him.
She has been crying.
“What?” Josh asks.
She shakes her head, wipes at her eyes, and again, with her little mouth clamped shut, she shakes her head.
“What happened?” he demands to know.
But Pauline won’t say. They walk outside, and she says, “Josh.”
“What?”
But she can’t find the words. Tears flow, and she sobs, and when they are riding home, just the two of them, she says, “I love you.”
“I love you too,” he replies warily.
For a moment, she seems pleased. But when the tears slacken, she becomes distant, almost cold. Josh has to wonder if this is the same woman that he woke up beside. A tentative voice asks, “What did you get today?”
Her answer is a cold stare.
“Show me,” he demands.
Nothing special. With an expert eye, he examines the designations and reads a few random lines. What could have happened—?
“Stop,” she begs.
Their car obeys instantly.
For an instant, she smiles. But if anything, it is a mocking expression that only makes Josh angrier and more scared. “I’ll be right back,” she promises, stepping out into the sunshine.
They have parked outside a small local park, its ornate garden enclosed by a high iron fence.
“Where are you going?” Josh asks.
“Wait here,” she tells him.
He does. For a moment too long, at least, he waits for her to return. Then he gets out and follows, passing through the black gate and into a little green glade. There, he finds Pauline dead. A suicide, apparently. Or maybe he doesn’t find her body. Maybe Josh follows her footprints across the sweet damp grass, observing that she was running the entire way, passing through the park and through the opposite gate… and regardless what happens after that, she is gone… she is lost… as good as dead, to him…
“NO NO NO, LIAR, NO!” He writes.
Then He drops the mind’s stylus, furious eyes gazing at each of the new offerings from the gray puddle. “I don’t believe this. None of this. You’ve invented these silly trees just to anger Me!”
The puddle doesn’t reply.
The silly trees are three vast and comprehensive genealogical records. Each record begins differently, and each ends the same: A creature with His glorious genetics rules not just this world, but the entire sky as well. To the ends of the galaxy, and beyond, these three gods hold sway.
“Shit,” He mutters.
A young slave stands nearby, watching His display with a fascinated horror. The Divine One is so perplexed and furious that He hasn’t bothered to kill her yet, and He barely notices her now.
Seeing the faintest trace of a hope, she runs.
He kills her at the Temple’s door, and drains her body dry of its blood.
“Shit,” He repeats.
“You made this all up,” He claims. Knowing that that cannot be true. “You did this just to be cruel, you fucker!”
The Authority remains silent, its gray face calm and smooth.
Because you feel unhappy, you must be deeply flawed. In an era of plenty and enlightenment, how can you do anything but smile? When you look at realities very close to yours, you see yourself smiling: your grinning, happy face is wrapped around bubbly creatures that aren’t at all like you, creatures that seem to enjoy everything about this wondrous, boundless existence.
In the midst of this life, you begin to kill yourself.
They warned you that this could happen. Years ago, they told you that suicide was more than a real hazard. It was a statistical certainty.
By every means imaginable, and none original, you busily extinguish your life—trillions of times every instant, accomplishing in the process a measurable and important nothing.
Josh delivers his last three offerings:
The final forty-two days of his journal, and a short story about a billion-year-old man who can never escape living the same velvet day over and over, and finally, a digital that he makes while he sits beside the ocean, discussing the nature of the universe and himself with the gray-voiced Authority.
“Tell me that I’m not small,” Josh begs.
But the Authority cannot give that simple gift. Honest and inflexible, it says, “But you are small.”
“Unimportant,” Josh moans.
“You are trivial, Josh. Of course you are.”
Then it takes a different tact. “Given the opportunity,” it asks, “would you want to matter? Would you wish to live in a universe where every motion of yours matters? Where your mistakes sweep away the stars, and the laws of nature need your constant attentions?”
“Yes, and yes,” Josh says. “And no. And never, no.”
Silence descends.
The first two offerings have dropped from view, swallowed by the gray fluid. Now Josh removes the disc from his camera and watches as it dissolves into the Everything.
“What do you want today, Josh?”
He doesn’t seem to hear the question. He cocks his head, as if listening to a sound only he can hear. And with that, Josh begins to nod, reaching inside the gym bag, a calm hand bringing up a simple black pistol. The weapon just made itself, born from a package of cream cheese, a stack of coins, and a dusting of microchines. A single bullet resides in the newborn chamber. With a smooth, certain motion, he lifts the barrel to his head. His mouth. His temple. The soft tissues behind his lower jaw, sometimes. And he squeaks, “Pauline,” as he abruptly tugs at the trigger, setting loose a nearly infinite series of astonishingly quiet little barks—a bullet smaller than his little finger passing through the soft wet center of his mind.
But in at least one reality, the gun fails. A mistake in fabrication, unthinkably rare and inevitable, spares him.
Spares him, and embarrasses him.
A long, strange moment passes, Josh staring at the pistol, a sense of betrayal surging, giving him a temporary rage. He flings the pistol at the ocean, and with a drum-like thump, it skips sideways, sliding across the floor and into one of the white corners.
Again, just as calmly as before, the Authority asks, “What do you want today, Josh?”
“Can’t you tell?” He laughs, and sobs, and on shaky legs, he rises and walks over to the pistol, recovering it before returning to his stool. Will the gun work now? The question appears in his face, his actions. With a stubborn hopefulness, he brings the barrel back up to his temple, and only at the last instant does he notice the new pressure. Like an insistent little tug, it keeps him from feeling the barrel kissing his skin. He feels warm fingers that aren’t his, little fingers curling around his suddenly trembling hand.
He looks back over his shoulder.
She says, “Maybe not.”
Who is the woman? Then he remembers. She was sitting in the outer office, sitting behind the first desk as he came in for his appointment. Her name is—?
“Not today,” she tells him.
“What?”
