“Destruction is a form of creation.”

She gives a little coy smile at this.

“That’s from Donnie Darko.” Followed by a deep drag from her milkshake. “Don’t pretend to be smarter than you are.”

“Why?” he asks her. “Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

This gets a laugh.

“Isn’t that what we’re <i>all</i> doing?”

—-

“To pretend to have importance,” he said to the poster. It was some abstract fractal pattern. It did not talk back.

“If most human actions only affect the people around them and there are six billion people on earth and our planet is in a solar system with seven others and our solar system is one of the trillions of solar systems in our galaxy and our galaxy is one of an uncountable number of galaxies in an infinite universe, then any human action only affects some infinitesimal fraction of a fraction of a fraction of existence as a whole and is rendered nonexistent in terms of net worth of meaning. Thus, all human actions are done to receive instant gratification. No one is important.”

The poster is the only thing on his walls. It is an altar. It represents systems and order. Divine geometry.

“Thus, we are all just pretending to be important.”

—-

He remembered the first time he realized the hydrogen bomb.

He’d learned it at a younger age. More accurately he’d learned powerful explosives. Mass-scale destruction. Nuclearity. Hiroshima Nagasaki same old song and dance. No one realizes the atomic nuclear hydrogen bomb till they’re of an age.

It was said in history class that seventeen well-placed bombs would end the world.

<i>Seventeen.</i>

He thought geez well pain is influence destruction is pain destruction therefore is power <i>therefore humans are god of earth

That made him 1/6,000,000,000 of God.</i>

And some of the other billionths were worthless! Babies elderly mentally deranged disabled and dumb the vegetables wasting their families’ money and the menial laborers and the sex workers and the <s>simple.</s> It was true that importance wasn’t real. But if you took Earth in its own scope weren’t there people who had wasted their place as God?

Could you measure how many people had?

Could you make a statistic of that?

—-

“No, you don’t understand,” he said to her. “I’ve rationalized it.”

“How?”

“Humans are God of our own realm,” he told her with delicacy. “I’m giving God the way out.”

“The suicide needle,” she mused.

“If God as a whole wants to keep its realm,” he continued to rationalize, “It will. If God as a whole does not, it won’t.”

“Makes sense,” she admitted. Milkshake tasted kinda dull now. All soupy.

She looked at him then. She took a real good look at the piece of God. She realized with her pretend-intelligence that he had the most terrifying quality a god could.

But in the end he was just human.

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

He laughed.