Even after everything, Christmas is Rose's favorite time of year. 

Humming Hark the Herald Angels Sing to herself, she opens the front door to put up a wreath.

Her front door does not open up into her yard. It opens up into a bar.

Hesitantly, Rose enters, vaguely wondering if this is going to be some kind of Christmas miracle where they prove that the entire world would be worse off if she had never been born. 

The woman at the table doesn't notice her entering, too focused on her notes. She taps her pen against her lips thoughtfully.

Rose can't help but look at what the woman is writing. She seems to be brainstorming for some sort of unusual altruism program? Maybe one where they adopt the Cascadian model of paying people not to have abortions. 

"Uh, hello," Rose says. "My front yard seems to have turned into a bar."

"Oh!" she says, looking up. "Yes, this is Milliways. It does that, apparently. It took my bathroom. Welcome! Enjoy a free beverage and a selection of multiversal literature; this bar attaches to many different worlds. What's yours like?"

"There are multiple worlds?!"

"Oh, yes. Some of them are awfully similar, some are awfully different. Great for harvesting ideas for how to fix the world."

"Are you looking for a new world to fix?"

"I'm always open to it. Why, does yours need fixing?"

"Humanity is slowly and horribly going extinct."

"That sounds in need of fixing. What's happening?"

"Bitoxiphosphene. I-- I don't know if you have it in other worlds. It destroys the female reproductive system. Women are infertile, or become infertile young, or they miscarry, or--" a barely noticeable pause-- "or their babies die."

"That sounds very, very bad. Alright. How is this chemical being disseminated? Are the effects acute, or chronic?"

"Chronic. It takes years of breathing it for it to have an effect, and prenatal doses are the worst of all. It's in the atmosphere. There's no way to get it out."

"There is now. Hello, I'm Christina Theodora, the second Christ."

"Christ is not a woman."

"Yeshua son of Miriam was not a woman. I am."

She's talking to the Antichrist. 

Her front door opened into a bar and now she's talking to the Antichrist.

Rose wishes she had paid better attention to Revelation. In her defense, she hadn't exactly expected it to be a practical issue in her life.  

But... it would be strange, wouldn't it, if the Antichrist were taking notes about how to get rid of malaria. By their fruits you will know them. A demon, or an insane human, could claim to be God, but they wouldn't be able to act like God, because God is love and no mortal could be perfectly loving. 

"I won't worship you yet," she says, "although I suspect I might regret it."

"I'm less concerned with worship and more concerned with babies dying and humanity going extinct."

That... is not a thing an Antichrist would say.

It is moderately unexpected from a Christ. 

"Can you heal them?"

"Yes, absolutely."

The emotion Rose feels is one she hasn't felt in a long time. It's hard to identify. 

"Can you heal my son."

"Yes, absolutely."

"We have to go to him right now-- he has weeks to live, they say, but my last child had weeks to live and she died in only two-- can you bring back the dead--"

"Yes, I can."

"I suppose I should not wish for my daughter to return, because she is in Heaven."

"...There's a reason people are born and grow up on earth, instead of everyone just being in Heaven from the beginning. It's not...bad, being in Heaven, even as a child, but it's certainly not wrong to want your children to be with you, on Earth. Children should be with their parents."

"I-- believed that it was God's will that my children die. Part of His plan."

"Was the bitoxiphosphene caused by human actions?"

"Yes, of course."

She closes her eyes and breathes deeply for a moment. "God is...bigger than the human brain can comprehend, but...free will is important. God--nudges things, sometimes, but ultimately...your babies didn't die because God wanted them too. They died because of human action. I'm sorry. It's easier to believe that your suffering has purpose."

"He must have had a plan for... putting the bitoxiphosphene in the ground at all? He is omniscient, He must have known and willed it-- my children's deaths lead to the greater good somehow even if I cannot see it--"

"They make me more determined to help your world. Does that count?"

"It. Seems that Christ would be determined to help the world without my children having to."

"Well. Yes. I would definitely have helped anyway." 

"But you can heal him."

"Absolutely."

"Can you leave the bar and come to the hospital right now?"

Christ could heal at a distance, and if Rose had faith, she would ask for that. But it is sinful to believe an insane human is Christ, and even the centurion hadn't asked Christ to heal his pais without knowing that Christ had done a lot of other healing first, and Doubting Thomas was forgiven.

"Of course. You'll have to open the door, if I do it will lead back to my world."

Rose opens the door and is relieved to see her own little house. 

"I'll call a Lyft."

"No need," she says, and hums for a moment under her breath, and then they are standing in the pediatric wing of the hospital. Christina scoops up the baby, cradles him for a moment, then holds him out to his mother.

For the first time in Alexander's life, he breathes on his own. 

By their fruits you shall know them.

Rose had planned to stay wary, if a miracle had occurred. To consider whether this Christ's behavior matched that of the previously known Christ, to judge whether she was wise and loving, to remain aware of the possibility that this was Satan in beautiful guise.

Alexander nuzzles his head against his mother's breast and falls gently asleep. 

"You are the Messiah, the Daughter of the living God." 

"Yes. I am."

She starts picking up the rest of the otherwise-doomed babies, cradling them for a few moments apiece, and then putting them back in their bassinets.

Rose doesn't notice. She is stroking her son's hair and murmuring to him about how he's a good baby and she loves him.

Aww. She keeps healing babies and keeps an eye out for doctors noticing something going on and coming to see what's happening.

After baby number six, a doctor will come up to her, say "you're not authori--", notice that the babies are well and giggling, and fall to her knees, her face on the floor, singing A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.

"Hello. I'm the Second Coming. Is this all the sick babies, or are there more in this hospital?"

"This-- this is the NICU, yes," the doctor says. 

"Good. Any barren women who want not to be should come here as soon as possible. If I'm gone by the time they get here, I've just left to heal more babies, I'll be back and they should wait."

The doctor has a facial expression that says that she thought that if the Second Coming was happening at her hospital she would have something more intelligent to say than this. 

"I, uh, yes, ma'am. I'll get on that right away."

"Good," she says, and continues healing babies. Occasionally she makes noises at them. 

"This is very dramatic," Rose comments, "but not very efficient. You should really just get all the bitoxiphosphene out of the atmosphere entirely."

"I'm working on it. It's not a chemical structure I'm familiar with, and I'm poking it some before I try stripping it from the whole world at once."

"Uh. I'm sorry I questioned you"-- what is the honorific for a deity--"ma'am?"

"Oh, it's fine. I'm not very familiar with this world, if you see me doing something that looks like I might not have all the information I welcome input! I'm not actually omniscient in human flesh."

"Oh, that makes sense. Uh-- I'm sorry, I'm sure I should remember from the Bible, but what do you want me to call you?"

"Christina's fine. It's both my name and my title, which is convenient."

In the Bible, we are commanded to call God Father.

Rose still feels a little uncomfortable calling God Christina. 

"Is there a reason you're healing the babies one at a time?"

"I'm using the time to get a better feel for what's wrong with each one. The more detail work I can do in my head as opposed to with sheer divine will, the faster I'll be able to do the rest. Call it frontloading the time requirements."

"You seem strangely limited for an omnipotent being. --Um, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to question you, I'm sorry."

"It's fine. My omnipotence is limited to some level by my humanity; being more omnipotent than you are omniscient could cause problems, so I'm not."

Rose is pretty sure it is not fine to question God! But okay!

She returns to cooing at her baby. She feels a creeping anxiety about the time-- her husband will be home soon, and he doesn't like it when she's not at home when he is-- and then feels anxious about worrying about her husband when she is obeying the literal Risen Christ. You aren't supposed to care more about your husband's opinion of you than you are about Christ's. 

As she worries, three or four infertile women, a reporter, and a cameraman file into the room. 

She glances at the women, considers the frankly horrifying states of their reproductive systems, spends about twenty seconds considering how to handle this while also cuddling miscellaneous babies who need healing, then smiles at the women, nods, decides she really can't excuse delaying Improved Baby-Saving just so she can cuddle more babies, and spreads her hands, fixes the rest of the babies in the room, hums a note for a few seconds, then vanishes to the next-closest hospital's NICU.

The cameraman got all this on film!

Rose checks out of the hospital with her baby; it takes a while because of all the other no-longer-sick babies who need to be checked out too. When she returns home, her husband is too delighted by the healed baby to be angry at her about leaving the house, particularly once Rose turns on the television to verify her claims that the Second Coming had happened and Rose had personally been the first person to meet Christ. 

That evening, Rose writes down everything she can remember about Christina in a Word document, then prints out several copies and puts them in various safe places. This weekend she will go out to buy archival paper. When the Newest Testament is written, she will be able to provide accurate information. 

That night, Alexander doesn't sleep. Rose walks with him all night, singing a lullaby and nursing him. Rose's husband screams at her to "shut that baby up", but Rose forgives him; it is only the effects of sleep deprivation. 

A few days later, the television shows Christina, in a pretty little small-town church. She is cradling a dead baby with visible deformations in front of a baptismal font, and then she dunks her and she comes out perfectly healthy and wailing, and then she hands the baby off to her parents, who are crying with joy, waves at the camera, and disappears. 

A few days after that, she starts doing the rounds in Mexico. Her healing has accelerated to the point where she only needs a few minutes in a city to cover all the hospitals in it. 

A few days after that, she has finished her first pass of Mexico, and there is a knock on Rose's door.

Rose is arguing with a Cascadian Jew on Tumblr about God's opinion on homosexuality while her baby naps.

She pauses mid-sentence and gets up to answer the door.

"Hi!" Christina says when Rose opens the door. "I've got almost all of the bitoxiphosphene out of the atmosphere, and it occurred to me that I should probably know more about this world's sociopolitical climate so I can head off any holy wars or claiming that I support things I don't at the pass, and you seemed like a good person to ask."

"Um. Are you saying you're choosing me as your disciple?"

"Yes. In a way that does not suggest you should abandon your baby. Babies are important."

"My first piece of advice is to try to recruit at least one advisor per continent, and maybe an extra one for China, China's big. I can give you advice on North America and a little bit on Europe but I don't... know anything... about the rest of the world."  

"That sounds like a good strategy. Do you know anyone on other continents who seem like good candidates?"

Well, she did call a Chinese woman a racist that one time for believing in evolution.

"Not really."

"Hm. Alright, I'll think of something. Meanwhile, may I come in and use your internet to get a basic overview?"

"Of course!" Rose invites her in. "This is my laptop, feel free to use it-- sorry, I was just arguing about Your opinion about homosexuality--"

"Homosexuality is fine," she says absently, opening a new tab to google China.

"--You should probably tell everyone that as soon as possible, it's illegal in Gilead."

"Joy. Yes, I'll do that. What other religious laws does Gilead have?"

Rose tries to think about what is illegal in Gilead and not illegal in Canada or Cascadia. 

"You can't divorce except for a handful of reasons. Converting people to paganism or atheism or Satanism or Islam is illegal. Paid surrogacy is illegal for people under the age of 21, but unpaid surrogacy is strongly encouraged. Paid adoption is illegal. Abortion is illegal. Contraception is illegal but that's not religious, that's just practical because humanity is going extinct. Pornography is illegal. Lots and lots of stuff is illegal for people under the age of 18 to view, like nudes in art and apologetics literature that explains what other religions believe too much. Jews have a whole bunch of laws, I don't know all of them--"

"Judaism and Islam are completely fine. Atheism and Paganism and Satanism are factually wrong but trying to prevent them through exercise of earthly power is a bad idea. Most of the fertility stuff is a low priority since I'm fixing the root of that anyway. Pornography is I guess not uncomplicatedly fine but unless it's live-action stuff that involves coercion of actors it's basically fine. Preventing minors from seeing Michelangelo's David seems a bit silly. What are the handful of reasons for divorce?"

"Reasons for divorce are adultery, your partner committed a felony, addiction, physical or sexual abuse, or two years' separation. --To be clear, none of the laws about Judaism are anti-Semitic! The Commanders consulted extensively with rabbis in drawing up the laws that apply to Jewish people. They're not allowed to buy pork, that sort of thing."

"That's good. Who are the Commanders?"

"They run the government of Gilead. The Commander-in-Chief runs the government as a whole. Each of the other Commanders runs a particular department, like the military or housing or the educational system."

"Hm. Alright. How precisely does homosexuality being illegal shake out?"

"If they catch you having gay sex, you can go to prison. First-time offenders are usually sentenced to go to an institution that treats SSA, same as minor drug offenders. If they know a website is used to get gay people to have sex with each other, they'll arrest you. It's not illegal to experience SSA, of course, and if you're monogamous and don't flaunt it you can usually get away with it." 

"Well, that's going to have to stop. Probably I'll bring back another baby on live television and then immediately and vehemently condone same-sex relationships."

"How-- how did we make that mistake."

"Do you want a specific historical answer, or just 'humans are fallible and make mistakes.'"

"I-- the former. Paul condemns it in Romans, it's condemned in Leviticus, what went wrong?!"

"Oh, at that point it was mostly just condemned in the surrounding cultures and they wanted to promote Christianity as Super Moral. The real trouble started when a Roman Emperor started a cult for his dead boyfriend and that cult got into conflicts with the early Church."

"I suppose He-- you-- didn't condemn it specifically in the Gospels."

"I do not have the human memories of Yeshua son of Miriam and it is not inappropriate to refer to him in the third person to me in order to reduce confusion."

"I-- people have been tortured, you know. In SSA-treatment institutions. It's not common but it happens, especially when they're treating adolescents or involuntary patients. People have married people they don't love and aren't attracted to because it's the only way they could have kids. People have been alone for their entire lives. It seems like you could have conveyed the message that being gay is okay in some way that worked better."

"Yeah. I could say 'free will' and 'humans are fundamentally imperfect' but--yeah."

"Is it the Cascadians or the Canadians who are going to be insufferable because they were right about everything?"

"Well, what's the difference?"

"Canada is a lot like Old America? They're really secular and they don't let teenage girls be surrogates or have paid adoptions and they have a ton of surrogacy regulations. It's all to protect women's rights"-- this said in a somewhat derisive tone-- "but their birth rate is ridiculously low. Cascadia is weird. They're sort of... paranoid hippies who are really into teenagers having rights? They encourage teenage girls to raise babies, have enough nukes to turn every inch of North America into radioactive sludge, eat their pets, and keep talking about legalizing polygamy."

"I...don't approve of nuclear weapons...and some context on eating their pets is going to be necessary...but given what you've told me about bitoxiphosphene teenage girls raising babies sounds like the least bad solution and teenagers having rights is a good thing and legalizing polygamy is fine as long as it's a reasonably egalitarian form of polygamy. Canada sounds like their life choices would have been really bad if I hadn't shown up but I did."

"Oh, uh, Gilead nuked them when they seceded. For context on their arsenal of nuclear weapons."

"...Why...did Gilead...do that."

"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--"

"You'd be surprised what things manage to evolve on their own! Why couldn't the bacterial flagellum, that one seems pretty straightforwardly evolvable to me."

"Uh, it's been a long time since I had biology class-- basically there's no way they could have evolved without nonfunctional intermediates, which wouldn't have been preserved by natural selection? And stuff like that is all over nature."

"Nonfunctional intermediates are often surprisingly functional! Like, with eyes, even a few slightly photoreceptive cells are a huge advantage over total blindness, and then other structures accrue around the proto-eyes once there are enough photoreceptive cells for assistant structures to be a better mutation than More Photoreceptors. And flagella could have started out as little bumps on the surface of a cell, which might or might not serve any purpose but probably wouldn't be selected against, and then if you got any control over the bumps whatsoever you could use them to move a little, which is an advantage over not that, and then the bumps keep getting bigger. Intermediate stages in wings are often used for gliding, like with the flying squirrel, and kick off from structures which were used for something else."

"I guess you were there."

"A human brain can't store all those memories but I've been given condensed summaries."

"...Evolution is a horrible way to create an intelligent species."

"In general, do you prefer unworrisome generalizations, or depressing truths?"

"Depressing truths."

"God can't actually see the future. Humanity happened by accident, and God had to give up a chunk of her ability to affect Earth-as-opposed-to-Heaven in order to create a self-perpetuating system of souls so that humanity wouldn't just stop existing on the death of our bodies."

"I'm not sure that I would do better at running a universe."

"That's why 'on Earth as it is in Heaven' is an aspirational, not a fact of life. That's why religion; God regains power faster when people pay attention to Her."

"...I thought religion was a thing because humanity was made to love God."

"Loving God is a good thing! Loving people in general is a good thing."

"I'm glad there is literally anything about my religious education which is correct."

"I'm sorry. I really am."

"I get to be the first disciple of the Second Coming of Christ, it's not all bad."

"That's true. Man, I'm not having any luck with figuring out how to filter for good disciples from China, I'm probably going to have to disguise myself and wander around until I find someone good."

"You could try whatever you did to choose me?"

"Well, I met you."

"You caused an interdimensional bar to appear outside my front door?"

"No. That was a coincidence."

"I realize God can't see the future, but surely He governs the behavior of interdimensional bars."

"Well, if that's the case, it wasn't the me part of God."

"I guess if you could go to China the other part of God could try to arrange for you to run into a good disciple."

"Yeah. We'll see, I still have meaningful research to do."

Rose spends the rest of the day reading, taking care of Alexander, and answering any questions Christina might have.

At night, she takes her accustomed spot on the couch.

...Christina files that away for later, but decides not to ask right away.

Rose immediately falls asleep! Almost as if she is chronically sleep deprived.

That makes sense. 

She gazes admiringly at Alexander. Babies are so good. 

Alexander sleeps for a while! Then he becomes concerned about the existence of gravity and wishes to make his complaints known through a long bout of red-faced screaming.

Yep, that is a very baby thing to do. Christina picks up the baby and bounces him gently, making faces. 

Alexander does NOT like this new person! He liked his old person! He screams.

"Would you shut that fucking baby up?" comes a shout from the bedroom.

...Christina walks over to the bedroom. 

"Do you talk to your wife like that?" she asks, in a cool, disapproving tone. 

He does not recognize Christina from the television!

"Who the fuck are you and why are you in my house?"

She flips the light switch on with one hand, propping the baby against her hip with the other. 

He recognizes Christina from the television!

"Um. I'm sorry, ma'am-- I didn't know you were here-- what do you need? I can wake Rose--"

"The reason I'm here at this hour is so as to not wake Rose, I offered to mind the baby tonight so she could get some sleep. Do you usually scream at her like that?"

"Uh-- that's very nice of you, ma'am, but Rose doesn't need help with the baby, she's just slothful. I'm sorry she lied to you like that."

"She didn't lie to me, I offered because I noticed she wasn't getting enough sleep. Now answer. The question."

"Uh... no, ma'am, it's just right now because it's hard to hear from across the house."

He's lying.

"I can tell when you're lying," she informs him flatly, and turns and leaves. 

Possibly he should have considered not lying to a deity!

"I'm sorry-- forgive me-- I didn't know what I was doing--"

"You damn well knew what you were doing when you shouted profanities at your wife because the baby is a baby. Babies scream."

Visions of hellfire dancing in his head, he mostly says variations on "I'm sorry."

"Go back to sleep. I'll deal with you in the morning."

He goes back to sleep! He does not sleep very well.

Rose sleeps excellently.

"Good morning," Christina says, still rocking the baby, when Rose wakes up. 

"Morning," Rose says blearily, opening her laptop and wandering in a foodward direction.

"...I've been trying all night to think of a delicate way to say this and I can't. Why did you marry that man? He seems...unpleasant."

"He was the first man who asked and if I turned him down I was concerned I wouldn't get another."

"...Huh. I'm sorry if this is intrusive, but...why?"

"Because I'm ugly and lazy and a bad cook and same-sex-attracted and barely fertile and I cry a lot and have a history of self-harm and suicide attempts."

It sounds like a well-rehearsed list.

"You're not ugly," she asserts immediately. "I guess the other things might present a barrier to marriage. Do you actually value being married in and of itself?"

"I'm incapable of financially supporting myself, and women are supposed to get married."

"If it's just practical concerns, I can make sure those are taken care of."

"It's immoral to divorce except for sexual immorality, and he has never committed adultery."

"It's--look, sexual ethics change a lot with birth control. Divorcing him is fine."

"Do you... want me to divorce him?"

"I want you to do what's right for you. I don't...actually know more about the situation than that he shouts at you at night. It's your decision."

"I'll take some time to think about it."

"More than reasonable."

Everything is terrible! Christ has chosen her as her first disciple, and everything she ever knew about Him (Her?) was wrong, and none of the temptations she's good at resisting are sinful but all the temptations she's bad at resisting still are, and she's pretty sure God wants her to divorce her husband, and Rose is pretty sure that good disciples do not respond to miraculous healings by occasionally wishing that it had never happened so that the baby would be dead and thus incapable of crying. 

But it's okay. Everything is okay. She feels like she's LARPing and her sense of self is floating six inches above her head and she is fine.  

When Christina leaves she will methodically throw every one of her coffee cups against the wall in order to listen to them break but right now it's okay. She's fine. Fine. 

She sips from her cup of tea. It's cold because she abandoned it for two hours. 

"Have you looked at what people are writing about you?"

"Not very much. What are people writing about me?"

Rose grabs her laptop, opens Google News, searches for "The Second Coming," and shows it to Christina. 

Christina will read the following information:

At least a dozen millennialist cults have formed, with levels of extremism ranging from "sit in a room talking about how Christina wants us to vote for liberal political parties" to "about a week away from murder-suicide."

Crowds have started thronging various churches in Canada, Cascadia, Australia, and Europe. 

China is censoring all information about the Second Coming. Chinese diplomats have stated that they believe Christina to be a fake by Gilead. 

Various non-Gileadite Protestant churches have taken credit for Christina (evangelicals), declared Christina to be the Antichrist (weird fundamentalists), or stayed awkwardly silent (mainline denominations). 

The Pope has not made any official statement about what Catholics should believe about Christina. Catholic commentators generally seem to agree that she's the Virgin Mary, with strong minorities advocating for various saints. A handful of Catholics think she's the Antichrist. 

The Gilead government has announced that she agrees with Gilead completely in every particular, which is why she started healing people in their country. Church attendance has spiked. The Eyes have done major arrests of homosexuals, heretics, and atheists in order to clean house for Christina.  

Jews everywhere are really pissed off that Christianity is right.

The Lilite Satanist spokesenby says that it is too little, too late, but that they support God going through an appropriate redemption process. 

The Gileadite Google News does not really understand that religions other than Christianity, Judaism, and Satanism exist or that people might be interested in their responses to what's going on. 

Sigh. 

"Not surprising. Thank you, I need to go resurrect a baby on television and explain some things."

"Like that evolution is real and homosexuality is not morally wrong and you shouldn't stay up twenty hours a day praying in your cult compound?"

"So many things! I'll probably have to resurrect a whole bunch of babies just to be time-efficient."

"It might be a good idea to have a press contact so that in the future people can call you and ask if you're a space alien."

"That's probably a good idea," she agrees. She closes her eyes and hums and checks, thinking strategically--press people with dead babies? Eyes with dead babies? Commanders with dead babies? High-ranking Chinese people with dead babies?

She is going to have to be more specific. There are a lot of people with dead babies.

She boosts her processing a few times--she can afford to do that, what with all this new attention--and skims candidates' histories for signs that they would be liable to accept baby-related bribery and/or go along with her without that. 

One Commander she might be interested in is Fred Waterford, a thoroughgoing hypocrite. He runs housing and urban development more-or-less incompetently, has a secret safe full of illegal science fiction, and had one dead baby and three miscarriages. His wife is significantly smarter and harder-working than he is and the only reason he has any political power whatsoever. She submits to him with the intensity of a frustrated CEO forced to spend all her time folding laundry and organizing the church bake sale. He cheats on her with a desultory fashion but really wishes she would be able to write again. 

Commander Waterford looks promising. She likes his taste in science fiction. 

Is he alone right now?

Serena Joy Waterford is aggressively respecting his right to man time in his man cave!

Fred is reading Stranger In A Strange Land with his feet on his desk. 

And now his man cave contains a non-man. 

"Hi! I like your taste in books."

"Aaaaaaaaaaa!"

Fred recovers. "Uh, I mean-- I'm reading it for research purposes! Really! Got to know what those Satanists are up to!"

"Why is everyone's first impulse 'lie to God?' At least the other guy was actually doing something objectionable. I wasn't being sarcastic, I decided it would be convenient to have a Commander publicly on my team and picked you because you have a dead baby I can resurrect on television and you have good taste in books."

"Oh! Thank you. Sorry about that, you surprised me."

"Yeah, suddenly showing up has that effect on people. Anyway, the Gileadite government is in fact wrong about a whole lot of stuff. Sooooo much stuff. I'm going to go on TV and resurrect a bunch of babies and explain stuff the Gileadite government is wrong about, and I can protect you from the Eyes afterwards. Also, you should stop cheating on your wife, the books are fine but adultery is in fact bad."

"If you're planning on eradicating adultery among the Gilead elite it is going to take a while."

"Not especially, but you seem like a mostly okay dude. And also I'm about to declare a lot of supposedly sexually immoral things fine, so it seemed worth clarifying that having sex with someone not your spouse without said spouse's knowledge or consent was still not fine."

"May I ask you some questions?"

"Oh, definitely!"

"First, is Keturah okay? Last I saw of her I was arranging her marriage to a Satanist Canadian spy to avoid having to forcibly impregnate her against her will, but we've fallen out of touch."

"Iiiiiii will have to check up on that, I am not omniscient qua omniscient while in human flesh and also I prefer to not invade people's privacy for the heck of it."

"It's not urgent. I doubt I have much ability to improve her life. I do worry about her."

"Kudos on refraining from impregnating her against her will."

"I'm not a monster."

"No, but you do have some pretty fucked-up cultural scripts."

"Become powerful and then you can ignore your cultural scripts and do whatever you want! --At least until the Second Coming appears in your office and tells you that you have to stop cheating on your wife."

"I'd say I'm sorry but I'm honestly not. On the other hand, I see no reason why she oughtn't go back to writing books."

"That was my second question! She's a lot happier when she gets a chance to write. She is an intelligent and talented Proverbs 31 woman who is utterly wasted on folding my underwear."

"Complementarianism is to a first approximation nonsense!"

"I have literally no idea how this revelation will affect my marriage."

Shrug. "I can't see the future, so not me."

"Do you want me to call Nick? He's the Eye who spies on me, although I'd appreciate it greatly if you acted like I believed he was my personal assistant."

"So that he can report on my liberal ways to his masters? I was planning to go on TV and denounce them sooner rather than later..."

"Best to control the information flow to the people spying on you, I've found. --Are you planning a coup?"

"At the moment I'm just going to completely delegitimize their current actions and give them a chance to shape up or expose themselves as hypocrites."

"Okay, but you understand that if you get on TV and say 'actually, God is fine with gay sex and screwing fourteen-year-olds, complementarianism is a lie, free speech is good' or whatever, there will be riots. People will die. Some of the people rioting will be in the military and they will come here and shoot us and take over the government and last time that happened we nuked Cascadia."

"...Adults screwing fourteen-year-olds is in fact not okay, but I take your meaning."

"It is not obvious from the outside which sex you do and don't take offense at!"

"Statutory rape is bad! Anything rape-like is bad! Anything consenting adults do--for sufficiently scrupulous definitions of consent, I suppose--is fine. To a first approximation."

"Unless the consenting adults are cheating on their spouses! And you might want to figure out a word to use other than 'statutory rape' if you're talking to Cascadians."

"That one is less sexual immorality and more 'in general, sleeping with people who are not your partner when you have a partner who is not fine with it is a dick move.'"

"I hope you can understand that from the outside it is not remotely obvious that having consensual sex with fourteen-year-olds is worse than cheating on your spouse, and we Gileadites have clearly been functioning on an outdated version of the commandments so we have very wrong preconceptions about what you do and don't approve of."

"Fiiiiiine. I will be comparatively gentle about ripping off the band-aid."

"Not actually what I was going for. I suggest contacting a government you like in North America, which sounds like it would probably be Canada, and arranging for a peaceful transfer of power. Present it in the press conference as a fait accompli. Complete amnesty for lower-level members of the Republic of Gilead, higher-level members get prison sentences or maybe house arrest, most governmental functions shall continue as normal but Canadian laws will apply, special elections will be held at thus-and-such a time, you will distribute pamphlets to every pastor explaining correct Biblical interpretation."

...She hesitates. 

"...Would Canada go over substantially better than Cascadia?"

"I don't think it would make that big a difference, You just seemed pretty down on sex with fourteen-year-olds. I think it depends on what policies You prefer. Cascadia tends to grant teenagers more rights, it's slightly more sexually liberal in general, it's easier to buy drugs there, they have stronger gun rights, they're kinder to animals, they're bizarrely anti-city, they spend a ton of money on their military but are generally pretty pacifist, they're the only country I know of where having open borders is a political third rail, they have forecasters which is admittedly a fascinating method of government..." 

"Fourteen-year-olds having sex with fourteen-year-olds is fine. And Canada seemed just about set to wipe itself out if I hadn't showed up."

"The problem with the Cascadian model is that, if it's common and socially acceptable for teenagers to raise infants or be their family's primary breadwinner, it's really hard to justify legally limiting their other choices, especially once you started giving a bunch of them the right to vote. For what it's worth, I think it's genuinely very rare for a fourteen-year-old to date someone much older than twenty, teenagers are just not very interested in people twice their age. Canada was wiping itself out because it values women's rights and wants to protect teenagers from making choices that they are quite likely to regret, both of which seem to be things You value."

"Yeah. Probably Canada is the winning move, I guess."

"I will arrange a meeting with the other Commanders. One thing worth thinking about is how You'd like to respond to Cascadia and Mexico, both of which also institutionally do things You disapprove of. For Mexico, You can talk to the Pope, it will no doubt go as the Pope does. Cascadia will have to be handled delicately. Your soft power is limited, because they have no reason to like or trust religion. And Cascadia's #1 priority as a country for the last twenty years has been making sure that we cannot use hard power on them. If You try, the entire continent will become radioactive slag."

"My plans with regards to Cascadia involve apologizing. Talking to the Pope...man, that's going to be awkward."

"Fortunately, the Catholic Church moves slowly, so You have time to choose the right approach. Your PR among Catholics is already quite good-- healing babies by dunking them in baptismal fonts does that-- but it would be best to avoid a schism."

"Maybe I can get away with 'you guys were factually wrong about some things but literally no one is not, we're cool'."

"I think it would be best to study the Pope's psychology and figure out how to target your appeal to him-- with your popularity among everyday Catholics, if you can get the pope on your side, the hierarchy shouldn't pose a problem." 

"Yeah," she sighs. "I guess that's probably strategically sound."

"An apology is a good start with Cascadia. I'd suggest healing as much radiation poisoning as possible. --You said you're not omniscient, what miracles precisely are you capable of? Healing, removing bitoxiphosphene from the atmosphere, multiplying food, calming storms...?"

"Oh, the bitoxiphosphene's gone, I dealt with that as soon as I could. Which was...not long after I...became public. Uh. Healing empirically yes, multiplying food and calming storms I haven't tried but I assume I can."

"You don't know what miracles you can do?"

"I mean. There's no reason to think I can't? I just. Haven't yet. It hasn't super come up yet. I guess if there are any hurricanes brewing I can go do something about that."

"It would be nice if we had an idea of Your powerset. The right way to handle Cascadia will be very different if You can no-sell nukes."

"I am confident that I could go find the nukes and disable them. I am less confident in my reaction time dealing with nukes if they were launched before I could deal with them."

"Best not to disable them, I think, if You disable the nukes Cascadia will believe You are attacking. --I will try to note places where Your capacity to do miracles may change our strategic analysis."

"Assume that my capacity to do things scales with my understanding of how they work and how much attention people are paying to me."

"...Should we be getting You to do an AMA?"

"Don't actually know what that stands for."

"An Ask Me Anything. My basic thought is to get You in front of the TV cameras, have You do some miracles, make You answer some non-controversial questions which traditionally for some reason include whether you'd rather fight a hundred duck-size horses or one horse-size duck, maybe have You say some noncontroversial things about peace and love and charity towards the poor, and then You can level up faster and save everyone's babies."

"I am in favor of saving people's babies."

"It's probably an unacceptable risk unless it makes You more powerful, but if it makes You more powerful it is worth it."

"An unacceptable risk?"

"Everything You commit Yourself to in public is one fewer option You have in negotiation. Sometimes that's the right choice, but right now You barely have any idea what Your end goal is. Am I right that I am the first politician You have contacted?" 

"Yyyyeeessss..."

"So You have no idea of how You want to handle, say, India and very little idea of whether anything You say will cause such grave offense that it ruins Your ability to influence India for the better at all."

She sighs and flops backwards. "All I want is On Earth As It Is In Heaven and no one whatever in Hell. Whyyyy does that have to be haaaaard."

"Original sin?"

"Fake," she sighs disgustedly. 

"Don't tell the Catholics."

"Fair enough, I guess. Sorry about all the..." she waves a hand. "Everything."

"Well, I do get to exist at all, that makes up for a lot."

"And you get to continue existing after you die! That part's important."

"Assuming I get the good ending, anyway."

"It takes way more evil than you appear to be to get the bad ending."

"I point out that I am literally one of the fifteen most powerful people in Gilead."

"During the time period when slavery was legal, the number of people who went to Hell was never more than a single digit per year."

"That's reassuring!"

"Yeah." Pause. "I'm gonna go check on Keturah."

"I'll organize the AMA and the meeting with the Commanders for when You get back."

"Cool," she says, and checks the location of Keturah's house, and is presently on her doorstep knocking on her door. 

Keturah comes to the door in the middle of humming "Good King Wenceslas" to herself.

"Hi! - oh. Hello."

"Hi! Uh, I was talking to Fred Waterford, for reasons, and he said he married you off to a Canadian Satanist Spy and were you okay, and I said I would check on you."

"Oh! OK. Does OK have, like, a specific definition here?"

"I guess...not seriously worse off than if you had married someone who wasn't a Canadian Satanist spy?"

"That seems like a sort of questionable definition. Um, did you want to come in or something?"

"Sure," she says, and steps inside. "Honestly, I've been starting to question the definition myself."

"Language is hard," says Keturah, cheerfully. She motions her visitor inside. It's not very large, but it's cozy, with a sparsely decorated little Christmas tree in the corner. "I was only making food for me today, but if you want you can have some, I'm making enough for leftovers."

"I'm not hungry right now, but thank you for offering. Your house is very cozy."

"I try! So you're - here for Commander Waterford?"

"Soooort of? We talked, he wanted to know if you were okay, people being okay is a thing I care about, I decided to check up, I'm not, like in the habit of doing him in particular favors."

"Oh. OK. Well. I'm here living my life and stuff."

"Yeah.

"I told him good for him for not forcibly impregnating you and he said he wasn't a monster and honestly that's better than I was expecting of him."

"Yeah, he could have been a lot less OK about things. Ah. Is it rude to ask who exactly you are?"

"My name's Christina Theodora, but I'm guessing that's not what you meant."

"I was mostly talking about the baby healing, but if you can't explain it for reasons that's cool."

"It's not that I can't explain it it's more that several murder-suicide cults have apparently formed but not triggered and I am concerned that if I explain it too exactly I will lose the ability to disarm them."

"Oh. Are you the sort of person likely to trigger murder-suicide cults? Because I find that cults sometimes make bad decisions in a vacuum anyway."

"The short version is that I am sort of the second coming."

"Mmm. So like a John the Baptist deal, or?"

"So multiple universes exist and I am the second coming in a different universe, and I found Milliways, which is this bar that steals doors in different universes, like you're opening some random door and it leads there instead of where you were going, and while I was there someone came in who was from here, and she explained bitoxiphosphene and I agreed that this was an ongoing humanitarian crisis that my powers were likely to be good at solving, and then once I was here I discovered all of the sociopolitical nonsense, and it turns out that doing right by everyone is hard."

"...so you're like an alien deity person."

"That's not a bad way of putting it. But I've been resurrecting babies on television so that people will listen to me and some people have decided to create murder-suicide cults over this and also people might listen to an alien deity thing less so I've been...eliding over details some."

"This is a different genre than the one I thought we were in, but hey, it was the second thing on my list and I've read more of these anyway. So. I assume you have some kind of big council of advisors somewhere which is advising you on your geopolitical game plan, so I'll, uh, try not to mess up whatever you're doing there? Unless you're trying to institute a different ill-conceived theocracy, I guess, because I feel like that could have some problems, given the last one."

Wince. "I. Don't, actually, I've been trying to find some but...so far what I've got are a random housewife and sorta Fred Waterford."

"Is the random housewife Serena Joy? Because you could probably do worse in terms of advice on how people are going to react to geopolitically significant  apparent theological revelations from aliens."

"No, the random housewife is the person who got the door to Milliways."

"Oh. OK. Well. That's less of a council but I guess at least it's distributed. And random housewives can be surprisingly capable. Sometimes."

"Yeah. I'm just--really scared I'm going to fuck this up horribly."

Her expression suggests that she finds this feeling deeply relatable.

"Well. I'm not, um, an expert in geopolitics, but - do you need a hug or something?"

"That would be really nice."

So Keturah gives her a hug. A good, long, supportive one.

"I don't think you've made any terrible missteps yet, anyway. People like healthy babies, and you haven't made any sweeping theological revelations yet, so you've thus far avoided the 'antichrist appears and leads the masses to hell' class of error, in addition to keeping your options open."

Gosh what a good hug. 

"I can't just...leave things as they are, though. I mean, people are doing things because of me, and a lot of them are bad things, and even if not that, uh, this is still the kind of country that regularly forcibly impregnates people and then steals the babies. I can't just let that keep happening."

"Right! Sure! Of course. You just have to, like, stop and think about what your endgame is, so then you can do stuff that gets you there and not stuff that makes it harder to reach. Do you, like, know what that is right now?"

Wryly: "On Earth as it is in Heaven?"

"This is I guess a sensible goal for some other universe's savior to have. - wow that's going to have all sorts of weird theological implications once people sit down and examine them. But, uh, I think it's a little on the vague side, as policy proposals go? You may want to try adding some bullet points."

"Well, I guess it's not really implementable in full--like, Heaven, at least my Heaven, really doesn't have a...geography? Things have...connections, more than locations. So everything is near the things it's convenient for them to be near and people don't have to interact with people they don't want to."

"That sounds really cool? But the lack of it would probably not be at the top of my list of ongoing things that are wrong with the world."

"Yeah.

"Why won't people stop hurting each other?"

"- well, I think sometimes because they don't know how to not, because they want to do the right thing but there are lots of competing concerns and it's hard to juggle all of them correctly all the time? And I think sometimes because, like - I don't know how much of this world's theology your council of two has informed you of, but we're all, you know, fallen. No longer in sync with the game plan. We chose knowledge and power over being... simple enough, I guess, to only ever do the right thing. And so now we know what our options are, but we don't always have the strength to pick the right ones. Because, um, being good in a world where lots of other stuff isn't is hard, and it gets you hurt, and we're not really as constant as God is? So - it's bound to be hard, starting from sin and pride and selfishness and pain, to become someone who can take all that and only ever dish out love."

She pauses. "I, uh, I'm not like a theologian? I'm like the opposite of a theologian. So that may or may not have made sense."

...She smiles. "People are pretty much people wherever you go. I--the Garden of Eden didn't literally happen, in my world, there was no actual physical Snake and Apple, but people are pretty much the same. All you can do is try to line them up so they don't make too much of a mess when they fall over. Because people do. Everyone does, even me." 

"That sounds like kind of a downer ending, in all honesty. But this isn't the ending. This is, uh, trying to navigate the chapter where space aliens come to visit. Which sounds like it could in temporal terms go either really well or really badly."

"Yeah. Maybe the answer is to go on television, resurrect some more babies, and then come absolutely clean about everything, and then announce that whether or not I'm backed by any kind of divinity I'm not planning to tolerate people being cruel in my name, or for any other reason I can prevent."

"So kind of a might for right deal? I - think I like the concept when Camelot does it. But I think Camelot was less divided on what 'right' was than we are, and it also had that thing where all the key players killed each other off or were forced to become nuns at the end. At least in the movie. I, uh, the point is I don't know how stable or sustainable even benevolent fallible absolute rulers are, especially you don't first win over the people who have to live with them."

"I don't want to be a ruler. I just want to tell people to knock it off when they're doing things that are really flagrantly bad."

"That's - kind of what being a ruler is, actually. Unless you're working in someone else's name, in which case it makes you a cop, a gang enforcer, or a kindergarten teacher. Although the last one is arguably a kind of ruler."

"I'm pretty sure being a ruler is more complicated than telling people to knock it off."

"Well. I am given to understand that getting people to actually reliably knock it off requires something akin to a state monopoly on violence, plus lots and lots of logistical stuff for figuring out which things people are doing and how they can be made to stop without breaking other parts of the system."

She considers. She takes a moment to breathe deeply and reflect on how insane the current situation is.

" - so I've never been a super powerful godlike Star Trek alien before, and you should take all of my suggestions with a grain of salt? But - if I were gonna nonviolently transition to something really good, and try not to stomp on truth, justice, and the American Way in the process, I'd - I'd wanna know if I could terraform Mars?"

"...I could probably terraform Mars."

"'Cause if you could terraform Mars then you get all this obviously bitoxiphosphene-free real estate that doesn't have an existing government to destabilize, and if you can teleport more people than just you, then you can get people out to your, uh, whatever you're running on Mars, and countries whose people have another attractive option have a lot less obvious power when you're trying to discuss what they should or should not within their own borders. And, uh, then you can take it from there without being totally dependent on existing deeply sketchy infrastructure. And you can accept as many refugees as you want, medium-term."

"That's probably the best solution I'm going to come up with. Although I have stripped the bitoxiphosphene out of Earth's atmosphere already, I did that first thing."

"That's cool! Hard to prove to everyone's satisfaction. But cool, that was good."

"Babies dying horribly is pretty much the worst thing. Ugh, not looking forward to figuring out how to actually administer a country, though." She sighs. "Governments do lots of stuff besides having a state monopoly on violence, and roads and other infrastructure is mostly not that big a deal for me in particular but that still leaves, like, a bunch." Another sigh. "Suck it up, Christina, knowing what you have to do next is a hard thing is way better than having no clue what to do next."

"Well, I mean, you don't have to do it all by yourself. You can get Commander Waterford to defect and do housing administration for you, or whatever."

"Is he, like, actually good at that? I like his taste in literature but he didn't seem to get why I might object to adultery and statutory rape but not gay people, so."

"I feel like that's actually a sort of a complicated set of beliefs that the vast majority of people throughout human history have not come to," says Keturah, diplomatically. "Um, but he's like, not entirely grossly incompetent, and he knows about housing? And if you collect an advisory council that consists entirely of random housewives then they will probably not be so good on the 'not grossly incompetent at housing policy' front."

"I mean even if you don't think being gay is fine it seems like an obviously different category of not-fine than the other two. Self-debasement seems like a different category than harming others. But I take your point. I suppose he's a better place to start than, well, any other idea I have right now."

"I don't think all instances of adultery and statutory rape are more obviously harmful to others than homosexuality is. But this seems like a thing the Earth theologians and the Martian theologians can debate later, when the Earth theologians are in better shape and the Martian theologians exist. Do you, uh, need anything else?"

"...D'you mind if I come back later? You're sensible. And you give good hugs."

"Yeah! Yeah that's fine. Dante's gonna be back in a few days but it's not like I'm doing anything important in the meantime. And I wanna go to Mars if you end up opening it up for business."

"That can definitely happen!"

"Cool! I mean if it's OK with Dante. I guess he has stuff here. But I'll ask him."

"...Do you want to continue being married to him? Take this as an entirely academic question if you have moral objections to divorce, it's just, you know, you didn't get married under the most romantic circumstances and my guess is that most people-who-make-that-kind-of-decision would be swayed by the part where he's apparently a Satanist. And no one's going to attempt to forcibly impregnate you on Mars."

"Oh we're not actually married! At least not in the, uh, actual sense."

She appears deeply unsatisfied with this wording.

"Huh?"

"Well you can't make someone marry someone, right? Like, if someone holds a gun to your head then it isn't a real marriage even if you have all the paperwork on file, and the same holds if you're a handmaid with religious objections to being same and if you don't get married then you're going to be sent to prison and be forcibly impregnated there. Plus there are, uh, things with lack of form and disparity of cult and all, and also I think if you marry someone without telling them that you're actually a spy for a foreign power then that might not be valid. So the not being validly married is really overdetermined, at this point."

"Are you Catholic?"

"Yeah. Badly. In theory."

"Well, for what it's worth, you were talking more like--in my experience--a Jesuit than any kind of near-Gileadite Protestant I've ever encountered, so."

"Oh. Well. Maybe I'm doing something right, then."

"We'll see! And with any luck you will soon have more access to Catholic resources."

"That would be cool of the aliens. Helps with the avoiding religious imperialism, and all."

"Quite."

"I think you're doing OK on that front so far. Most of the godlike Star Trek aliens were much harder to reason with."

"Q was an obnoxious twit and I hold myself to far higher standards than 'better than him'."

"Oh I wasn't even thinking of him! Like, in TOS the Metrons were all - uh, you know what, we shouldn't have this discussion right now, you have babies to save and planets to terraform and housing to develop."

"It's good to take a breather every now and then, but good point, I should probably be going."

"Yeah. Come back any time, Christina."

"Thank you," she says sincerely, and then she is back in Fred's man-cave. 

"Is Keturah all right?"

"I think so. Also, change of plans, I'm terraforming Mars."

"To build Heaven on Earth from scratch?"

"Yeah, Keturah was really helpful about figuring that part out. Also there have been some details I have been eliding that I should probably stop."

"Keturah's smart! You should listen to her. What details?"

"So I'm not not the second coming, per se, but I'm not the local second coming. There are multiple universes and I met someone in an interdimensional bar and she explained about bitoxiphosphene and I followed her home."

"Should we be expecting God to show up soon to smite you for trying to grab his territory?"

"I have thus far encountered no evidence to suggest this to be the case."

"Probably worth checking if the world is actually six thousand years old, then."

"That seems really unlikely. Mine sure isn't."

"Well, I'm not sure how else to check for a deity, but if we're assuming people in your world evolved therefore people in our world must have evolved, then we should probably assume that your world has a deity so our world also has a deity."

"Oh god the Mormons were right."

"What?"

"There are a bunch of different gods even though there's only one god of Earth! --I guess I don't know if we become gods if we're sufficiently Mormon."

"...I don't know of any methods by which normal humans might become gods and I don't expect that if there were they would involve Mormonism in particular."

"Damn, I was looking forward to having my own planet."