Twelve young Earthlings appeared on Gaia: lost, reborn, and newly empowered. Three millennia prior, there had been another. And another and another, popping up here and there, always spaced out by a few centuries give or take, sprouting like random weeds in the timeline. These Earth people had never been heroes, and now they never would be.

Rather than appear on Gaia’s surface, however, they appeared above, under, and through it.

“You were ghosts...” The words slipped out from Nyx’s mouth as Ta’Gelkiyr attempted to explain it. Nyx shook their head a second later. “Or is there no point to setting a label on it?”

“We’re seen as demons who’re incredibly high in the pecking order by design,” said Ta’Gelkiyr. But there’s no reason we can’t be called space ghosts, or angels—”

“Or grand designers,” offered Ethel.

“No, not that,” Ta’ shot down.

Ethel frowned.

The world had existed before chthons were summoned as its guardian spirits—experimenters—a crop of children given a new toy. The world hadn’t come with instructions. It hadn’t come with explanations or rationale. It was just a new Earth with a complex vestigial piece: the underworld.

“We could remake the world a little, and chthons have tried it,” said Ta’, “but inevitably we get dissatisfied. Either we snap things back to normal or we break a war out at World’s End and feud for an age over the right to rebuild. Pretty tiresome.”

Their electronic eyes flickered. “But that’s not what I came here to tell you. That’s just more questions without an answer. As far as I can figure, it’s an existential ladder leading up and up, full of baffled workers working endless jobs, and at the top there’s a god who’s as clueless as anyone below.” Their voice sounded cheerfully hollow, well worn with lifetimes’ worth of rehearsing their answer to life.

“It sounds so simple when you put it that way,” said Ethel. “I can’t say I like it.”

“Eh,” Nyx grunted. Their strategy remained the same: pull out the esoteric knowledge and heartache now, but unpack it later.

Agi got a weird look on his face, and it didn’t escape Nyx’s notice. He narrowed his eyes and quirked his mouth, like he was coming back to an old forgotten thought and deciding he liked it.

“You were summoned to Gaia against your will,” he began cautiously. “One might say you are bound to the new planet as a liege to your master.”

“One might...” said Ta’.

“But...not only are you powerful—and in the transcendental way that can change the fundamental laws you live by—you also have some link to Earth. Unless it’s gone?”

“Oh! Yeah. We can do poltergeist stuff,” said Ta’ brightly. “It gets tedious, though. You go from influencing your former family members and occasionally setting right what once went wrong, to trying to tweak historical events and only making things a lot worse or weirder, and then when the loneliness sinks in you pivot to putting celebrity faces on slices of toast—it’s not that great.”

Nyx and Ethel’s mouths hung open.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” said Nyx.

“That’s the most asinine thing I’ve heard in years!” Ta’ raged, lights strobing. “‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ ‘You weren’t there!’ What am I? I’m supposed to save you now? Look, I just kind of showed up on Gaia, but the only reason you’re here is because I put my miraculous powers to work and put you here.”

A vein popped in Nyx’s forehead. “What the fuck? Why?”

“Because I felt like it.” Pause. “You don’t appreciate it?”

“No!” Nyx hammered the statement in with a stomp. “I mean, sometimes! It’s a mixed bag!”

Ta’ stayed quiet for a while. Nyx went quiet too.

“Well, like I was saying,” said Ta’, “doing poltergeist things only made me sad and lonely. Sadness and loneliness don’t go away when you’re a Gaian god. What the chthons could do, and very effectively, was drag souls from Earth to Gaia. It’s called reincarnation, but really it’s more of a rebirthing process, since you come back the same-ish. Heh...maybe someday we’ll do this on a vast and ridiculous scale. You may as well thank all the gods and moral codes y’all might believe in that it hasn’t come to pass in your lifetimes—to date.”

Ta’’s thoughts drifted back to the last reincarnation-motivated battle, from four hundred years back. Gods, that was a fun war. These piddly humans and demons had no idea of the shit Ta’Gelkiyr and their ilk got up to in the deepest bowels of their depressive boredom.

As Ta’ went on, they paid no attention to Nyx and Ethel’s slack-jawed expressions, or to how they kept falling—been there, seen that.

“You remember the tags? Those wooden things you found in your hands and pockets when you first reappeared on this planet.”

“Of course we do!” Nyx shouted. “We have memories, we’re not literal rats.”

“I got it. Geez. Don’t mind me, I’m just a being whose tiny vestiges of mortal existence are this close to vanishing. Anyhow, those tags were an experiment of their own. They were my idea. They were supposed to be quantum-entangled with similar chunks of wood that I had created on Earth—chunks that are still sitting in some dude’s workshop.”

Ta’ sighed, as if running a hand through their hair. “I don’t even know what my end goal was there, or what I expected. Would you have been able to go back and forth freely? Would it be teleportation, or more wormholey? Would it allow nothing but communication? And even if any of that succeeded, what would the point even be? I can see it now: me acting like your personal god-goddess-genderless-deity as you warp from Gaia to, like, the old well in the back of your antique family home, or something, and me giving you a total bullshit quest just so you have peace of mind in this nonsense universe.”

What Ta’Gelkiyr didn’t tell them was what the chthons really wanted. Maybe there was no point to telling. Maybe Ta’ was too embarrassed to say. Or maybe they felt that these youngsters should have a bit of hope after all.

After so many thousands of years living in playrooms, living in vats, all they wanted was to be human again. Not to live full lives, but to put a life to rest and know peace.

“So why am I here before you?” said Ta’. “One last human act before I shut down.”

“And what’s shutting down, for you?” said Ethel.

“It’s not sleep. Not real sleep. As a spirit, my senses are always on—no such thing as turning them off. I figure if I delude myself into thinking that all is nothing, that’ll do the trick...but hey, kids, you’re regular humans and regular demons, so you don’t have to worry about that.” The LEDs smiled.

When Ta’Gelkiyr called this the prelude to “one last human act,” Nyx became a notch more suspicious. It was arrogant, wasn’t it? Self-serving. It pretty much had to be.

Even if, inside that metal shell, Ta’ was struggling with their final scrap of prehistorically old human morality.

Ta’ came to their point.

“Maybe I can’t live the rest of my immortal life the way I want,” they said, “but it’s not unattainable for you.”