The world was broken. Deo had the proof in his hand, and a bowl of cereal going soggy beside him.
The phone glowed. Every scroll brought more. Civil war in Zambezi. A child soldier, hands too small for the rifle he held. Factory fires in Dhaka. Plague in the favelas of Rio. Famine. Corruption.
"god." He didn't look up. "Every single day."
His shift at the call center started in forty minutes. He was going to spend it telling strangers to restart their routers while the world quietly ended.
181 centimeters, dark skin drinking the light, cheekbones his mother said he'd grow into and never did. His eyes were the part people noticed. Watchful. Like they were doing math on everything they landed on.
"This is insane." He set the phone face-down, picked it back up two seconds later. "This is actually insane."
He glanced at the dying spider plant on the sill, the one he refused to let die out of pure stubbornness. "Don't look at me like that. I'm getting to you."
He didn't get to it. He looked back at the ceiling instead.
"If there's a creator," he said, out loud, to the empty apartment, "why is it this messed up? Why all this? For what?" He laughed, short and humorless. "I could do a better job. I can't even keep a plant alive and I'm telling you, I could do a better job."
The room held its breath.
Ping.
His eyes snapped to the phone. No number. No sender. One line: "Isaiah 55:8."
"What is this." Not even a question. "Spam. This is spam." He almost laughed. "Great, now the universe is sending me chain texts."
He tapped the screen. A second line typed itself, as if the phone were alive.
"Do you truly think you can do a better job?"
His breath hitched.
"Okay." He set the phone down slowly, like it might bite. "Okay, this isn't a software update."
Silence, and then his own voice, louder than he meant it: "Yeah. Yeah, I can!" He was on his feet now, he didn't remember standing. "Yes! I said it! You want me to say it again?"
The air thickened. A hum crawled up through the floor. The sunlight on the wall bent wrong. The rug rippled like something breathing beneath it.
"Oh, no." All the fight went out of his voice at once. "Oh, no, no, no. I'm about to die. I never even finished the cereal."
No sound. No light. Just reality, rewriting itself around a Presence that filled the room.
"Deo." The voice lived in his bones. "You have challenged me. You claim you can do better."
"Yes." His voice shook, but some idiot part of him was grinning. "I did. I did say that."
"Then so be it. I grant you my authority. The mantle is yours for three hundred days."
A blue screen tore open in the air.
SYSTEM: Divine System Initializing.
ERROR: Host Vessel Compatibility, zero percent.
Implementing gradual integration protocol.
"Zero percent?" He squinted at it. "You're telling a god's loading screen it's wrong. Get it together, Deo." He said it out loud anyway. "Zero percent compatible? Then why am I the one standing here?"
"A human vessel cannot inherit my totality at once. Your perception will stretch across the tapestry of human history. Three hundred days. Three hundred thousand years. Guide it. Shape it. Heal it. Fail, and it all burns."
"No pressure," he said, and his voice cracked on the second word.
Power hit him like a wave with no shore. The planet spun beneath him. Time became a river, and every life, every choice, blurred past too fast to hold.
Then it was gone. He was on the floor, gasping, forty minutes from a shift he was now definitely going to miss.
"What." He said it flat, to no one. "What was that."
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: Passive Divine Aura is active. Probability manipulation aligned to user's subconscious is ongoing.
"What the hell is that." He read it twice. "Somebody explain that to me right now."
A flat voice answered in his mind. "Query recognized. It stabilizes your vessel by aligning probability to your subconscious desires."
"My subconscious." He stood very still. "So I'm just — warping reality. By existing. That's a thing that's happening now."
"Affirmative. The effect diminishes with control and distance."
The screen faded. He looked at the spider plant.
"Alright." He held out a hand toward it, feeling ridiculous. "Let's see it, then."
Brown leaves flushed emerald. Stems snapped straight. Flowers burst open, and their scent rolled through the room.
"Ha!" He pointed at it like it had said something back. "Ha, look at that! Take that, plant!"
He turned toward the window, toward the street below, and grinned. "Okay. Okay, let's actually try something."
A sparrow veered clear of a windshield. A falling wrench slowed midair, dropped harmlessly at a stranger's feet.
"Yes! Did you see —" He caught himself talking to an empty room again and didn't care.
Then the ripples showed themselves to him, one after another. The woman who'd dodged the wrench missed her train, and because she missed her train she wasn't there for her sister three years later, at the one moment that mattered.
"Wait." His grin died. "Wait, no, that's not — I didn't do that. I just moved a wrench."
A barista held a stranger's gaze too long. Somebody found an envelope with half a million dollars in it. None of it chosen. His power was just handing people what they wanted with no idea what it was actually handing them.
"I'm not a god." He said it to himself this time, quiet. "I'm a hazard with a customer service job."
He should have stopped there. He didn't. He found the village in the Sahel instead and poured everything he had into the ground.
By morning, the desert was green. "There." His voice shook, but it was pride this time. "There. I did that. I actually did that."
Then he looked closer, and the word died in his mouth.
Salt traders bankrupt overnight. Aid pulled from the region next door. A warlord, hearing about the sudden wealth, marching soldiers in to take it.
"No." He said it twice. "No, no — I fixed it. I fixed the famine."
"You started a war," he said, and this time it wasn't a question either.
He sat down hard on the rug. "I can't see where it lands. Any of it." A humorless laugh. "I was never even good at chess. Too many moves ahead."
Something in the fabric of things snagged. A sound only something inhuman could hear. Something old answered.
He felt it before he understood it — cold scales dragging across the inside of his skull.
"No." He was on his feet again. "No, no, nope, not today —"
Noticed.
Three days of nothing. He called in sick to work twice. On the fourth day the guilt won, and he tried again, careful this time, quiet.
A street artist, struggling, forgettable. "Just one person," he murmured. "Let one person actually see it."
A woman stopped mid-stride. Bought the painting.
The moment it was done, he felt the attention return — not curious this time. Waiting.
"Oh, come on." His voice had gone very small. "Come on, I barely did anything—"
ALERT: Foreign Divine Entity has detected the user's spatial signature.
He went still. "It's not in the Sahel anymore, is it."
A smell like a tomb cracked open seeped through the walls, and he already knew the answer.
A floorboard creaked in the hallway. Wrong. Too heavy. Too slow to be a coincidence.
"Okay." He backed toward the far wall, whispering it like a plan he didn't have. "Okay, okay, okay—"
Another creak, right outside the door.
"I never even called out sick today," he said, absurdly, to no one, and almost laughed at himself for it.
The doorknob jerked once. Then turned, screaming metal on metal.
"Please," he said, to the door, to the god, to whoever was listening. "Please tell me this thing loads faster than zero point one percent."
SYSTEM INITIALIZATION: zero point one percent complete.
HOST VITAL SIGNS: critical.
...