By Gary McGath
Copyright 2009 by Gary McGath. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fan fiction. All trademarks, references to published works of fiction, and allusions to familiar characters are for purposes of entertainment or satire only. This is not a commercial work and is not offered for sale.
[The Celestial Conference Room. The LORD, GABRIEL, MICHAEL, URIEL, LUCIFER, and RAPHAEL.]
The LORD: We're still on target for the Friday ship date. Gabe, how are you coming on the speed-of-light limit? We don't want people hopping out to planets that are still unfinished.
GABRIEL: It's working nicely. And I think you'll like the revised version I've been testing. It ties gravity in as well.
RAPHAEL: I've run into a little problem, though. The way you've coded it, you can have places where everything just gets sucked in, nothing can get out. Black holes, you might call them. I ran a case where gravitational forces went to infinity and the program just blew up. Division by zero.
GABRIEL: Oops. I'd better fix that.
The LORD: It doesn't sound like too bad a problem. You say nothing can get out? No information, no light?
GABRIEL: That's right.
The LORD: Then just special-case it so it looks right from the outside. It doesn't matter what happens inside as long as you trap it.
GABRIEL: Good idea, Lord!
The LORD: Of course it's a good idea! Now, Uriel. I think you've done some really nice work on the laws of motion and orbital mechanics. I wish the other pieces were as clean.
URIEL: Thanks. It's really one of the easier pieces to code. Once I figured out there should be an inverse-square law, everything fell into place.
The LORD: But Mike, your code for atoms is an unholy mess.
MICHAEL: I know, it's not very clean. But the specs were ridiculous. First they said that particles with the same charge have to repel each other. Then they decided the nucleus of an atom needs to have all the positively charged particles packed together in the middle. What were they thinking? And then I'm supposed to give the atoms properties to fit that table of theirs. I might be able to make it simpler with enough time, but not by Friday.
The LORD: Okay, I know it's not easy. Are you at least sure it's compatible with Gabe's and Uriel's pieces? Rafe, have you done any testing on that?
RAPHAEL: So far it looks OK, but I'm not completely comfortable with it. There might be some cases where you can sneak around the speed-of-light limit. Just a few particles, though, not a spaceship or anything like that. But the matter-to-energy and energy-to-matter API could be trouble. And Gabe, you said gravity is in that framework now too?
GABRIEL: Don't worry, Mike. Gravity's really simple. It won't cause any problems with your stuff.
The LORD: I think we're going to have problems down the road with this. We might have to do some patches in the field. Try to get it as tight as you can in the time we've got.
MICHAEL: I'll do what I can.
The LORD: Lucy, I like your scripting language for genetic information. All in one molecule, too. That was some really intelligent design work.
RAFAEL: Only one problem there. A couple of scripts I was testing got infected with viruses.
LUCIFER: Does that really matter? It's a good feature set. They'll just have to install virus protection. And did I mention these X and Y chromosomes? They're designed to let information be swapped around from one script to another.
The LORD: And viruses too?
LUCIFER: Well, yeah, I suppose so.
The LORD: Oh, well, it'll make life interesting. Anything else? ... Then we are going to ship on Friday, right? I don't want to work on the weekend, and I don't think you do either.
[LUCIFER whispers to MICHAEL.]
The LORD: I heard that! As a matter of fact, I do think I'm God Almighty! If you don't like it, Lucy, you can start your own company!
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