Chapter 40:

　　"Cute-sama daio!" Cute burst out of the shrine entrance the moment I scattered a donation of coins into the altar box. She literally flew into my arms, and before I knew it I was spinning in circles embracing God as she nestled her head against my chest.

　　"Cute-sama!" I exclaimed, not knowing what else to say. This was the biggest shock in my life. Even getting run over by a truck seemed like a much more normal plot development.

　　"I've listened to your prayers. You said you loved me. So here I am. Let's get married and have children!" Cute-sama looked up into my eyes excitedly.

　　Oh snap. I had confessed to her. She was also the perfect woman. Blonde haired, blue-eyed, fourteen with angel wings, innocent and pure, accommodating and generous, everything you could ever want in a woman. There was no way I could play my feelings for her off as 'I meant that as a friend.' I had meant it exactly and completely as someone who wanted to have sex with her. Besides, she was an all knowing God, so lying wouldn't work in the first place!

　　"Cute-sama, I'm honored by your feelings, but marriage is a closed circle. I can't just add in more people than was originally agreed upon. My wives and I share an understanding. If I break that, it means I don't respect them, which would instantly transform them all from waifus into whores. Even if it's Cute-sama, that's not something I'm willing to do." I tried to put her down gently.

　　"I knew you'd say that, so I asked all 100 of your wives already. The unanimous reply was daikange!" Cute-sama squeezed herself even tighter against me, eyes sparkling. This was bad. The thrill of embracing the one girl I always wanted but could never have for the first time in my life was causing certain physiological chain reactions reason could no longer refute.

　　"Rewind. You know how I feel. Between your perfect beauty, the kindness you showed me on that day, and your cute personality, I couldn't help but fall for you from the very beginning. But it's been 70 years since then. You never even talked to me even after all the times I came to pray. I'd given up on ever seeing you again. Why the sudden change of heart?" I asked.

　　"I listened to everything you said. Not only when you prayed to me, I've been listening in to everything you've ever done in your life, not only on Eden, but on Earth too. I'm always at your side. It's just that God can't intervene in mortal affairs without destroying what makes them most precious to me, their free will. So I had to stay transparent every time and pretend I wasn't blushing scarlet from your praise." Cute-sama drew little circles on my chest with her index finger plaintively.

　　"Do you invade everyone's privacy like this?" I moaned. I had thought, said and done a lot of embarrassing things over the years. She'd kept track of all of them?

　　"Yes and no. I catalogue everything everywhere and know all about it in the back of my mind, but I only pay attention to the people I love unless there's some need to do otherwise. And Christopher, I love you more than anyone else in the entire history of mankind. That's why I want to marry you and bear your children. And that's why I watch what you're up to all the time, like a ravenous wolf. You bring me joy. That's why I couldn't help it anymore and I had to be at your side. I had to touch you and tell you how I felt. Just watching wasn't enough anymore." Cute-sama replied.

　　"But doesn't this constitute an intervention in mortal affairs?" I asked.

　　"I'm on vacation. I've temporarily forsaken the status of God and descended to your plane to live like anyone else. The body of a human, but the mind of a God!" Cute-sama did a cute pose.

　　Are you Jesus or Detective Conan??

　　"So long as I don't order anyone around it should be fine, right?" Cute-sama looked up at me with pleading eyes.

　　"Of course it's okay. I don't suddenly feel any less free with you around." I reassured her. "But then why the sudden desire to go on vacation? Have you done this before?"

　　"I'm a virgin!" Cute-sama protested. "I didn't even know about feelings like these until I met you!"

　　"That didn't come out right." I apologized quickly. "I'm just worried about you. It all seems so sudden, so maybe you're rushing into marriage due to emotion instead of reason, and then a few months or years down the line you'll realize this wasn't what you really wanted or needed. After all, I'm just a normal guy, and you're Cute-sama. I can't marry someone if there's a chance it will just end in divorce. That's not a real marriage. Even if it isn't an insult to my 100 waifus, it would still be an insult to you. I can't sleep with a Goddess with any foundation short of eternal love."

　　Cute-sama looked at me and then looked away. Then she walked barefoot back to the porch of her shrine. There seemed to be some sort of electrostatic force that kept an invisible barrier between her and the ground, so she never actually dirtied her feet or felt any pain, but it was so thin it looked nearly the same. It carried an ethereal aura like so many things about her. She really wasn't like any other girl I'd ever seen. She, and her attractiveness, was an order above. She sat down, stretching the hem of her pure white one-piece dress out so it wouldn't be caught beneath her legs. And then she burst into tears.

　　"Christopher. The Earth is dead. I couldn't do anything to stop it, but I had to watch the entire sorry course. I wanted to shout at them that they were wrong, that they were making the wrong choices, that it wouldn't work out like this, but I couldn't. And now, instead, when it's all too late for any of it to matter, I'm burning billions of souls in Hell. Can you ever forgive me?" Cute-sama begged.

　　I rushed up to her porch and knelt in the dirt, taking her hand in mine and kissing its back, pledging my fealty to her as her knight. "Forgive you? I want to thank you! Don't you remember? I hated everything in the world and everyone in it. Now you're finally giving them what they deserve, what I've been wishing upon them all this time. Justice! Are you sure you aren't burning too few?" I encouraged her with visions of bloody revenge.

　　Cute-sama laughed between her sobs. "Too few? Christopher, there's over ten billion of them screaming in pain. . ."

　　"If they made Cute-sama cry, they deserve infinitely worse!" I kissed the back of her hand again. "Zamamiro! These people! These Terrans! They had all science, all philosophy, all nature pointing out to them right from wrong. It should have been easy! It should have been simple! Earth could have become so good, and instead they ignored it all, preferred their obvious delusions, and threw it all away. Cute-sama isn't to blame. You set up the world to be a place where humanity could flourish. They did it all to themselves!"

　　"I didn't make the Earth for it to be blown up by imbeciles." Cute-sama continued blubbering. "I didn't think it would end this way. I only wanted people to be interesting, to make decisions using their own reason which may differ from mine, and learn from them. I just wanted to stop being so lonely. Why do people have such tremendous gifts, such amazing faculties, and yet always, always, always. . ."

　　Cute-sama was the goddess of all Creation. The Earth had managed to overpopulate itself beyond any reasonable measure, ending up with over ten billion, while Eden had a grand total of a few thousand. For the last 70 years she had been watching 99.99998% of mankind revel in absolute evil, ignorance and darkness, with only 0.00002% of mankind serving as a relief valve.

　　Was it any wonder she wanted a vacation? A chance to live in a world where 99.99998% of people instead brought her joy? Were company worth having? Were a reminder of why life was worth living? No, it wasn't a surprise. If God had a heart, there's no way she could have viewed Earth's final century with equanimity. It had to have been driving her insane.

　　"I just want to feel hope again. I'm full of so much despair. Do you know what the despair of ten billion people dying in a couple years feels like? Or the millions who slowly wasted away afterwards, waiting for someone to intercede, for me to intercede, to help them, and never getting it? Because this was the fate they chose for themselves, and so it was the fate they would receive. The last two people on Earth were a seven year old and a four year old pair of sisters in an underground bunker when the nukes rained down. They lived for eight years waiting for something to change, but of course nothing could change, because the whole world was dead. I sat and watched their despair creep up on them day by day until they couldn't take it anymore and killed themselves. And I was relieved. Relieved that I wouldn't have to taste their feelings any longer. That it was all finally over. I reincarnated them into the happy brain world because I figured they could use a long break. Christopher. . .you want eternal love? I'll be as eternal as you wish. I could use a long break too." Cute-sama mewed in a pleading high pitch.

　　I picked Cute-sama up. She was amazingly light. Or maybe her wings could let her levitate even when they weren't flapping? There was only one decent thing left for me to do. I wiped the tears from under her eyes away, and turned her face up towards me. "Let's do it. Cute, I've loved you since the day we met. Will you marry me, make love to me, and bear my children?"

　　"Yes!" Cute-sama proclaimed, and then she finally dived into me and kissed me on the lips.

* * *

Girls' Side:

　　Cute trod barefoot through the endless corridors of Hell. The prison cells were each their own entire world, a simulacrum where people could learn the costs of their errors via experiencing the pain they had visited upon others during life. The primary sin of virtually everyone on Earth had been the same, "I valued the wrong things." But there were billions of permutations of the same sin. None of them had cared who they had hurt or what sacred principles they had defiled by valuing the wrong things in life, so now they must answer to Her, and be made to care, in death, or else the maxims they swore by would be allowed to stand. Something contrary to justice, something false, must never be allowed to stand. So before she would let any of these people die or be reincarnated, they would have to admit they were evil and their beliefs were false. They must be taught by Hell what they refused to learn on Earth. And Cute could see through all lies, so their only escape from Hell came when they truly repented of their sins. Just wanting to get out of Hell and saying whatever was not enough. Until they realized why they were mistaken and why they should have valued the right things, the lessons would continue.

　　Everyone here had the mental acuity to do the right thing and understand the truth. They weren't drooling retards incapable of figuring out left from right. In fact, life was very simple and anyone could grasp its core, if they only wished to do so. She wasn't giving these people calculus exams. She merely wanted them to admit the difference between good and evil, true and false, right and wrong, just and unjust, sacred and degrading, beautiful and ugly, joyous and pleasurable, rational and irrational, purposeful and purposeless, meaningful and meaningless, sincere and fickle, integrity and hypocrisy, syllogisms and fallacies, reality and superstition, etc. She wanted people to understand the difference between history and convenient, self-serving narratives.

　　Billions upon billions of her patients were taking remedial classes where they watched the life of Mohammed, as he raped, massacred, plundered and lied his way through life. There they saw the complete ignobility, the utter selfishness, the degrading materialism of his life, that created an entire religion simply to flatter and serve himself. If someone hurt his pride he would suddenly have a revelation that Allah wanted her dead. If a girl caught his eye he would murder her husband and rape her as his new millionth wife later that night. Aisha was only six years old when she was married off to Mohammed, while she was still playing with dolls. She had no understanding of what was going on, no feelings for Mohammed whom she had hardly met before, and no ability to decline. He consummated this forced marriage when she was only nine years old, at an age when any sexual activity could only be painful and damaging to the child.

　　The man they worshiped as the prophet of Allah, essentially Cute-sama herself, they were saying she had sanctioned a child rapist. She would not allow this heresy to stand. Mohammed was not her prophet. He was a psychopath who had constructed the biggest lie on Earth simply as a way to get all the wealth, fame, power, sex and petty vengeance he could before he died.

　　There was a separate ward for the idiots who had fallen for the ridiculousness of Christianity, the obvious self-serving lies of Joseph Smith, and the endless ritualistic nonsense of Hinduism. There were so many people who needed complete deprogramming before they could realize what a ridiculous farce they had lived for all their lives. How was it possible for three to equal one? Did these people even listen to themselves? And why on Earth would she send her only begotten son to be crucified because she loved the world? What the hell use did the world have from Jesus being crucified? And why would she waste her only son on scum like that who would crucify innocents?

　　It was mind-numbing how long it would take to get these people back to the rationality of 2 year olds. At the age of 2 most people were more reasonable than they became as adults. The moment religious viruses were imparted into their brains it all went haywire from there.

　　Then there were the secular religions. Egalitarianism, victimology, environmentalism, socialism and the sadomasochistic cult of the value of hard work. Cute had no idea where these ideas had come from. For thousands of years the nobility had rightly understood that their lives were blessed because they worked less than the peasants. But around the time of the Protestant Reformation, a new and completely bizarre belief swept across the world, which said the Elect were those who did nothing but work all day every day, that work was the only useful activity in life, that workers were the only admirable people, and that whoever made the most money while working the hardest was the man closest to God.

　　Cute was completely flabbergasted. All the instincts she'd designed humans to evolve with were against work. Work was painful, degrading and dull. She wanted humans to avoid painful things, that's what pain was meant to do -- to warn you away from harmful things. She wanted people to avoid dull and repetitive things, so that they would try out new and interesting things every day -- that's what boredom was for. She wanted people to avoid serving others so that there would be more interesting variations between them, that's why she gave them all a will to power, a desire to be free, and a sense of pride when they could be true to themselves and conversely shame when they had to contort themselves to suit others.

　　Despite every instinct she'd implanted into mankind such that they would avoid pain, avoid repetition, and avoid servitude, somehow it had become the prevailing ethic of the world that the best people were the ones groaning in pain from heavy loads, working for bosses who insulted them all day, doing the exact same thing as they had done yesterday, the day before, the year before, and the decade before that.

　　It made Cute want to pull out her hair.

　　Or take egalitarianism. She had given people amazing faculties to suss out the quality of the people they met almost immediately. You could tell so much just from their looks, their deportment, their vocabulary, and their manners. It should have been possible to easily figure out that some people were better than others just by looking around and talking to people. This lie should have been exposed in about two hours of testing the hypothesis. And yet for hundreds of years it was held as a sacred and unquestionable truth by all the best and brightest. The 'right sort of people.'

　　Now, obviously, in order to convince yourself that your own eyes were lying to you every day, a theory had to be more complicated than 'everyone is equal.' The convoluted explanation was that everyone at birth was equal (Including the mentally ill? Including retards? Including those with severe physical defects?) and then they gradually became different due to the oppression of others, or conversely via unfairly obtained privileges. But this too was absurd and easily disproven through well published and well known facts -- for instance that the children of the richest black couples had lower SAT scores than the children of the poorest whites.

　　Or the fact that IQ was 80% hereditary so it was impossible for the environment to be doing anything. Or the fact that women were granted more graduate degrees than men and affirmative action the entire way up the corporate ladder but still earned less than men and contributed fewer serious improvements to quality of life in the form of scientific, artistic or philosophical advances.

　　In bizarro world, no matter how favorable an environment was made for women, even if the entire legal code was weighted in their favor, still, somehow, the 'environment' was oppressing them and privileging men.

　　What privilege? Was it the privilege of having unattractive bodies no one wanted or would trade anything for? Or the privilege of not being able to reproduce or nurse their children? Was it the privilege of generally attracting 0-1 people who might want to marry them, as opposed to the hundreds or millions who would come knocking at a girl's door if only she would show them the time of day? The privilege of divorce laws that gave women all your earnings for the rest of your life and all your children to her newly awarded single parent home? The privilege of being the vast majority of people involved in the criminal justice system, whether as perpetrators or victims? The privilege of having to fight all the wars? The privilege of a shorter average lifespan? The privilege of a suicide rate four times as high?

　　Cute had evolved women to all be national treasures at birth, and men to fall head over heels for them. The idea was that men, with their highly functional bodies and minds, would impress women by contributing to mankind as a whole. Genomically, economically, philosophically, scientifically, artistically, the men would give their all for the women and the children, and the women and the children would pay the men back with their love. That's all Cute had ever asked of them, but even that they had been unable to give. They demanded more from men in exchange for less, every year, until the point that the men were being taxed of everything they had and the money deposited directly at women's feet who had done absolutely nothing in return.

　　The entire dynamic had broken down, while women pretended to work at meaningless jobs that contributed nothing, somehow justifying their own existence as pseudo-men who no longer fulfilled either role. And in this androgynous, transgender, non-binary, homoerotic world, eventually no one was anything or served any purpose. Cute had evolved them to have useful callings, productive instincts, like love, lust, loneliness, gratitude, strength, dependability and charm. Where had it all gone? Why had it been traded in for a parade of barren freaks?

　　Who could look at the world (even before it blew up) and say it was a better place than it had been before?

　　Egalitarianism believed that everyone could eventually live like a white man and receive the same outcome as white men historically had -- in other words, they could be at the top of the world while contributing everything of value to the world. All that needed to happen was to privilege the historically oppressed and oppress the historically privileged, and it would all work out.

　　Hundreds of years later, as they ratcheted up this belief (because the only reason the theory had failed so far is because it hadn't been tried hard enough) to nigh infinity, blacks, women, Hispanics, Muslims, LGBT's and all the rest of the merry gang never did live like white men -- when prosperity is butchered on the altar of equality go figure there isn't much to go around -- and they never contributed like white men either. Science had ground to a halt. Infrastructure crumbled. Knowledge people used to all know was replaced with ignorance, superstition and lies. Cities became unsafe, property unguaranteed. Fossil fuels were replaced with less functional, unaffordable alternatives. Food became scarcer at the very time African populations swelled, propelled by the belief that all races were fungible units so blacks could do anything whites could do if they just moved to white countries and received proper educations, meaning they were all assets and carried zero costs. The lights started to go out. Any independent thinker who tried to get people to change course was accused of various thought crimes and sent to jail, their ideas scrubbed from public discourse and never allowed a fair hearing.

　　Men had no incentive to try, and women had no ability to succeed. This was because Cute had given women the incentives and men the abilities, and the two were supposed to trade between each other in order to prosper and grow. She had designed mankind to live in families, clans, tribes and nations. Not atomized, universal, non-binary fungible units, all capable of anything. You would think humanity could realize this just by looking at the animal kingdom, and how strict instinctual behavioral patterns adhered to the males and females of every species. That just maybe the same was evolved, inherent, and instinctually true of humans as well. But no, apparently all the clues she'd given them scattered across the entire planet was not enough to pierce the convenience of simply wishing for the opposite to be the case.

　　In order to teach feminists where they had gone wrong and why they were in Hell, she was raising them all from birth as men, and giving them a taste of how it felt to be on the other side. They would all suffer the consequences of what they as women had voted and argued for, and only at the age of seventy or so would she unlock their memories of originally having been women, the very vipers who had destroyed their own fake new lives. And if this wasn't enough to realize what they had done was wrong, they would live another male life, and another, and another, and each time be reminded at the end what they had said and done as women to ruin their own new lives, until eventually, at some point, they would admit the injustice they had done to the opposite sex. The unfair demands they had made, the untrue accusations they had made, the selfish heartbreaking romances they had toyed around with, they would learn how it felt in a way they couldn't help but understand. And once they had suffered a thousandfold what they had so eagerly dished out upon others, maybe then she could take their apology seriously.

　　Cute did not suffer fools to live. They would all learn. The secular narrative spreaders who ignored all the obvious facts on the ground in order to flatter themselves or destroy the objects of their envy, the religious navel-gazers who invented their own realities and blasphemed God, Herself, who didn't have anything to do with their bullshit scriptures, the people who simply lacked all discipline and acted like beasts, prey to every random appetite despite her having given them perfectly serviceable prefrontal cortexes that could regulate imprudent behavior, and the cruel ones who seemed to think their purpose in life was to hurt, maim, kill and dominate others just for the fun of it.

　　In a world that had become so putrescent that the best solution to everything was mass obliteration, tens of billions of souls had each independently contributed to the rot in their own special way. They had all done something to send Earth down this timeline. And each and every one of them would pay for it. Because Earth should not have died. She had given them the tools to live, to thrive, to reach the stars and never look back. But they had defiled the gift she had given them and spat in her face. They had taken their inheritance of hope and thrown it into an abyss of despair. And so they would pay, and pay, and pay, for all that was lost, and all that would now never be. They would pay and pay and pay until every last ounce of her frustration and disgust with them was squeezed out.

　　As their Creator, she felt she was owed something in return. Their lives were meant to be lived in such a way as to glorify God, to justify their creation. They had instead given her nothing but misery and disgrace. She was ashamed of them, ashamed of herself for having given birth to them. She felt as dirty as they were. And the only way to cleanse herself was to scrub all their souls clean, until at last, at the very end, they were the intellects she had wanted them to be and given them every opportunity to be. And then, purified and cleansed, they could honor God with their prayers and benedictions, and what was crooked would be set straight again.

　　It was up to them how long the process would take. But she was fine with it taking a good long while. The only currency they could pay back their betrayal with was suffering. It was too late for them to do any good now, and she felt like their suffering wasn't remotely up to par with what they had put Herself and other good people through. Not yet. Not even close. Let them pay and pay and pay.

* * *

　　"Cute-sama?" Christopher whispered into her ear as they lay in bed together.

　　"Mmm? What is it?" Cute turned over to look into his eyes, her nude body glowing like it was always at least encased in moonlight. Her wings, which had been conveniently folded up so that they wouldn't smack him in the face if he cuddled close to her back, stretched out again now that they were facing away from him, luxuriating in the extra room.

　　"It looked like you were having a bad dream. That's no good on a wedding night. I know the first time is only painful. . ." Christopher looked at her apologetically.

　　"You could never hurt me. Literally. My body is immortal and indestructible. I just let my hymen split apart and disappear for your sake, so you'd believe me when I said I was a virgin." Cute smiled coddlingly. "It felt wonderful from start to finish. After watching you with so many girls, the moment the same thing started happening to me, the moment my dreams of you touching me came true, I was already the happiest I could possibly be. Between the euphoria of being here in your arms, in your bed, as your wife, I'm not even sure the sex ever registered."

　　"Then instead of thinking about painful things, let's try and see if. . . now that the initial euphoria is over with and all. . ."

　　"If little Chris can make me feel good all on his own?" Cute smiled and cupped his erection with her small soft hand. "You're my husband so you can take me whenever you want you know. Whether I'm asleep or awake, here or anywhere, I'm yours forever. You don't need a reason. If you want me, take me. You earned that right once and for all when I promised to honor and obey you, you don't have to earn it all over again each and every time. And if I feel good fine, and if I don't that's fine too. So long as you enjoy my body I feel special. . .just being able to give that to you. That's the only happiness I'll ever need."

　　"I feel better when you feel better, so you need to orgasm for my sake." Christopher explained.

　　"Well, if my husband insists. . ." Cute shimmied herself tight against his larger torso laying side by side and slowly settled herself over and around his penis. "Now thrust carefully or little Chris will fall out. And kiss me while you thrust. If you do, I think I'll never stop cumming. After all, you may be used to these feelings, but this is my very first time. Ho-hum for you is still overwhelming over here."

　　"It's never ho-hum for me. Especially when it's our very first time." Chris kissed Cute on the mouth, and then opened her lips up and inserted his tongue even as he started ravaging her from below. She felt a shock and surge of pleasure twisting up her stomach just from the words. Her heart raced as her breasts squished into small saucers against his, and her comprehension of the universe narrowed to a singular blessed point.