Chapter 38:
Cute walked barefoot through the ashes of a dead world. She had a strict policy of non-intervention until after death, so there was nothing she could do to save the Earth from itself. The Muslim population had grown innately in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Russia and Europe. It also took over whole new regions via the liberals' bright idea of open borders immigration into the Anglosphere and elsewhere. Meanwhile the populations of other nations had continuously sunk due to feminism, resulting in the relative balance of power shifting to Islam's favor. After inheriting the nuclear arsenal of Russia, the USA and Europe via majority democratic vote and declaring itself the Caliphate, it demanded the entire rest of the world surrender or perish in holy flame. To be fair, they weren't wholly motivated by religion. The black-Muslim billions, who had already wrecked their own countries due to a combination of socialism, incompetence and corruption, would have starved to death without plundering the outside world's economies for their endless needs, so they would've done the exact same thing regardless.
China responded with a slew of bioweapons targeting both crops and humans that its own region had been given immunities to on the outside world, its population too small and aged to counter the surging Islamic hordes in conventional war. The Muslims had countered with the thousands of nuclear warheads Russia and the USA had set aside for each other, and East/Southeast Asia had disappeared in nuclear fire. The survivors of the worldwide conflagration had then died of hunger as nuclear winter prevented any crop growth and bioweapons killed off all remaining feedstock.
The pitiful space stations and otherworld colonies that had begun to develop also starved or froze or suffocated to death for lack of continuous additional supplies from Earth. They hadn't prioritized self sufficiency and paid the price. The same was true of any submarine crews.
A few humans had survived using hydroponics and underground caves with nuclear fission as their fuel, but the diseases and radiation had rendered them sterile, or too isolated to find enough others to start a community with, and so they had simply given up and overdosed on drugs. Heck, that was common even before the cataclysm.
It was odd wandering across the Earth and seeing nothing green left. The plants hadn't received any sunlight in nearly a decade and all wilted away. The animals had all starved for lack of plants. All that was left were some bottom feeding fungi and bacteria.
She had checked and double checked, but the very last humans had passed through her afterlife sorting system earlier this afternoon. It had been a 15 year old girl and her 12 year old sister who had been living in a secure bunker, the children of some Chinese bigwig. There had been food for another fifty years but they had agreed to commit mutual suicide knowing that no matter how long they lived together no children would come of it, and no one was left to come to their rescue.
There was no prospect for re-evolution in the time period remaining for the Earth. In just a billion years, the sun would grow too hot, vaporizing the oceans and then annihilating the atmosphere, hard boiling the Earth like an egg into a perfectly lifeless corpse. That was even before it went red giant.
No, Earth's tale was done. The souls of mankind had all been dealt with as she saw mete. Some were given new lives in new worlds, some had been given special bonuses due to Cute being partial to them, some were sent to Hell to be tortured for some indistinct period until they a) realized the error of their ways and b) paid for the harm they had done others, many were reincarnated with no memory of their previous lives (a blessing in most cases), and many more were simply annihilated as being too tired, worn out or dysfunctional to have any additional use.
The souls of Earth were judged according to Cute's sense of justice. There were no further appeals and no law codes people could rely upon that would guide her decision making. If she didn't like someone, if she found them offensive, after watching them across the entirety of their lives, they received a bad fate. If she liked someone, if she found them attractive, after watching them across the entirety of their lives, they received a good fate. And if she found people uninteresting they received a mediocre fate.
She had been spinning out inhabited universes for a long time now, rewarding her most favored champions with playgrounds of their own, in the hopes that they would found good worlds with good life trajectories due to their founder's virtue. The loss of Earth did not come as a major blow to her. Yes, there had been a lot of people on Earth, but it still represented less than 1% of mankind's total population. It was not the first planet to die out and it would not be the last. She had gotten used to seeing every possible manner of human ugliness that could be imagined coming to fruition. But she had also seen every manner of human goodness play out time and time again across the many worlds. Love, beauty, truth, justice, grace, courage, piety, temperance, stoicism, kindness, curiosity, playfulness, discipline, teamwork, altruism, perseverance, delight, joy, righteousness. . . Her omniscience meant she had seen it all, despite having done nothing to force them down the right path.
Which meant their sparks of divine goodness were just as brilliant as her own. And she loved and admired the mortal race despite their flaws.
Cute did not know when she had originally come to be. Before she knew it, she was, already formed in full, already with omnipotent faculties. She had come to be in a deep, dark void, with nothing outside of herself to interact with. It had been dreadfully dull for an infinite intellect, so she quickly decided to see what she could do to decorate the place. Her conclusion was that there needed to be sentient life, much like her own, that could make its own decisions about how they wished to live, so that she could always be interested in what they did next, and that it would be her job to punish the wicked and reward the just such that her life garden subtly but surely grew ever more resplendent with time.
It had taken billions of years for the universe to be born and life to evolve to sentience, so she had simply set her alarm clock and gone to sleep until the Neolithic Age where humans started getting their act together. After that she'd diligently been tracking the life and handling the afterlife of all her creations, a project that had managed to entertain her for tens of thousands of years.
The name she had given herself hadn't originally been Cute, it had been Amsynth. But she had been given many names by many people who worshiped her on many worlds, and she didn't mind humoring each of them with their own denominations. What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and so on.
Divine intervention was too powerful an impact on an established world, so if people wanted her blessings they had to do it on whole new worlds where her power couldn't disrupt people's previous free will decisions. This meant that everyone she had favored with an outrageous wish was also forced to build up their habitat from scratch. Of course, if someone had asked to be of average strength in a magical world, it was fine to insert them into one of her preexisting planes. But Christopher's wish had been especially ridiculous. Sailor Moon's Silver Crystal was powerful enough to destroy the entire universe, much less the abilities of his other wives, which he demanded all be translated intact and in full to his next life.
Earth was her first creation, and she had let its sentient inhabitants, modeled after her in mind, body and soul but not power and scope, do whatever they wanted with it. It had not been founded by a hand-picked primogeniture like her other projects. So she didn't exactly feel disappointed by their implosion. She hadn't expected much from them in the first place, except as a way to test souls that would then go on to greater things in other worlds. They had all started off as worms after all, so how much could you ask of them?
Earth had done its job, and she, their Creator, had done her job, and that's all there was to it.
Cute slapped her cheeks as she gazed forlornly at the devastation from the top of Mt. Everest, with only gray skies above and white snow below. The world was a hazy formless mirage in all directions. There was nothing left to see here.
"Right. It's time for a vacation." Cute said to herself. She froze time on all planes outside of Eden and relinquished her duties as God for the nonce. She wanted to spend some time healing her aching heart from the loss of her first child, Gaia, and she knew just the place and just the person to do it with. She had already received a plenitude of heartfelt invitations and heart-throbbing confessions from her favorite, so he shouldn't mind. After tens of thousands of years, she felt justified indulging herself for a bit.
Cute teleported to her Shrine and hopped off the altar, her white wings fluttering as they glided her bare feet gently to the wooden floor. "Kita-yo. Asobi mashou!" She said in as cheerful a voice as she could manage.
Kagome opened the sliding screen door adorned with paintings of various flowers and her mouth dropped in shock. Repressing her general tomboyishness, she dropped into dogeza position. "Cute-sama, we're graced by your presence!"
"Umu," Cute nodded regally. "You have done a great job as my miko. The shrine looks great. I'll be moving in here for now, so you can serve as my attendant from here on."
"As you wish." Kagome said with her forehead to the ground.
"This is a convenient time, so I'll ask you now, would it be okay if I married Christopher too?" Cute asked hopefully.
"I think that's something that would require everyone's opinion." Kagome couldn't keep up with the pace of events.
"Of course I'll be asking their permission too, but I just wanted to know how you felt since you're already here." Cute responded.
"I don't think it would make any difference, at this point." Kagome sighed. "100, 101, what does it matter? Besides, the two of you met before any of us so if anything we should be asking for permission to impose on the two of you. . ."
"I hoped you would say something like that. Of course, I modified your personalities to be fine with polygamy from the beginning, so. . ." Cute trailed off, tapping her lip. "Oh, you can get up now, if we're all going to be wives of the same man then I'd prefer to be treated like a sister and a friend than a Goddess."
"Thank you." Kagome said, standing up and brushing off her knees. "I'm not actually good at bowing and scraping, even though I was chosen to be your priestess."
"I'm your Creator, you all didn't exist except as storybook characters before me, so I'd like to know -- are you glad to be alive?" Cute asked.
"Indubitably." Kagome responded with fierce affirmation. "All the more so now that I know Christopher wasn't making that part up. In my memory my whole past life was real, so it was always jarring to wonder if he hadn't just abducted us all here, even given all the source work evidence."
"I trusted him to treat you all well, based on what I'd seen up until the day he died, so I thought it would be okay to let him live it up a little." Cute justified herself to the abducted, brainwashed and modified bride.
"I have a question for you then." Kagome responded. "If he'd asked for one or two wives, would you still have stranded us on this deserted planet?"
"No." Cute replied. "If you couldn't live happily ever after, I would have made other arrangements. But I thought a fresh start was what Christopher truly wanted, and I trusted you guys could work something out, so I granted his wish behind the wish."
"Then another question, why does God wish to marry Christopher of all things?" Kagome asked what perhaps should have been her first question.
"Because I want a child too!" Cute pouted. "All of you just keep making more and more and I've never even had one."
"Err, that might explain the marriage part, but Christopher remains an enigma. . ." Kagome responded. Were children really something that enviable?
"Christopher is my favorite person in all the multiverse, so of course I'd prefer marrying him over any other." Cute nodded to herself convincedly.
"I have an excuse to love Christopher. You input the long relationship I had built up with Inuyasha as in truth being my relationship with him, and then banned any questioning of this feeling, so I've felt like our marriage was a natural and foregone conclusion from the beginning. But what's your excuse for wanting to be one among 100 wives to a lecherous otaku?" Kagome asked.
Cute smiled to herself just thinking how much she loved him, mulling over how to explain herself. "Christopher values things correctly. He disdains the disdainful and honors the honorable. His judgment is supreme. Even when I think of something as no big deal, when I investigate his thinking, his appraisal, I realize that he was right and I was wrong. He's taught me the beauty and wonder and greatness of so many things, that I would've overlooked as pebbles on the road. Kagome, you are one of those things. You and all the other wives, all the other stories you came from, he saw the value in them that I could not, not until I learned them from him. And for that he has my eternal gratitude. I may have omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and omnibenevolence, but his eye for the true value of things is more divine than mine."
"I'd rather be valued by Christopher, someone whose valuations can be trusted, just 101th as much as any other boy's total affection. He's already said he loves me, and that made me feel better than anything else anyone else has ever said or done. I can't imagine marrying anyone else. What's the use of hoarding a loser to myself? I'd rather share a winner."
"Of course, the only reason I granted him any wish he wanted in the first place, is because I thought he was truly wise in his first life, and I wanted to see what he would do with a world that bent to his will. But I had no idea how fun, how perfect, how loving Eden would turn out to be. I'm so envious of you all. Do you know what I've been doing these past 70 years? And all the while, Christopher just kept making Paradise better and better. . ." Cute chewed on her wingbone in envious frustration comparing their lives.
"What's it like elsewhere? All I have are my storybook memories to compare things with." Kagome asked with a hint of concern. Cute-sama was behaving energetically, but it seemed like a great deal of sorrow had been contained in those words.
"There are around 1,000 inhabited planes, all with different rules and different people. Most only live on one planet, with much more primitive technology than what you guys have here. A few are interstellar and intergalactic civilizations, which though impressive materially speaking. . .have all become too regimented and repetitive for my tastes. They have lots of people and they're all so bland. I think it's great that they found out a way to all get along, but, hmmm. . ." Cute trailed off, not knowing precisely what she wanted or why.
"Ah!" Cute clapped a fist into an open palm, her face lighting up. "Tsunderes! There aren't any tsunderes!"
Kagome almost toppled over in disbelief. Entire intergalactic civilizations had been written off due to a lack of moe?
"It's not only that. I don't remember anything cute about them. There weren't any lolis, yanderes, puppies, kittens, kemonomimis, maids, mahou shoujos, princesses or brocons. People are grown in vats, mass manufactured already in fully adult form, and embedded with all the training they need by AI's because they don't have any parents. Then they go and do something 'productive,' but the only product is material things. And then the cycle just repeats."
"In every interstellar civilization?" Kagome asked disbelievingly.
"No, that's just an example. But it's all more or less super efficient like that. Everyone lost their humanity and emotions along the way, because at some point it was decided they were irrational, inefficient, or inconvenient. Some of the universes I founded don't even have humans any more. They're weird creepy slime molds and gigantic floating computer chip cubes and the like. All their thoughts are totally alien. I understand all things, so I understand what they're doing all day, but I don't understand why anyone would want to do those things. I consign them all to oblivion upon death because, really, what can you do in a situation like that?"
"Then there's this place, Exocet, where brains are just sitting in rows and rows as far as the eye can see, fed a steady drip of pleasure-inducing drugs, immortal, unthinking, perfectly content, upkept by machines until I guess entropy wipes them out trillions of years from now. What's with that?" Cute snorted in disgust.
"There is one plane that's always fun. They've been at war for over a thousand years now, and right when you think one faction is getting the upper hand, somebody stabs them in the back and it all goes back to chaos. It's lasers and explosions and all sorts of intrigues and gallant deeds all day long. I think they live to fight, and I guess that's one way to keep things interesting. But again, it isn't cute."
"And cute is justice." Kagome summarized the only teaching they had received from God.
"Exactly! Awwww. Coming here really soothes the soul. Kagome, can I hug you?"
"We're going to be sisters, right?" Kagome smiled affectionately. Of course, there might have been the fear of divine wrath annihilating the planet if she had responded otherwise guiding her response.
Cute dived into Kagome's arms and nuzzled her cheeks against Kagome's breasts, her wings folding around Kagome's back in a double embrace. "Everything's so warm and fuzzy and endearing here on Eden. I love how you all flirt with each other, trading insults and compliments like they're just different flavors of ice cream. There's so much honesty here, but also more than enough kindness to smooth it all out. I know you've only begun, so it could still all go wrong, but you're the sole high-tech plane with so many adorable things still remaining."
"Glad to be of service?" Kagome smiled, patting Cute-sama on the head.
"Christopher knew who to choose. Together, you've surpassed my wildest dreams. Before, I thought humans were best off with swords and sorcery. They're constantly fighting off monsters, the population is always low, and every day is a lot of hard work just getting by, but at least the people there felt alive, needed and appreciated. I thought perhaps that was the best mankind could do. But Eden proved me wrong. You all have surpassed fantasy with your own breed of sci fi. I want to live here, where life is easy but still passionately lived. This is the place to have a child."
"I'm sure Christopher will be happy to oblige." Kagome laughed tremulously. How long did God intend to hug her? And did this mean she was slated for another round of pregnancy too? Knowing Chris, it wouldn't do to leave anyone out. . .
