I walk into the light. I walk further, and I shield my eyes from the blinding rays emanating from an unknown place high above. It is neither cold nor hot. I feel neither sad nor happy. I look down. I am walking on neither solid ground nor a liquid nor a gas. Everything seems to be locked in an eternally neutral state, exceedingly calm. Yet, it feels eerie to be lost in such an unusually peaceful environment. I walk for what seems like a century. Fed up, I sit down and sigh exasperatingly. The unfamiliar situation doesn’t seem strange to me anymore, nor does it alarm me. All of my heart’s unease has settled, as calm as the place I am stuck in. Maybe it’s just a dream. A lucid dream or something. 

“It isn’t,” a deafening booming voice echoes around, answering my thought out loud. I immediately scream, clutch my head, and cover my ears, automatically bringing my legs close to my chest. I suppose it was an immediate defense mechanism.

Panicked, I try to think of anything that happened in my past. I can’t remember much, except for random sensations, like a wailing screech, the smell of iron, and the feeling of my heart twisting in agony, plummeting down into my stomach. It is exactly what I experience when I wake up from a nightmare. I don’t remember anything that happened in it, but I know that it wasn’t pleasant and made my gut wrench.

I look around for the culprit who caused my blasted eardrums. I muster up all my courage and speak as forcefully as I can.

“Who are you? Show yourself!” Unfortunately, my voice sounds more like a squeak of terror than the menacing shout I wanted it to be. 

All of the lights immediately dim. My surroundings gradually come into focus. I was standing on smooth metal, with ten feet tall metal walls on all sides of me. Beyond the walls the room is darker, but I can just barely make out huge aquarium tank sized glass boxes with dark matter and sparkling orbs inside, as well as giant beakers filled with bubbling multicolored liquids. I now see the source of the light: a circular cone-like dome that stemmed from a bending metal wire with an uncanny resemblance to a desk lamp. I hear shuffling and a slight scratchy sound. Something in the far left corner creaks loudly, and I see a dark mass come closer to me. 

It is a giant, but it looks like a human wearing a lab coat. I squint my eyes, trying to discern the giant’s facial features and to figure out what was going on. It is an elderly man, with wispy white hair that looked like the Chinese dragon’s beard candy. The wrinkles on his face create a labyrinth. His soulless, grey eyes stare right through me, and I cannot guess what he is thinking, try as I might. I suddenly feel unbelievably hopeless as I looked at him and I feel a rush of fear. Uncertainty grips my heart and lungs, twisting them like one would wring water out from a washcloth. Just like the droplets of water fly from the towel, I feel like my inner thoughts and grip on reality rush away from me. Just as I am able to remember his face, it morphs into a completely different shape. It is now a woman with a pointy, triangle shaped head with jet black hair tied into a bun. However, she still has the same piercing grey eyes staring blankly at me. It changes again into a young boy, smiling, and I see that his two front teeth are missing. However, his smile does not seem to reach his eyes. His strawberry blond hair is unkempt, pointing in a million different directions, almost defying gravity. Next, the shape transforms into a woman with drooping eye sockets and tears falling like a waterfall, dripping down into her thin-lipped mouth and off of her quivering chin. The entity’s face changes endlessly, but its eyes remain the same. I avert my gaze, as simply looking in its general direction makes me nauseous. I muster up enough courage to compose myself together and speak.

“Who are you?” I am just able to whisper. “Or maybe a better question is what are you?”

The being raises its eyebrows and leans forward, propping its head on its hands. 

“You know, I don’t really know either, but there is a term that your kind has created for me. God. I am, in a sense, your God.”

“Are there more of your kind?”

“No. I am the only living being in this universe. That is, until I created your kind. For all the years that I have been living, I’ve been experimenting.” 

He gestures to the countless bubbling vials behind him. 

“And I came up with you,” God says, pointing at me. 

“How?”

“I don’t really know,” it says nonchalantly. “I just sort of popped up in this place in the void, built myself a shelter on a floating rock, found some resources, and built my lab.

I created a universe for your kind to live in. Then after a few millennia, I managed to make the first living organism to plant into said universe.”

I can’t tell if this is just some huge prank or not, but for some reason, I believed its words. 

“What is this place?”

“My lab, my house, the only shelter available in this endless void.”

“Why am I here?”

“Well, isn’t it obvious? You’ve just died a few minutes ago and now this is sort of your afterlife. This is where you go after you pass away. Most of the time, because there’s so many people dying at the same time, I just let them reincarnate naturally, but I decided to pick one of you to talk to.”

“Why me?”

“Completely random chance. However, when I did some reading on your life, it seems like you went through a lot, so I decided to use you.”

“I don’t believe you. I can’t remember anything that happened in my life.”

“Well, you don’t have much of a choice, now do you?”

It stares at me with those soulless grey eyes. It turns around, grabs two small vials, and extends its hand towards me.

“Get on my hand.”

I climb on, and it sets me gently down on the floor. It pours a drop of dark blue liquid from the first vial on my head. I can just barely make out the word on the label: “Growth” before the floor suddenly becomes much farther away from me. I have now grown multiple times my original size and am now face to face with God.

“This is much better. I don’t have to squint to see you,” God mutters.

It hands me the second bottle, filled with silvery iridescent gas. 

“Drink it and don’t let it spill. You have to have all of it in order to regain all of your memories of your most recent life. Brace yourself. I think it might be a bit painful.”

Ignoring the fact that it just implied that I should somehow drink a gas, I shove the fumes into my mouth, fully trusting in its instructions. 

Suddenly, I am a newborn baby, staring directly into the bright light of a hospital room. Now, I am a toddler, hobbling around my living room. The speed at which the memories pass through my mind causes pain that is almost head-splitting. Finally, I am an adult, just graduating college. I see my smiling parents in the audience clapping wildly as I am handed my diploma. Next I see my two children and my dog prancing around in the backyard. Now I see myself in my own bathroom mirror. My hair is limp, my skin is sallow, and my eyes are sunken in. They look almost grey…

Towards the end, I see someone laying on the ground, in a pool of blood. I feel that same heart wrenching feeling in my chest, as my eyes begin to blur and sting from my tears. I smell the iron emanating from the body. The figure that is leaning over the body stands up abruptly and makes its way towards me. As I frantically crawl away from it, the person lunges towards me, and I see its dark brown eyes turn to light grey just before I am jolted back into reality. 

For some reason, I have collapsed onto the ground. God helps me to my feet and watches me as I gasp for air, putting my hands on my shaking knees, struggling to breathe and still recovering from what had just happened.  

God grabs a chair, and I gratefully fall into it with a thud. 

“It looks like you were murdered.”

“Yea..”

I put my head in my hands, but they quickly slide off because of the sweat. 

“I would give you water but since I don’t really need it to live, I don’t really have any in stock…”

As my breathing normalizes, I look up at God. There is something I never really figured out, even when I was alive. For years, that figure who murdered me and my family had been terrorizing us, but I never knew why.  There was no real reason or motive I could think of.  Maybe that person was targeting the wrong people by accident.  

“Why did that person kill us?”

“You never found out?”

I shake my head. 

“Well, do you remember your job in your last life?” 

“Well, I was the CEO of a construction company.”

“Remember when that earthquake hit?”

“Yes, all of the heavy cranes fell and crushed a nearby building.”

“And what did your company decide to do after that?”

“We were running out of money, and we couldn’t afford to compensate for all of the victims.”

“That’s right. A family member of one of the people who was killed in the accident decided to take revenge on you and your family. The aftermath of that earthquake I dropped in was quite surprising, actually.”

I don’t even have time to process the first few sentences it said.

“What did you just say? An earthquake you ‘dropped in’?”

“Yes! Over the course of these millions of years I’ve been adding in some stuff to spice your world up; just to see what would happen. Infectious diseases? Natural disasters? All added in by me.”

I wondered why it would allow all of that evil to exist.  Before I can ask him, God gets up from its seat and shuffles through the numerous cupboards behind it. I hear clinking. After a few seconds, it returns to its seat and shows me a glass vial filled with thousands of little microbes buzzing around, suspended in midair. On the lid there is a label: “The Bubonic Plague.” 

“Look! I decided to drop this into your world a few centuries ago. I can’t really control where these go, so it fell into what you call Europe. It was absolutely astounding how many people died. I’ve also dropped a lot of ground tremors these past few years. They always fall towards a few certain places around the world though, I don’t know why. Also, I tend to drop these in too, you guys call them-“

God’s sentence is cut off by my punch to its face.

“You must remember that I am God. You can’t hurt me.  You can be angry with me, but you can’t hurt me.”

“YOU MEAN TO SAY THAT YOU WERE THE REASON WHY SO MANY PEOPLE SUFFER AND THAT YOU CAUSED NOT ONLY MY DEATH, BUT THE DEATH OF MY FAMILY TOO?”

“Simply a matter of overpopulation. It also wasn’t really my fault. It was the murderer’s…”

It says everything so matter-of-factly that I punch it again regardless of whether it actually hurts it or not. It feels good to take revenge on it even if it was only psychological.

“Listen, I understand why you would be mad.  A lot of people are mad, but you can’t change the fact that the deed has already been done. Besides, they’ve been reincarnated already. They don’t remember anything about their past lives. Ignorance is bliss. Wouldn’t you rather not know than to have a reason to be angry with me?”

“That only makes it slightly better,” I mumble.

God grabs me by the shoulders and looks me straight in the eyes. I look away, breath catching in my throat, as if the bottomless pits of void that were its grey eyes sucked all hope from me once again.  

Wait. I can’t look scared. Be brave, you idiot.  How many people get a chance to stand up to God?

Taking a shaky breath, I look back slowly and attempt to stare at it again. 

“The way we figure out everything about our lives is the day we die,” it says gravely. “What did you find out?”

I think carefully, racking my brain to the last thought I had, as I was stabbed. 

“That everything was all just a waste.”

“Exactly. The point of this universe I fabricated was just to waste the time away. You and your kind are nothing more than lab rats meant to suffer for my entertainment.”

“No. That can’t be. Earth has beautiful things in it too. Like sunsets and flowers.”

“Even more exciting to take it all away from you,” God shrugs nonchalantly.

God bolts up from its chair abruptly and turns sharply towards the cabinet, grabbing one of its many vials. 

“I’m getting bored.”

Knowing what would ensue, I rush forward, trying to wrestle the bottle away. Enraged, I blindly kick and punch, hoping to delay the inevitable. Unfazed, God pushes me into a glass booth. The door slides shut, separating me from God. I pound helplessly on the glass, my blood boiling and tears gushing out of my eyes. I am not even aware of my own screaming. I do know that I am screaming not only for myself but for everyone else that falls under God’s fate. 

“Reincarnation starting in 3…” A monotone voice echoes from a speaker.

God opens the vial.

“2…”

God’s lip curls up ever so slightly. It slowly pours a few drops of liquid onto the world. I can just barely make out the first few letters on the label: “Catastro…”. 

“1”.

For the first time, in God’s soulless grey eyes I see an emotion: an insatiable and sinister greed.