Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Interview with a Diety: Catastrophe at the Config Center

This is part two and if you work for that creepy vampire chick that wrote those books the same holds for this as did for part one which is here.  So get off my back, blood suckers.

Chapter 2:  Catastrophe at the Config Center

God disappeared in a puff of, well, warm air, leaving Gabe alone with me. Gabe was slight, prim little - I guess - man but I've been never too sure about archangels.  He was dressed in a rather old fashioned three piece suit - dark grey with a french blue shirt and very old school tie.  He was the personification of a white shoe lawyer down to his shined black wing tips.

He had a steady, open gaze and directed it at me as if it were a searchlight seeking something to destroy: "Did you get what you needed?"
"Somewhat but you know how it is, these conversations always generate more questions than answers"
"Yes, particularly when you're talking about the 'Adam Affair'" Gabe made quote marks as he said the words and his eyes had a peculiar expression.
"What do you mean 'affair'?"
"Dad God was technically correct about what happened, it's just that it was quite a bit bigger deal than any of them want to admit".  Gabriel's voice was precise, clipped, very east coast.
"I don't understand, what 'bigger deal'?"
"Jesus had to push Him hard, very hard to get God to agree to creating Adam, and when it didn't turn out then.."
"What do you mean 'hard'?"
"Well the reality is that each part of the Godhead lives in constant, how shall I say 'tension' with the other two parts" Gabe said a bit pedantically.  "They get along but they have very different personalities and priorities so there can be quite a bit of roaring that goes on".
"And so....?"
"Well Father God felt that Jesus and Holy Spirit had ganged up on him and forced him against his will to run this 'Adam Experiment' as He calls it.  Only Jesus didn't think of it as an experiment at all but as a new 'phase' in the Godhead's existence" Gabe sat wearily down in a chair.
"And you don't know what it's like when the Godhead gets in a conflict and go all Rama-Rama on each other"
"You mean.."
"Let's just say that the Hindus are a bit confused"

"Well anyway" said Gabe as he visibly relaxed, "when they start bellowing everyone else ends up having to take sides and the cherubim get all up in the seraphims' grills and the archangels, well we just try to hide out on our clouds.  But it gets ugly, feelings get hurt and it affects Heaven's performance."
"I don't understand, I thought Heaven was supposed to be perfect"
"Well it is but perfection as measured against specifications.  Sometimes Heaven is perfectly wonderful but we also have a spec for a perfectly mediocre heaven.  Fortunately we've never had to develop one for a perfectly awful Heaven."
"But I don't understand"
"It's an Deming thing:  'perfection is conformance to specifications' - we have different specs for different states of the Godhead.  St. Deming was quite prohetic but because he did his best prophesying in Japan many people assume that God just shintoed it."
"Shintoed?"
"Disemboweled and beheaded it as being foreign. But he didn't. Let's just say the Japanese are extra-particularly confused."

"You said that 'Adam didn't work out'?"

Gabe was visibly uncomfortable, his eyes darted around the room like a film noir stool pigeon.
"I mean the project didn't work out - there were complications during and after Creation and the config center wasn't familiar with the "In God's Image" workflow - because it was new and had never been properly piloted.  We did some small scale tests making superintelligent male Baboons but all that did was  make them exceptionally well groomed Superboons who quickly killed all the other males so they could mate with their females."
"Wow"
"They also built these wildly elaborate tree houses and filled them full of bananas and then spent their days raiding each other's rotten banana stashes"
"Wow"
"Yeah, it was quite a fiasco - I mean baboons don't even like bananas.  Which is why we discontinued testing".
"but if you discontinued...."
"Well at that point Father God bailed on the config center and said he going to go spend some time on Jupiter - a 'real planet with superheated poisonous gasses, bone crushing gravity and most importantly, no living things' - and that left an opening for Jesus to push the code base into production without a single release protocol.  So naturally we ended up with 'Adam'."
"So why was that so bad?"
"Believe me, starting the human race with that naive, horny, weak willed jackass was a blunder almost as great as the time when we let Satan out on 'work release' without his ankle bracelet."

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