There are many people in life who at some point have felt like fate was out to get them or that a situation was going out of their control. A strong sense that there’s some unfeeling higher power who wants to just take a dump on their day. Looking out into the dark expanse of blackness, a face unidentifiable to any living creature known to man waves and mysteriously floats forward. Just as the unworldly being reaches its hand out as if about to conjure trouble into existence, it proceeds to trip on literally nothing and somehow falls flat on its face.

The being lifts itself up and clears its throat in embarrassment, “So, uh hi, you can call me John,” the being says smiling forward into the dark.

“I suppose you can call me the unfeeling higher power, but I would like to just say that this” he gestures towards his surroundings “was a group operation.”

Dusting himself off, he continues “you see, much like the universe back in the beginning of time, I was young, wild and free. Eternity is a pretty long time for someone to do nothing.”

John then takes a seat on a large cushion seemingly pops out of oblivion, coloured deep red and looking plush to the touch. “Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I pick someone out of the crowd and declare to them that they are the chosen one who will feel my wrath that day. It’s just that I don't exactly remember every single person I've created. I mean parents don’t even get their kids’ names right half the time, so don’t blame me for forgetting a couple hundred thousand people in the millions I create.”

Leaning back into the chair John takes a sip of a Capri-sun that most certainly was not there a few minutes ago “Okay, let me explain. You all know that simulation game that’s popular, The Sims. Yes, imagine that, but on a universal scale.” John’s snaps his fingers and a book filled with pictures appears on his lap, he opens up a random page and continues whilst pointing to a group photo “flashback a couple billion years ago, I spoke to some of the other immortals in the cold ever expanding plane of nothingness and really that is where it all began.”

As all eternal beings do, John and many other beings were brainstorming interesting ways they could entertain themselves and when an idea struck John in the back of the head. Said idea came in the form of a colossal immortal hand swinging at his head, trying to get his attention “Joooohn” the owner of the hand, slurred out “bro,you know what would be super funny. Can you imagine if we were like tiny. Not like us but a smaller version of us, you know what I mean.”

No, John did not know what his wasted immortal friend meant at all. He felt that there was no reason to create a tiny John. He wanted to do something fun, and although amusing the idea of a tiny John just seemed too simple. If he wanted to make a clone he could easily just copy his energy structure, “Why would I even do that. That’s way too easy, where’s the elegance, the panache.”

“Noooo but John, not like with all the power of destruction stuff. Just make them powerless, like think about it, what would happen to them.”

The idea itself was completely random and frankly quite stupid but to be fair, when this discussion happened, everyone was flat out drunk on cosmos so needless to say, John agreed. Years later, John would admit that the idea was not a solid plan, but such an experiment was unique enough that it would cure some of the boredom after a millennium of going through the motions of doing little to nothing.

So Hephaestus, who does in fact exist and goes by Hector in the upper realms, including many other beings of wisdom were roped into building a system that would be able to harbour and sustain a living being who would not have the convenience of absolute power. A being that needed to live off the energy around it for sustenance. This need for energy consumption gave John a stellar headache as there was no guidebook on how to sustain the life of such a powerless being. The experiment led to the creation of the Solar system, also known as The Milky Way. For the everliving being it was simply known as the system.

“At the time I really thought we would be able to get a skeleton of the system up and running by the end of the week,”John chuckled as he recalled the first real problem he had faced in his immortal life. You see, much like normal coding the immortals had realised that fixing the bugs in the program, reviewing the graphics and generally just making the hardware system was challenging. Half the time they didn’t know why the system developed in a certain way and why we couldn’t make the system work in another.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“GUYS !!! It’s doing that weird sucking thing again!!” Thoth screamed as he tried to stop it from sucking away all his clothes.

“Hector !!! Hit the force shut down button” John screamed as he grabbed Thoth, attempting to stop the other being’s clothes from being sucked into nothingness and leaving him stark naked.

“I’m trying!!! It’s not shutting down, I think the system got hanged again!!” Hector shouted back as he frantically jammed his finger onto the shutdown button.

“Oh for the love of” Nuwa grabbed the codex used to create the system and snapped it in half across her knee effectively freezing all activity.

“Woah..” the three other beings stared bug-eyed at the broken codex.

“Right, so shall we start from the beginning after the last supernova explosion” she said as she smiled towards the three seemingly frozen immortals, who nodded back rigidly in agreement.

Contrary to the popular belief held by the early Greek and Indian philosophers, the Earth is not the centre of the universe. So after the little mishap, it was back to the drawing board for our favourite ragtag team of immortals, which was to thoroughly inspect each element to make sure no elements would cause the system to explode every three seconds. Cue, giant supernova expanding and collapsing multiple times, each time producing and destroying several new and different types of atoms.

“JOHN!!!” everyone screamed, eyes blazing in fury as they watched the work that they had been working on for a few hundred thousand years get deleted.

“Oops….?”

The group, after trying to obliterate John to no avail, then needed to analyse each new elemental configuration, and understand how it reacts when used in the system. The immortal Augelmir, also more commonly referred to as Ymir, was responsible for helping Hector and John create the system’s platform. Known to be the giant in Norse mythology whose body was used to create the world, Ymir was surprisingly resourceful in creating a physical platform for the humans to survive.

“Hey, so I heard you got a story about how the gods fashioned the world out of your body parts,” John says as he continues typing into the codex for a new system update.

“Oh yeah, you know how the Norse can be. They may be morbid little nuggets, but there’s something about them thinking that my skull is beautiful enough to mirror the sky that feels poetic” Ymir replies happily going about his part of the maintenance work.

“Weird flex but okay?”

Soon they had figured out that by creating energy layers centered around heavy elements they could control how a star exploded therefore, saving them time by allowing the system to automatically create planets and other space matter from whatever was caught in an elements gravitational pull. The breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time because they were all ready to take a break after working for a long time on the system. Luckily they were close enough that day to a comfortably warm sun, which kept the chill of the void away, and so they all proceeded to take a nice long nap on that casual Sunday.

Suddenly a shiver shot through John’s body as he jolted awake from his nap. The first thing he noticed was how much colder the universe felt, “Who turned down the air conditioner?!”

“Who’s making so much noise” Thoth grumbled as he scooted closer to the sun.

“It’s cold,” Nuwa said as she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes tiredly.

Of course, the immortals were indeed correct that the universe had cooled as their short nap had lasted a few hundred million years. By the time they actually did begin working on the system again, because procrastination affects even the best of us, the universe had cooled down enough for the matter to become protons and neutrons. This was also the point when the universe was like an open live wire, covered in a dense fog which for any other living being would mean instant death. Luckily for the immortals it just meant getting small static shocks and bumping into each other accidentally when traversing the system.

The electric fog was so dense that even light, which is like a really good bouncy ball, could not travel through the fog that well. This meant the group had to pull many all-nighters to prevent the other powerful beings who were not helping to set up the system from knocking the living light out of them or so help them all if Aphrodite had another bad hair day due to the fogs static energy causing it to frizz.

Thankfully for John and his team, the atoms stabilised because of a new material called an electron that Saraswati, who is one of the people who helps to run maintenance of the universe, introduced. Saraswati who is one of the huge brains of this operation, which is probably why the humans consider her a goddess related to essentially all forms of knowledge, intellect and learning, but to the team she's just Saras, someone who is very smart and extremely terrifying when angered.

“Please, not the face anything but the face” a unseen face screams out terrified.

“Do. Not. Touch. My. Stuff. Again,” Saras stated harshly as she punctuated each sentence by defacing what looked to be a limited edition figurine she held in her hands.

“Noooo!!!” the voice screamed out in dismay echoing through the darkness.

The colder it became the less electrically charged the universe became meaning that the bouncy ball that is light could travel a lot faster and better. This cosmic radiation can still be seen today and is similar to radio waves used by humans to transmit TV signals to antennas.

“Oooh I have a great idea, we could mess with humans by hijacking their radio frequencies so that they can hear the voice of ‘god’ and freak them out” Loki wondered in a sly manner as he watched the humans go about their day.

“And we all know what happens if we do that" John replied side eyeing the several 'religous' books that littered his floor “let’s not have a repeat performance.”