Build God, Then We'll Talk by James D. Irwin

I built the Genesis device in seven days. I only stopped to rest once. The whole time I just heard her voice echo around my head over and over and over… build God, then we’ll talk she said.

She— Eleanor— was a fellow student at the Andromeda Academy. Obviously she was beautiful. Nearly everyone thought she’d be Miss Universe sooner rather or later. Her people never aged, which was a distinct advantage. Anyway, I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her. Most of the students did. For the first seven years I was at the Academy I was too nervous to approach her. Most of the students were.

Eventually I couldn't take it any more I just walked right up to her, like I would a sales assistant in a discount shoe store. I nervously coughed, but before I could say anything she just looked at me dismissively and said ‘build me God, then we’ll talk.’ I was hurt, but distracted by how pretty she looked when she looked dismissive.

I took her remarks at face value, and set to work. I thought if I could pull it off, she might pull me off. I didn't have a clue as to how to build a god. You can invent gods easily enough, but building them into a physical presence is generally quite tricky. Most gods exist in ethereal forms, if you even see them at all. Gods also, as a rule, need a domain to rule over. That’s when I came up with the idea for the Genesis device. If I built a world I could declare myself God. It wasn't quite what Eleanor had asked of me, but she’d probably still be impressed. Also I’d be a God, and that’s the sort of power girls are supposed to find attractive.

Building the Genesis device wasn't that difficult. We’d be learning all about them in Terraformology class. The next step was obviously finding a planet I could terraform. I got pretty lucky and found one in a nearby galaxy. I fired off my Genesis device and BANG, the process began. Things evolved a lot quicker than I’d anticipated.

As soon as sentient life appeared I declared myself God. It was good to let my inner-authoritarian out for a while. I handed down a list of simple rules, although I got bored of enforcing them after a while.

Really my biggest mistake was boasting about it all over school. That’s when the problems began. All the older students would visit the planet and declare themselves to be the one true God. A lot of people on the planet believed them. I was never entirely dethroned, but it was still heart-breaking to see the creatures I’d created slaughtering each other.

Maybe things would have been different if I’d kept quiet and just shown Eleanor in private right when I first became God. I tried to put a positive spin on things, but she just laughed at me for not being god of my own world. I took this to be a rejection.

I cried for a long time— floods of tears. I abandoned the whole planet after that and hoped everything would just sort itself out. I’d forgotten about it for the last several thousand years, until I saw Eleanor on TV. She’d been crowned Miss Universe. She was just as beautiful as ever.