I was trimming back the azaleas when I heard the noises. Faint, almost inaudible, but there.
Took me quite a while but I finally tracked them to the hole left when I pulled that old railing post out of the ground a week back. I meant to fill it in but, you know, things come up.
Anyway, I leaned down and put my ear near it. Carefully, didn’t want a snake surprising me.
It was the weirdest thing. I could hear rushing wind, something like a far-away ocean, and a tiny roar that was getting louder…
I sat up in time to see a tiny, tiny thing fly straight up out of the hole on a thumb-sized cone of fire. There was a faint boom as the fire burnt out and the bottom bit fell off, and the tiny thing arced through the sky and began to plummet.
I caught it, barely and held it up.
The size of fleas they were, but their looks of terror were absolutely–
OK, yes, fine, they were humans and the hole was the entire universe and I’m probably their God or something and I created All That Is this time by yanking out a rusty old gate.
You know what? I’m tired of creating universes all over the place. I throw out my gum, there’s a universe. I write a cheesy little computer game for fun, by morning there’s an entire cosmos of races fighting to the bloody death by the millions over which one of them I like best and really it was just me forgetting to carry the two. I don’t care if it turns out your universe is merely an atom in mine. I don’t want to have to deal with the ethical responsibilities for bringing 8 billion sentient beings into creation just because I was too tired to run the dishwasher one night.
Forget it. Take your thought experiments and quantum physics musings and get out. And stop praying to me! I’m getting migraines.
I put a rock over the hole. I kept the tiny ship, though. It was pretty cool.