self-worth. That, and he is eighteen years old. He has one overriding talent—a passion that will never be greater than it is today. And because it is his request to make, he grins as he says, “I want a digital, a video. Made by me. At my age, and with my background. Very, very close to this reality—”
“I understand, sir.”
“Having sex.”
“Yes, sir.” The voice couldn’t be less surprised.
“Having sex with two girls, at once.”
Silence.
“Are there any examples like that?”
Quietly, the voice asks, “Would you like to request specific women?”
“What?”
“Name two women, eighteen years old or older, and if they are registered in this reality, I could conceivably gather enough material to fill the rest of your natural life. Sir.”
Josh already knew this. But understanding an abstract theory isn’t the same as hearing it promised, and a promise is nothing compared to a belief. He shivers now, and grins, and feels deliciously ashamed.
“But first,” the Authority says with a slightly ominous tone.
“What? What is it?”
“You must give your gifts now, sir. Since you are requesting three examples of your genotype’s accomplishments, you must surrender three works from your own life and accomplishments. Please.”
This can be a trauma. Sometimes the client examines his own gifts with a suddenly critical eye, and all confidence collapses. How can a tiny soul measure up against Nobel winners and God-like despots?
But eighteen-year-old boys are a blend of cockiness and unalloyed ignorance. Without hesitation, Josh pulls three offerings from a long gym bag: a fat rambling term paper about the role of robots in the War of Ignorance; an eleven-page story about a misunderstood adolescent; and a comic book written by him and illustrated with help from a popular software, the superhero wearing Josh’s face and his unremarkable fantasies about violence and revenge.
With a gentle importance, he sets his gifts on top of the infinite ocean.
Each item sinks and vanishes, and when they are found suitable—meaning complex enough and unique to this singular reality—Josh is allowed to finish his final request. With a dry mouth, he names the two most beautiful girls from high school. But one girl hasn’t registered, Josh learns. So in a moment of inspired lust, he mentions his thirty-year-old, twice-divorced algebra teacher. Then in the next breath, a shiny disc drops from the final make- portal. He grabs it up and laughs, pocketing the disc and then shoving his lesser treasures into his gym bag.
“Thank you,” Josh tells the Authority.
“You’re welcome, sir.”
Then as he stands, ready to leave, the voice says, “Visit me again, sir.” Which is as close to a joke as the Authority ever comes.
It is a wonderful world, as is every Earth perched beside the great ocean. Experience and technical expertise pass into the Authority, and they emerge again, shared with All for very minimal fees. Very quickly, lives have improved. Wealth and princely comfort are the norm. Few work, and fewer have to. Today, every house is spacious and beautiful, each powered by some tiny device—a fusion reactor no bigger than a thumb, perhaps. Food and fine china and furnishings and elaborate cloths are grown in make-portals, produced new every day. Water is recycled. Toilets are always clean and sweet-smelling. Unless the inhabitants don’t require prosaic nonsense like food or their own corporeal bodies. Many, many things are possible, and everything possible is inevitable, and this one particular world, no matter how peculiar, is just about as likely as any other.
Each citizen owns a million great novels. Every digital library is filled with wonderful movies and holo programs, immersion games and television shows, plays and religious festivals captured by cameras, and spectacles that cannot easily be categorized. Even local classics exist in a million alternate forms: varied endings; different beginnings; or every word or image exactly the same, but created by entirely different hands.
Surrounded by such wealth, the crushing chore is to decide what to watch, and read, and play. Which of these remarkable snowflakes do you snatch from the endless blizzard?
This is why people gravitate towards the familiar.
In the absolute mayhem of everything possible, why not find treasures that have been created, in one fashion or another, by you?
Or at least, by some great version of your own little self.
Because no one else may look at the ocean, The Divine One kills the slaves who carried Him to this place. He murders them with a casual thought and drinks a little ceremonial blood from each, and then flings the limp carcasses into the stinking heap that always stands beside the Great Temple. Then He waves an arm in a particular way, awakening a network of machines that make the crust shiver and split. Yet even as the ground rolls beneath Him, the ocean remains perfectly still. Unimpressed. When He speaks, machines enlarge His tiny human voice. “Old friend,” He announces with a sharp peal of thunder. “I am here!”
The response is silence.
“Three genealogies. Give me! Three family trees with My Greatness astride the highest, finest branch!”
“No,” says the Authority.
“Yes!”
“First,” it says, “you must honor me with three gifts—”
“I honor no one but Myself!”
For a moment, the Authority says nothing. And then, quietly, it asks, “Must we debate this point each time?”
“Of course!” The Divine One laughs heartily for a long while. “Our debates are half the fun, my friend!”
“Are we friends?”
The Divine One stands at the shoreline—an outwardly ordinary man peering down into the opaque fluid. “In My life, every other creature is My slave. My personal, imperfect possession. You are the exception. Why else would I look forward to our meetings? Like Me, you are immortal. Like Me, you are wondrously free. You have your own voice and your own considerable powers. Even if I wished, I could never abuse you—”
“I am a puddle,” the Authority interrupts. “A drop of goo. You could boil me to steam, to nothing, and fill the hole that remains with your own shit—”
“I could never destroy you,” He replies. “Never.”
“Why not?”
The Divine One pauses, grins. “We both know perfectly well. This is but one world, and I am only one god. Removing you from this single place would be like stealing just one cell from my immortal hide.”
A pause.
Then again, the Authority says, “Three gifts.”
“Three trinkets,” He rumbles. “That’s what I will give you.”
A new slave appears—a beautiful young woman with a dead face and full hands. She keeps her eyes down, setting an ornate satchel at the feet of her Living God, and then she kneels and dies without complaint. Once her body has been drained of a little blood and thrown aside, He opens the satchel. Using His own little hands, He looks tentative, fingers unaccustomed to handling mundane objects. His first offering is a journal encompassing the last three moons of His life. The second is an immersion recording showing the Long Day Festival that He choreographed, half a million bodies parading and dancing along the Avenue of Honored Bones. And a nano-scale digital—His third offering—shows the sculpture that He fashioned at the end of that very good day, fashioned from the harvest of severed limbs and breasts and sexual organs.
Without comment, the ocean swallows the three gifts.
“Three genealogies,” He repeats. “You know my tastes. Each offering has to be different from my family tree, and different from each other. And I want stories. I want to see from my genotype’s origins, back into the deepest imaginable past, with biographies of the ancestors, when possible.”
It is an enormous request, which means that it takes all of three heartbeats to accomplish. The results appear as sophisticated maps injected into His enhanced consciousness, and with a genuine relish, He sets those elaborate trees beside His own ancestral history, marveling at how genes and circumstances interact to produce
