The night sky opened before him and Matt Callaghan gazed in quiet wonder up at the drifting celestial clouds.

Green and yellow. Purple, blue. A painted rift of stars and galaxies spun out overhead above him, so close he could almost touch them, their soft colours illuminating the world below.

It had been three days now. The rain had stopped, the clouds finally parted, the sun rose and the sun set. Matt was not completely confident that it did so in the same place every morning and every evening, or that that place was west or east or that such directions even existed here. He was not sure if the days were twenty‑four hours long and constant, nor that time moved the same way that it did back on Earth. He suspected maybe it didn’t. Yet he kept counting sunrises all the same.

For three days Matt had just kept walking. The thin linen ‘shoes’ he’d fashioned had predictably disintegrated in short order, but the grass was soft in most places and he soon found the soles of his feet turning hard. At first Matt had been worried about going hungry, and about the animals, but those two fears soon were soon revealed to be baseless. There were ripe, overabundant fruit trees hanging thick with apples, pears and oranges scattered in groves as he passed, and bushes of mulberries and blackberries growing wild around every hill and corner. The predators, lions and tigers, crimson‑green and sometimes feathered velociraptors and a pack of what looked like giant three‑headed wolves all seemed to avoid him, simply skirting out of his way, their eyes glazing over him or their approaches being deterred by his uniquely human smell. The smaller creatures conversely showed no fear at a person approaching, and Matt was able to very easily catch fish by standing in a stream and letting them swim between his outstretched hands. This was a world devoid of danger, he soon realised. He scaled the fish with a bit of obsidian he found amongst the stones on the shoreline, and cooked it beneath a rocky overcrop on a fire of broken branches and paperbark. Matt had never been very outdoorsy, but his Mom had taken him and his siblings camping a few times and shown them a couple of things. It wasn’t high luxury, but he could make do.

Matt continued, often, to wonder what he was doing – or, maybe, what Jane was doing, if she really was actually through with him, resigned to letting him wander the wilderness forever until he died of old age. Maybe this was her giving him the life she thought he wanted – maybe this was her idea of punishment. Maybe she was genuinely ignoring him, and once she felt like he’d had sufficient days in the time‑out corner she would magically appear and he would be transported back to the palace. In a way, though Matt didn’t know, it didn’t matter. He couldn’t predict nor control Jane’s actions. He could only control himself.

Matt stuck to the shade during the daytime, meandering slower in most instances or resting on beds of soft grass underneath shady trees. Despite this, by the third day the skin on his torso was becoming more golden, and his legs stronger and more certain. His beard was starting to grow. At night he walked mainly, the path illuminated by the blanket of stars and the irregular path of the moon, which strayed much closer than it did on Earth, hanging huge and silver in the sky. He still did not have a destination, only a general sense of purpose, a desire to wander and be free.

It was on his fourth night, when he stopped in a cave rest overlooking a river to rest and take shelter, that Matt found the dog. He had just lit a fire – getting better at it each day with practice – and was warming his hands when from the back of the cavern he heard something whimpering. Matt turned around, peering curiously into the darkness, then pulled a smouldering stick out from the fire and made his way cautiously deeper inside. In the back, amongst a pile of fur and bones, a puppy sat whimpering; white and stringy haired, with splotches of black and brown, floppy triangular ears, amber eyes and a fat stomach. Matt wondered how it had come to be there, but then he saw one of its feet was twisted and it was struggling to walk. Maybe the mother, for whatever reason, had moved on, forced to leave the runt.

“Hey little one,” Matt whispered. He bent in and scooped up the whimpering puppy, who was shivering cold and terribly scrawny. Matt brought it back to the fire, holding it firm against his chest. “Here you go.”

He waited for several hours with the little dog in his arms before it stopped shaking, feeding it morsels of fish and talking to it in a calm voice about everything, anything and the world. By the time the sun rose, the puppy was sleeping. The following day Matt searched around until he found a plant with strong‑looking leaves of a sort he’d repeatedly come across, and with much trial and error jerry‑rigged a kind of rudimentary harness. From there, the little pup stayed strapped to Matt’s chest, bobbing as he continued to walk. They carried on, past wide, mist covered lakes where huge, finned serpents stirred while flocks of grey dodos squawking on rocky shorelines, heading towards a distant mountain, rising up into the sky.

*****

“Damnit.”

Jane rolled back a few seconds in time, glaring at Ironleaf City’s wireless networking system, which continued to resist her attempts to fix it now and for all eternity. It worked now well enough, but Jane could see the lines of reality twisting round to indicate that in a few months’ time the network would inexplicably slow down again. She was a god. It was freaking wi-fi. Why was it so hard to make wi‑fi work as a god?

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The work was continuing – the cities built, the planet expanded to a size she believed was adequate. Beautiful, empty metropolises dotted the land, atop and beneath oceans, amongst the jungles, the snows and the skies, each one as unique and different as she could make it and each one ready to receive all those who strove to reside there. She would make modifications once the people came, of course, to adjust for whatever they needed beyond what the silhouettes of the life threads told her. Humanity would want for nothing. Or so she’d initially thought.

The first batch of humans she’d imported had been a source of near-constant frustration. The first city done, the other work unfolding, Jane had reasoned she needed randomised test subjects, so had simply ascended up to her heaven a random subway carriage of New Yorkers. All had arrived simultaneously, with only what they were wearing and carrying, and all had been told they were now children of paradise, congratulations. They would want for nothing, they need only ask and they would receive, they would be provided for entirely. They would live long and happy lives free from pain and suffering. They were unchained, limitless, free to do as they wished.

For the majority of people she’d transported, this news had been met with understandable shock, confusion and excitement, followed mostly by joy and acceptance. A few people had asked for their dogs, one old Russian man for his bird, all of which was Jane was fine with, all of which was perfectly doable. They settled in to exploring the city, the world and its many wonders, marvelling at the majesty all around them, searching out places to call their home.

Yet there were some, Jane found as she scowled, who were being nothing but difficult. Some inexplicably lurching towards idiotic, mean or self‑serving behaviour even when there was a literal god at their beck and call, ready and willing to serve them.

There was one sleek‑haired man in his mid‑thirties who about five minutes after the transportation hit, ran straight up to the tallest of the unoccupied city towers and began tearing off metal sheeting to hastily scrawl signs, claiming it as ‘his’ private property. He did that to three other entire skyscrapers, to the point of yelling at other people stopping by that they couldn’t come in unless they rented from him, before Jane teleported him into the middle of the desert. He was a faunamorph, able to turn into a snake, so Jane knew he would get out of there eventually, but she couldn’t see his behaviour changing and she wasn’t certain what she’d do when he got back.

There was another woman who complained about the food, and a lack of a movie theatre. Jane, appearing before her, asked her to describe whatever it is she wanted to eat, and she would transport it through to her. Yet everything the woman requested and Jane delivered the hag deemed “stale”, “fake” or “unacceptable”, by virtue of some flaw or issue not even Jane’s omniscience could divine. The woman’s dietary requirements also seemed to change daily, and even with the ability to perceive both past and future Jane struggled to placate her and struggled to keep up. She made her a movie theatre, no problem, which the woman soon came to perpetually occupy, but within a week she and another resident had almost come to blows over his desire to watch something other than the woman’s soap opera, which she sat gawking at all day, transfixed by the inanity playing out on the big screen. Jane was forced to transport the pyromancer man to the opposite end of the city and extinguish the fire he started in the cinema curtains, which he was not happy about even once she manifested him a theatre of his own, and even when she assured him he could burn it down to his heart’s content.

Then there was Mister Abdul Aziz al-Maliki, penitent Muslim, who refused to settle in at all, instead wandering around the city refusing food, water and shelter, crying Arabic phrases and wailing “I worship no God but Allah!” Despite Jane literally appearing in front of him and performing miracles, he refused to even so much as go inside, and his screaming soon began to annoy the other residents. After three days Jane was finding it hard to resist the urge to drop a boulder on that one, and see if Allah lifted a finger to intervene.

Then there were Mr and Mrs O’Brian. Although initially ecstatic at the time of landing, the couple soon came into serious dispute after it was revealed that Mr O’Brien, who possessed super breath, had viewed his transportation to paradise as rendering his vows of monogamy obsolete. Mrs O’Brien, who had super senses, had, upon finding him gleefully entangled with another woman, repeatedly tried to stab him. Jane had, naturally, seen the whole thing coming, yet felt hand-tied to do nothing but intervene at the time of conflict to prevent bloodshed, transporting the O’Briens a couple of hundred miles apart. Yet Mrs O’Brien held onto the knife, and swore every night to the starry heavens that she was going to track down that man and murder him. And she was, to Jane’s displeasure, slowly making good on her promise, every day narrowing the distance between them as she trekked relentlessly across Jane’s world.

Then, finally, there were the children. A small excursion of schoolchildren had been on the subway, who Jane had expected, maybe hoped, would delight in a world of abundance and openness, free from rules. Yet many of them just screamed for their parents. Okay, Jane allowed, that was understandable. She brought in the children’s parents. Then those parents wanted to bring their friends. And their friends had their own children. And soon what was initially meant to be a small proof of concept had blown out in number three fold, and Jane was spending half her time in the timestream trying to correct and anticipate every need.

“I miss my home,” some people kept crying. Eventually, Jane got so angry she just started sending them back. If you want to leave, fine, no one’s stopping you. No one’s forcing you to remain in paradise. She seethed with every one she transported back, refusing to admit the irony.

And so the nights swam ever onwards, and day after day Jane found her gaze inevitably drifting back to Matt – back to the small, stubborn human and his new companion as they wandered her wonder‑strewn world. Day after day she watched them, night after night, for glimpses, then minutes, then hours – as Matt hummed to himself, as he talked to the dog, as he sometimes sang, and as they made their way slowly across the wilderness, bearing no destination save ‘on’.