"We shouldn't have. There-- was a lot of chaos after the coup, I don't know if it was the decision people would have made if it had been less chaotic, maybe it makes more sense if you have access to confidential information that I don't, but-- as far as I can tell they just did it because they were afraid people would become atheists and have deviant sex. And that happened anyway and a million people died." She pauses. "You should heal the Cascadians who have radiation sickness. I-- I don't know what it will do politically, it might piss off high-ranking Gileadites you need, but. It's the right thing to do." 

"Yes, I'll do that. I don't need high-ranking Gileadites; I might want them, but I can get by fine without."

"The Cascadians will love you. Your followers will consist primarily of a bunch of atheist hippies with assault rifles."

"I like hippies. The atheists with assault rifles part I can work on."

"Maybe protecting them from Gilead will help, but I'm not sure, the assault rifles might be a cultural thing at this point."

"As long as they don't go around assaulting people with them."

"I think the evidence suggests that murder rates are better correlated with cultural factors than with gun access? --But of course you'd know better than I would."

"Once cultural factors encourage gun misuse you can solve the problem by taking away the guns, to at least some extent. As long as they're not being irresponsible with the guns there's no reason for them not to keep them."

"I guess so. --Anyway, you wanted to use my computer, so I should probably stop talking."

"I can multitask," she says cheerfully. "If you have something else to do, I don't need you right now, but you are being helpful."

"I'm not sure that there's anything I can do that is more important than talking to God? --Although I'll probably have to multitask once Alexander wakes up."

"How's he doing?"

"He wants to sleep all day and play all night, but other than that he's fine and healthy. I don't know that I've got three hours of continuous sleep in the past few weeks though."

"I've heard that about a lot of parents. ...Want me to watch him tonight so you can sleep?"

"That would be... really nice?"

Rose is not entirely sure how to respond to the creator of the universe offering to babysit. She wonders if this is how Mary felt constantly about everything.

"Okay. He's a very good baby."

"He really is!"

The good baby wakes up, stretches adorably, and rubs his eyes. Then he immediately begins bawling. Rose begins to feed him. 

Christina gazes admiringly at him for a moment, then returns to her research. 

Rose has a brief crisis about the ethics of breastfeeding in front of God, but then concludes that God has probably seen lots of people breastfeed and also herself has breasts.

Some time later, she asks, "finding anything interesting?"

"Deseret needs to knock it off with letting twelve-year-olds get married. Gileadites don't believe in evolution?"

"Of course not. It's an atheistic racist lie."

"...How...is evolution...supposed to be racist?"

"If God created humanity, then all races are equally endowed with a common human nature. You wouldn't expect different races to have different psychology. If humanity evolved, then some races are probably smarter or stronger or even more moral than other races, because that's how evolution works-- there are different populations where different traits are more or less common, and sometimes they speciate. So evolutionists explain the fact that black people in the US have worse outcomes than white people by saying they're actually just worse people." 

"Huh. That's bizarre. Evolution is real but none of the subsets of humanity have meaningfully genetically diverged, the reason black people have worse outcomes is because even if there's no institutional bias against them any more--which might be true here, I don't know--they're still descended from people who had nothing, and nobody came in and said, 'hey, sorry about the slavery thing, let's give you all nice things until you're on par with people not descended from slaves.'"

"Are you sure? My science class presented a lot of proofs of creationism-- there's no way the bacterial flagellum could have evolved on its own, for example--"