new god

[WP] "When a planet is destroyed, a single person from the dead maybe reborn as a God. Your Domain shall depend on aspects of how you lived your life, actions, hobbies, work or anything else." That's what you were told before being reborn, but you still really weren't expecting the Domain you got.

*****

Dave hovered in the vast darkness. There was no real sense of anything now, after Earth had been destroyed in its entirety. You would perhaps expect there to be buildings and even other people floating around in space. You'd be wrong. All he saw was rocks and dust. In truth most humans and other living things had just gotten squished instantly into little giblets due to unfathomable earthquakes.

'Well, this is it', thought Dave to himself. 'I'm dead and stuck in limbo as a ghost or some shit. No way I survived that meteor or whatever had broken up the Earth into little fragments.' As moments passed by, he gave up those things that made sense while he was alive but not so much now that he was in some indeterminate state. Like breathing. Why bother breathing if there was no air left? He removed his hands from his eyes and looked around - because why not? His eyeballs clearly didn't freeze or explode or whatever was supposed to happen to eyes in space. Dave didn't know.

'What now?' Dave thought to himself. After just a few minutes floating around he was already bored. He dreaded an infinity of whatever this was. He dreaded being alone for all eternity. As he continued rotating, hovering in space, he tried to scan his surroundings for any sign of another living - well, reasonably living - person. He saw nothing that held his interest. For a moment he thought he saw a billboard from McDonald's off in the distance. Dave decided he'd rather not.

"When a planet is destroyed, a single person from the dead may be reborn as a God." The voice echoed mightily in Dave's ears and took him by surprise. Not only did he not see anyone, but he was also pretty sure that sound couldn't travel through empty space (he was wrong about that). "Your Domain shall depend on aspects of how you lived your life, actions, hobbies, work, or - you get what I'm saying - anything else." "H-hello?" Dave tried in response.

Suddenly Dave felt his mind expand. There was no better way to explain it. It was like where he was once a body floating in space, now he saw himself from the outside floating in space. He was no longer just a body. As his mind expanded he became that rock or that piece of dust or that (he signed internally) McDonald's sign. Not only that, his expanding mind continued to expand faster and faster - in no time at all it reached the end of the gathering of rocks formerly known as Earth.

Then it continued onward, out into space. His mind caught up with the moon that had lost the orbit around the Earth. His mind expanded all the way to Mars and the other planets, even the sun. He felt himself becoming the sun, but even that was small compared to the enormity of becoming the solar system. Then, in a complete paradox, he felt his mind expand to such a degree that it expanded beyond his own expansion. So he simply did. And because he simply did, it was so. He was a being unto itself, encompassing all of existence.

His mind wandered back to that body of his back in the debris field of old Earth. How small and petty it now seemed, mere moments later. He poked his body with his mind and it went haphazardly drifting off into the distance. Of course that distance was no distance but now only a part of Dave. It was fairly confusing, but also made perfect sense. He decided he preferred it making sense, so it did.

He tried stretching his actions beyond the solar system but he ran into a kind of bubble around it. He poked Mars out of orbit with this thoughts, but when he tried poking other stars nothing happened. It didn't matter how much his mind expanded - beyond the confines of the solar system he could only observe. 'I guess this is my domain', he thought, and because he thought it, it was so. Out among the stars he felt other gods, orbiting other dead worlds. They did not hold his interest for long.

'But that voice - whatever that thing was - had told him his Domain would be specific to him. Tailored to his life somehow. Dave wondered what that meant. Was he going to be handed the Domain on a silver platter, or was he expected to decide for himself? In the end, he searched his own consciousness to find the answer lay somewhere between those two extremes. Like a person doing yoga, or meditating, or some bullshit like that, but imagine a solar system doing it to itself. If you can't, that's fine. But Dave could, and so it was.

'Mmmmmmmmmmmmm', he chanted to himself. 'Hot dogs.' Hot dogs? His Domain was hot dogs? Why hot dogs? Dave remembered old Earth. Hot dogs had always held a kind of strange symbolism to him. It was an indulgence, but not for the rich. A guilty pleasure of sorts. The kind of food that only a master could perfectly cook, and only a master could perfectly recognize. Its transitory nature confounded him in his youth - so delicious and yet so passing in its taste. And it was a kind of safe haven - few if any truly cared, so it was the kind of topic that he could freely discuss with others. Others liked talking about hot dogs with him. 'Hot dogs', he repeated to himself. And because he did, it was his Domain.

Still, he felt that something was off. If this was his Domain - did that mean that others had different domains? Was there a domain of mustard, for example? Or a domain of fast food? Or a domain of hot dog salespersons? Before his mind had even created the first symbolic hot dog in his own Domain, his mind searched the cosmos. Outside his bubble - outside his Domain. And there he found that terrible truth which was the cause of his growing discontent.

In all the solar systems, in all the galaxies, in all the universes that his mind could instantly comprehend - there was only one place in which hot dogs existed. One Domain where hot dogs were welcome - his own. This was a most unsatisfactory state of things. It was not that he wanted everything to be hot dogs, but he felt strongly that others should at least know about them. Dave banged his metaphorical hands against the bubble holding back his Domain. Nothing.

Then his mind saw something outside the bubble - one of those old satellites that humans had sent into space with no chance to return. Which means that things they had made could travel outside the bubble. There was a vastness of space between his Domain and the closest god. But he could make more humans here. And they could go out there and spread his word. Alright, technically two words. His mind returned to Earth and almost instantly pieced it together again. It was not a matter of moments but thoughts. Already he saw his plan laid out before the humans he would recreate. They would in time, after he had restored civilization, build mighty ships to brave the void between the domains - and because he imagined it, it was so.

In a corner of space completely uninteresting to anybody except those who lived in it, the mighty works of God in his Domain were set in motion.

The universal Hot Dog wars began.

*****

THE END