talker, but after three days of silence his throat felt like it was packed full of gravel. He tried to lick his cracked lips but his tongue was sandpaper. His dehydrated brain rattled in his skull like a dried pea. It hurt, but after breaking the seal on his silence he figured he might as well keep going.
“He was bored and wanted a pastime. He said he was going to make little retarded versions of himself and breed them. He was going to make something called a Universe to put them in, sort of like a big terrarium. All of us would have to stop being infinite and bind ourselves to the finite and take care of the Universe for him because it had all kinds of problems. To be honest, it sounded like an enormous pain in the ass.
“Most of the Host thought he was kidding, but I had a feeling he was serious and so I kept asking him why. At first he said it was because there should be something instead of nothing, but eventually he broke down and admitted that he was creating this Universe because he wanted people to glorify him and proclaim his greatness. He was bored of our praise. He said it felt like we were just going through the motions. I mean, what do you even say to that?
“But there was no stopping him. First, he made his giant container, the Universe. Then he made time, and gravity and came up with the idea of things beginning and things ending. He came up with order, with self-organizing systems, with Brownian motion and all kinds of stuff, but he seemed to find it lacking somehow. It ate at him. Later I realized that the problem was his limited imagination. He couldn’t imagine any of his creations not loving him. He’d come up with a system to organize and operate his Universe, but it wasn’t balanced. He had a status quo, but no revolution. He had order, but no chaos.
“He was creating all kinds of particles and energy, neutrinos that simultaneously flowed backwards and forwards in time, cosmic rays, gamma radiation, but all along he was talking about how he was going to make people. I couldn’t see the point. They sounded really complicated and annoying but he had his heart set on making billions of them. I decided to see what they would be like and so I stole a little bit of his essence and created a series of micro-universes, like cosmic ant farms. I seeded each one with a drop of my own blood, which gave them life, and I watched them evolve.
“Each micro-universe was placed in a trough of liquid time and I pumped it around them quickly, watching them evolve in fast forward. Every possible Creation played out before my eyes, one million times faster than normal. A lobster empire spawned from a billion-year-old Atlantis that never sank. A race of super-intelligent dinosaur kings who prevented their own extinction when kamikaze pterodactyls shattered that asteroid before it hit Earth. Silicon ghost robots rising from primordial petrochemical pools. Virtual universes populated entirely by living ideas. Reverse universes that turned the laws of physics inside out. But at some point or another they all fell apart. Because at a certain point, humans appeared.
“The human animal was a contaminant. Wherever they evolved into existence they heightened tensions, sparked conflicts and seeded violence. An opportunistic outbreak of humanity ripped a totally silent universe in half, and the smallest exposure to humanity resulted in a 5th Dimensional universe tearing itself to shreds when a cold war turned hot after humans invented the 8th Dimensional bomb. Wherever there were humans there was war, torture, fanaticism and death. They were terrible. They were diseased. They were flawed. And these were the creatures the Creator wanted to breed?
“I begged him not to do it. It was cruel, it was callous, it was vain. My argument was so convincing that all the other archangels took my side, but he wouldn’t be swayed. He was unleashing these monsters because they would sing his name. These beasts who built cosmic-sized weapons, who loved digital watches and worshipped pornography, who would one day broadcast every one of their waking moments to each other until their entire existence was nothing more than a hall of mirrors where they watched each other watching each other watching each other. These creatures were polluted. They were profane.
“But he wouldn’t listen. He ordered us to begin