Deus Servavi: I

It was a Tuesday, or so the humans said. God always felt strange on Tuesdays, which was itself peculiar, as for most of the previous fifteen billion years they hadn’t existed. But still, he’d always felt strange on Tuesdays. He filed the thought away for a later time, perhaps during one of the nice long baths Gabriel was adept at making. As much as God was always omniscient, it was so much more satisfying being omniscient in the bath.

 

But the bath could wait. For now, God gazed down at the world. His world, as much as any of it could really be called his. He thought back, back to the beginning, to the curious nothingness that had never existed, for how could anything exist without space? It had been a curious time, constrained but endless, eternal but without time. In short, it had been bloody boring. And all of a sudden he’d had an idea; stuff! That was what was needed. Matter! Of course, being both eternal and all-knowing, he’d had the idea ages ago, and wouldn’t think of it for quite some time; sometimes being God made his head hurt, or at least it would have if he had corporal form, or a gender for that matter. He found the baths helped.

 

But the matter thing hadn’t been easy, which would have come as a surprise to God without the whole omniscience malarkey. It wasn’t that he couldn’t make the matter, that was simple enough, but it wouldn’t stay. He made it, and within moments it would undergo catastrophic failure and implode, and it would be back to the nothingness. It would have been incredibly disheartening, but those brief moments, oh those moments! If God had been coarser, he would have found them orgasmic (except that he wasn’t vulgar, and so found them merely intensely and profoundly pleasurable – it had struck him, in the absences between the moments, as grossly unfair that he could be all-kind and all-knowing, but that omni-pleasure was denied him). He became addicted – he had to have more moments, more time. Again he tried, except that, in the nothingness, there was no again, only now and forever; but regardless, he tried again. And again. And again. And then, for some variety, he gave it another go. And finally, after a million and no tries, it worked; a perfect balance, matter with anti-matter, energy perfectly balanced. Nothingness defeated by nothingness; he’d enjoyed the irony so much he’d spent the first billion years in a celebratory bath. The hot water hadn’t been run for a while, and the boiler had given a considerable bang, which had scattered the matter about a bit, but that, at the time, had seemed a side-issue. Finally, there was something!