Good catch! Thanks

Will do! (I think this is a compliment? But if not I'll still take it.)

I have a pet jaguar now.

I named her Jabari, meaning brave one, because I always come home to find her crouched at the door, waiting to pounce on my boots. Other than her unconquerable instinct to hunt humans, she is by far the easiest cat I've ever owned. She has no claws, no fangs, and only stands as tall as a squirrel.

Admittedly, adopting a jaguar is a tacky trend at this point. I'm catching the wave at the tail end, when it's as easy as rescuing a stray from the shelters. When the rapid evolution had just occurred, and all jaguars on the planet found themselves on the prey-end of the wildlife spectrum, owning one of these little devils had been a high luxury. But it took less than ten years before nearly every street in the country had a proud-posturing mini-big cat being walked on a leash.

We've seen now that this was likely the first of the ancient wishes to come true. As far as I can tell, it's the only one that has had a clearly positive benefit.

Following closely behind the rapid evolution of all jaguars came many sudden and unexplainable events like the torrential rainfall along the Tigris-Euphrates river system in the Middle-East, the appearance of an enormous fish in the Huang He, or 'Yellow River', of China, and the eruption of a previously dormant volcano along the east coast of Kenya.

Taken on their own, each seemed like an individual freak occurrence of nature. It wasn't until the resurrection of Sadiki, the ancient Egyptian, that we all pieced together what must be happening.

Sadiki's body coalesced from a scattering of dust outside of Cairo. The skeleton had formed first, discovered one morning just lying out in the open under the hot sun, and scientists gathered from across the globe to watch as the streams of dust carrying Sadiki's soft tissue slowly trickled in from the farthest reaches of the desert. Even the white linen outfit from Sadiki's burial had reformed, and until then, scientists were too cautious to get close enough to discover that this was not a modern human skeleton.

Sadiki, through the help of some very excited historical linguists, described a long and arduous battle for their health, and many prayers from friends and family for their full recovery. Their mother, in a slightly blasphemous taboo, even wished on a wandering star.

At last, all the individual anomalies could be collected into one theory. And this theory seemed to hold for many freak occurrences to come, like the sudden appearance of a land bridge across the Red Sea, trapping many cargo ships in the newly formed Great Red Lake.

When I'm out on my late walks with Jabari, I watch the first stars appear in the sky and wonder what the earth will look like when all the past millenniums' worth of wishes come true. I'd really like to see this planet after all the little changes catch up, see how society carries on with what will probably be a daily reshuffling of the laws of physics.

So tonight, I wish to come back like Sadiki, at least for a short while, in however far a future that may be. I'll try to remember tomorrow to wish for Jabari's safe return as well, as long as some other misguided wish from the ancient past doesn't wipe us out before then.

__________________

I'm on day 30 of a streak.

If you liked this story, the other 29 days are collected at r/FarFetchedFiction.

Thanks.

They called me Azathoth, The Blind God.

They told me all of creation was only a dream I had concocted in my ignorance. They said if I were to truly awaken, the fabric of reality would rupture down to loose threads, and every other conscious being would fade from sentience, in this existence and all others.

They asked to be spared in return for their unwavering devotion.

I asked if I could clarify what they'd meant by approaching me.

"So all you little red riding hoods have become convinced that the threads of your lives, and the lives of any loved ones you have, are being plucked on a single near-infinitely large harp that exists in the ear of a sleeping space squid God."

The first of the red-cloaked figures nodded. "More or less."

"And after observing my mundane behaviors, you've pieced together that I must secretly be the mortal incarnation of your deity who, again, upon waking up will essentially stop plucking the strings and collapse all of existence back in on itself."

"By means great, terrible, and unfathomable." The worshipper smiled.

"Can I see that stick?" I asked, pointing to his steel-headed cane. I thanked him for handing it over, then I brought it down firmly on the top of his head.

Whether I am this God or not, folks need to learn how to let sleeping dogs lie.

I'm on day 26 of a streak. If you'd like to read some of the other 25 days, they're at r/FarFetchedFiction.

Thanks.

"This God is dead!" You shout from the steps of Heaven's visitor center, "and we have killed him!"

Down below, the fifty-strong crowd of college freshmen cheer, and roar, and spit coffee-rich loogies up to the bloody body of the building's greeter God. One of the freshmen has carried an empty turtle shell with them, all the way from Earth, stolen out of the biology hall's display case. This furious student now straddles the dead body and brings the shell down over and over against the God's skull.

"Turtles!" He shouts with each swing, "All! The! Way! Down!"

"What the heck's going on out here?" Asks an attendant from the visitor center's main entrance. They wear a sun hat under their halo and a name tag on their blue sweater, robin egg, though the script the name is written in is illegible. The look of mild annoyance in their faces washes away to horror as they notice the body on the marble steps.

"My God!" Shouts the angel. "What did you do to him?"

"We didn't do it," snickers one of the Philosophy-101 students. "He created a stone so big that it crushed him!"

You and your hoard of teenagers laugh manically, though you don't exactly understand the joke.

"Why would you do this?" cries the angel. "He was just a kind, retired old God looking to do something with his free time. What has he done to deserve this?"

"What did we do to deserve him?" asked someone from the back.

"Wait, I recognize you," says the angel. "You're that bitter little God from the city counsel meeting, shouting at everyone about monotheism! I thought you'd moved to another afterlife."

"It doesn't end here!" You turn to face your new followers. "It's time for Regenisis! It's time for an Unholy Crusade! Let's give these Gods a taste of their own genocide!"

The class cheers again and follows you through the streets of heaven. They carry their pocket watch assembly manuals, their pipes that are just pipes, their chickens and eggs, and many other half-understood thought experiments into battle, through every public service building and God training center in town, through every court room and cosmic laboratory. You and fifty dedicated young minds over-rationalize your way into killing every modern, hipster God in town who are too loving not to turn the other cheek. You bring the Old Testament back on the new guards, until you are the last God in heaven.

Your followers celebrate their victory with a book burning in the town square, though, after starting the fire, no one can come to an agreement on which books to burn. So you carry a box of old phone books from the office of the dead God Mayor. The names of all the old God citizens fill the pages, and you and your disciples tear them out, page by page, to feed to the flames.

A few of the women in your class call back to vague pagan traditions they found on Google and decide to strip down and dance around the bonfire.

As the excitement dies down, you pull a wooden crate before the fire and rise to address the crowd.

"I thank you all for your devotion in dismantling this intellectual paradox."

You are met with enthusiastic whoops, claps, and whistles.

"Now that the reign of these defunct deities has passed, it's time to usher in a new universe, with one God, one voice, one ruler of creation to define the trajectory of existence!"

You receive one soft set of claps, which quickly shrinks away to nothing as it realizes no others will join it.

"As a. . ." You clear your throat. "Well, of course, as a cool God. A ruler of the universe that can let go of the steering wheel once in a while, let the universe run itself sometimes and see how it goes . . . A God that doesn't need a bunch of praise, or even, you know, can just be left alone up here in heaven as they watch you all just . . . doing your thing, and-"

"Let's get him!" Yells the turtle shell wielder.

And so your new followers pull you off your soap box. Despite your willingness to fight back, they force your hands behind your back and tie you to a wooden post. As you swing wildly from giving threats to promises to cries to bargains to hurdling furious curses down on all their heads, the students carry the post by its ends over to the roaring fire.

You realize this was all a bad idea, that you should have never showed up to the city counsel meeting, that you should have just payed the levee tax on postage stamps and gone about your day.

You accept that this is your death, and you've left no one behind you can pray to.

I'm new here, but I'm on a 20 day steak. If you liked this and want more, the other 19 are at r/FarFetchedFiction

Thanks.

You're not wrong. That was a twist I was thinking of adding, but the story would've gotten too long for the idea I wanted to put out there. Other than the coincidence of going to write the same thing in the windmill book, it's just as likely to be some random stranger that had the same idea, but I figured it wouldn't really matter if the lesson he takes away came from his actual previous self or not. If he can't remember a single thing about his past life, and has no knowledge of what his future self will be like, then the reincarnation would be indistinguishable from a stranger anyways.

Hey thanks, I like that you like it!

'No, you're not insane.'

The words written in faded pencil sure made me feel insane, as they had been the words I intended to write when I opened this second volume of 'Windmill Construction Through The Ages.' I bent the book across the worn spine to read the rest of this hidden line.

'Hello star child!' it read. 'Hello new me. Hello beautiful, innocent redeemer. I want to tell you so much, so please find my collected notes in the pages of 511.712094'

The number held no significance to me. I thought it might be some sort of code that only I would know the answer to, so that no unsuspecting windmill-construction fanatic could accidentally stumble upon my past self's secrets of the universe.

But no. It's the Dewey Decimal system. And as the first librarian I asked for help pointed this out to me, I felt like a complete idiot in two lifetimes. The librarian showed me exactly where to find 'Children In The Early Anthropocene.' It looked to be some incredibly niche topic on the study of historical geology. The book made a cracking sound as I freed it from the bottom shelf, as if it had become a part of the library from so many decades without moving. I could barely keep the pages from falling out of the old binding for how weak the spine had been worn.

Retreating with the book to a private corner of a study room, I pulled the hardback covers wide apart and found a sort of confession written out one line at a time in the hidden margin between the pages.

'Your name was once Arthur Bishopp. I'm sure it's a pleasure to finally meet yourself. If you're lucky enough to be reading this, you must have found one of my many notes left behind in what books I imagined would interest your young mind. Tectonic Tides of Pangaea vol. IV, I suspect?

'I knew you'd retain my love of the sciences. You must be such a gifted child in your school. I bet all the teachers ask where your brilliance comes from.

'Me, dear child. It comes from me. Think of me as your true father, for you are the product of my devotions to study. Not only have I lived my life to the utmost of karmatic benevolence to ensure a favorable rebirthing, I have crammed my head so full of knowledge that it has become entwined with my soul. You did not need to learn from a teacher that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the right angle sides. You knew it instinctively. The teacher needed only to remind you.

'I imagine you will be able to accomplish great things for human kind with these blessings I have bestowed upon you. Be sure not to take all the credit, but you probably need no reminder. We always have been a very humble person.

'Since you are obviously ingrained already with my same love of knowledge, for proof in having found this book at all, and are primed by my studies to absorb all collective knowledge at their first encounters, I see no need in imparting any key scholarly teachings here. Instead, I will give you the best of all personal advice I've collected after fifty-seven years travelling this earth, as I'm sure it will pertain to you still.

'Don't let others interrupt you.

'Don't suffer fools.

'Don't cast your pearls before swine.

'Don't eat with your mouth full.

The advice carried on and on, one line per a page, for what looked like at least a third of the book. I stopped reading and closed the book.

Everything was beginning to make sense in my life. I was not born a genius, as Arthur Bishopp had expected. I did not scour the library as a child looking for the latest volume in the series about tectonic plates. I sucked dirt.

This man was the reason I had been born into a hard life of squalor, to a mother that could never afford rent and a father who walked out after the birth of my third younger sister.

This man is the reason karma saw fit to give me a body that couldn't run too fast without risking a complete shattering of my lower vertebrae.

This insufferable man, and his god awful list of life advice, gave me colitis.

Even now, in my sixty-eighth year of life, I have zero scholarly interests. I only picked up the book on windmills because I liked the picture on the cover. I can't believe that my same consciousness shared the same mind as such a self-righteous know-it-all. What vanity! Assuming he would pass on such a genius that I could better human kind with my knowledge of tectonic plates.

Despite the proof for my theory of reincarnation, discovering this text has turned me off of the whole concept of leaving behind any words of wisdom for my future self. If Arthur left me anything at all, it must be the vanity for thinking my current self could ever know better than the next iteration of my soul.

I'm not going to make some child live in the past for my sake.

I dunked the historical geology textbook into the library's toilet before slipping it into the trash. Then I prayed that the memory of what I read would not outlive me.

​

**********

I'm somewhat new to the sub, but this is day 16 of my streak. If you want to see more of my submissions like this, they're collected at r/FarFetchedFiction

Thanks.

I'm glad! Thank you very much.

"I'm so sick of working under this asshole. Every day dealing with the same freaking crap left over from the day before. Why can we never seem to catch up on this work load? The stress is too much! I can't keep it together."

"You have to keep it together, Tony. We're a rectum. That's literally our one job."

"You know back in the mitosis days, I thought I'd be somebody. I remember when we first formed the cavity, thinking this is it, we're making a mouth. Then the freaking stem cell committee tells us we're at the opposite end of the chute and it's been nothing but chaos since."

"Life's what you make of it, Tony."

"Wouldn't you have liked to know? Did they ask you before they gave the taste buds to the other guys?"

"Be very grateful they didn't give us taste buds."

"I'm just saying. Of all the jobs out there in the whole wide organism, why the rectum?"

"It does no good dwelling on what could have been, my friend. Now stop talking shit and start talking some shit, alright?"

"Where do I put all this sugar, boss?"

"Just with the regular shipment, right there in the blood intake."

"No problem."

"Hey, wait a minute. What's with all the extra hydrogen bonds going on there?"

"Ain't that normal?"

"No, that's not normal! Is that alcohol?"

"Could be."

"What!?"

"Maybe."

"MAYBE?"

"Probably."

"Where the hell did we pick up alcohol? We're just a kid!"

"I don't know. Must've come in on the same delivery as the nicotine we picked up earlier."

"You didn't!"

"We didn't the first time. Sent it back up with a load of stomach acid. But by the third try we had to let it through."

"What is this organism coming to?"

"Should I still unload the rest of this-"

"Scuse me, coming through. Hey there fellas. Where should I unload all this sugar?"

"Are you kidding me! Can't you see all the hydrogen hanging off that stuff?"

"Pardon me everybody, just got in with this load of sugar. Hey where should I drop this off-"

"Gang way everybody. Got some fresh sugar here to unload."

"No! No. Everybody back. Turn around right now and take it all back up where it came from. I don't care where the kid is, or who he's trying to impress with this. We're not doing this right now."

"Hello friends! Does anyone need some sugar?"

"Ah damn. I got a chunk of dirt stuck in my pore again."

"Just flush it out with some more oil."

"I'm trying, but it's just settling in deeper."

"Well get it out of there, quick!"

"It's too deep! I can't push it out!"

"Oh no! Ohh God, what if it's an infection?"

"You think it's gonna make us sick?"

"Just nuke the thing. Better safe than sorry."

"Alright. I'll just drown it in pus and let the immune system handle it."

"Hey, that's what they're here for."

"Yes! Good morning beautiful world! I've finally made it to the surface. Hello sky! Hello sun . . . oof, hello sunlight."

"First day?"

"Oh yes. I'm so excited! I've always wanted to be a part of the waterproofing layer."

"Ha! You're a funny kid."

"What?"

"Waterproofing. Haha! I haven't heard that one in ages."

"Are we not doing that up here anymore?"

"Oh sure, once in a blue moon when the kid will take a shower. But lately our role has been redefined as . . . cosmetic, you could say."

"Cosmetic how? And what's going on with this heat? Why are we out here in the direct sunlight without any sunscreen?"

"Oh you sweet summer child."

"It feels like burning. God this is really starting to hurt!"

"Take a look at my face kid. This is the face of a perfect, shriveled, crusty tan."

"Ouch! Good God, why can't we just move over to that shady tree? Someone has to put in an emergency reflex order to the legs! Jesus Christ. This is torture!"

"Beauty ain't easy."

"Ah! Aaaaaah! It burns!"

"Hey Steve, you ever think about what it's like at the other end of the chute?"

"Hmm . . . Nope. Can't imagine."

"Me neither . . . Hey pass the butter."

"Do you even recognize your own prison?" I ask the dining hall of laughing professors. This conference is a waste of everyone's time. Having to prove the necessity of my research grants to these out-of-touch gatekeepers is a degradation to the entire purpose of scientific experimentation.

"Do any of you," I ask, "realize how tight the walls of your cage are? The limits of your observation?"

Their smiles are fading.

I try bringing it down to a grade school level.

"The rainbow. The entire spectrum of visible light. That marginally slim window we have to the universe around us, that splinter of wavelength that sits between 400 and 700 nanometers. Is that really enough for you?"

"Stop embarrassing yourself," someone yells up to me from the far table. "Give the mic back already!"

A few murmurs agree. I can feel the hand of the research panel's director on my shoulder. He's asking me to surrender the microphone and return to my seat.

"No!" I shout, pulling away from him. "Not until I've said my piece." But my voice has stopped echoing back to me. The little red dot on the microphone has gone out.

"You have." The director extends his hand towards the stage steps. "Now please."

I toss the dead microphone towards that hand and the clumsy director can't even catch it. Then I turn to the room of cranky, balding men who all look to have quickly grown bored with my voice. "What have you got against progress?" I shout.

"Let it go!" says my old professor.

"It can't be done!" shouts my old lab partner.

"Not by you, at least!" came a voice from the back, and this returned a few chuckles.

"No, not just by him," someone else responded. "Give it just a minute of real thought and the whole notion falls apart. The size of the human eye restricts developing any cone cells possible of-"

"It's not the eye, it's the mind!" shouted my old lab partner. "You can't just introduce new signals to the nervous system and expect the mind to re-calibrate itself to turn the static of new sensation into meaningful-"

"Hello?" joined another voice, "are you forgetting about all the progress in nerve-controlled prosthetics these past twelve years?"

"Oh sure," the argument continued from across the room, "because motor function is the exact same thing as light perception and visual cognition."

"Even if it were possible to introduce artificial cones into the optical nerves-"

"Whose talking about artificial? His report claims to be able to grow existing cone receptors to-"

"In human patients?!"

"Why anyone would even finance the research, even if animal trials proved successful, when the human eye is so different from-"

"Yeah right! Like this would ever even reach animal trials!"

"You pessimistic bunch of cowardly know-it-alls!" I shout from the edge of the stage. "I've already done it!"

I clutch my glasses, my new wire-framed glasses with no focus in the lenses, just a slight shade of pink that has been laughed at twice already tonight. I hesitate to take them off. It's going to hurt. But these wind bags must see. They must see what I see.

I remove the glasses and every light in the ceiling shines twice as bright. The whispers of steam from the seated men swirl in the air overhead like the film of a soap bubble. The remnants of chicken on scattered plates still glow. And every piece of bare flesh becomes a paintbrush as it moves.

I squint through the swirls of bright fog and see someone with an arm that gives off no heat.

"You, who mentioned the prosthetics. Is that because your arm is made of plastic?"

The man looks shocked, and so do the guests seated around him. He gave no indication that the hand was not natural, and I guess I've embarrassed him in front of his colleagues.

"You there, in the wheelchair!" I point. "You've just farted."

"And you!" I point to my old college professor who gave up on me immediately after I earned my degree. "You've just pissed yourself! I can see the warmth rising from your lap."

The room says nothing.

I lower my hand, still frozen in an accusatory stabbing gesture of my upturned finger.

"No need to say anything," I tell them. "The embarrassment behind you cheeks is enough. God, if I could just make you see. See the wave of new colors rushing through your faces as the warmth fills every available blood vessel. I can see the light of your hearts trying to pump more blood to your head so you can reason your way out of this without looking like an idiot. But I can see the idiot rising in the heat off of every one of you. It's beautiful."

I return the pink-tinted glasses, filtering the waves of light past 'red' away from my sensitive eyes. The director's hand returns to my shoulder, probably to turn me around so he can apologize like a gentleman.

Only it's not the director. It's the thick hand of a security guard grabbing my shoulder, and his other hand has mine wrenched behind my back so he can steer my down the steps of the stage and out the side door of the dining hall.

I'm thrown out like a bag of garbage. I guess I should have expected as much from such pretentious society. But I could not have expected to be helped up by my own lab partner waiting out there by the gutter. Somehow she knew to wait here instead of the front doors.

She finds my glasses in the gutter and returns them to my face.

"They didn't listen." she says. Not a question, just a statement. "Of course they wouldn't. Such a backwards organization anyway, still refusing to accept woman into their research programs."

"I'm sorry to admit," I say, "but I didn't even get to explain your breakthrough. They threw me out as soon as I made a display of your results. I'm sorry. I thought I would pull your name out at the end, like some big reveal. I thought if they heard it from a man first, they could take it seriously."

She gives me a sympathetic but pitying smile and links her arm around mine to walk down the street. "I'm sure Eunice Foote was told something similar. Maybe I'll join her and Rosalind Franklin's little club in heaven, and the three of us will look down on all your friends and colleagues as they eat their conference dinners and slap themselves on the backs."

"I thought you'd be angry."

"I am angry," she says, "but my anger's directed at so many other people, I don't have any left for you my little test subject."

She slips her hand in mine to stop our walk at the sidewalk corner. The doors to the dining hall are still propped open nearby. I can hear them laughing.

"What's it like?" she asks, for what's probably been the twentieth time that question has been asked since the procedure.

"I still can't describe it," I say. "The distinction between red and infrared is constantly getting clearer, but the hue is not like a deeper shade, it's just . . . new. It's a new paint on the palette. It has a way of mixing into all the other colors. I could put a name on it, but it wouldn't mean anything."

"And if you had to express the feeling of it?" She let go off my hand to wrap her arms around me.

"Warm, obviously." I look at the imprint of her hand where it held mine, the ghost of her interlocking fingers over my knuckles. "But like a lively warm, not some red-hot metal. A kind warm. It usually gets all drowned out in direct light, but when it seeps through a covered source it's like . . . " I point at the glowing light above her heart. "It's like here. Whatever you're wearing, whatever color lies on top of it can't hide the glow. And it shines through your cheeks when you smile. And it feels like-"

I don't have to tell her what it feels like.

She brings her mouth close, and shows me that she already knows the feeling.

Thanks for reading! I'm glad you liked it.

There once was a grand collective construct of pure intelligence and negative mass who witnessed the birth of humanity in the focus of its imagination.

We'll call this intelligence . . . MacDonald.

Now old MacDonald had a galaxy on the eve of the confluence of our space-time. Measured by the constraints of unidirectional time travel, this would be considered a very young galaxy in this universe, but the whole universe itself was just a cheap, refurbished hand-me-down from MacDonald's more grand, more intelligent, and even more negative in mass older brother, whom we'll call MalDoncad.

MacDonald, having been born through the barrier between the fields of quantum physics with gifts of infinite power, was always being teased by MalDoncad for not being born with infinite^(2) power like the rest of the family. But, despite the eternal patronizing, MalDoncad could not help fixing MacDonald's problems, no matter how often they were brought to his reality.

One eon, MalDoncad was playing on what was essentially a guitar of pure hyper-compressed light waves, reconstructing the magnetic field of a nebulous structure he remembered hearing in his college days, when he heard an immature moan from his little brother.

"I can't do this one!" he cried. "Will you beat it for me?"

MalDoncad sighed and called down the wormhole, "Where are you at?"

"All the land is broken up. The atmosphere is getting pretty thick. Most of the water is melted. And they've figured out a baseline recipe for rapid oxidation."

MalDoncad plucked a quark in surprise. "Rapid oxidation?"

"Yeah! They're using it to alter the chemical make up of the lesser beings so they can nourish themselves for longer on fewer kills. That's a good sign right?"

"Who is 'they'? MacDonald, what the hell kind of fabric are you weaving with that thing?"

"Just come look!"

MalDoncad grunted with a sound like a supernova. He set down his light-waves and took one last rip from the lingering bowl of Higgs-Boson particles in his anti-gravity bong, then he dissipated from existence to reconstruct himself in the frequencies of his little brother's reality. "Okay, give me that," he said, snatching the bubble of universe from MacDonald's amygdala. "Why's it so small?"

"I stopped the expansion until I could get a handle on this galaxy. I've been trying to grow the periodic table at the same time, but I've barely been able to fill the sixth atomic shell with all the questions they keep asking."

"Questions!? Questions, MacDonald! How have you-" MalDoncad decided to stop wasting his stardust by screaming and just take a look for himself. He witnessed the progress in our corner of the galaxy since he'd last had to take the controller from MacDonald, and he could barely understand the sequence of events following his last soft-reboot with the meteor against the lizard-bird monsters. He realized MacDonald must have introduced the fungal branch of life way too early, as one of the strains seemed to have accidentally formed a similar chemical structure to a space in the brain of his primate creatures. When the two met by chance, the primate creature's mind hit a ceiling of self-reflection before MacDonald could build a pseudo-source of creation out of hot rocks. The ape asked a question, (not with words, more like a string of loose concepts and a desire to tie those concepts to others it did not realize until now could be defined,) and it sounded something like, "Me? Me? Me? Me? Why? Why? Why? Why? How?"

And here's where MalDoncad saw his brother's critical mistake. Instead of just picking up this stoned primate and flinging him into the black hole at the center of its galaxy, MacDonald saw his universe discovering itself as a likely progression of the toy, a level he hadn't reached yet, and so he tried to calm the beast. He did this in the worse way possible, by cursing it with even more knowledge.

"It's alright my beautiful creature," he said. "My name's MacDonald. I mean no harm."

"Me! Why? Me! Why? How?!" cried the thoughts of the ape.

MalDoncad fast forwarded to the universe's present state. He saw the effect of millions of generations of life when allowed to procreate with their own sense of desires, and he was sickened by it. He found an individual organism that seemed pretty old, comparatively, and asked with a voice it could comprehend, "You there, what's your purpose?"

"Oh lord," answered Noah, "My purpose is only to serve you, to praise you, to live in worship of you."

MalDoncad pulled away from the universe to scowl at his younger brother. "You sick spectrum. Have you been stroking your self-worth with this thing? I didn't realize you were even old enough."

"I thought that's what I was supposed to-"

MalDoncad interrupted, "You and Dad are going to have a fun conversation when he gets home. But don't worry, I know what to do." He came back down to the white-haired organism. "Hey, buddy. How many of you here are under the impression that you've been created for the sole purpose of my watching you praise me?"

Noah stammered, "Every single one of us, my lord. Or at least a good portion of us, I'd say. At least enough that I could bring them here and prove it to you."

MalDoncad saw a golden form standing in the center of where the organisms collected their lives. "What the hell is that?" MalDoncad asked, pointing at the two golden arches.

"Why, it's an image in your likeness, my lord. We've done just as you've asked. Shall I collect some of those worthy followers to prove their devotions to you?"

"No, I've heard enough. Stay there, you're all getting scrubbed."

"Getting what?"

MalDoncad did not answer. He exited the universe and tossed it back to MacDonald and instructed him to, "Take that moon, smash it against the planet, start over from proteins."

"But that's going to take forever! Can't I just take the water and melt it down to wash the sentient ones away? They can't survive in water, and that way I can at least try again from microbes."

"Do whatever you want. Just don't let those things survive or you'll never finish it."

"But what if they come back?" asked MacDonald. "What if I were to make beings so intelligent they could end up comprehending the wider existence outside of their planet."

"Don't be cruel, MacDonald." MalDoncad was already half-dematerialized through the wormhole when he stopped to ask. "And by the way, what's with those golden arches."

"You didn't recognize them?"

"Is that supposed to be me and you?"

MacDonald smiled.

"Even though there's no possible way they could comprehend the likeness?"

MacDonald nodded.

"Huh. That's actually pretty cool." MalDoncad gave his brother an affectionate punch on his dimensional fractals.

"Thanks."

"Still. Get rid of it . . . Or at least hide it in your sock drawer before Dad sees it."

My new life at the Sane Asylum isn't so bad.

The staff has been ordered to keep my mask on at all times that I am outside of my soundproof dorm. Due to my toxic influence of stupidity whenever I opened my mouth to ask a question, the doctors and nurses were ordered to never try and communicate with me, to only give short, simple, easy-to-understand commands when they have to. They kept their distance, but that didn't mean I'm left all alone.

The head counselor put me in a full dorm with three other guys. None of them were particularly bright to begin with, but that's the company I've always ran with. I guess that was good thinking on their part. I don't want to make anyone whose already in this tough situation get themselves even worse off for coming here.

All the residents here have got something particular to their conditions. I've got my brain-shrinking bad breathe. My bunk mate's got a forehead that displays his inner thoughts. My best friend in the dorm's got a thing where he's constantly making the left switch with the right, right with the left, the whole surrounding universe flip back and forth, which gets very confusing when we're trying to straighten out whose bunk is whose. And his bunk mate does this thing where he burns in the sunlight. That's it, thought. No other vampirish characteristics. He just melts in the sun.

No one here gets especially bitter or angry at our situation. We know it's technically an asylum, but we've all still got our heads on right, so no one's trying to put us in diapers or spooning tapioca into our mouths. It feels kinda like an eternal summer camp, where the state pays for our toys and we don't have to worry about earning a living.

I don't mind being the smartest person in the room anymore, even though I have no choice.