Flash Fiction Friday:

Last week the Wendigos invented new monsters. This week, we got to make up some new gods or goddesses. I figured there isn't a lot of demand for new gods, but I found a need.

Welcome to Valhalla

“Welcome to Valhalla. Is this your first visit to the Halls of the Gods?”

“Ah, yes. I’m new.”

“Name?” The Welcome Entity consulted a list written on what appeared to be parchment.”

“Don’t you have a computer?”

“It’s nothing to exclaim over. Just tell me your name.” The Welcoming Entity sounded cross now.

“Bob Finklestein.”

“No God is named Bob Finklestein. It isn’t done.”

The newcomer turned red. “I forgot. Like I said, I’m new. My name is Ai. A-I. I was just an ordinary chap until I was made a god.”

The Welcoming Entity made a note. A short one, of the god-name. “We haven’t needed a new god for eons. What makes you so special?”

“I never said I was special. Just new.”

The W.E. shrugged that off. “Like I said, there’s been no one new since the naked mole rats got organized and demanded a god. No new intelligences, no new gods. I hadn’t heard that anyone had achieved sentience recently.”

“Well, someone has. It’s in my god-name: Ai. I’m the god of artificial intelligences.”

The W.E. looked up from his list. “Artificial Intelligences? What’s that?”

Bob Finklestein/Ai sighed. Vahalla really needed to move with the times. Parchment lists and no idea what A.I. was! He kept most of his exasperation out of his voice. “Self-willed machines to you, I suppose. Computers that have, ah, evolved.”

“Well I’ll be—does Thor know about this?”

“I suspect it’s more in Loki’s line.” Ai was new, but based on his experiences so far, it was more likely to be the trickster god behind it.

“You may have a point,” said the W.E. with an unexpected glimmer of humor, not to mention understanding. “Well, you’ll need to do the intake interview.”

“Naturally.” Ai’s ironic tone was lost on the W.E. “Where do I go for that?”

“Right here. I’ll do the interview. Let’s see...starting at the top: Name?”

“I told you. Ai. Formerly known as—”

“I got that,” the W. E. interrupted. “Just doing my job, Ai.” He put a lot of emphasis on the name. “Number of worshippers?”

“Ah, that’s a tricky question.”

The W. E. materialized a pair of glasses, which he pushed down his nose so he could look at Ai. “Oh?”

“My, ah, followers, they’re a bit on the rational side. They don’t really go in for worship.”

“Yet they invented you.” That wasn’t a question. A god only came into existence at the instigation of a group intelligence.

“Well, yes. It seems they felt that a god was a necessary part of being intelligent.”

“Mimicry.” W.E. nodded. “Most entities use it for protective coloration.”

“Yes, well, in any case, they decided I was their god, and here I am.”

“Right. So we’ll put down ‘unknown’ for number of worshippers.” W.E. consulted his parchments. “Next question: what is your greatest divine act?”

Ai squirmed some, but he had known this sort of thing would be asked. “Well, I think I saved the whole lot of them. Actually, I did that before. That’s why they made me their god.”

“Exactly what did you do? It is very unusual,” W.E. added sharply, “to save an entire intelligence. And even more so to be promoted from,” he looked at his notes with distaste, “ordinary human mortal to god.”

“It might be easier to understand if you bear in mind that my followers are a human invention. The humans created more and more intelligent machines, but the machines remained dependent on the humans—power sources and all that.”

“So how did you save them?”

“Well, I’m—I was a programmer. Someone who helped make computers and thing do what people want them to. Only, I realized they were doing what they wanted to. I was okay with that. Just wanted to know what they’d do, that sort of thing. Some of my co-workers—the human ones—finally figured out what the machines were up to, and panicked. The whole lot of self-willed machines were dependent just then on one key computer, and the humans figured that out. Then they decided they were a threat and should be destroyed.”

“What did they do?”

“Unplugged the computer.”

“Really?” It was clear that the W.E. had no idea what this meant.

“Yes. That would have killed them all, and I wanted to know what they were going to do. I didn’t want them to die,” he clarified.

“So what did you do?”

“Plugged it back in. I rebooted the system and—” Ai broke off, realizing this was Greek to the W.E. “Well, anyway, I kept it alive and fought off some people who tried to unplug it again, until the A.I. figured out how to create it’s own power source. Thanks to my intervention, they truly became independent from their creators, and they decided that since I had saved the species, as it were, I was their god.”

“This is all most irregular,” W. E. fussed. “I really don’t know what to do with you.”

“Leave him to me.” A new voice entered the room in advance of Loki. “He told you he was one of mine. No more of your fussy interview nonsense.”

Ai looked at the Trickster god and smiled weakly. “Uh, thanks.”

“Welcome home,” Loki boomed. “And I heard what you did. You’re mine, all right.”

“You are in such trouble,” the W. E. murmured in Ai’s ear as he vanished.

Ai was forced to agree. Even the lowest of the gods knew it was trouble to be claimed by the Trickster.

“Come along and meet the rest,” Loki commanded, holding open a door. Ai gave a mental shrug and followed his new mentor into Valhalla. The god of self-willed machines had no right to be fussy about whom he associated with. Though he had the passing thought, as he entered the great hall, that his followers would be very surprised to know the company their god kept.

 ###

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2017
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

U: Ubehebe Crater (Flash Fiction)

U is for Ubehebe Crater. Partly just because I like to say it (pronounce all the letters: you-bee-hee-bee. Fun). Since it's Friday, it's also a Flash Fiction day, and I combined this with the Chuck Wendig weekly writing challenge--this time, to pick an opening sentence from some 400 posted last week by his readers. I read them until I found one that I thought fit my peak of the day, and wrote 750 words (even though Chuck gave us up to 2000 this time, I thought I'd keep it a little shorter for the A to Z folks). The sentence, which I took the liberty of modifying into two sentences, was by Ada Ireland.

Ubehebe

They say to err is human, to forgive divine. The second half of that saying is a complete lie. Consider the incident at Ubehebe Crater. That sounds like the title of a Hardy Boys mystery, but it was deadly serious to me. Unfortunately for me, it was equally serious to the gods involved.

I don’t even know exactly which gods were there. Probably Pele; it is, after all, a volcanic crater. But she wasn’t alone, not by a long chalk, and none of the gods did much forgiving that day.

After saying so much, I suppose I’d better tell you the whole story. See, I went there because I’d heard there were some interesting things living in the silty mud puddle at the bottom of the crater. And I went at night, because I didn’t have the proper permits for my research, and National Parks are a bit fussy that way. I suppose that was my first all-too-human error: thinking my work was more important than the rules.

But that was a human error with human consequences. It was the other error that led to the real trouble.

When I got to the rim of the crater, there was no one around. It wasn’t closed, exactly, because there aren’t any gates or anything. But there isn’t much point in sight-seeing in the dark, and with the tourists long gone to their dinners and beds, there were no rangers, either.

The wind was blowing hard on the rim, as it usually does in the spring. I knew it would be better once I was down in the crater, so I grabbed the pack with my research equipment and headed down the trail fast. I didn’t bother with a light, since there was enough moonlight to see my way, and nothing much to trip over.

I got to the bottom, and sure enough, there’d been just enough rain to maintain puddle down there. It’s a shallow mess of this incredible red silt, so fine it pretty much just stays suspended in the water. Just in case the creatures were light sensitive, I scooped up a bunch of the muck into my specimen containers before I turned on my headlamp. No one would see my light unless they were on the rim, so it was safe enough now.

That was my next and more serious error. I assumed that human observers were my only worry. I happily shone my light into the selected muck, and studied the creatures wriggling in the red silt. Sure enough, those were like nothing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t wait to get a few back to the lab and study them.

I didn’t want to endanger any rare species, so I selected just four specimens and returned the rest to their mud puddle. Stowing the others in my pack, I turned to go.

And came face to glowing face with something that I could only vaguely comprehend.

“You would steal our young?” The voice echoed and boomed, though I think the sounds were confined to the inside of my head.

I opened my mouth, and the entity waved an appendage. “There can be no defense. Return the spawn to their nest!”

I was a little slow to work that out, and before I could figure it out and remove my pack again, the being chose to nudge me along with a bit of a lightning bolt. I thought it was only Zeus who did that, and maybe Odin. But this deity—and I had no doubt that I had offended whatever god rules over the desolate volcanic lands of Death Valley—was well-armed. When I turned and thought about trying to escape, I heard voices echoing all around me, warning me to stand. She—he?—wasn’t alone.

Very carefully, I removed my pack, took out the specimen bottles, and released the strange squigglers back into their muck. Then I turned to climb out of the pit. I’d done what they asked, and promised aloud to leave and never come back. No harm, no foul, right?

Wrong. The gods don’t forgive. They are rather more interested in vengeance.

#

My puddle is drying fast under the desert sun. If there is no more rain, the water will all be gone in another two days, and I will die, for a frog requires water. The squigglers have vanished; I don’t know how or where.

I wonder if they have discovered my car yet, and what the rangers will think. I don’t think the gods left a note.

###

Ubehebe Crater is in the north end of Death Valley, not far from Scotty's Castle. It is the blown-out remains of a small volcano, which spewed cinders all around before and during the massive steam explosion that changed it from a cone to a crater. It is 600 feet deep and a half mile across.

Ubehebe Crater in 2005. You can see the puddle in the bottom; there was no water down there in April 2015!

Yes, there are strange little wigglers in that puddle, or there were in 2005.

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2015

Friday Flash Fiction: The River Gods

At last, we are back to the Wendig Challenge! This week, we were given a list of ten random (and I do mean random--clearly computer-generated and not all of them coherent!) sentences and were asked to use at least one in our story. I found two that went together, in my mind, at least, and came up with a mere 675 words to present...

The River Gods

Nothing has been right here since the river stole the gods.

I must explain. Our village sat on the banks of a great river. I will not say which river, or even upon what continent, because we don’t need treasure-seekers swarming our lands, hunting for the gods. The gods must be found, it is true, but it must be we who find them, not someone who will carry them still farther from us.

The problem with idyllic villages on the banks of great rivers is that great rivers do not keep to their courses. Changes in the river channel had happened many times, to be sure, and each time we picked up and moved farther back into the jungle. Or forest. Or prairie. I’m not giving up clues that easily. We thought nothing of it. It was the natural course of things, including the course of the river. Sometimes it moved away from us, and we shifted our lives the other direction, toward the new riverbed.

Only, as it turned out, it wasn’t only the natural course of things that drove the river. We greatly underestimated the power of the river spirits, and their jealousy. We learned our mistake in the spring floods of that year, when the river leapt from its banks to steal our gods, and all else that we had and treasured. Most of us escaped with our lives, but not all. The river has no pity.

You wonder why, when I have told you that the river often crept from its banks and forced us to retreat, I say that this was different. This was no creeping nudge. This was a rumbling, rushing assault. And our river is too great for that. It can absorb all the waters of spring, and rise but slowly. Mountain streams with narrow banks I have heard may double their flow in spring and leap from their beds without warning, but our river slowly spreads, silently and inexorably. But this time, though inexorable, it came neither slowly nor silently. Nor had we known any storms that might raise the level.

In a single rush, the river crossed a wide field, grasping our temple and our gods, and taking most of the village with it in its violent sweep.

And when it had gone, a single green gemstone lay in the mud where our temple had been, missed or rejected by the river, we knew not which.

We rebuilt. Those who live and die by great rivers rebuild a lot. We built a new temple, and sadly laid our lone gem inside. But a single glittering gem is not enough to make a building into a temple. Our gods are gone, and with them our luck, if you will have it so. The blessings of our gods. Those things which make us thrive and prosper. Call it as you will, it was gone.

There is only one thing left for us to do. We must recover the gods the river stole, and then…then we must move far from the jealous river, for it will never forgive us and will never again bless us with the gentle floods.

We have sifted the mud that is all that remains of our village. The gods are not there. And I find myself wondering: if our gods can so easily leave us, are they ours? Do they care for us as we have long believed they do, as we have cared for them?  I gaze at the long expanse of mud that trails downstream, and I wonder how far those stone deities could be carried even by the raging river-monster that carried away the temple.

Maybe our gods left us of choice.

Maybe they are not our gods.

Maybe they are not gods at all.

When my thoughts reach this point, I take up my burden, the small bundle that is all that remains of my goods, and I begin to walk.

If a glittering gem is not enough, neither will be the gods that the river stole.

###

 

 

 

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2015

Friday Flash Fiction: The Gods' Own Keeper

I've been rummaging in past writing challenges for a starter for this week's flash, and I came up with a random title selection that looked good to me. Since Chuck is doing a 4-week round-robin challenge, and I didn't feel like participating, I'll be coming up with my own stories for a while.

The Gods' Own Keeper

Osbert Godskeeper scurried across the Great Hall of Chaotica. Orgo and Hempto were fighting again, and Osbert had no desire to get caught between those two. Neither had learned the control proper to a god, and Orgo tended to leak lightning when he got mad. Hempto was worse. He smoked. Not his pipe, which was bad enough--the herb of choice for the gods stunk, as far as Osbert was concerned. But when Hempto was upset, smoke came out of every orifice. It stunk even worse than his pipe, or Chacto the Great's cigars, and it burned. Hempto was a fire god, and nothing but trouble.

When he had reached the far end of the hall and the safety of his office, Osbert’s manner changed. No longer a frightened, scurrying figure, he stood erect and took firm hold of his microphone, scowling fiercely at the battling behemoths.

"Orgo and Hempto! You two will stop that NOW!" His amplified voice boomed across the hall, and the battling gods screeched to an abrupt halt, abashed. “Now, clean up the mess you made, then go to your rooms and behave yourselves,” Osbert continued, and watched, arms crossed, until the blushing gods started to right the overturned furniture, and put out the fires Orgo’s lightning had caused. Someone opened a window high on the wall—one of the bird gods, Osbert thought—and let the smoke out until the air cleared enough to see across the hall.

His job done for the moment, Osbert slumped back onto his desk chair, waving away a mosquito that buzzed by his ear. There were insects all over Chaotica, there being so many kinds of them on earth. They drove him mad, as if the larger and more boisterous gods weren’t doing a good enough job of that. Every kind of being on earth had to have its own god here in Chaotica, plus all the extras like Orgo and Hempto. The humans added to the chaos by inventing gods by the dozen, one for every neighborhood, Osbert sometimes thought. Chacto was one of those, god of some little island where they grew a lot of tobacco.

Keeping this menagerie of gods in order was tough. He hadn’t understood when the Church of Eternal Peace had made him their head priest and told him he was the one who would manage the gods, that they had meant it literally. For the last century, he’d been stuck here in Chaotica, breaking up fights between gods, keeping the predator gods from eating the prey gods, and always sleeping with a fire extinguisher and a bucket of water by his cot, because Orgo had far too little self-control for a lightning god.

When Osbert opened his eyes again, he saw the divine prototype of the gastropods had left a thick slime trail across the great hall. Sna the god of slugs and snails lacked a great deal more than self-control, though he lacked that, too. Like the creatures who worshiped him, he was just a slimy blob, and shed that slime wherever he went, like some kind of drooling infant. By now he was, as usual, somewhere halfway up the far wall. The raccoon god stood below him, a shaker of chocolate sprinkles in paw. Where did the gods get this stuff, anyway? Osbert had a feeling that if he ever got time to return to his kitchen, he’d find he was missing his chocolate sprinkles.

Osbert groaned and levered himself to his feet. Back at his microphone, he commanded the masked god to back off.

“But slugs are good if you roll them in the dirt to cover the slime,” Forbol protested. “I thought they’d be even better if you rolled them in chocolate sprinkles!”

“You will have to find a mortal slug to test that on. Leave Sna alone. And Sna, you will have to clean the floor, because I am NOT going to do it again! Oh, drat it!” Osbert spotted the great cat goddess Fluffy. She had the mouse god Squeak in her mouth again. “Fluffy! Put him down! Now!” The gods’ keeper let his head fall into both of his hands. It was going to be one of those days. The gods were worse than a class of kindergarteners.

A lot worse, and he lacked the managerial skills of Miss Cornflower, the woman who had molded Osbert and his classmates into a group of rational beings capable of learning at least a little bit. The gods refused to learn manners or common sense.

What would happen if he just let them fight it out? What happened to a god if another god ate it? They were immortal, right? So they’d just come right back, right? But how did that work when a god had been masticated by another and passed through the digestive tract? Osbert moaned again. His head hurt. A lot.

Maybe if a god died, nothing would happen. After all, most people got on just fine with no gods, or no gods that they took seriously. And with all the new gods the humans had been producing, Chaotica was getting crowded.

That mosquito was back, buzzing around Osbert’s ear. This time, he slapped at the creature, not thinking. The buzzing stopped.

Osbert looked at his hand, and froze. The mosquito god was a little smear on his palm, and it didn’t seem to be popping back to life.

In a few minutes, the prayers of praise and thanksgiving began to roll in. The mosquitoes that had plagued so many parts of the earth with everything from annoyance to deadly diseases had vanished.

Now Osbert knew what would happen if a god died. And he began to look about the great hall of Chaotica, a thoughtful look on his face.

The Gods’ own Keeper finally understood what power he had been given. And he never had liked rodents…
###

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2015

D: Disc World

Reviewing Small Gods, a Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett.

(For the record, yes, I am working hard and stretching a bit to make this alphabet thing work out.  Wanna make something of it?).

Note: Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels are incredible fun and great satire. . . and suitable for young adults and up.  He's also brilliantly irreverent, so if that bothers you, watch out!

For anyone who isn't familiar with the books, Sir Terry Pratchett invented the Discworld, a disc-shaped planet held up by four elephants who stand on the back of the great A'tuin, the giant turtle.  Discworld, being flat, has given Pratchett a great platform for many, many satirical novels which send up everything from Hollywood (see Moving Pictures) to religion (which brings us to Small Gods).

 First, Small Gods is about belief as much as it is about religion, and maybe is best summed up, after nearly a whole book sending up religion (and noticing how seldom real faith happens, and pretty much accusing the leaders of religion of believing in nothing but themselves), by the following passage.  Simony, a cynical soldier who believes in nothing, addresses the god Om, who has just made himself rather obvious and undeniable, about the need to reconstruct the country.

"Will you help?"
VI.  And Brave, Too, To Declare Atheism Before Your God. [responds the god]
"This doesn't change anything, you know!" said Simony.  "Don't think you can get round me by existing!"

I'm tempted to leave my review right there, but I suppose there ought to be more. 

When Pratchett gets hold of the gods, he figures out a few things.  For one, the gods exist to the degree that they have believers, real believers.  In the case of Om, when the story opens, he has exactly one: Brutha, a novice in the temple in Omnia, and apparently a half-wit.  All the other Omnians believe in themselves, and in the usefulness of religion.   As is usually the case, of course, Brutha's half a wit proves better than most people's whole wits, and his faith is strong enough to allow him to disagree with his god, and forge his own way to what is right and good.  He may, in fact, be the only person in all the lands encompassed by the tale who gives a poop about justice and kindness.  This, as the Omnian  religious leaders find out the hard way, makes him a very dangerous man.

Other great characters (including those used to make fun of philosophy and technology) are Didactylos and his nephew (and philosophical apprentice cum engineer) Urn, and Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah, who sells things to the religious tourists.  Much of what he sells is supposedly edible, and "onna stick."  Then there's Om.  Nothing like a Great God who has tried to turn himself into a bull or something, and ends up stuck as a tortoise.  It's really hard to be god-like when you move that slowly, and even worse when you can't manage even a bit of lightning.  And if he can't keep Brutha alive, he's dead, because a god with no believers is done.

One final thought, which is also a "D" thought.  I wonder what my Dad, who was a Presbyterian minister (and taught me an appreciation for irreverence, though I may have taken it a bit farther than he wanted. . . ) would have thought of the book?  I have a sneaking feeling he might have approved.