1 Little Baby Hand God

Blinding white light peeked through my heavy eyelids. I still can't seem to open my eyes fully. What just happened? My head seems to hurt too. Maybe I went out drinking somewhere and blacked out? No way, I don't drink. I'm not that pathetic.

I suddenly feel like I'm in a transition of dreams. It feels like how one would say they are Lucid dreaming. I could see my mother smiling at me and Mr. Kim asking for the re-edited excel sheets third time this week. I'm in a festival similar to the one I visited with grandma when I was 12 with dragon kites and paper lanterns. I see myself hiding a love letter in Sun Lee's locker.... wait... Stop don't do that dumbass! Why did I do that! I'm cringing so hard. Oh god, wake me up.

"Miss Juniper?"

I got up straight and turned around almost snapping my neck. Who was that and what is with the voice? It felt like the speaker had a bass booster set to high ambiance right beside his vocal cord.

"Are you there Miss Juniper?, You have been unconscious for quite a bit now."

I faced in front of me and there I can finally see the owner of the voice. A little baby with 6 wings on each side and was sipping what looked like a glass of red wine. The baby kept twirling his glass of wine while analyzing my movements. Yes, I have totally lost it now that I am imagining this.

I kept looking at, the now amused, baby, waiting for it to speak again.

"You are awfully calm for someone who just died", the baby chuckled and started to slowly float towards me.

No, I was not calm as this thing was claiming. Quite opposite in reality. Now I'm starting to question what reality is all this. I can feel all the gears in my brain turning. Weird enough I can sense I am dead. I feel hollow inside. My nose is not flaring for oxygen and I felt like the white light was coming from me as if I was the one illuminating the room. I slowly started to come to my senses.

"You are a floating baby" I replied matter-of-factly.

"One could say that I am" it answered back.

"So I am dead and you are an angel-?"

"A God actually, the ones you humans worship", interrupting me suddenly. The floating-diaper-wearing God stopped coming towards me at this point and a puff of cloud appeared beneath his feet as he sat cross-leg on top of it with the wine glass still on his hand.

"We have a lot of things to get at and the first matter of business is that you seem to be aware you are no longer alive right?"

I nodded as the reply.

"You are Miss Juniper Kang, Born in a Victorian Gate City, Taiwan, age 26 at the time of death, a diligent office worker at MicroGreen Tech. Incorporated. Died on a roadside accident involving a red passenger bus speeding at the crossing with no headlights on. The only person to die on sight with the driver and 3 passengers partially hurt. No other bystanders were injured. How unlucky could you be.", the god mumbled the last part out. He does have a point. No one, other than me, apparently died.

"Secondly I have chosen you for a very important job as well. As the universe I made keeps expanding on its own, I need to put up a new system on board and I am currently short-handed too as you can see"

Yes, you do have literal baby hands at work not to mention. I started to humor myself with the thought of him doing any nominal task with those. As if sensing my daring thoughts he looked at me straight in the eye with the scariest and straight face a baby can make. That made me giggle.

A zap of lightning bolt struck me and I felt every existence of me burn with the shock.

"Listen you humans are not the only present beings I created. All you don't know isn't something you can comprehend. I am the almighty and I have chosen you for something worthy. If you don't cooperate now then we will have issues and you would not want that."

I could still feel the current tingling throughout my body. I always believed as a ghost I couldn't feel any pain but seems I need to listen to him seriously now if I don't want that to happen again.

" You are a selected candidate. We monitored you for a while and we expect you to meet the expectations we have set for you. Would you be able to ?"

"I don't know, maybe?" I rhetorically answered.

Another bolt of lightning struck me and this time making every strand of my hair stand to the very end.

"Okay okay! Stop doing that! I'll do whatever that is you want me to do which, by the way, you didn't tell me yet!" almost angered by being toyed around.

"Oh! How rude of me. See the way you were selected was that you were previously monitored by a soul such as yourself. He collected data on you in a way that proves whats makes you an ideal soul to live in our better and advanced universe. It could be data based on basic human sentiment or anything that you find is valuable as a human being. Now what your task would be is to find similar souls and collect those data. If you can find souls that make the cut you can enter this said universe. "

"This is basically a pyramid scheme ."

"Exactly."

I don't want any part of this. Peace was never an option for me even after I die. But all this considered I had nothing else to do. Like what would I do now that I am dead. I could just stay in heaven tho...

"You have no other option. Forgot to mention that."

After mentioning, this God took another sip from his wine now emptying the whole glass. The glass wine started to fill itself on its own.

"What about the whole free will thing then. Isn't it like your whole thing?", I talked back.

"That's only valid when your alive", he said those words slowly as if mocking me. As if this is common knowledge I missed out on.

I feel totally helpless and somewhere I knew he was taking me very lightly while also taking his time. If I rebel against him anymore I knew something worse than those lighting bolts will hit me.

"Come on this seems like it's an amazing deal! Think of it this way you can judge people as freely as you want! You can finally play God with them. Full liberty and freedom to tortu- test your subject in the name of data extraction that is."

"Wait how can I test my 'subject'?", suddenly getting curious about this whole ordeal.

"Like a ghost, you can't physically disturb or displace anything on the land of the living but as you are on a task, you are allowed to do such things only when it is deemed very necessary. Anything extreme with the dire catastrophic outcome would result in your soul completely banished."

I shredded at that thought. That just felt very nasty.

"It still at you benefit If you think about it. You could make them suffer if they did you anything bad in your past life or make them go through many hardships in their ..... that's a huge evil grin on your face"

Why yes my little god. I already have a bunch of people as my 'subjects' in mind. How silly of me this god was actually looking out for me. I tried to compose myself before speaking.

"Oh lord all mighty, the great one, the creator of the universe! I, a humble soul am deemed worthy for such a huge responsibility! I only hope to do my best! So where do I sign?"

God smiled as if expecting this outcome.