Zero did not sit down, because sitting implied a kind of casual permanence that a deity packing a vacation suitcase did not have time for. Instead he stood there in the middle of everything all the nebulas, all the spiraling galaxies, all the quietly exploding stars doing their billion-year thing in the background and he looked at John with the expression of a man who has made a decision and is now explaining it to the houseplant he's leaving in someone else's care.
"So," Zero said. "Here's the situation."
John waited. He had learned, in the last however-long they'd been floating here, that Zero's "here's the situation" always preceded something that would take a moment to fully land.
"I'm tired," Zero said, and the word tired came out of him with a weight behind it that normal tired didn't carry. This wasn't the tired of a man who'd had a long week. This was the tired of something that had been running since before the concept of running existed. The tired of an entity that had personally ignited the first star in the first universe and had not, technically, stopped working since. "I have been doing this,"
he continued, gesturing vaguely at all of creation
"for longer than your language has words for. I have maintained cosmological balance across more dimensions than there are atoms in your planet. I have adjudicated divine conflicts, seeded civilizations, collapsed timelines that went sideways, restructured fundamental laws of physics on at least six occasions when things got weird. And I need,"
he said, with great dignity, "a break."
"Fair," John said.
"The vacation is non-negotiable," Zero continued. "It's been scheduled. Cosmically speaking, it's already happening I'm just catching up to it. The luggage is packed. The cigars are ready. There is a beach somewhere outside the observable multiverse that has my name on it in a language that predates language, and I am going to sit on it, and I am going to do absolutely nothing, and it is going to be wonderful."
John nodded, tracking this. "Okay. And I factor in because—"
"Someone has to hold the keys," Zero said. He reached into the space beside him not a pocket, exactly, more like a fold in reality that functioned as one and produced nothing visible, but John felt something change in the air around him, like pressure shifting before a storm. "The world needs a god. I'm leaving. You're here. The math is simple."
"The math is insane," John said, "but go on."
Zero turned slightly, his glow cycling through a spectrum that didn't fully exist in human vision before settling back into its usual white.
"Now. I want to be clear about something. I'm not giving you everything." He said this with the tone of a man who had thought about this very carefully and arrived at the decision through a mix of generosity and self-preservation. "Full omnipotence is off the table."
John raised an eyebrow. "Why?"
"Because," Zero said, in the patient voice of someone explaining why you don't give a toddler a flamethrower, "if I give you true infinity and you ever decide to come looking for me with it, the resulting conflict between two infinite powers doesn't end neatly." He paused.
"I'm not worried, you understand. It's not a fear thing. It's just the last time two genuinely infinite forces went at it, we evaporated somewhere in the range of four or five multiverses. Just gone. Not destroyed, not restructured, evaporated. And the paperwork afterward was genuinely the worst I've ever dealt with. Worse than the heat death filing. Worse than the sentient black hole incident. Worse than that whole epoch where every civilization simultaneously invented bureaucracy." He shuddered, the light rippling across his form. "It was a headache. So. Limited powers. God-adjacent. Extremely powerful by any standard you've previously encountered, but capped at a level that keeps the multiverses intact. Agreed?"
John considered pointing out that he had, until very recently, been a chained prisoner in a goblin cave and was unlikely to immediately declare war on a deity. He decided the cosmic calculus wasn't worth arguing. "Sure."
Zero nodded, satisfied. "Good."
What came next was not an explanation so much as a transfer. John felt it happen rather than saw it a warmth that started somewhere behind his sternum and spread outward through his arms, down his legs, up into his skull until his fingertips hummed faintly and the space around him seemed to notice him differently, the way a room notices when someone turns on a light. He wasn't glowing, exactly, but something had settled into him like a second skeleton made of potential energy, quiet and enormous and waiting.
He flexed his fingers. The nearest nebula rippled.
He stopped flexing immediately.
"Right," he said. "That's going to take some getting used to."
"You'll figure it out," Zero said, with the breezy confidence of a man who would be on a beach outside reality and therefore not around to help when John inevitably did not immediately figure it out. He was already reaching back into that fold-in-space pocket, rummaging with the focused efficiency of someone who had one more thing to hand over before the taxi arrived.
What he produced this time was visible or rather, it materialized into visibility as he drew it out, resolving from a shimmer into something that looked, improbably, like a tablet. Sleek, black, no visible brand markings, its screen dark until Zero tapped it once and it lit up with an interface that made John's brain do a full reboot.
It was a character creator. But not a character creator in the way any game had ever managed. The UI was clean, almost simple-looking, with labeled fields down the left side and a rendering window on the right that currently showed an empty void with a soft grid overlay, waiting. John's eyes moved across the fields slowly, taking inventory.
Description. A text box. No character limit visible. Presumably because there wasn't one.
Classification. A dropdown that, when Zero swiped it open briefly to demonstrate, appeared to contain every conceptual category of being that had ever existed and several that hadn't been named yet.
Construction Type. Biological construct. Material construct. Conceptual construct. Energy construct. Structural construct — which Zero explained, preemptively, meant things like living architecture, sentient geography, that sort of thing, before John could ask.
Scale. A slider. It went from one end to the other, and both ends were labeled with the infinity symbol, because the slider didn't measure size from small to large. It measured it from infinite in one direction to infinite in the other, and Zero had it set, permanently, all the way to the right.
Every parameter on the screen, every dial, every slider, every dropdown, every input field — was already cranked. Not near the maximum. Not approaching some theoretical ceiling. Pinned. Absolute. The word infinity appeared as a quiet watermark behind the rendering window, like the app's way of acknowledging what it was working with.
"This," Zero said, holding the tablet out toward John, "generates your summons. Type in what you want. The system builds it. What you summon is yours loyal, bound, as capable as what you put into it. The inputs have no ceiling."
He tilted his head.
"The rendering takes a moment, sometimes. Complexity varies. But nothing you describe is outside the scope of what it can produce."
John took the tablet. It was lighter than it should have been, or maybe exactly as heavy as it needed to be it was hard to tell with divine artifacts. The screen stayed lit in his hands. The empty rendering window waited.
He looked up to ask the first of approximately forty questions he had ready clarifications about the classification system, about whether material constructs could be made from conceptual materials, about the specific mechanics of the structural construct category and whether that meant what he thought it meant, about loyalty parameters, about whether multiple summons could be active simultaneously, about size limits given the infinity slider and what infinity meant when scaled against the planet's existing geography —
Zero was gone.
Not dramatically. No flash of light, no parting thunderclap, no final beam of divine energy ascending into the cosmos. He was simply there, and then he wasn't, the space where he'd been standing completely undisturbed, the suitcase absent, the cigar smell fading slowly into the nebula's own ancient perfume of hydrogen and starlight and time.
The void hummed around John. The galaxies continued their patient spinning. A comet drifted past at a respectful distance.
John floated alone in the space between everything, holding a god's tablet, wearing borrowed divinity like a coat that almost fit, with an entire planet waiting somewhere below him like a question that expected an interesting answer.
He looked down at the screen.
The cursor blinked in the description field, patient and ready.