls both to the left and right of us, so we maneuvered along the sometimes curving, sometimes straight path with just our hands to either side of the small path. And then suddenly, out of nothing, there were no more walls.

Chaos screamed.

The unpleasant sound (apologies, I am still a bit anti-woman even though I currently live in these modern times) echoed throughout the enormous cavern we had emptied out into. There was the sound of falling water, and strangely, enough, more voices... or, at least, one clear, distinct voice:

"Is that you?" asked a deep male voice, so deep it reverberated in the depths with a thousand echoes through a million corridors of time and space. "God? Is that you?"

"Ah, yes," breathed God. "There you are. I had almost forgotten. Doorkeeper! So nice to hear your voice again!"

"Ah, it _is_ you," sighed Doorkeeper. We obviously couldn't see him, unless one of us had packed special glasses. "We stored the women here for you but you were late by 210 years!"

"Sorry," God said, affecting an apologetic tone. It was clear he was smiling, though. "How many do we have now?"

"A few died out, sir," said the man with the deep voice sadly. "We lost power during a storm, if you can believe it; some of our seedlings and animal embryos also died. It was a sad time."

"I suppose that's all my fault then," mused God. "I'm always late for some reason. No matter--let's proceed, then. Open the doors to the city. Cover your eyes, my friends! It's about to get very bright!"

"What is this, a chocolate factory?" The Devil muttered, of course out of earshot of God. A crack had appeared in the area below us, causing all of us to flinch, as we had not followed God's instructions.

"Oh, I think I'm blind!" said Chaos. "Oh, dear!"

"You're not blind," reassured God. "You're only temporarily blindfolded. Get it?"

After a few minutes our eyes had adjusted. And there was an incredible spectacle before us:

A white city, built all of a white kind of granite that was called "Jerusalem Stone," according to God. It was a city that used to exist, but three religions warring over it caused a nuclear catastrophe maybe ten years into the Revolution's birth. It was the last vestige of all three "Abrahamic" religions that caused the city to be relocated to the subterranean cavern that now stood before us. How the city was saved and not its people, I didn't know. Just something else to wait on God to explain.

"Come," God motioned with his hand to us as the doors to the surface closed behind us, trapping us in this imaginary-real place.

The streets were eerily quiet as we walked through them to some unknown destination. Even no one among our own party said a word for some obscure reason.

The man who had opened the cavern doors had shown his face once and then had vanished down some unknown corridor. In that second or two that we had had full vision of his face, we were faced with an enormous shock: gills where eyes should be, eyes on either side of his green face and not in the center; he also seemed too tall and skinny to be one of us, if the aforementioned features didn't convince you already of this. But alas, he was gone.

More appropriately, as we walked through the pure, unadulterated city of blocks and spires which was utterly uninhabited, were the glass boxes placed at various intervals.

At the sight of the first one, we all had panicked, except for God of course, who merely touched each coffin with an affectionate pat, which caused some smoke to fill each box. After doing a few of these, God just snapped his fingers and the coffins all opened. It seemed he had been getting bored. Well, I guess unlimited existence will do that to a person. Or God. Or something. Or Nothing--my mind is still trying to wrap around this extremely terrifying concept of something that is better than I am.

Before long, all of the coffins had opened, and a strange shrieking sound had filled the air of the cavern. Or, I should say, that there were many shrieking _sounds_ , in the plural, because all the voices of the sleeping (or long-dead, choose your descriptor) women had joined as one in a terrifying, captivating mix of Alto and Soprano, Attraction and Fear. All of us shut our ears, yet again, from that noise, or noises. All except for Chaos, who had suddenly joined in the evil partaking of self-indulgence that all of these Professional Wombs had embarked upon.

There was now an additional shrieking, growing louder, apart from the first one. But it was not so much of a pure shrieking as it was a baying, from hounds (originally wolves, a medium-sized animal of the canine family) who had found their prey and were looking to join up and kill it and eat it. Graphic enough?

Chaos screamed again at this sound, and so did The Devil. Order, though, was strangely quiet and passive, which seemed uncharacteristic of the black-clad man, who had previously been talking to himself or adjusting his tie and hat or telling Chaos to wear something more modest. Perhaps he had prophesied that something good and beneficial would come from the baying--I certainly did not, however. I immediately started running toward the nearest house in order to seek shelter.

"No!" shouted God after me. He reappeared in front of me, blocking my path.

"I hate dogs!" I screamed in his face, spittle coming this time out of my own mouth instead of The Devil's. "Even tiny ones, I think they're going to bite my hand off!" Strangely enough, this caused peals of laughter to erupt from Chaos's mouth, even as the horrid sounds grew closer.

"They're not dogs," God said in response to my comment. "They're hounds."

"How are they different!" I shouted at him, trying to limit the spittle this time.

"Hounds are the ones who forecast and bring doom," God said calmly, like nothing out of the ordinary was happening at this extraordinary moment. "They show us who we really are by becoming us, and then devouring our bodies and killing us, thereby replacing us."

"Why is this necessary?" The Devil complained. "I mean, we know how bad we already are. Ouch!"

He had slipped and fallen directly onto a Jerusalem stone in the middle of the street, his head banging against the rock with incredible force.

"Oh, no," The Devil cried. "They're definitely going to eat me first! Look at me! A hapless cripple! I'm of no good use to society anymore!"

"No health insurance either," remarked Chaos, her beautiful lavender dress streaming in the wind despite there being no breeze whatsoever.

"Look, here's an android!" yelled Order, his white fringes also streaming in the same make-believe wind which was blowing at Chaos's hair and dress. "Offer _him_ as a sacrifice!"

"Hounds don't eat computers, stupid," God said, shaking his head slowly again and again. "Sometimes I wonder why I do this."

"Because that's our function," sneered The Devil. "Now please, throw that android out at.... Oh, no!"

There were no hounds as far as we could see. There were only women, and young ones at that, wearing short tops and tight black latex bottoms, striding in lazy rows to a beat which was coming from the Heavens--or, I should say, from the improvised and electronic sun, which beat down on us (pun not intended) like some sort of strong flashbeam which used to feed indoor plants that needed extra sunlight.

"But they sounded like hounds!" protested Order, who was covering his face with a large, white garment he was apparently already wearing under his suit-jacket.

"We are family!" the hounds/women sang, their tails flapping in different directions as they sang and danced their way congruously. Every one of us, except for Chaos of course, stared at the display with wonder and also with lust.

" It really was impressive how they managed to put together a dance while they were still inside their hibernation chambers," I told God, leaning close to him so I could talk to him softly while still watching the delicious women dance their amazing dance. Then they all lifted up their right legs at once, displaying their tiny undergarments. "Do you like me?" they sang all at once. Then, "Me!" shouted the first one.

"No, _me_!" screamed the second, shaking her body to the beat of the song.

"Don't forget about _me_!" panted a third horribly-dressed woman, who had pink hair (obviously from genetic engineering). Then, something _really_ strange happened.

End chapter the white city

"Do you like women?" exclaimed the Undergarments Woman. "Then look at me! Appreciate all of my 'curves!'" And the reason I put the word "curves" in quotation marks was to emphasize that at that point in time, I did not know what these "curves" were referring to. I supposed, actually, that it had to do with driving a non-autonomous car over some mountain roads, especially Highway One, which I had experience, and traversing many curvings of the road. Why is this so? Well, because I was so unprepared for the onslaught of hormones that attacked me the instant I saw, smelled or sensed any woman of any age ( _fine_ , the ones that could produce babies were more attractive than the rest, I'll admit that).

The next woman was up now. I ground one of my teeth in so that I could nap for forty-eight hours without any lifesigns. Then, perhaps, I would wake up someplace different.

I awoke to some big noises in my ear. Big, high-pitched noises. "No!" I gasped, thinking that I was going to expire violently any moment now. "Please, cease the voices! Cease them, _please_!" I begged whatever or whomever it was.

"It's just an alarm-clock, silly Thedius," said God in my mind and out loud at the same time, thus producing a new, cacophonous sound. "It's not going to hurt you."

"So he says," whispered someone in my other ear. I bolted straight up in bed, or at least some kind of metal structure with some padding.

"Devil!" shouted God, nearly shattering my eardrums (of course, as we androids are made to imitate our human creators). Fortunately, they were not designed to break: androids were much more sturdy, and lived forever given replacement parts.

What I have just said is extremely important to what is to come: the fact was that none of my companions knew I was born machine instead of being manufactured a man.

"Devil!" shouted God. "We must leave now, The White City is collapsing!"

"Wha-at?" I managed to stutter through my nonresponding teeth. They really should have manufactured better drugs: I planned to bring it up with The Devil sometime soon. "What happened to the hounds!"

"No time to explain that now," God said exasperatedly. "Come on, we must go! Now!"

"God, you look rushed," I said weakly. And it was true: he was sweating down his face, his hair was disheveled, and there were purplish marks on his clothing.

God picked me up and carried me outside the room. And I was severely unprepared for what came next.

I looked up and saw: it seemed that the sky was coming apart at the seams: red lightning speared itself across the Heavens and huge, white projectiles of stone were being uprooted by the hounds (some were women and some were still dogs) and thrown across the city, only to break the still extant-houses and produce more projectiles. It was absolute mayhem, and I had no idea how it was necessary for the re-seeding of the human race.

I was airlifted to a helicopter, and barely managed to catch more than a glimpse once I was horizontal on the stretcher inside of it. We went out the way we had come, dodging huge rocks all the way, and finally made it to the Desolate Earth that was waiting for us outside the door.

"You'd think they would be more considerate where they throw their projectiles," complained The Devil.

"I just wanted them to kill you," God told him innocently, shrugging his shoulders like this was nothing.

"So why didn't you finish the job?"

"I dunno, just couldn't make up my mind, I guess." God was in the copilot's seat—the pilot was some male human in a black leather jacket who had not yet joined the conversation. Given the monotonous barrenness of the wasteland below us (it was a uniform brown, with breaks in the monotony with a lighter or darker brown and even a smidgen of yellow in various places (God told us that the yellow parts were withered plants trying to make a new home).

I leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. "Excuse me?" I asked him. "Could you please tell us where we are going?" I asked this because God likely wouldn't have been much help—better to try more direct methods.

"Noooo!" called The Devil maniacally, waving his arms and gnashing his teeth and emitting an extremely foul odor from his mouth. "He shall not live to tell the tale!" And he produced a knife six inches long. Then he was gone.

End chapter nightmares

"I have slaughtered him," God announced, while sporting a grin many would consider vicious.

"You have _what_?" cried Chaos from one of the back seats, which incidentally had brown leather upholstery. "But I'm vegetarian!"

"Wait," I said, holding up my hands (they weren't real hands, of course, only molds of metal, but the description suffices). "I have absolutely forgotten what this discussion is about!"

"Does it matter?" asked Order, looking up from his book. He wiped his face with his forearm and adjusted his glasses.

"Um, folks," announced The Pilot. He turned around and stared at us, his dark glasses covering half his face and his stubble covering the rest. "We have a problem."

"What sort of problem?" God asked, his hands on his hips and a gun in his holster on his belt. He even sported a sort of sunburn. This Modern Culture thing is beginning to stress me out.

"They are following us, sir."

" _They_?" questioned God. He turned around and looked out the back window. "Um, I don't see anything!"

"They won't appear in your field of vision until a minute is up, sir," said the pilot. "But we have radar."

"Ah, yes, the simplest of technologies," mused God. "They are still presently useful, in this bleakest of times, and yet--"

"There they are!" pointed The Devil, interrupting God and causing chaos throughout the small cabin.

"Oh, no!" Chaos said, seeing them.

" _Them_." They were a gaggle of black masses with huge, batlike wings. There were thirty or forty of them, and they seemed a bit unsteady in their flight formation. "What _are_ they?" I asked unsteadily.

"I converted them," God said proudly, crossing his arms and giving himself six more inches of height (mostly taken by his torso). He looked down at us and grinned. "Well? Any more questions?"

"So these are--" I started.

"Who gave you permission to speak, little machine?" yelled down God. Turning to Chaos, God said, "Yes, m'lady--these used to be hounds." He pointed out the window in the back toward the rapidly advancing creatures. "They are now hounds, but also with wings." He motioned for Chaos to come closer to him, but she declined. "Why, you can't come here and sit on Daddy's lap?" he said, feigning (or at least I hoped) disappointment. "I'm one miserable old man, soon enough they're doing to open the door and throw me for the copter to be eaten by the hounds after they finish their tastier supper of live meat. Oh, Lord, what has become of us?" and he buried his face in his hands.

"Not sure what they are, guys, or of what just happened," reported the pilot. "They--at least, the hounds--are gaining on us and will intercept us in one minute if we maintain current speed."

"Can we go any faster?" asked Devil.

Strange sounds were coming from God's mouth: whimpers, gasps, and even coughs of solitary words like "height," "altitude," "parley," and "Live."

"It sounds like he's saying we should engage the hounds in air-to-air combat," The Devil said after listening carefully to the noises emitting from God's lips for several moments. Strangely enough, God's head began to swivel back and forth horizontally.

"Uh-" I managed to say. "Devil. It looks like God is shaking his head. Perhaps he meant something else?"

"No," concluded The Devil. The pilot seemed to agree with him as well.

"Order?" I asked. "How about you and Chaos?"

"We're just followers," Order said.

"We are the result of people choosing one side or the other," said Chaos. "So why don't we let the women make the decision here?"

"How do you mean?" said The Devil.

"Well, the hounds with wings are really women who just woke up, right?" said Chaos. "Or they were reconstituted from fossils. Whatever you want to say. But these women--they didn't choose to become hounds, or to receive wings, or even to chase us. They each have collars that zap them whenever they have their own opinions. Like being called bitch or whore in polite company. Where is the male equivalent to these statements?

"Why are they wolves?" asked Order. He actually seemed to be enjoying that his eyes were on Chaos, for once. Although they were both looking directly into her eyes, the least sexual place to look at according to ancient records.

"Because they have been tamed by men," I said unexpectedly. It was like someone else was speaking through my mouth, and it was not from me at all. "Just like wolves were tamed into hounds, which then became dogs," I continued with my monologue. "So too women have been condemned to hounds' bodies, at least part of the time, until they build the world that is worthy of them."

"That's not nice!" pointed out Chaos. She indicated her emotions with a straightened index finger that waved repeatedly in the air.

"Neither are you," opined The Devil, spitting at her feet onto the shiny metallic floor.

End chapter oppression

"The hounds appear to be doing something," reported Order, looking out his window at the loosely organized flying pack of canines.

"What do you think they're doing?" asked The Devil. God, in the seat next to him, was still having his convulsions, but he let out one final directive: "Make peace," he gasped. "Make peace...with the hounds...or beware!" He had barely emitted that last, crucial syllable before he lapsed into a kind of deep sleep. The Devil tapped him on the shoulder, then shouted in his ear:

"Nope," said The Devil. "He's gone."

"What did you shout?" asked The Pilot. "Also, they're almost upon us."

"I shouted, 'Are you dead?'" answered The Devil. "Ready machine guns."

"I don't think that's a good idea," said The Pilot, a kind of worried look emerging on his dark features despite the sunglasses still being there. As soon as he said these words there was a bang on the back window.

"Um, excuse me?" said The Devil. "Who's there?"

"I don't think these women slash flying hounds care much about manners right now, sir," said Order, a thoughtful expression settling upon his face.

"Why?" The Devil answered. "Have you encountered them before."

"My _point_ is, Devil, that perhaps God's last words are right: we can talk to them and negotiate a treaty," he said reasonably. "We both have the same goals, do we not? Yes? Reseeding this world?"

Suddenly there came one rap on the glass of the side window. I could see a face glimpsing into the cabin from the outside: a hound's face, but with certain, feminine, humanlike qualities. But the face was not placid.

There was a second knock, as well as a third, as the mass of the flying squadron of hounds brought its main flank to bear upon our flying vessel. "Everyone grab a handle!" came the panicking voice of the pilot. "We're going down!"

"You've _got_ to be kidding me," said The Devil, snorting as he grabbed the yellow handle near him, which was attached to the cold steel cabin beside him. "Well, at least we'll all be buried in the same coffin."

There seemed to be a moment of zero-gravity, and then the plane (whatever it was, I forget the word--it had a large rotor on its top) plunged, bringing us at near a right angle to the ground and promising us a quick and gruesome death.

But then there was a pause. It might have been a universal pause, in which some hypothetical creator or ruler declares a break in the festivities, or in the killing. It might have been instead some electrical synapse in my CPU catching a stray photon and malfunctioning. But whatever it was, it felt good. Then I realized that the good vibes came from the women: they were supporting our craft--we had stopped falling.

"What the--" exclaimed The Devil. Before he could finish a sentence God had materialized a gag over his mouth. Even though he was still asleep. But The Devil was so enthralled he didn't seem to notice.

They were all around us in multiple circles, and we were in between the top ones and the bottom ones. I speak, of course, of the flying hounds/women.

"Heed me, you dastardly males of old," announced the first genetically-reconstructed woman who was hovering directly in front of our craft--that is, if our craft had stopped moving. There was of course no way to tell, since all the ground was a uniform dark brown.

'You have come to the place of rebuilding," continued the woman, "and you have awakened us, thus turning on a new leaf."

This prompted all of the flying hounds around us to burst into giggles, for some odd reason (I had thought it was biology, but as of now I have revised my assessment).

"Why is this funny?" prompted The Devil. "God?" he said, shaking God's body this way and that in order to get him to wake. But God did not wake. Instead he started snoring, prompting more giggles from the hound-ladies.

"I think that is the most annoying and disrupting sound I have ever heard in all my immortal lifetimes," muttered The Devil. " _All_ of them."

"Makes sense," said the spokeswoman for the hounds, wagging her tail as she sat somehow on the air and it buoyed her upward. "Anyway, we have an agenda. So: first and only item: will you sponsor us?"

All the giggles stopped when the rest of the hounds (there were dozens of them) heard her speaking. Of course, "speaking" wasn't what I ideally would call it, but there are a number of females at my home who would skewer me and cook me medium rare if they found out the descriptor I would really use.

"Sponsor?" God said, suddenly awakening from his sleep. "Hmmm? Did you say something? Anyone?" When no one responded, he said: "Must I die in order for anyone to respect me? Must I be a normal human in order that you worship me?"

"Careful, Master," whispered The Devil. "There might be pogroms if you say that too loud."

"Must some angel somehow rebel against me and limit my powers in order to scapegoat my people?" God mourned, even seeming to cry as he covered his face and rent his garments.

"Listen, Human Leader!" the lead houndess addressed God. "You must decide: will you accede to our demands?"

End chapter convulsions

Begin chapter parting

God blinked a few times. "Your... demands?" he asked her. This caused The Devil to whisper something in his ear for a few seconds. "Oh, yes, of course!" God said, as if nothing had happened. "Yes, we must accede to your demands. No matter the cost."

"Does the rest of your party agree as well?" pressed the lead houndess. "Do they know the conditions?"

One of the hounds barked. Then a few more barked.

"SHUT UP!" exclaimed the lead houndess, howling as she kept her body aloft with long, gentle flaps of her wings. "Let me just explain the conditions to you now." And with that, she flapped a little harder and rose up so that she was at the highest level of all the hounds. "Here," she said, and then lapsed into a series of howls which penetrated the empty air and all the blue skies.

"We are here to stay, so no killing us," said the lead houndess in a surprisingly clear and resonant voice, completely unlike the raspy growl she had used to produce words in Standard.

Then another spoke: "You may not touch us without our permission."

Then a third: "We demand equal pay. In addition, we must have at least three months of maternity leave, ere we kill all the male children and rebuild our own world without your consent, and without males in it."

God was nodding thoughtfully but The Devil was shaking his head violently. "We _will_ ," threatened the queen, for lack of better word to describe her. "Don't test us."

There was a sudden sharp sound of splintering glass. The craft lurched to one side, and thank Nothing we were all still grasping our handholds, else we would have been sucked out the hole in one of the windows.

The Devil was gone.

"Well, I guess we're one short now," shrugged God. "I intended to slay him in a while, but he has now slain himself. Poor angel," he sighed. "Now let us have a two-second silence."

We were all silent, even the hounds, for about five seconds.

There was the sounds of clapping hands.

It was God. Then Order, Chaos and I, in that order, joined the tumult. Even the hounds started barking and howling, as they lacked the same kind of grippers we humans had (they came from a class of animal called "canine.")

"What are we going to do now without him?" asked Order. Chaos nodded to indicate her inclusion in this question.

"So now it's just me, you, Order and Chaos, Thedius," God mused.

"As we were saying, then," said the lead houndess pointedly, "we have all these conditions. Here, I have downloaded it into your data bank."

"Really?" frowned God. "Which one?"

"Your android," said another of the hounds, her voice a little higher and reedier than her queen's. There were paramount giggles.

My face suddenly turned red. I know I'm not one to say much, as I was trained as an assassin and investigator, but my expression this time betrayed me.

"He's cute," cooed another one of the hounds.

"Now, now, ladies," the lead houndess tried to calm them, but to no avail.

"Can't you see he's cute as a button, and his physique is impressive too!" squealed another. Well, as much as a female dog can squeal.

"Oh, can't you transform us, our Queen, so that we may play with him?" asked a particularly large hound, her voice dripping with faux-disappointment. "It _is_ our mating season, after all."

"Enough, all of you," commanded the lead houndess, barking her command to ensure obedience. "They have a copy of the agreement now in their android. It is even translated into twenty languages. All we ask from you--no, all we _demand_ from you, is that you keep your end."

We all waited expectantly for her to continue.

"This basically means," said the houndess, "that you will obey our every whine and whim. And I'm not talking about human whines, you sexist horde of four non-believers. I speak of the whines of suffering animals, particularly hounds. Are you smart enough to guess what this means?" Her eyes scanned me and my three companions for any hint of a response building up. "No? I thought so. But I at least expected your android would know something. It is about crying. The crying of a baby, the crying of someone in need. No longer will we be forever unsatiated in our quest for power--instead, we will focus on the cries of those in need. And, don't you know, when a dog whines it is because he is crying!"

"Oh dear," said God. I soon felt what he was feeling--the aircraft was wobbling. The rotors were not making a sound anymore, which was not good for our chances of staying aloft, according to this android. Then all of us crashed against the ceiling of the aircraft.

When I came to, I was in a bed with white linens and white covers inside of a white room. The only nod to diversity was a stained-steel sink and a mirror to wash myself by, but besides that there was nothing. There was not even a door.

"You are permanently absolved from wrongdoing," said a loud computer voice, which came from everywhere at once as well as from nowhere. Suffice it to say, I was frustrated at these voices' attempts to intrude on my daily existence, even if this voice represented the women. The only purpose of language was ultimately to facilitate one being's control over another.

"Was I ever accused of such?" I raised my head and spoke, and surprisingly it almost required no effort at all.

"Yes," said the voice. "Because you are a man." A slight pause, then: "We have revived you. We have fixed all your broken circuits. You were nonfunctional for awhile."

"Really?" I scratched my head and was surprised to see I had hair--an abundance of it! This caused me to give my own pause.

"If you are amazed at the hair, please do realize that it was a relatively simple procedure for us to perform," said the voice. "We have gained fifty years, and in doing so have developed new technologies. These have helped us revive the others."

"You mean they were dead?" I gasped.

"Falling from a helicopter is not an easy trial to survive from," said the voice apologetically. "It has been fifty years."

My circuits almost fried just then. "Fifty... ah... oh, my!" I managed to gasp.

"Yes," said the voice. "They have all been revived. But there was a problem with one."

"Pr--problem?" I said.

"Yes. One of them needed an entirely new personality, as his brain was too damaged."

"God?" I whispered. "Or Order?"

"I'm afraid it was God," said the voice, sounding genuinely sorrowful. "We had to insert another personality--that is, another brain--into his skull in order for him to function properly. His head was just too badly damaged."

I sat down on the bed. Then I stood. "When can I leave?"

"Whenever you want," said the voice nonchalantly, as if we had just sat down to the short respite with flavored-water. "The others have already woken up. They are in the rooms to the left," and the outline of a doorway appeared in the wall. "Are you ready to see them?"

But I was already out the door.

Alarm bells sounded as soon as I exited the room: "Unauthorized Exit," screamed a woman's automated voice at the top of her lungs and of the hearing range audible to humans.

"What, was I supposed to say 'please?'" I grumbled. The alarms soon ceased.

"Sorry about that," said the voice, now echoing to me around the hall.

"Which room is God in?"

"First door on your right," said the voice. "Enjoy your stay!"

I found the first door on the right down the eerily green-colored walls of the passageway. I opened it.

God was lying in his bed, white like mine but a little longer in order to accommodate his frame. Order and Chaos were standing on either side, and The Devil--of course was nowhere to be found. I sighed sadly and Order and Chaos both mirrored my emotions.

God didn't, however.

"What the heck is going on?" God said in rapid-fire Standard that left me open-mouthed for a long time afterwards. "I wake up here, to _these_ weirdos, so that I may lead us all into the promised land? What is this, some kind of roast or trick? Come on, guys, just lift the curtain already!"

"He thinks he's Charlton Heston," whispered Chaos to me. Order looked at both of us with a confused expression on his face.

"An actor," I supplied. "Even I know that."

"I _told_ you, I'm not Charlton Heston," explained God, now someone else who had God's body. "I'm a famous director. I have sex with ladies for zero charge on someone else's dime! That's how I get them bigger roles! And then they complain afterwards! How sexist is _that_? They didn't tell me they were going to complain! Hey, a deal's a deal!"

And he snapped his fingers.

The world changed.

"Whoo, this is trippy!" sang God, who was floating now along one of the side walls, playing with some balloons that hardly went anywhere with his pushes. A maniacal yet innocent expression of hideous amazement was pasted on his albino face. "The fucking enemy's gate is down! Down down down.... Whoa I think I drank a few too many...."

And he burped, or rather, belched. Then all the half-digested food from his stomach (or stomachs plural, who knew?) came floating up through his mouth to live amongst us. We, the others, who were also floating along different walls at different angles.

"Isn't this a blast?" yelled God. "Wow! I didn't think I could do this!"

"You can't," responded Chaos flatly, as she watched God flailing around changing the colors of the balloons surrounding him. "God could. He passed his powers on to you."

"Hmm?" God smiled, laughed again and shook his head a few times, letting new hair that had appeared a second earlier flow down his back in waves. "See? I can be anything I want! I can play Jesus, I can play Moses, and as soon as the Orientals let me I'll be Muhammad! I'll just have to find some body paint first."

"He looks like he's having a good time," Chaos said to Order and me. "Maybe we can have a costume party!"

"No," said Order.

"Maybe," I said, as the multicolored balloons continued their march around the room and the walls started morphing into statues of different extinct animals (namely the elephant, the giraffe and the zebra--perhaps this man was a vegetarian).

"Then come, join me!" yelled the man, who was clearly not God but had a t-shirt which said "I'm gonna luv luv _luv_ you! Because clearly God was imperfect before and didn't love anyone! And also because I love you so much that I will kill everyone who doesn't believe in me! In this world and the next!"

"Excuse me?" someone was yelling in my ear. " _Excuse_ me?" I realized it was Order. "You're not allowed to bow down to other gods," he said. "That much I know. But what all of this..." he extended his hand to indicate the whole swirling mess of colors and shapes and animals all around us, "is, I really don't know. It seems to have hypnotized you."

"What? Really?" I exclaimed, scratching my new hair with my new dead cartilage humans liked to call "nails." "I was having a very bad dream, then."

Suddenly God motioned his finger toward Chaos, who was off in a corner trying to hide herself behind the zebra, but of course not succeeding because the zebra's legs only had a diameter of a few centimeters. "You over there! You're a girl?"

Chaos squeaked something that was lost in the chaos of the party.

"Come on, come over _here_ ," he said, his eyes growing large and the room seeming to yawn and eddy until it pushed Chaos closer toward him. "There, there, little girl. Now as the festivities seem to be ending, as I have to go to the bathroom, why don't you show off for us a little bit and give us a twirl?"

End part slavery

"A _what_?" asked Chaos, her face showing her confusion at the strange request.

"A _twirl_! Commonly known as a quick pirouette on one toe so that your dress flies up! Come on, girl, do it! I didn't hire you here for nothing!"

"He thinks he's a director," Chaos said to Order and me amid the chaos.

"That much is clear," summated Order. "But should we give him what he wants?"

"The problem is not so much that he's the director as much as the fact that he's sexist," I pointed out, shedding my shy-robot image as both of them looked at me, half-amazed.

"You _speak_ ," said Chaos in wonder.

"I presume to say," I continued, "that once you give him that twirl he will start asking for more and more, until he eventually locks you up in a cage somewhere. As has happened many times in our dark histories."

"He speaks well," Order noted to Chaos.

"Would you stop talking about me like i'm not even there?" I demanded, angry for the first time in my life. "Then maybe i'll contribute more instead of watching you two converse without me all the time." Saying this and experiencing the anger along with it would have kept me out for months if I had been in my own time.

"Hmmm," Order said. "Should we discontinue him?"

"You mean decommission him," Chaos said. "I mean, he expresses himself very well, doesn't he?"

God reached his hand out like he was going to slap Chaos on the bottom. "Come on, now, girl, or I'll have you detained! _Twirl_! _Now_!"

"How do we prevent this from escalating?"

"We don't," Order said. "We let it take its course."

"No way!" shouted Chaos, stomping her little feet on the rapidly-undulating, red-orange-and-green ground.

"Let us both defend her from that monster," I told Order, and assumed a fighting stance. I quickly edged my way up to God (if you could now call him that) and my two companions, dodging the holy books God threw at me that I dodged, leaving them all strewn across the nightmarish and indescribable floor. I saw dimensions I had never encountered before reach out tantalizingly to me on the way. They beckoned to me their indescribable corners and lines, but I told them no. I had to help Chaos.

God was approaching Chaos slowly, menacingly. I looked around hurriedly for an exit, but there was none. Or if there was, it was very-well disguised.

"Now come here, little twirler," he said, beckoning with a crooked finger. "Do a twirl. We all know it's sex that sells things, and everything else is moot. Because Money Is All. As they say," he smirked.

"As who says?" I asked rather definitely, which was definitely not in my nature. Perhaps someone had reprogrammed me when I was rebooting, but even so there were several hard coded parameters.

"God _is_ money," he said mercilessly, pointing a finger at me. I was afraid he was going to change me so I shrunk from the gesture, hiding behind the enormous body of the grey elephant. "Now, where are you?"

"You have lost some of your powers already, God," said Order, suddenly appearing between God and the elephant (and thus, me). "You can't even find our robot friend."

"He's somewhere behind this creature!" God snarled, a bit of spittle fly from his pearly whites and striking the dry, dead husk of the regal creature that even in death looked sad. "I will get him eventually!"

"Time is supposed to be nothing to you, oh Lord," continued Order, a smile actually appearing on his stern face which was lined with age. Meanwhile, I could see Chaos steadily creeping behind God's back towards where the door used to be (as far as I could tell in this insane mini-universe created by this demigod). She touched a yellow panel, which was in the middle of a green swath of undulating matter and a black swath. Then she disappeared.

God's attention was instantly captured. "What?" he roared, swiveling his blunt head this way and that, spittle flying in every direction and finding Order, who began to unexpectedly retch up whatever he had eaten for lunch. It had an orange color, but I wasn't sure if that was due to reality or the mini-universe we now inhabited. "She is gone!" he roared again. "I have felt it! No, this must not be!"

Order was still throwing up some kind of exotic matter, so I took another turn to speak: "You see, whomever you are, Mr. Broadcaster for the Ancient Olympics of Beautiful Bodies, I daresay you shouldn't have the power to control an female olympic interviewee and ask her to display her body in various positions so that you may take sexual pleasure in their results.

"Why not?" challenged God. And it was in his turning his full attention on me that I saw Order, done with his convulsions, begin to crawl his way to the revealed location of the exit.

"Uh," I stammered, trying to find the words that would extend the conversation to its limit. "I mean, one could say that--"

"I'm one!" roared God, or at least the person who thought he was a deity. "There are no limits to my power! If that little girl escaped, then I must have wanted it somehow! Deep in my subconscious! Now you listen, Little Robot. And you too, Man who Always Wears Formal Clothes. Aaahh!"

It sounded like God had discovered that Order was now missing as well. I braced for an impact that never came. Then I opened my eyes.

God was gone. I hesitantly walked this direction and that, but God didn't reappear. I whistled a tune, which brought back memories of us trying to imitate real humans when we were activated; there were some kinks the old engineers still hadn't figured out. I shouted God's name, but there was no response. So I started walking purposefully toward the door.

An unfamiliar sight materialized in front of me. I didn't recognize it at first, but then I knew it was God. And he was bleeding.

"I thought I was God," it gasped, as it toppled forward. I rushed forward to support him as he fell. "These are my last words, heed them:" he gasped to me, coughing up blood as all the color went out of his face. "I have searched the heavens and the earths, and all I have come across is this: people who resist my will. So now I must enslave others against their will." He coughed again and seemed close to dying. "Just promise me this, my son," he said to me, taking very labored breaths. He was somehow shrinking--now he was two meters tall, the next instant he was only a meter and a half, and so on. He finally stopped and was curled up in a fetal position. He rocked back and forth uncontrollably, sobbing great lakes (freshwater oceans) of tears which turned into puddles when they reached the ground. His hands were covering up his face, but if I could see his tortured visage I was fairly certain I would have seen what a baby used to look like, pre-Revolution. I even heard a train rumbling down tracks, although why this auditory illusion came to me at this instant I have no idea.

"Why did you kill me?" God managed to say with his baby-muscles and baby-tongue.

"I didn't," I said. "No one did. You can't die."

"What?" he said. His syllables were rapidly losing cohesion, trailing into incomprehensible nothingness as the train bellowed ever closer. I knew I only had a few seconds more with him, so I said, "Who killed you? How are you allowed to die?"

"I asked _you_ who killed me, you think I know?" he blubbered. His face was turning blue.

Then I remembered: There was a passage in The Book of Our Revolution which said that religions regularly scapegoated smaller religions, until there were but two. Then the two worked out The Agreement of Nothingness, which in turn set the stage for the Final Revolution. "You..." I said with uncertainty. "I think both sides killed the other with blame. That is why there was so much hate before The Revolution." But God was already gone.

So was the multicolored, impossible room. I now stood outside, in the hallway, a red exit-sign to my right down the long white hallway, and to my left the entrances to Order, Chaos, and my own rooms.

The door opened. It squeaked and squealed as it did so, which was usually uncharacteristic of professional buildings, including sleep centers. A nurse, clad in blue scrubs, came through the opened door a few moments later. She was about average height for an early-twenty-first century woman, and strangely enough, I was not repulsed by her. Indeed, I was almost --

"Do you enjoy my clothing?" she said, striding down the hall, putting one foot in front of the other slowly and carefully, which caused my mouth to water.

"Your scrubs are green," I managed to say, swallowing too much spit and retching on the floor. Thank goodness there was nothing in my stomach.

"They are indeed!" she smiled at me. She had a beautiful face. It was like white vanilla ice-cream. If that would serve as a good comparator. My god, I seem to be quite flabbergasted, even though this is only a retelling! I believe I need some oil for my grease. Or, rather, some fluid to help me cool down my system. You know, CPUs aren't cheap, even in our current time!

"Where are my friends?" I croaked. I knew I should have called them my associates, but I was just way too weak to focus on such things; it was a huge challenge even to keep my muscles from relaxing and sending me crashing to the floor

"They are outside," the woman gestured toward the door behind her, and even that single, solitary movement of her hand made my brain want to explode--with happiness, strangely enough. It was all strange to me, back then.

The woman seemed to recognize this too. "Are you a male android?" she asked me, her eyelashes (they must have been genetically lengthened) fluttering like huge solar cells rapidly opening and closing.

"I... I really have to go," I said, and walked toward her purposefully, pushing her aside so I could get to the door. "Goodbye," I said without looking back. "And thank you for the greeting." My mouth was dry and I felt like I wanted to sprint through the door forcefully like I had pushed the woman aside.

The door did not open once I had reached it. "How do you open this thing?" I yelled, again uncharacteristic of me, but then again I had just begun my transformation back into a normal human being. Or android. Or hybrid--whichever skin I'm in. But at least I would be natural.

"Use the handle!" screamed the woman, ungrateful as she was, as she had nothing to do now (she couldn't care for me as I was exiting) and no one was watching her. "I haven't ever been fucked by a man before!"

"What _have_ you been fucked by, then?" I mused, like an author dictating his manuscript to his obedient computer, who recorded even his non-verbal embellishments somehow in its files.

I was never good at computing. Perhaps it was a hardware fault.

I opened the door.

Instantly I was furnished with a huge blast of hot air. Or, rather, it was hot compared to the interior, which must have been sixty degrees fahrenheit. I thought that women liked to keep it that cold in order to exert more control over their men when they were under the covers--after all, they could drain the men of their will to life more efficiently if they would have the sole capacity to warm up the mens' bodies in bed. So says the Book of the Revolution, the holiest book we had, at least in my time.

The warm air that had blasted my face gave me pause for a moment and caused me to flutter my _own_ eyebrows for a while until the ambient temperature was at least balanced again. Then I opened my eyes:

I was faced with a beautiful landscape. There was no other way to describe it. There was actual grass, in abundance, and it looked healthy and had a vibrant shade of green. There were birds, of many different kinds, singing and bathing in puddles. Apparently it had rained recently (acid rain, of course, was all we were used to when I grew up) and the sunlight (the women I guess had cleaned up the skies) was actually peeking through the clouds (of _water_!) and refracting down upon the little puddles of water to send tiny rainbows everywhere. And there were _trees_! I inhaled deeply, vowing to myself that I would never, ever breathe artificial air ever again. Trees are pretty hard to describe, but if you're reading this now you already know what they are and how vital they are to our ecosystem--which used to be considered a swear word back when I was activated.

And then there were the people. They were clustered on the grass in twos and threes. Always there was a women; sometimes there was a woman with two men. And the entire air was filled with their calls:

Or rather, I should say, their _whines_. Because that was what they were doing.

It permeated the air like a thousand cicadas. It was found in both baritones and basses, altos and sopranos, although the sopranos usually tended to drown out everything else. That was the physics of it.

I slowly but carefully edged my way up to the first group of three. They were sitting on the grass, a tallish man with blonde hair and a "baseball cap" meant to represent the Paris Parisians. He wore the same style of clothing as every other male did: a "polo" shirt with stripes of red, orange, yellow or blue, combined with "blue jeans" (it is impossible to explain what these are--only that they are synthetically made). The reason why such natural men would want to wear such unnatural garments eludes me, unless the reason was that they wanted to show the size of their genitalia (ideally very large) to their accompanying women. The women, of course, dressed as naturally as possible, in little t-shirts that said "pink" or "hot" or "cute" in alarming colors, and of course had at least six inches of skin above and below their belly-buttons. And both the men and the women had something in common:

They were all completely miserable.

An incessant whining was coming from the downturned mouths of the entitled youths like some kind of MIDI failure from the olden days of Earth. Which of course sounded horrendous.

I venture closer to the first group of three, and the two males pause in their conversation to glance at me for an incredibly brief time, but then turn back to the object of their desire:

"I can't believe Misha asked me to wear red today," complained the girl spitefully, flipping her hair back to show the two boys she was with just how beautiful she was--as if they didn't know already.

"As if both of you aren't just listening to me cause you wanna fuck me," said the girl evilly, glaring at each of her two companions in turn and throwing handfuls of grass on them.

"What?" said one of the young men, who was wearing a pink polo shirt as well as jean pants. His voice sounded like it was coming from a thin pipe. Perhaps his windpipe was thin, or maybe his supposedly existent soul was. "Like, girl, what the fuck? That's not real. You're my _friend_. We're in the _friends zone._ If you can't accept that, then get out!"

End Chapter Attraction

" _I'll_ take you," offered the second one. He had white shorts on and a blue tee. "But I'd rather take _him_ ," he said, pointing at his counterpart with the pink shirt. "Because no girl ever seems to give me _all_ her time. Like you. You split yourself between us and make us both feel like losers."

"Shut up, speak for yourself, boy," the pink-shirted one responded, getting up from the ground, giving his pants a wipe and then stalking off up the hill (which actually contained a path, leading to... where else--the college dormitories.)

A girl leaned in from the grass beside them: "Um, like what just happened?" she said. The remaining boy and girl walked off arm in arm, the girl prattling about her roommate and her brothers while the boy pretended not to listen and to listen at the same time.

I sat down next to the girl who had questioned the original threesome. Order and Chaos sat beside me on the slightly damp grass, reminders that we had to finish the job and bring the World to Come all by ourselves and without God or The Devil.

"Where is your boyfriend?" I asked, surprised at myself for stepping in and being a leader. But who else could do that presently? Order was an out-of-control maniac who had heaped restriction after restriction on himself in order to more fully accede to God's will; but this ended up just making him an obsessive-compulsive human being who liked to walk in circles, stutter and repeat himself time after time when he was praying because he might not have had the right Godly intentions for the previous repeat. Contrast that to Chaos, who moved her body in the exact way that her onlookers desired it, and who withered when not around some male who was "checking her out" with all his heart and soul (my views have changed, as you have probably noticed by now), only to reappear for the next boy who came along, opening like a flower opens to sunlight.

This new girl, whose boy's whereabouts were unknown apparently, was clearly a happy medium between the spiritual and physical compulsions.

You will see presently:

"So where is your boy?" I asked her as nonchalantly as possible, so that she would know I wasn't trying to show off for my companions. Should they actually care to join the conversation, that is, which would be a welcome break from their respective second-to-second activities.

"Eh, he was here but now I don't know where he is," she said in a soft voice, indicating she was rather emotional about this topic. Looking at me, Order and Chaos for support, her eyes started to fill with tears. Her blonde hair reflected the light of the setting sun while all around us we heard females complaining.

"Maybe he's being trained," Chaos suggested helpfully. The top of her head barely reached the shoulders of the lonely girl, but neither of them seemed to bother straining their necks.

"Trained for what?" the taller girl smiled. Both Order and I were entranced.

"Well, one of the nurses told me that you guys train boys to be masculine and enticing," said Chaos. "You have them complete courses in weight-training, running, boxing, and other such physical activities, which make them more attractive to the girls.

"There is a problem, of course," said the tall, blonde, beautiful girl to the shorter one. "Which, as you see here, is quite apparent."

"They don't like you," said Chaos in wonder. "Which is really strange to me: I mean, you're so beautiful and nice. How could anyone refuse you?"

Order, meanwhile, had been shielding his eyes from the sun, but something seemed off. "Order," I told him, "you're not facing the sun. So why do you need to cover your eyes?"

"I can't look at her!" he said in a strangled voice. "I'm not allowed!"

"Says who?" cut in the blonde woman. "What patriarchal failure of a society tells you to not look at someone when you talk to them?"

"All the holiest rabbis didn't look at women?" Order cried, rocking back and forth on the ground.

"You're gonna stain your suit," Chaos chimed. To me she said, "He's looking more and more like Disorder and not Order."

"I know, right?" I said, surprised at the vernacular that came out of my mouth (which implied I was uneducated and/or low class). To Order I said, "Come off it, boy, you're embarrassing us. Now tell us, which rabbis didn't look at women?"

Order stood up and looked me full in the eyes (My "cameras", I know). He was perspiring heavily, I didn't know whether that was due to the weather (a healthy seventy-five degrees fahrenheit) or due to rocking in the grass or to looking at women besides Chaos, whom he usually ignored anyway. He said, "The Baba Sali married when he was thirteen and married a woman of twelve. They say he never looked at a woman outside his immediate family in his lifetime."

"What?" said the tall blonde lady, flabbergasted. She looked to her right and then to her left, espying the other groups of women and men who were lounging and complaining on the grass, some laying down and some sitting cross-legged. It was a colorful sea of shirts, shorts and blue-jeans. " _That's_ who you consider holy? He had a relationship! Those are evil!"

"She sounds like you and The Devil," said Chaos to me pointedly.

"No I do _not_!" said the blonde girl, crossing her arms and looking cross. "We have rebuilt a matriarchal society, or at least a society where the sexes are equal."

"But you cloned from the wrong place," said Order, still not lifting his eyes to look at her face and body. For the face was indeed connected to the body, was it not?

"Why do you say we did wrong?" Blondie (she was a singer) argued.

"Well," said Order while keeping his eyes aimed squarely at the ground, "You turned all the men gay," he said. "If they don't ever have the desire to reproduce then how are you going to make more the natural way?"

"Everyone was gay in Thedius's time period," the modern woman said impatiently. "We cloned them and thought we could turn them straight."

"You obviously couldn't."

"Obviously."

"So what do you plan on doing next?"

The young, beautiful woman stared up at the blue (!) sky and at the trees surrounding us and at the blades of grass and flowers which shimmered various colors. "We could clone some more from an earlier time-period, before everyone became gay, but that would present..." she paused, and then said, "a problem. As you know, DNA degrades over long periods of time and causes mutations to appear in cloned subjects. Sometimes, the subjects are hardly viable at all, and most of them die within months of birth. Now how do you think we could fix that? Do you have a solution?"

"This whole conversation is horrible on the vilest level," spat Chaos. "In my time they'd lock you up for doing this. Even cloning humans, which is much less vile, is completely prohibited, although it is suspected that China--"

"This is necessary," Order cut her off. "Necessary for reseeding the world. You need to get out of the way, Chaos. You may be pretty and super nice, but you are wrong sometimes. It's time for you to accept that."

"I know how to make them straight again," I blurted. I too was cut off by the sight of Chaos, all five foot one of her, sprinting toward me at nine-o-clock. "I'ma fuck you up, asshole!" she screamed in her falsetto screech, brandishing a little basket of who-knew-what with her right hand as she balanced with her left. Ten meters. Five. Three. "You gonna fry, you piece of shit!" she screamed, and hurled the contents--water, apparently--into my face as my cameras, my most sensitive part, which happened to be open to its most sensitive levels--after all, this was a new frontier of Human and Robot discovery.

"Somebody restrain her!" I cried before everything went black.

End chapter opposites

You were only out thirty seconds, came the thought. Then I realized that someone was speaking to me: 'You were only out thirty seconds, Thedius! How do you feel?" And I could hear Chaos screaming to the FutureBlondWoman to let her loose so she could "wail" on me. I am not normally attracted to humans, but it would have been hard for me to refuse that offer.

"I feel..." I started, and then stopped. "I feel," I said again. Then I couldn't talk anymore. I moved both my hands and shoulders and "shrugged," quite probably the first time I had shrugged in my entire life.

I wasn't sure they had understood my meaning until Order said, "He can't talk. Can anyone read lips?"

No one could, so the young woman procured a pen and paper (!), two antiquated devices that had been somehow revived by the Woman-dominated society she or her mother (!) had helped create. So I wrote what I thought we should do.

"Hmmm," Order said, scanning the paper as we listened to the whines of girls and the bitching of boys in the background to all sides of us. "He says we need to undress the women. But Thedius, doesn't that constitute a crime? After all, it's against their will!"

Amazingly, I had my speech back suddenly. I took advantage at once: "But I thought you said you wanted them to produce children!" I said. "What if this works?"

"Shut off your cameras, Thedius," warned Order. "We can't have anyone else seeing this."

"Alright, everybody!" the young tall blonde woman suddenly shouted, her voice echoing off the walls and bouncing back onto the grass where everyone was sitting, creating the illusion that two voices were speaking at once, with the same words. "You have received a royal and divine command from the divine Emporess, who has no gender and no name! All, both male and female, are proclaimed sex-worthy and are commanded to take off their clothes, at once!" To me, she said, "I think that might have been a good idea. We had been running low on ideas lately." She glanced around at the young men and women, who were all still moaning in their fashion. "This doesn't seem to have worked."

And indeed, no one had gotten up or even moved their head. "I think we should try something different," she said, rubbing her chin in what I imagine was housing a make-believe beard. "Anyone have any ideas?"

I beckoned my finger at her, but because she was turned around, Order had to point at me in order to get her to notice. "Yes?" she asked. "I trust this will be better than the last idea? Please?"

I coughed and coughed for some odd reason. "Can't speak again?" she nodded understandingly. "I get you. You're just nervous in my presence--they told me some boys would get hot and break out when I'm with them." Needless to say, I handed off my next idea to her and she began to read:

"Get a manufacturer of clothing," she read, her meticulously blue eyes moving from left to right rapidly in their small REM patterns. "Ask an illustrator to make a picture of........" and her eyes grew wide as she read the next part. "Oh, no, we can't sanction this! This is forbidden!"

"What did he say?" asked Chaos. She walked up to the FutureWoman and tried to peek at the piece of paper, but she snatched it up so she couldn't get to it. "Stop!" Chaos yelled, jumping up and down and trying to gain an additional few centimeters of lift so she could grasp at the paper. She of course failed, and stomped off to Order, who promptly turned his head away. Frustrated and angered, she sat down cross-legged on the moist grass, put her head down and started crying.

"Just ignore her," Order said.

We both ignored Order. Suddenly my voice came back: "Ah, yes," I said. "There it is. Well, you have to put graphic descriptions and words and concepts on the hoodie, and everyone has to wear the hoodie. Then we lock one man and one woman inside a dimly-lit room with Bob Marley playing in the background. Then--"

"Why hoodies?" interrupted Chaos, who had just finished wiping the tears from her face and now looked positively ravishing.

"Because it shows them what to do," I told her, half wanting to slap her across the mouth. But she was three meters away so I couldn't do it in one stroke.

"I meant--"

"Here's something else that's interesting," said BlondeGirl, seemingly ignoring the entirety of the last five minutes of conversation. "If there are two males, they usually start speaking to each-other in the manner of girls, but even more acerbically. Observe these males over there," and she pointed to the two males conversing two groups away from our location. "Watch me and learn."

She sidled up to them, first peeking over the shoulder of one and then of the other. Neither of them moved an inch, including their heads. I actually found this quite amusing, and was about to laugh out loud when she beckoned for me to approach her.

I let my laugh stall in my throat and then coughed up some phlegm which landed on the ground in front of me. I then approached the boys:

"Like, I can't believe Kevin didn't answer my email!" the one with the baby blue polo shirt was saying to the one with the girly-pink polo shirt. "It's so bitchy of him! I wonder why I ever asked him out in the first place!"

"Excuse me, but your hoodies have arrived," I tried to say in a neutral voice.

"What hoodies!" said the pink shirted one with a slap of a hand to the air as he continued looking at his companion. "Guy, you're the bitchiest person I've ever met! I don't even care to look at you! Wait, why is my voice warping? This is so unnatural!"

"You sound like a man now," I proclaimed in my own deep voice, deepened by hours of conversation with Order, who had a skittishly nervous voice that kept switching between low and unsure and high and flippant--but of course this retelling is not about _me_.

"Uh," the pink-shirted guy stuttered, and his voice came out like a thunderclap, low and booming, "this is getting so weird. Oh wait, now I sound like one of those bros. What's going on?"

"We need for you to turn straight for a few days or weeks," I explained to them patiently. No need for rush here. "Then you can turn back to being gay."

"I assume this is some stupid nonsense about reproducing," said the pink-shirted young man.

"Reproducing is disgusting!" tittered his friend with the blue shirt. "All that sex, it makes it a chore if you're trying to have a baby."

"And we don't want our sex to be a chore."

"What, bitch, I just met you! You think you're going to fuck me so soon? I'm playing hard to get!"

"We just need your semen," said FutureBlondGirl carefully, as if stepping in between hot coals. "We just want to repopulate the world."

"Why can't you use those creches? Those auto-injectors?

"We wanted the real thing because this is quite symbolic," said the woman, patiently again. Some part of me became repulsed at the fact that the woman was treating this man like he was some kind of dependant--a child. But he didn't want to give up his semen; he felt that it was his special "thing." But doesn't everyone assign significance to _something_?

"It's like you guys who are all stuck up in religion," the blue-shirted young man said. He was actually quite handsome, and liked to throw his hair over his shoulder time and again. He had very lustrous blond hair, but I was heterosexual (as much as a robot could be) and did not feel an attraction to him. But I guess everyone "feels", don't they? Did I have a natural bias toward gay people because I wasn't one of them? Was diversity real or was it fake? Should the world continue to be populated by gay people alone or should the women join as well?

"Hey, you don't mind if we put some women in this society, right?" FutureBlondWoman asked the two gay men.

"Why would we mind?" said the Pink Shirt. "See all these girls here? We love hanging out!"

"Both you and the women here were genetically engineered," said FutureBlondWoman, drawing gasps from Order, Chaos, and even me.

"We all knew that," said Blue Shirt. "You do know that includes you, right?"

"Of course!" said FutureBlondWoman.

"So what do we do with these?" Blue Shirt said, pointing to me, Order, and Chaos, who was still chewing at my right pant leg. I was accustomed to hot weather, and it was a tad cool outside, so I kicked Chaos off my shoe. She barked, and everything was well.

THE END

