Unidentified Funny Objects 2 (26 page)

The creature hopped off the table and came back with her bag, jacket, and the keys to the Ferrari. Then it climbed in the bag and looked at her expectantly.

“Right,” she said, and headed outside.

She got in the car, which smelled of new leather and Sharon’s perfume, and put her bag on the passenger seat. The creature poked its head up and held out Abby’s iPhone. It was displaying her Reminders app, with a new entry at the bottom. It said Go to supermarket and buy big pizzas for Cthulu.

“Cthulu,” Abby said. “Seriously? Your name is Cthulu?”

The creature waved its ears.

Abby sighed. “Fine,” she said. “Fine.”

She put her hands on the steering wheel but didn’t start the car. Cthulu gave an inquiring chirp.

Abby scratched behind his ears for a while. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she said helplessly. “With her? I mean, if she can do all this—should I be trying to get her to, I don’t know, eradicate hunger? Create world peace?”

Cthulu cocked his head, then opened up the Notes app on her phone. He typed, carefully and delicately with one black claw, Control by omnipotent power = eradication of free will and individuality. Create puppets, not peace.

“Right,” Abby said. “Right.”

She sighed, started the engine and drove to the office.

SHARON WAS WAITING IN her consulting room, sprawled in one of the puffy armchairs with her booted feet swung over the side. The reception desk was empty.

“Where’s Donna?” Abby said.

“I gave her the day off. Don’t worry, you’ll get the credit.” Sharon shimmered, briefly changed into a mirror image of Abby, then shifted back again.

Abby sank onto her own chair. “Oh, God.”

“Yes?” Sharon gave her an expectant look.

“You can’t do this,” Abby said.

“The facts of the case would beg to differ.”

”I don’t mean you can’t, I mean you can’t.” Abby shook her head. “You have to stop.”

“Why?”

“Because—because—control by omnipotent power means the eradication of individual will. We’re human beings, not puppets.”

Sharon shot a suspicious look at Cthulu, who was sitting on the desk and chewing on a paper clip. He spat it out and looked back with wide, innocent eyes.

“Sharon, please,” Abby said. “I didn’t want this. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I called you, woke you, whatever. But please, can’t you just—go back? Go home?”

“The thing is, you’re totally right, what you say in your book—which is currently number one on the New York Times non-fiction chart, by the way, no need to thank me. The key to happiness is to keep learning, growing, and experiencing.” Sharon swung her boots off the chair and sat up straight. “But how do you learn when you already know everything? How do you grow when you already are everything? And as for experiences—I’ve spent a thousand years as a grain of sand, I’ve gone sunbathing inside the burning heart of a star, I’ve played with dinosaurs and ridden centaurs. I’ve watched civilizations, species, whole planets, come and go. But it all gets old in the end. I’m bored, Abby. I’m bored. I need direction. A sense of purpose. That’s why meeting you was so perfect, don’t you see?”

Abby looked down at her desk, at the notebooks and case files. Her own image smiled up at her from the cover of her book. A red sticker said “The Mega-Bestseller! As Seen on TV!”

A small sound escaped her. She wasn’t entirely sure if it was a laugh or a sob. Abby Fowler, Life Coach to the Gods.

“Okay, then,” she said. “Tell me, on a scale of one to ten, how do you rate ‘all-powerful superbeing’ as a career?”

Sharon seemed to consider this. “I suppose it beats working in retail,” she said.

Abby wiped her eyes. “Okay. Fine. You really want my professional advice? Here it is. Nothing interests you because nothing challenges you. You need something that you aren’t automatically going to be good at, something you can’t control.”

“You do know the meaning of the word omnipotent, right?”

“If you can do anything, then that should include creating something you can’t do.”

Sharon scratched her neck with glittery fingernails. “Gah. Ontological paradoxes give me hives. But, you know what? You might just be on to something. Every story needs an antagonist, doesn’t it? Every hero needs an arch-enemy. A nemesis.” She nodded, her eyes gleaming. “That’s exactly what I need. A supervillain.”

Abby pursed her lips. “Well, that’s not exactly what I—”

“Two evenly-matched combatants, pursuing each other through time, space and multi-phasic trans-dimensional realities, constantly fighting an epic, eternal battle for dominance. What a great idea. I love it.”

She leaned back and crossed her legs. “Naturally, it goes without saying that the job’s yours.”

A card materialised on the desk. On the front was a satellite picture of Earth, with the words “Congratulations on your Apotheosis!” superimposed over the top. Inside, it said, “Dear Abby—it’s going to be fun!—Love, Sharon.”

Abby laid the card flat. “No, thanks,” she said.

“So, I think the first thing we should do is—hang on, what?”

“I said no, thanks. I’m quite happy here in my ordinary, non-phasic reality.”

“You don’t want to be a god? I was joking earlier, you know. It’s a lot better than working in retail.”

“No, I don’t want to be a god. I like my job. I like my life.”

Sharon pulled on her lip ring. “Ah.”

“Ah? What does that mean, ah?”

“You like Paul.”

Abby frowned. “What? Yes, of course I like Paul. So?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.” Sharon looked away.

“I might not have omniscient powers, but I’m good at telling when people are lying. What are you talking about? What about Paul?”

“Well—” Sharon shrugged. “I just made sure all the boxes were ticked, that the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed, that the—”

“What are you saying? That you——what? Mind-controlled him, somehow? Changed him? Made him perfect for me?”

“Well—”

“My God—all the time we’ve been together—how far back does this go? Did you go back in time and make him fall in love with me?”

Sharon rubbed the back of her neck. “No,” she said slowly, drawing the word out. “Not exactly.”

Abby lifted her chin. “Whatever you did, undo it.”

“You don’t really want me to do that.”

“Yes, I do. Didn’t you hear what I said about free will? That’s important, Sharon. That matters.” She stood up and folded her arms. “I don’t want some perfect, fake Paul. I’d rather take my chances with the real one.”

“Yeah. See, there’s your problem.”

“What?”

“There isn’t one.”

“There isn’t one what?”

“A real Paul. There isn’t one. I made him to order.”

“That’s not possible. I met you yesterday. I met him two years ago.”

“Mm, no. It’s the happiness thing again, you see. Good memories are part of it. So I gave you some. Trust me, Paul is about thirty-six hours old.”

Abby’s knees gave way and dumped her back in her chair. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Then take it back. If that life isn’t real, I want you to get it out of my head. You must be able to.”

“‘I can, if that’s what you want.”

“I do. No, wait. What happens to Paul?”

“Like I said. There isn’t one.”

Abby’s voice caught. “He dies?”

“Technically, he goes back to never having existed.”

Abby’s stomach churned. “Get out,” she said. “‘I don’t care what powers you have, if you come anywhere near me again I will kill you.”

“Well, you see, I’m like energy, in that I can’t actually be…” Sharon looked at Abby’s face and trailed off. “Maybe we won’t get into that right now.”

“No,” Abby said. “Maybe we won’t.” She snatched her car keys off the desk and slammed the door behind her.

“YOU’RE HOME EARLY,” PAUL said. He was stirring something in a wok on the hob, something that smelled spicy and delicious.

She nodded. “I dumped a client,” she said.

“Really? That doesn’t sound like you.”

She stood by the breakfast bar and crossed her arms over her chest. “Tell me where we first met.”

“Huh?”

“Tell me, Paul.”

“On the early morning train to Glasgow, three years ago. You were speaking at a seminar on personal development.”

She closed her eyes. “What’s your favorite food?”

He licked the spoon in his hand and grinned. “Green Thai curry, obviously. Why?”

“Same as mine. Your favorite book?”

“Abby, what is this?”

“Just do it, okay? Humor me. Actually, no. You know what? Don’t. Don’t do what I want. Because you always do, don’t you? You’re always perfect.”

Paul gave her a quizzical look. “Is that a bad thing?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is.”

He laughed. “So—if not doing what you want is a good thing—maybe this is the right time to tell you I booked up for Trevor’s stag do in Ibiza?”

“This is the trouble, you always—wait, what?”

“It’s only for a week.”

“You’re going away for a week? To Ibiza? Without me?”

He put his head to one side. “You do know what stag do means, don’t you?”

She gave a tiny shudder. “I hate Ibiza,” she said. “And Trevor, come to think of it. What if I said I don’t want you to go?”

Paul grinned. “Well, since I’ve already paid my deposit, I’d say we’d have to agree to disagree for once.”

Abby let out a long breath and scrubbed her hands over her face. “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe we could do that. Maybe we really could.”

Paul took the wok off the heat and turned to face her. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

She found a smile from somewhere. “I’m fine,” she said, “I just need some air.”

She slipped out the back door into the garden. A large leaf detached itself from next door’s apple tree and swirled in the air. Somewhere, a cat yowled.

“Are you there?” she said softly. “Come on, I know you can hear me.”

“I’m here,” Sharon said. She was sitting cross-legged on top of the shed.

Abby scuffed her heel on the decking. “All right. I still think it’s wrong, what you did. But he’s Paul. However he started out, he’s real now. So I want you to leave things as they are.”

”You humans can really be capricious, you know that? But yeah, I can do that.” She jumped down. “So, about that supervillain thing?”

Abby shook her head. “No. Definitely not. I am not going to play Joker to your Batman, or David to your Goliath, or whatever it is you had in mind. So you can forget all about that idea. The answer’s ‘No.’ One hundred percent no.”

“How about Buffy and Faith? I’ll let you be Buffy.”

“The answer’s no.”

Sharon scratched her ear. “Ah,” she said.

Abby raised her eyebrows. “Ah? Again, with the ah? Now what?”

”So you didn’t want to be given supernatural abilities that would enable you to interact with me on a more equal footing, then.”

“No. I did not.”

“Ah,” Sharon said.

THAT NIGHT, ABBY DREAMED about going sunbathing inside the burning heart of a star. When she woke, she had a deep, all-over tan.

THE BANK APPROVED ABBY’S loan application. She gave the rest of the funds that had appeared in her account to charity and used the loan to lease another floor in her office building. Joe Callaghan was her first employee.

Cthulu discovered online grocery shopping, and she had to buy three new industrial-sized freezers to store all the pizzas. Paul went to Ibiza, and posted photos on Facebook that made Trevor’s fiancée call off the wedding. Abby made him sleep on the couch for a week, but in the end everybody agreed it was probably for the best.

Sharon wiped out half of North America with a tactical strike launched from an orbital space laser, but Abby put it back before anyone really noticed.

“DID YOU HEAR?” JOE said, as he put Abby’s coffee on her desk. “Some woman’s opened up another coaching service on the forty-eighth floor.”

“Actually, I like to call it a facilitation service,” Sharon said from the doorway. She’d dyed her hair brown and swapped the motorcycle boots for suede high heels.

“What’s that?” Joe said.

“It’s a more hands-on approach,” she said.

“Really?” Abby said. “This is what you’re doing, now?”

Sharon shrugged. “You know what they say—if you can’t beat them, join them. And then beat them.”

Joe narrowed her eyes. “And what makes you think you’re going to beat us?”

“I get results for my clients,” Sharon said. “Whatever they want, I can make happen. In fact, I guarantee it.”

Joe snorted. “Good luck with the advertising standards agency on that one. Well, just make sure you don’t try to pinch our clients. Otherwise you’ll have a fight on your hands.”

Sharon grinned. “Oh, pet. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Story notes:

I've always been fascinated by the concepts of immortality and omnipotence—with endless time and power at your command, what would you do? Many fine stories have looked at this question from the serious, “with great power comes great responsibility” angle. I decided to try a more irreverent take.

Michelle Ann King writes SF, dark fantasy and horror from her kitchen table in Essex, England. She has worked as a mortgage underwriter, supermarket cashier, makeup artist, tarot reader and insurance claims handler before having the good fortune to be able to write full-time. She loves Las Vegas, vampire films and good Scotch whisky. Find details of her stories and books at 
www.transientcactus.co.uk

by Desmond Warzel