She is humming, softly, and swaying, slightly, as she scribbles in her notebook, just aimless brainstorming that circles back to the same points oftener than not. Either way, she isn't paying much attention to her surroundings, even as the door closes behind her, and almost bumps into a table that wasn't supposed to be there before she looks up.
"Bar says it's called Milliways. Apparently time stops outside while you're in here . . . which I guess would mean you can't be from the same world as me. Assuming she was telling the truth about how it works, anyway, but I checked it a couple minutes ago and it seemed to be true then."
Honestly, he's pretty sure this whole thing is some sort of demonic trick, but he's already damned so he might as well enjoy it while he's got the chance. Either that or it's God making some sort of last-ditch attempt to save him, but when he asked Bar for a book recommendation he got something that so far hasn't mentioned Jesus once, so that doesn't seem especially likely.
He wobbles back and forth between "the demons who made this place are out to entrap her too" and "she's a demon in fair guise" and ends up rocking back and forth on his bar stool a bit instead of doing anything about either possibility. "What are your problems? If you don't mind telling someone who can't do anything."
"I'm sorry to hear it," he says on autopilot, because he's not sure what else to say. He's not exactly satisfied with the state of his world either, but in his world's case it's because of human sin, so it feels kind of hypocritical to complain about. And in his world he could say something about everything being part of God's perfect plan and everyone except him would find it comforting, and presumably God rules over her world and all the others, but delivering fake reassurances to someone from a potentially very different culture sounds like a dumb plan.
"Yes, that." Actually, it belatedly occurs to him that this should have been more obvious, because she's wearing clothes and Adam and Eve were naked. But maybe there's a universe where humanity didn't Fall and they still wear clothes for other reasons; clothes are pretty useful, after all.
"So, this happens in nature, too, only instead of 'whatever traits humans want' it's 'whatever traits lead to surviving long enough to have more surviving babies than the competition.' And over time this can lead to colossally staggering changes. And when an animal hits on a strategy of being smarter than the competition, eventually you can get people. And then God freaks out and invents immortal souls because people ceasing to exist is an awful concept They've never encountered before."
"Enh, there's omniscience and there's omniscience...knowing how everything is now doesn't necessarily lead to drawing all the conclusions you would have if you had more experience. Being literally the first person to exist causes mistakes and all that. Anyway, I don't know about percentages, but in species with especially short generations you can get visible speciation within a human lifetime, like, lots of geneticists like using fruit flies but finches are also a good example."
"Uh, I didn't mean any disrespect to your world's God or anything, sorry. It's probably the same God ruling over all the universes anyway, and He decided to do humans differently in different ones for some reason. And yeah, I've heard of speciation. Are you saying if you keep going you could get two kinds of finch or whatever that are as different as humans and apes?"
"Oh, yeah, definitely! I mean, have done, we have lots of kinds of finches. Anyway, they're probably different, and I don't mind the disrespect. I disrespect God all the time! For example, while being the first person ever and having to figure out ethics from scratch is a great excuse, the entire Old Testament is a giant series of fuckups!"
Bruce has no idea what to do with that statement, largely because he agrees with it. "Uh. I, uh. That's blasphemy?" He looks around nervously. Neither of them seems to have spontaneously combusted or come down with hideous boils, and there aren't suddenly any bears in the room, or anything, so that's nice.
Gaaaah she's probably a demon and whether she is or not this is not something he wanted to be talking about today. "Uh? No? It's literally the direct word of God? Say, about that evolution thing, do you know what's the farthest they've gotten a species to change from its original form? I think in my world it's dogs but I would have to look it up to be sure."
"And still remain the same species? Man, I dunno, I'm not a biologist. Probably depends on how you define species anyway. Dogs are weird, you have little yappy dogs and great big huskies that are practically still wolves and you've got greyhounds with their big barreled chests and tiny little waists, it's crazy. Lots of things in nature are crazy, though, not that dogs' craziness isn't entirely humanity's fault. Do you now how many different morphologies there are of oak trees, it's a lot. Anyway, the Bible comes from God but humans wrote it down and then translated it a bajillion times and as anyone who's ever played a game of Telephone can tell you just because the person at the beginning of the chain knows what they're talking about that doesn't mean the end result is infallible."
Bruce doesn't see why God would let anyone mess up the Bible, but he knows from Greek and Hebrew classes in school that translation is hard, and if God had reasons to confuse humans' languages at Babel then He might have had reasons to confuse the Bible too. Maybe if the Bible made too much sense humans would try to rely on it completely and never pray for guidance, or something. He shouldn't speculate.
"Yeah, dogs are weird, it's pretty awesome how many kinds there are. Um, if humans evolved in your world, did you evolve in the Garden of Eden or were you already barred from it?"
"I guess your world wouldn't have that, if it's a metaphor, yeah . . . Bar, can I borrow a copy of that picture of the Eden angel that was on the cover of National Geographic?"
Bar provides a glossy 8x10. It shows a pillar of cloud, lit as though by bright sunlight, though the surrounding mountain pass is overcast. Floating unsupported in front of the cloud is a longsword that must be four meters long, with crimson flames licking along its blade. Behind the entity is only darkness in which no shapes can be made out.
"We do! Mostly, anyway. There are ways of circumventing mortality but most of them are inconvenient and/or don't scale. Anyway, one angel is not infinite defense, I'm more optimistic than you about how accessible they are. Any idea what class of angel?"
He recalls the speculation being mainly that they're an Archangel, since Principalities on up don't spend much time on Earth that anyone knows about, but. Well. His next remark is addressed to his shoes where they're pulled up into the legs of his barstool.
"Um. Before we go any further with this conversation. If you're going to say stuff like 'one angel is not infinite defense' you might as well just admit to being a demon? It's not like there's anything I can do about it, I'm definitely not faithful enough to drive out demons, I just want to be clear about it, you know?" He cringes a bit; just because the one demon he knows is uninterested in random violence doesn't mean they're even mostly all like that.
...She bursts into giggles. "I'm not a demon! I mean, I guess I could see how you'd come to that conclusion, but that is slightly the opposite of what I am! I mean, okay, the opposite of a demon is an angel and I'm not strictly speaking an angel, but," giggle, "I'm definitely on the sacred side of the sacred and the profane. I'm, ah, I'm the Second Coming."
"Why would the Second Coming need to sneak anywhere . . . ? Never mind that, if you want to prove you're not a demon you can, hm. Let me think a second."
He knows demons can't touch crucifixes, but he also knows demons can be sneaky and have powers he doesn't understand. If she's a demon then possibly the entire bar is an illusion of some sort under her control, which means borrowing a crucifix from Bar isn't a solid test. But there's the one on the wall in the hallway outside the door he came in, and he can probably reach it without letting the door close.
"Would you mind waiting here for just a moment?" he asks, getting off the barstool and moving toward the door without turning his back on her.
Okay, so if she's telling the truth it's different Gods per world. And they might not always agree with each other? That sounds weird enough that he'd wonder why a demon would bother making it up, except it's obvious, she wants to break into Eden and thinks he can help somehow. Argh, he's got too many conflicting models of the world in his head and they're messing up each other's predictions.
Bruce opens his door and manages to grab the crucifix off the wall while propping the door open with an outstretched foot; being a teenage mess of arms and legs that go on for days is useful sometimes. He brings it back to Christina and holds it out, close enough to be within her reach but hopefully not close enough to look like a threat.
...She giggles some more, covering her mouth with her hands.
"Get up, get up," she says, bending down to take his hands and assist him with this. "You had every reason to doubt! I'm never going to criticize someone for testing the reasonable breadth of hypothesis space! Besides, I'm not your Lord, different universes, remember?"
He cooperates with being helped up because this requires less having a functioning brain than anything else. "I, um. Thank you?" He really has no idea what is supposed to happen next or whether there are any actions it makes sense to take. What do you say to an alien Messiah who wants to steal the fruits of the Two Trees?
The mental contrast between the woman standing in front of him and the thousand-eyed flaming wheels that generally say that line in history and movies is enough to snap him out of whatever he was snapped into; he chokes back a hysterical giggle. "Nope, sorry, pulling myself together now. So, um, I totally understand wanting to make everyone in your universe immortal? That makes a lot of sense. But also, breaking into Eden and stealing the Apple of Life is like the most classic movie-villain bad idea of all time. So I don't really know what to say here."
"God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life," he recites. "Anyone who accepts Jesus as their savior and loves Him with their whole heart is redeemed by grace and goes to Heaven."
(This is a group which does not include Bruce. Bruce is too full of doubts, of God's goodness and His omnipotence and pretty much everything there is to doubt, not to be damned. But he's not going to bring it up.)
(Actually, now that he lets himself think about it, it's possible that if he dies in Milliways, or in Christina's universe, he might end up somewhere other than Hell. It's not certain enough to be worth slitting his wrists over immediately, but it's something to think about.)
"Only one or two a year? That's--that's really good. In my world it's maybe five, ten percent? It could be more or less. We don't have a way to count."
He's spent several nights he couldn't have slept anyway reading the analyses: extrapolations from Dante and from other prophets' less comprehensive but equally terrifying visions and the rarer but less terrifying visions of the souls in Heaven, theological speculation on the fate of everyone in smote cities, differences in self-reported level of faith when you hooked people up to lie detectors and extremely abstruse discources on whether various heresies are sufficient to make someone's faith in their concept of Jesus too disconnected from the true Jesus to render them unsaved. He didn't understand the stuff about the heresies, but the conclusions they came to matched the range of guesses from other sources.
Bruce lets out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "So you think people from my world who die in Yours won't go to my world's Hell? And, wait, fix it, You think whatever makes nearly everyone in Your world be saved is something You could do in mine?"
(Bruce has given a lot of thought to whether a version of himself who was faithful enough to be saved would be the same person, and concluded that the answer is "maybe" but that the modification would be worth it even if it was "definitely not".)
"I think in my world you go to hell for being a nazi rapist who tortures babies in his free time, not for not being a Christian. I think there's no reason to think souls can jump from my world to your Hell. I don't think I can make everybody believe in Jesus hard enough, I think with enough resources and ingenuity I can squish Hell."
"Wow. That would . . . that would be amazing. I have no idea if God would permit it, Hell is supposed to be just and deserved but also God was willing to send His Son to die to save us from it but also if He wanted to destroy it He would have . . ." Bruce trails off with a shrug. "It's a pity you got me instead of someone who understands theology at all."
"In my world, let me try to remember this right, nobody was originally supposed to go to Hell, but Lucifer--um, one of the brightest angels--rebelled and was cast out of Heaven and Hell was created to hold him, and then humans were created with free will and chose to disobey God, and that created sin, which separates us from God and condemns us all to Hell unless we're redeemed by grace." Also he's curious how Hell can be an accident but he doesn't want to sound like he's questioning Christina's omnipotence or anything.
"There are no fallen angels in my world, demons are just something that...happens. Probably spontaneously, but it's possible they're caused by intelligent action somehow. Hell was an unintended side effect of the invention of a self-perpetuating system of immortal souls and there's a lot even I don't know for sure about it."
Bruce runs his hands nervously through his hair. "So. There's a thing I should really clarify. Which is that. My world's God claims to be omnipotent but I have a lot of doubts about it. Because there are things where it seems like He's acting under constraints. So I don't actually know." Bruce gets steadily twitchier over the course of this explanation.
Bruce is failing high school theology (a predictable consequence of spending every class trying to think about anything else), but he has enough context to remember which one that is. "Huh. I guess enough other stuff is different that that isn't really evidence of anything on my end. So, um, what happens now?"
They certainly look a lot chiller than even the least frightening angels he's seen in pictures, but on the other hand they're not pictures, they're right actually there. Bruce gets up, aware that he's making either the best or the worst decision of his life (or was that when he entered the bar?) and opens the door.
The only reason Bruce doesn't start leaning against the door like something is going to try to get in is that he was already doing it. He makes several sounds that are probably the beginnings of words, then says "I agree on the goal there but frankly I am both useless and terrified."
The single book with the largest quantity of relevant content is the Bible, but there are also a handful of things written by demons on how to operate unnoticed on Earth, plus one treatise that was technically made publicly available before all extant copies, the theologian who wrote it, and said theologian's house were destroyed in a spontaneous fire. (Most governments banned all of his earlier publications after that, just to be on the safe side, but Bar only cares that something was published at some point.)
"Fuckin' me," she mutters under her breath at this anecdote.
If she hands out various copies of the Bible to the angels she has in here and splits the treatise and the demonic texts between her and Bruce, they can get through it reasonably quickly. What's the verdict?
From the Bible, they learn that either God can neither teleport people nor reliably predict the outcomes of His actions, or He really likes sending ineffective plagues on the Egyptians.
The theological treatise looks, at first glance, to be surprisingly benign for something that got its author killed. It's a rather abstruse document on how Heaven, being a realm of Spirit distinct from matter, must have different properties of space and time, with some speculation on what those properties are. For instance, Heaven and Hell as seen in prophecy both have a top and a bottom, and the treatise suggests that the local equivalent of gravity points in a single direction everywhere rather than toward masses. Furthermore, since Heaven and Hell are perfect opposites, they must have opposite directionality, such that objects in Hell fall towards objective cosmic up.
The demon books put the treatise into some very valuable context. Apparently a handful of demons took an interest in interplanar physics after seeing a piece of Heaven torn off and turned into Hell, and they theorize that that event may have caused lingering instability. This has a couple of consequences. For one thing, the bottom edge of Heaven is "adjacent" in higer-dimensional space to the bottom edge of Hell, and it may be possible for a small quantity of spirit to move from one to the other as the boundary "twitches" back and forth. Perhaps more interestingly, there's some speculation that a sufficiently large release of (earthly rather than spiritual) energy might destabilize a portion of spiritual spacetime, with disastrous results for any beings in the area. The first batch of books they get doesn't include reports of anyone testing that theory empirically.
He stares for a bit. "There are programming languages where the equality operator is intransitive? I guess if someone wanted it to be a metaphor for the Trinity . . . I'm sorry, I've gone off on a tangent, where were we, angels. Uh, I guess what to do about angels depends on, um, what you're . . . planning to do to God?" It's not the easiest subject to wrap his mind around, people planning to do things to God.
There's a lot of "why". There's a lot of attempts to count days. There's a lot of people writing their own names over and over, or the names of their loved ones, or snatches of poetry. Sometimes there are messages for later arrivals--"fewer demons that way", "beware: ants", "even despair has an end". Nothing that looks like anyone expected a living person to read it.
Wow. Hoo boy. They're gonna need to import so many therapists. Not that she didn't realize that, but. "Even despair has an end" is definitely extra concerning.
If she's going to deploy conventional explosives against God (why the fuck is that even a thing that might work) with minimal damage to innocent bystanders...is there anything published about, like, the layout of Heaven.
There is! Prophets have had visions of Heaven, and theologians have pieced them together into some fairly complete maps. Like Hell, Heaven is a finite space in the shape of a cylinder. It has nine levels, arranged vertically: the region where the saved dwell in bliss, seven levels occupied by the seven angelic choirs, and then God's throne at the top. Each layer is immediately recognizable by its inhabitants; unlike the diversity of forms seen in demons, each kind of angel is pretty similar to the others of that kind, and they're all different kinds of extremely weird-looking, starting with six-winged humanoids and going from there.
It's a pretty big finite space and there's only ever been a finite number of people. There's a theological debate about whether it gets bigger as more people die or just gets more densely populated. It's fairly dense in at least some areas, but since there aren't any buildings and the saved just stand in one place singing songs of praise to God this doesn't really complicate things much.
People who are confident they're saved usually talk about Heaven like they expect it to be wonderful, but. Bruce remembers being very small, four or five, and asking if there were dogs in Heaven, and being told that eternal bliss was better than having a dog. He didn't totally buy it, even then.
"Yeah. Pretty much."
Bruce keeps getting these statements he doesn't know what to do with, and every time he tries to do something with them he gets another one. Maybe instead he can just stare at his own feet for a bit.
"What else do you need to know before you can--do what you're planning to do?"
She bites her lip. "I think I'm going to spend a little more time seeing if I can get anything useful from your world's literature just in case, and then I'm going to go into your world, teleport to your world's God, and conjure a little bit of antimatter."
Bruce is aware that however this turns out it will be an important moment in history. Hopefully if someone writes a book about it they'll leave him out of it. Hopefully enough people will live to remember this that that's a concern.
He says solemnly, "Good luck," and opens the door.
As soon as God realizes there's an intruder in Heaven, he throws a massive amount of lightning. But the matter-antimatter explosion is already flooding the area with energy.
God can handle energy. The spacetime of Heaven, already under strain, cannot. Reality starts to tear and fold into isolated islands like a pot of soapy water getting stirred into foam.
Christina might want to find somewhere else to be before the place she's standing stops being a place.
There's nothing immediately noticeable in her vicinity, but there's a lot of telepathic yelling getting broadcast to whoever can hear it.
Hello? !?!?!
What?
Help? We are so alone
Holy holy holy is the Lord of Hosts
Where is everyone?!
Praised be the One to Whom our praise is due?
Where are we? Where . . . am I?
What??? We're scared? We're scared
Are there not normally humans where you are? she asks the one who said, "There are humans here!"
My name is Christina, she tells the one who asked, "Who are you?"
What was the light like? she asks the one who asked, "Where did the light go?"
How is it quiet? Everyone's talking, she asks the one who said, "It's so quiet."
Can I help? she asks the one who said, "Lonely. Alone."
Gradually the chaos of voices resolves into a few, coming from very different directions, each more coherent and somehow larger than before.
We are not where we were. We were in Heaven, and then everything was coming apart, and now we're here, and the humans who were with us in Heaven are here too, but they aren't singing.
We are the Archangels. We used to be the Host.
The light was Heaven. The light was the LORD. The light was everything.
The Song has stopped. We hear the other Choirs but we are not one with them. We are the Thrones only.
We don't know.
A brilliant streak of light shoots across the sky and vanishes into the distance. People are staring off after it in awe.
"Naked mole rats are a random animal I picked out of thin air. Wireheading is the practice of overstimulating the pleasure centers of your brain so that you perceive literally nothing but bliss, so called because the idea originated in science fiction stories where it involved sticking wires in your brain to run electric current through it."
Souls that lose their bodies in the mortal plane appear at the edge of Heaven with new bodies attached. As of about a minute ago, Heaven can no longer hang onto them, so they get dumped into outer space at the edge of the mortal plane, where they then proceed to die again, rinse and repeat. A sphere a light-year across is very large, and only a handful of people die every second, so the accumulating asteroid field of dead bodies is not very dense yet.
There are two pieces of good news, though. First, the people who went to Heaven before God died got made indestructible, so they're still hanging out in space being confused. And second, in the absence of a Final Judgement, nobody new is going to Hell.