Prime

God had always been ethereal, esoteric, a figment in which to ground her soul in the real world and give her a mechanism to cope with how shitty life really was. That all came to a screeching halt when she met Gabriel. It hadn’t taken Claire long to figure out that she was jumping from one reality to another. The fact that she was able to was the astonishing part. In Plague World, she met Gabriel. As she stood over the body of her infected “twin”, he strolled out of the diner’s kitchen like a spring-breaker at the beach.

“How do you feel, Claire?”, the question seemed as nonchalant as his interest in the scene around him.

“Who the fuck are you?” Her breaths came heavy in the aftermath of her killing.

“I’m an angel.” Again, the sheer disinterest in his voice was more than maddening to Claire.

She dropped the bloodied knife and stood straight, the muscles in her back screaming in agony. the last few days… weeks… whatever, she had been through some shit, and her body felt every bit of it. “Yeah… And I’m God.” She had no time for games, she had to find her way out of this hell hole, and this douche was holding her up.

“You’re not too far off, my dear.”

And just when she thought she couldn’t handle any more weirdness, she had to take an interest in what he said. The conversation lasted the night, and by sunrise Claire was laughing hysterically. Gabriel was not amused. But, he was no longer his nonchalant asshole self, either. In fact, he seemed mildly perturbed by Claire’s incredulity. Seriously, though, how could two thousand years of religious practice have so completely wrong?

After a silence, Claire looked at Gabriel and said, “So, Christ didn’t die on the cross to save our souls, but to kill off all but 300,000 quantum realities? And you’re an angel because you’re a Jumper? You’re actually human and have no wings?”

“We’ve been over this a thousand times, Claire. Yes, I’m human, and there were mortal forms of me in many of the realities. But they died millennia ago.”

“But why did you, or any of the other angels, not become God? And why do you want me to be?”

“We let our other selves die out naturally. We didn’t have the chance, as Primes, to take them out purposely, as you do. It was a power we chose not to wield.”

Claire dropped her head and shook it back and forth. “Why me? Why do you want me to be God?”

“Because you don’t want to be, which is the exact reason why you must. You will be the seventh God of Earth. When the Creator let Himself die on the cross, He realized that only humans could guide humans, and so He chose from among us to take up the crown. But the weight of the crown is heavy, and even a prime will buckle under it. The third God lasted the longest, but six centuries was too much for her.”

That night seemed another lifetime to Claire as she stood looking into the funhouse mirror. Gabriel had guided her only so long, teaching her how to locate and kill her other selves. She barely paid attention to the realities she jumped to, and time had no meaning for her anymore. The killings though, they had started to change her. She felt powerful, and each self that she dispatched was easier than the previous. She was drawn to them, as if she was developing an internal compass that told her exactly where they were. But she needed to find a faster way, because this Groundhog Day feeling was dragging her down.

Thus, the funhouse had become her plan. She knew that she could bridge worlds through the mirrors, and her others would be drawn by her power to look into the very same mirrors in their own worlds.

Her sneakers were caked in mud, her jeans were damp and blackened and highlighted by numerous tears, her red hoodie was in dire need of laundering, and her tangled hair fell about her dirt and blood-stained face like a Barbie found in a landfill. And as she stared at the faces in the mirror, she knew that they were not her own. But she was the Prime, and the hunger inside her to be the one was unlike any hunger she had ever known. Claire saw that realization in the faces staring back at her. She saw their lives flashing before their eyes.

The screams of terror were simultaneous, and they amplified each other until the sound became silence. And she ran through the reflections, absorbing each self in a flash of anguish and ecstasy. Claire didn’t notice when the mirrors stopped shattering and the world around her became bathed in white light. As she fell to her knees, she felt inside of her a power she was never expecting.

“You’re here.”

Claire lifted her gaze to see a man kneeling before her.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for you.” When she first laid eyes on him, he looked to be in his early sixties. Now, his aging was accelerating until his entire body crumbled to dust.

As she ran her fingers through what was left of the man that had been there just a moment before, Claire was aware of the universe itself. She saw all of the realities unfolding before her mind’s eye. She knew… She was God…

“Now what?”