by Alex Raizman
That was it, enough to propel Ryan out of his chair, to his feet and into the air, where he floated, crossing his arms across his chest - half divine wrath, half disapproving father. "I am aware, you tiny, pathetic man. I'm deliberately collapsing this empire, because there is nothing great about it. And while I'm at it -" He snapped his fingers again, and the Emperor screamed.
"What did you do!? Oh Ryan's Holy Name, what have you done?!"
Ryan ignored the irony of having his own name taken in vain against him, instead focusing on the question. "As a friend of mine is fond of doing, let me answer your question with a question." Ryan turned to Daasti. "Hey, Daasti! What do you think about the Empire?"
Daasti took a few ragged breaths and said something quietly.
"Sorry, Daasti, couldn't quite make that out."
Daasti looked up at him, and Ryan was taken aback by the hatred he saw. He'd gotten hate in his life, and even more since becoming a god, but Enki's rage was a candle being tossed into the sun compared to the hate Daasti directed at him.
"I said. I had. A family."
Daasti charged at Ryan, the silver sword springing to his hand. There were about a thousand ways Ryan could stop him, but instead, he just did the invulnerability trick he'd tried when he first arrived in his nanoverse, then floated down to the ground so Daasti could wail on him for a moment. Around the room, other re-educated eyes, seeing with the clarity that comes from free will for the first time in years, turned towards Ryan.
After a few moments, Daasti was panting, and Ryan put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean for any of this to happen. But I'm going to make it right. For starters, I've restored your free will, all of you."
Without looking, Ryan raised a hand. The Emperor, who was trying to scuttle away, floated into the air. "Really, son? I broke your hold over every re-educated in the galaxy with a snap of my fingers, and that was right after I literally rewrote the laws of physics. And your response was to sneak off?"
He looked at the formerly reeducated and moved the Emperor over to them. "I'll let you do what you see fit with this. Daasti, can I talk to you a bit longer?"
Eyes still burning with hate, Daasti rose to his feet. "You are a monster god, a war god. What do you want with me?"
Ryan took a deep breath, looking out the window. "I...man, you have no idea how crappy I feel about this. I just wanted to accelerate technology, but I didn't think about providing any kind of ethical framework for it. You hate me, I get that - this is all my fault."
Daasti regarded Ryan as Ryan stared at the Empire. "So, what? I'm supposed to feel pity for you? You're Ryan. You're God." That ugly rage welled up in Ryan, and he focused his attention on Daasti. To his credit, the man who had seen him wink a planet destroying plasma beam out of existence didn't flinch. "Go ahead, if you're going to," Daasti said, not breaking Ryan's gaze. "Annihilate me. At least I'll die free."
Damn, Ryan, you're glaring at him now too? He just pointed out you're the worst kind of absentee dad and you're going to get pissed at him? This place is messing with your head, fix it and get out. But that ugly feeling remained as he stared at Daasti. Ryan narrowed his eyes. Think, Ryan. You just threw this galaxy into chaos. Something would need to happen to make things better here. Otherwise the civil wars Ryan just created would never end. These people had been controlled for years. They’d need a guiding hand.
Who better than someone who knows how monstrous the Empire really is?
"No, Daasti. I'm not going to annihilate you. I'm going to do something much worse." Ryan reached out and put a hand on Daasti's forehead. In a series of clattering clanks, every augmentation fell out of him, bouncing on the floor. Daasti stood there, as natural as the day he was born. "I'm going to make you a savior."
Daasti shuddered and, if not for Ryan’s hand on his elbow, would have fallen. "What did you...what happened?"
"I just made you into a demigod. You're a good man, Daasti.” Ryan wasn’t sure of that, but he was hoping. Ryan knew he made a mistake with these people before and trusting Daasti with this kind of power was a huge gamble. This time, I won’t just leave it be and hope for the best. “You’re full of rage, and with a hate for this Empire and this twisted version of what I want people to believe, but you’re a good man." At least, you better be.
Ryan looked out over the Empire again, where ships were lining up in front of the no-longer functional wormholes, a traffic jam of war machines in the space between worlds. "I don't believe people need religion to have morals. But I found a primitive culture and accelerated their technology without doing the same to their philosophy. I created a monster. You have the power now to slay that beast."
Daasti stared at his hands. "So, what, you're going to leave again?"
"Yup." Ryan gave Daasti a smile, and began to feel that hatred, that rage, fade away. "Between you and me - I have no idea what I'm doing. You can't possibly screw it up worse than I did. But don't let it go to your head. I'll be back, and if you turn out to be just another Emperor - well, then I'll have to fix things myself."
"It's too much for one man alone, Ryan."
"Oh, I figured. That's why you can share the power. Pick carefully, and good luck."
And with that, Ryan was back in his staging area. He felt sick, and weak. What the hell is happening to me? Knowing only that he had to get out of here, he dropped out of realspace and began the journey back to the Core.
I really, really hope Crystal doesn't expect me to roll with this.
Chapter 21
Deluge
Ryan stumbled out into Crystal's nanoverse. She glanced away from her globe and over at him. "Bloody hell, what happened to you?"
"I was hoping you could tell me." A chair appeared for Ryan, and he sank into it. "I was in my nanoverse, and while I was there, I found out my followers had made...I don’t know. An evil empire? I guess that's the best term."
Crystal walked over and called a chair to sit across from him. "Let me guess. You got there and you started feeling angry, imperious, cocky - went a bit 'Bow before me, worms!' on them?"
Ryan gulped and nodded. "Yeah." For a moment it felt like old times, when Crystal had first picked him up - what felt like a lifetime ago - and had first explained to him what a nanoverse meant. That moment of comfort, of familiarity, was enough - and with no hesitation, the entire story of what had transpired came rolling out, his breath getting ragged with fear as he described the way he was acting. "So what the hell happened to me, Crystal?" he finished, almost shouting, but not at her. "Why did I turn into that guy?"
She paused to let him catch his breath and gave him a grin to try and defuse his panic. "I'm guessing you'll try to sock me if I tell you to roll with it, love?"
Ryan's eyes narrowed and he felt his fingers clench, but the response was so absurd it got a much-needed laugh out of him. "It had crossed my mind."
"Right. Well, I told you your mood influences your nanoverse, yeah? Goes both ways - your personality, especially when over there, is shaped by what people believe you are." She patted his knee and gave him a reassuring smile.
Relief flooded Ryan for a moment, but before it had time to settle in it was tackled to the ground by its total opposite in blind panic. "Wait, what you do mean especially when over there? What about over here?"
She smiled. "And that, love, is why you should always go back and check on your nanoverse every couple of weeks at least. It takes a while to start impacting you in the core world, but it can." She frowned. "I wonder if that's what happened to Enki?"
"Come again?"
Crystal got up and walked back to the globe. "Want a story to distract you, love?"
Ryan settled into the chair. "Hell yes, I could use a distraction."
Crystal gave him a small smile. "You sure? I'm warning you, it's not a happy one, yeah?"
"Please."
She moved her hand, spinning the globe a bit, as she started to speak "So back in the day, when you lot were first figuring out this civilization thing a
nd the first round of deities were fading away, sick of life and letting their nanoverses die, a man of a hunter-gatherer tribe - it's been so long I've forgotten the tribe’s name, not that it matters - found a nanoverse."
Ryan settled in to listen.
"This newfound god, on the short list of human gods at the time...oooh, but that man was a bloody clever bugger. So clever he ended up - after a couple thousand years - helping found the first really urban spot of humanity, good old Sumer, and the five cities that made it up. He was worshipped, like all the older gods were, but he wasn't all that interested in being worshipped, at least, not at first." Her voice trailed off for a moment, and Ryan let her vision drift for time before prompting her.
"What happened?"
His voice seemed to startle her, and Crystal ran her hand through her hair. "Back then I pretended like I had just found my nanoverse, same as that clever bugger and his friends - the first pantheon with a city. And let me tell you, love, it was something else. Watching humans figure out language and pottery and weapons and culture - it's not like watching it happen in a nanoverse, where you see it happen in millennia long spurts. It’s different seeing it happen in real time.”
Crystal shook her head, like she was trying to clear something away - perhaps the moisture in her eyes. "But with civilization comes war, sure as rain makes mud. And for the first time, Enki, god of craft, god of intelligence-"
Ryan couldn't help himself. "God of intelligence? Enki?"
"Oi, do I interrupt you?"
"All the time."
She chuckled at that. "Fair enough, love. Yes, Enki, who was associated back then with being a clever boy and making stuff. Can I continue?" She didn't wait for Ryan's nod. "Where was I? Oh, yeah. For the first time, Enki found the limits of his power. Lamashtu - that's who we were up against - she created a whole bunch of monsters and just threw them at us. We were losing, so badly that Enki only saw one way to deal with the mess, only one way to win."
"What was it?"
"The Deluge. The seven of us - the Seven Gods who Decree they called us - flooded the whole damn valley. Drowned all the monsters and the people, because Enki figured we could always get more people, but Lamashtu would need too long to get more monsters."
"That's..." Ryan swallowed, thinking through the logic there. "That's horrible."
Crystal nodded. "So imagine how bad Lamashtu's monsters had to be, yeah? If I was going to sign off on that, they had to be pretty nasty."
Ryan decided he didn't want to think to think too hard about how bad they must have been, instead nodding in agreement.
"And it worked, Enki's plan, even though it boiled down to 'if we can't save it, we'll decide how it ends.'”
Ryan coughed. “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
Crystal shook her head. “We’re going to find a way to save everyone, that’s the thing. Back then, we just wanted to...to save what we could. It worked, to a degree. It wiped out Lamashtu's monsters and left us with enough people to rebuild. But he wasn't the same after that, not really. Spent lots of time in his nanoverse, sure there was a way he could have done it better. He brought me there once." Her voice was low, and she focused more intensely on the globe in front of her.
"What was it like?"
◆◆◆
The streets of Isin were full of corpses.
Ishtar fought the urge to look away. You killed these people, she reminded herself. She and Enki and Anu and - all of them. Granted, the alternative had been to let Lamashtu kill every single person in the valley. But...Is this all you are? A mass murderer? The lesser evil?
It had been years since the Deluge. Most of the corpses had rotted down to skeletons, and those that hadn’t had been mummified by the sun and heat. Ishtar glanced up to see the predominant inhabitants of Isin: crows. Their population had grown in the aftermath of the Deluge, although it was now thinning as the carrion decreased. One of the birds was regarding her with a hungry eye. Will you die? Will I be able to eat you?
Ishtar reached out and twisted reality. The screech of an eagle pierced the air, and with it the crows scattered. They were clever animals and did not want to be around when predators arrived.
None of the surviving people had dared to come back to the city. To find them, Ishtar had to travel to the wilderness, searching for the remnants of this once-great civilization. She wanted to see the people before meeting Enki. And if he’s bothered by my tardiness, I’m sure he’ll find me.
Eventually, she found a small cluster of tents. Human eyes peered out, but quickly ducked back inside at the sight of Ishtar, the goddess of war and fertility, one of the Seven.
“I don’t come to harm you,” she said, reaching to her back and pulling around the basket. “I’ve brought bread, and seeds to regrow the fields.”
“Leave us alone!” someone shouted. “You’ve done enough to our people!”
Ishtar winced. It was hard to hear those words, to know the truth of them.
“What, did you expect gratitude?” said a voice from behind her.
Ishtar glanced over to the speaker. Enki, the First among the Seven, was striding out of his nanoverse. He was a regal sight. His hair was meticulously groomed, his beard kept perfectly trimmed. He wore only a skirt, as the men often did, and his torso glistened in the sunlight.
Ishtar didn’t understand why the male torso was less enticing to humans than the female, but in this heat, she envied Enki the privilege of being able to walk around bare-chested. Humans are so weirdly prude. “Not gratitude, Enki,” she said, shaking her head. “But I figured they’d at least allow me to help.”
“Something about humanity you’ve never understood, Ishtar: the importance of pride. Accepting aid from the people responsible for the suffering? Better to starve.” Ishtar searched Enki’s eyes as he spoke and saw the haunted look to them. Enki had been worshipped as a god of intelligence, knowledge, and crafting. How much did it hurt, old friend, to become a destroyer?
“They’ll come around, Enki,” Ishtar said, quietly. “If not this generation, then the one after, or the one after that.”
Enki’s lips pressed into a line, and he gave her a curt nod. “Maybe. I don’t care if they do, honestly.”
Liar. In all the time she had known him, Enki had cared more deeply than any god of even Ishtar’s age about what happened to the people that worshipped him. It was one of his more admirable qualities, and part of why Ishtar had trusted him with the truth of her origins. “Then what do you care about?”
“About making sure it never happens again. Never again will we have to purge a country to save it.”
Ah. That, at least, sounded like the Enki she had known. “You know I want the same thing.”
Enki gave her a searching look. “Is that how you did it, Ishtar? With oceans of water?”
For the second time that day, Ishtar fought the urge to look away from something that made her uncomfortable. “No. I purged the world with the oceans of fire that lie beneath the land.”
From his face, Ishtar had put more venom in those words than she intended. “I...I had to ask,” he said
Ishtar sighed. “I understand needing to know. Maybe later, I’ll tell you the full story.” If I can even remember it. A million years is a long time. Ishtar had been vague about how long in the past her epoch had been. It made things simpler. “Is this why you called me, to ask that question?”
Enki shook his head. “I figured something out. Come with me, Ishtar. I want to show you something.” He motioned back towards his staging area.
Ishtar put down her basket of bread and grain before following. As she entered his nanoverse, she glanced back to see curious eyes looking at it. Maybe they’ll take it. I hope they do.
Enki’s staging area was a flat stone room with a single altar that functioned as his control panel. He walked over to it and began to trace the cuneiform lettering. “Thinking of taking us fully into your nanoverse, Enki?”
He gave her an intense look
, and Ishtar’s heart skipped a beat. There was something in that gaze she’d missed out in the core, a glint that set her teeth on edge. Suddenly she was wondering if entering his staging area was the wisest idea. Don’t be absurd. This is Enki we’re talking about. He won’t hurt you.
“Just for a bit. Do you mind?”
Ishtar shook her head, although part of her wanted to object. She fought those objections down.
They dropped into his realspace, and Enki began piloting by tracing his fingers along the control panel’s engravings. “I’ve spent a lot of time in here lately,” he said, “thinking. About how we could have done better.”
“We did everything we could,” Ishtar said, frowning as the system they were approaching loomed ever closer. It looked...familiar. It’s our solar system, she realized with a start.
“Did we, though?” Enki asked, shaking his head. “I don’t think we did, Ishtar. And I can prove it.”
They arrived near Earth. It was Earth, Ishtar was sure of it. She’d seen it from the moon enough times to know that blue and green sphere. “Enki...what are you doing?”
“I know we can’t create nanoverses in our own. So I did the next best thing. I call them godstones. They make the people in here into gods, same as we are except without the personal universe.”
Ishtar walked over to the edge so Enki couldn’t see her face. This is wrong. Recreating Earth? Making fake nanoverses? It was...abhorrent. “Why?” she asked.
“Let me show you.”
They flew down to a copy of Sumeria. Ishtar knew these cities, knew these fields, knew these people. He hadn’t just recreated Earth, he’d copied everything that had once existed in the core world, people and all.
Lamashtu's monsters were swarming the people of this world. A recreation of Ishtar’s second greatest failure. Horrible creatures out of nightmare, crawling out of fissures Lamashtu opened in the Earth.
Ishtar wanted to be sick. She wanted to scream. Instead, she whirled on Enki. “Stop this, Enki. Stop this right now! It’s sick. People are dying.”
