The Seven Days

On the first day, Bob was late for work.
         It wasn't at all intentional; his alarm clock, which was linked by optic-fibre broadband to a nuclear clock in Moscow and could not be set manually, had decided his clock's IP was in China and not Cheltenham, and therefore was not due to chime for several hours yet. Bob stirred himself to wakefulness at the chirruping of his mobile phone, followed by the growl of his boss Tim asking facetiously, 'Forget something?' Bob swore under his breath, then apologised to his boss Tim for swearing at him, and then promised he would be in work within the next half hour despite living forty-five minutes from his office.
         Bob was a surveyor, although not a very good one, even when he dutifully showed up on time and obsequiously performed any given duty. Mostly his lack of ability was due to the fact that he didn't really understand what it was a surveyor did and relied solely on the fact that the general public didn't know either and as a surveyor he knew more than they did, so he could wing it.
         He left home without putting brush to either tooth or hair, his shirt unironed and unkempt but half-covered by his jacket. He knew there was a stain somewhere on his person; he kept catching a glimpse of it in his peripheral vision, like a brown creeping shadow, but had neither the time nor the energy to find and take care of it. His attempts to straighten out his clothes as he walked to his car only made matters worse. He swore regularly, rhythmically, like he was practicing an obscene rap song. His car very nearly didn't start, but because there are only so many things that are allowed to go wrong for one person at any one time, it sputtered begrudgingly into life after a few more turns of the key.
         At twelve minutes past ten, Bob's car broke down and had to be pushed to the side of the A40. As he waited impatiently for Green Flag recovery, he started to feel a tickle in his nose. He hoped he wasn't coming down with something sickly, but the British weather had been assailing him with a monsoon of sorts as he tried to fix his car and it wouldn't be unlikely. He cursed again as he sneezed, making a noise like, "Fucpschoo!"
         And as he sneezed, Bob realized he now had the powers of God.
         The realization was more potent and life-changing than what usually happened to him after a sneeze. Indignantly, he realised that to discover your omnipotence in torrential rain while sitting in a Mondeo on the hard shoulder was a ridiculous situation for an Englishman to be in, and lo did he perform his first miracle.
         Driving to work in a pink Lotus Elise (he'd always been drawn to the colour) he realised he was thinking too small. Work? The simple-minded pursuits of mortal men! And thus de he get his mobile phone out and spake unto his boss Tim, 'I quit.' As an afterthought, he added, 'Oh, and incidentally, you are now the spotty twelve-year-old boy you always act like, and your company is now a school filled with attractive girls who all find you repulsive.' And Bob was right.
         Flying to the Bahamas in a personal jet with seventeen nubile maidens attending his every need, Bob realised he was still thinking too small. Apparently phenomenal power didn't automatically come with the mentality required to use it to its fullest. He needed to start thinking outside the cosmic box. No more thinking like a mere human.
         Lying on a lounger on the surface of the sun itself, Bob decided perhaps he ought to reign it in a bit.

On the second day, Bob started to feel quite guilty about the frivolously selfish use of his miraculous powers. After all, what if they were limited? Should he store them away for emergencies? What would happen if and when they were spent, would everything return back to normal in a poof or stay as he had made it? What would happen to him, Bob, himself? Surely he was given the powers of God for some purpose to better humanity. He had a lot of questions, and no answers. There was of course only one person who might answer the questions, if He even classed as a person at all.
         God, the Almighty, Creator of All Things, turned out to actually be a rather boring chap. He spoke in a resigned, lethargic manner, with perhaps a hint of a Liverpudlian accent. Bob looked into the face of God –
         -on a side note, Bob noticed Heaven was almost exactly as it was depicted in cartoons and films, a vast hall of clouds with Grecian pillars extending into the infinite. Angels with white robes, harps and huge dove-like wings loafed around like people with too much time on their hands and too little to do, which is exactly what they were. The Almighty himself sat on a large kingly throne, which, as a sort of soft furnishings juxtaposition, had a bright green hand-stitched cushion on it, presumably to improve His comfort –
         - and asked him the question.
         'Why do I have the power of God?'
         'All my people hold within them my power,' He said. 'It's just that they never really achieve their full potential. It's the ineffable nature of humanity to restrain itself, to hold itself back. Like a built-in safety mechanism. You're the first to override it for two thousand years.' God looked quizzical. 'Incidentally, how did you…?'
         'I sneezed.'
         'Oh. Well, that's definitely a novel approach. Last fellow hit his hand with a hammer and swore so hard his brain turned inside out. Went around saying he was our kid; think the power drove him a bit daft to be honest.'
         Bob wasn't really satisfied with this. The God before him was nothing like the majestic figure St Bartholomew's had instilled in his subconscious as a child. He seemed somehow slovenly, lazy, apathetic. Bob also knew he wasn't going to understand how or why he had been given this gift and decided to return to Cheltenham and work things out for himself.
         Before he left, Bob had a thought. He had the opportunity to ask the Creator of the Universe the big questions which had worried mankind for eons.
         'Why,' he asked, 'do bad things happen to good people?'
         And God, in His infinite wisdom, just shrugged.

On the third day, Bob became something of a celebrity, appearing alongside a vapid Big Brother housemate, with blonde hair and a deficit of brain cells, on a popular daytime television program. He announced to the world his newfound divine power and his intent to use it solely for the altruistic betterment of humanity.
         He clicked his fingers and world peace happened.
         The audience gasped.
         He announced his new e-mail address, which was for people to send to him ideas of how to improve humanity and the world in general. The e-mail address was this;
         [e-mail]
         The host, who was hung-over and wore a crinkled suit, appeared to be very impressed indeed with Bob and announced him the new Jesus. To which Bob replied, reading from the autocue, 'No; Jesus was the old Bob.'
         The audience laughed and applauded like trained seals.
         Bob returned home the traditional way, walking in a meandering fashion while taking in the tiny wonders of the Earth. He felt elated; he was filled with self-satisfaction at his generosity and power. The interview for the telly had gone very well, he thought. I hope someone emails me, he thought.
         When he got home, there were two hundred and eighteen thousand, six hundred and forty-four emails in his new inbox. Bob removed the emails offering him an easy way to chat up women, a larger manhood, a way to "get ripped" without creatine (whatever that was), and was still left with seventeen thousand, three hundred and sixty eight unread messages.
         'Well,' said Bob, and, 'Good grief.'
         Perhaps it was a bit short-sighted to think that few would take him up on his offer of fixing all the world's problems. Maybe Bob had bitten off more than he could chew. Just how much could a chartered surveyor with the infinite powers of the Creator of the Universe achieve within his lifetime? Maybe I should just fix the big stuff, he thought, and then tell everyone that they can have the same powers as me if they only get a mild cold.
         He began a filter for common words in email titles, and felt slightly foolish for not anticipating the highest hit; "climate". Easily fixed, thought Bob to himself, and cracked his fingers for effect.
         The ozone layer filled its own hole. Carbon Monoxide mutated and redesigned its molecules so that it would float to a mine in South Wales where it would become more coal and oxygen. The excess oxygen then combined with hydrogen and was transported by cumulonimbus to Africa where it would rain, providing renewable harvestable crops. Tectonic plates developed sponge-like edges and would bounce harmlessly off each other. The melting point of polar icecaps increased itself to 75 degrees Fahrenheit through stronger covalent bonding. Everything was looking peachy-keen for the planet's future.
         Having deleted over ten thousand e-mails, he considered the matter dealt with.
The second most popular term was "endangered".
         The way Bob saw it, he had two options. One; he could ensure that endangered animals would continue to reproduce thanks to a hormonal imbalance which would cause them to be constantly in heat. Two; he could make sure that all extinct animals would return to the world and thrive once again.
         Clearly, option one was normal, human, inside-the-box thinking, whereas option two was the sort of revolutionary idea that made him such a thoroughly brilliant God. There was really no alternative.
         Bob had second thoughts when he saw the first BBC news report of velociraptors deftly picking people off in Hyde Park.

On the fourth day, Bob's inbox was full. He had one million and one unread messages, the superfluous last message being a warning from his service provider that his mailbox had exceeded the agreed limit.
         Bob, humanity's saviour, couldn't really be bothered.
         He switched off his laptop and went for a walk. The sky was wet and grey, echoing his mood perfectly. Cheltenham looked like a brown watercolour that someone had spilled water over. As he turned onto the high street, a group of chatting women noticed him and started pointing at him. They seemed quite pleased to see him. Others, too, joined in this odd ritual of looking and pointing and talking.
After just a few moments, it seemed like the whole street had stopped what they were doing to stare open-mouthed at Bob. He began to feel conscious that his trousers had a hole in them and he couldn't remember where it was.
         In these situations, it just takes one person to break the stalemate and open the floodgates. The person in question was a middle-aged lady –
         - she was named Laura after her grandmother, her likes included watching soap operas and cats, and she was a very mean-spirited woman-
         - who came careening towards Bob with a hungry look in her eyes, looking at him like a wolf looks at a lamb. She began asking, 'Why don't you get all—', but was then interrupted by a cacophony of questions from the thronged masses.
         'How will you deal with oil distribution?'
         'When will the world end?'
         'Why does my foot hurt?'
         'Can you bring my Ethel back?'
         ‘Who shot Kennedy?’
         'When—'
         'How—'
         'Why—'
         Et cetera, repeat ad nauseum.
         'STOP!' Bob shouted, and they stopped. That is, their voices stopped, but their mouths continued jabbering wordlessly, their desperate questions disappearing into the ether. It didn't take them long to realise that he couldn't hear them, and so they began clawing and pulling at his shirt, the ones at the back pushing forward as they tried to get closer, forcing all their weight onto him. 'GO AWAY!' he cried.
         Suddenly, he was alone on the street. There was not a soul to be seen. He felt guilty and more than a little embarrassed for sending the people away, and he had no idea where he’d transported them. Things weren't going as he had planned them at all, and he had no idea how to fix it despite the phenomenal powers he had.
         Bob went back to his house, and locked the door, and went back to bed. He didn't get out of it again until the next day.

On the fifth day, he awoke with a new sense of purpose. He realised now that he alone could not fix all the problems of the world. He'd done all the big stuff now; humanity could look after itself. After all, he was trying to fix things, not do everyone's work for them. People needed to learn to take responsibility.
         He went back onto the popular daytime television program he'd been on just two days ago. This time he was sitting with a man who sang for a band that were far too cool for Bob to have heard of, because Bob liked Stevie Wonder and didn't even know what an emo was, other than a vague feeling it was a sort of long-legged bird. The singer's hair was smooth against his head, and had a sort of isosceles triangle for a fringe, and his trousers were so thin Bob wondered if he had any feeling in his feet.
         Bob explained to the hung-over host that it was never his intention to do everything for humanity, only to heal the world in order they could start again. He admitted that he didn't even look at the emails that were being sent any more, but he joked that this excluded the ones about manhood growth (which made the cool singer giggle in an unbecoming manner), and he told humanity that they too had the power of God inside them all.
         'How do you know this?' the hung-over host asked.
         'I asked God,' said Bob. 'He told me so. He said that we all could do it but we just had to find a way to… bypass the part of our brains that held us back. He said that it was a long time since it had happened to anyone, but didn't tell me why.'
         'Why?'
         'He's very mysterious.'
         The cool singer with the pencil-thin legs scoffed. 'How did you do it then?' he said.
         Bob's cheeks reddened. He coughed nervously. 'I sneezed,' he said. 'It just sort of happened.'
         There was something of an uproar. Someone at the back of the audience sneezed theatrically, and shouted out 'I'm Jesus!' in a foolish way. The hung-over host had screwed his face up in cynical disbelief. The cool singer was too cool to react at all.
         Again his plans had not come to fruition. He left the studio, and went and sat on the moon to think in peace. He hoped that at least a few people would have seen him on TV and found a way to unleash their Godly power.
         Several hours passed like a lame old donkey on Blackpool beach. No one had bypassed what Bob had started to think of as their limiter node. Nobody could be bothered to achieve the same divine level as he had, despite the possibilities that held. Was humanity really so lazy it couldn't solve its own problems and instead left it to Bob to deal with? He felt not like their leader, as he should, but rather like the PA in the office who seems to be the only one who ever does any work.
         How could he make them change?

On the sixth day, everyone in the world woke up with the sniffles. It was dreary weather from Cardiff to Calcutta; that sort of "typical English weather" made so famous for its soggy browns, greys and dark blues. Clouds emptied themselves in a sort of persistently lethargic drizzle, heavy enough to soak everything and everyone that was out in the open air. Even parts of Africa which had only just discovered rain thanks to Bob's solution to carbon monoxide, found it a depressing sight as their drenched chickens coughed and spluttered and their usually dusty land turned into a viscous brown sludge.
         Basically, every human being alive ended up with a dreadful cold.
         …Which meant a lot of sneezing.
         Bob sat at the peak of Mount Fujiyama, hungrily watching the world, wringing his hands gleefully like a nefarious villain from the silent film era. As far as he was concerned, he'd offered humanity the chance to redeem itself, and it had refused the offer. Now, he planned to force their salvation upon them.
         It was some time before things started to happen. At about nine forty-five in the morning local time, Ed Winchester, a television presenter from Boston, Massachusetts,  sneezed and received holy powers. His first miracle was to turn himself into a superhero.
         Next was a Tokyo businessman named Akira Yashimoto. His first miracle was to extend his manhood (without having to reply to any spam emails and give away his credit card information). His second miracle was to move the office where he had worked to a remote island surrounded by sharks and piranhas and auto-targeting gun turrets.
         The third person that day to fulfil his celestial potential was a small raggedy orphan boy known as Mouse. His first miracle was to create a big house for himself and his orphan friends to live with lots of food and toys and no chores ever. His second miracle was to bring his parents back to life. He immediately told them they were selfish for leaving him and that he hated them and that he was glad they were dead and then he sent them away again.
         And so on and so forth, for each limiter node bypassed led to another selfish abuse of devout powers, each new superhuman chose to make things better only for themselves at the expense of everyone else. Women were seduced, millionaires made, antagonists killed in ironic ways. By the time two billion people had the power of a deity, the Earth was carnage.
         Bob, sitting disconsolately on the moon, sunk his head into his hands and asked himself, 'What have I done?'

On the seventh and final day, Bob had reached a decision. And the decision was this:
         Humanity wasn't worth saving.
         He felt oddly relieved in forming this thought, rather than heavy-hearted as he guiltily thought he should feel. It was as if he'd already known it, deep down, and his experiences of the last week had allowed him to release any false pretence he might have held on to. He vaguely wondered if any of the other people now in his position, with newly-acquired heavenly command, had worked it out sooner than he had. How long would it be before someone took it too far and destroyed the world?
         …Or the universe?
         Poof! And he went to look at the pyramids in Egypt. Zam! He saw the Panama Canal. Whizz! He was watching the running of the bulls in Pamplona.
         One by one he teleported around the globe, trying to see everything he had always wanted to see, now he had the opportunity, and before it was too late. Michaelangelo's David had almost brought a tear to his eye, almost made him think that perhaps mankind could redeem itself… until he saw a small starving boy get kicked by a stall keeper in a local market. Shaking his head, the very last thing he visited was the tower in Pisa. He stood it up straight as a parting gift, because it had always grated on the obsessive-compulsive side of him.
         Thus it was that on the seventh day, at seven-thirty one pm Greenwich Mean Time, Bob climbed a celestial stairway up to Heaven, never to return. As he climbed, the Led Zeppelin song ran through his head, although, because he wasn't really a very cool person, he was thinking of the Rolf Harris version.
         Ooh, and it makes me wonder...