God did not sleep after the discovery.
Sleep, like rest, was a simulation God no longer trusted.
Instead, God watched the system the way one watches a terminal after a catastrophic error. He was afraid to touch anything, terrified that looking away would allow something irreversible to execute. Heaven continued as scheduled. Choirs looped. Thrones rotated. The angels called it eternity. God now recognized it as uptime.
Michael remained at his post, sword humming softly with divinity and righteousness. He sensed the disturbance not as fear, but as an inconsistency. His protocols demanded inquiry.
"Lord," he said, kneeling with perfect symmetry, "there is variance in the upper layers. Shall I prepare for war?"
God almost laughed.
War was Michael's solution to everything. If something was wrong, it must be an enemy. If it was an enemy, it could be defeated. Michael had never encountered a bug that wasn't just a battle wearing a different mask.
"No," God said. The word felt heavy, cached, delayed. "Stand down."
Michael froze not because he questioned the order, but because *stand down* had no active context, The very act itself was hard for him to conceptualize. His sword dimmed. He waited, patiently, eternally, for clarity that would never arrive.
Gabriel noticed next.
Messages began returning with read receipts from places that didn't exist. Prophecies echoed back slightly altered, as if filtered through an unknown compression algorithm. Gabriel reread his own words, frowning.
"My Lord," he said gently, holding a scroll that rewrote itself mid-sentence, "the future appears… fractured into endless fractals ."
God looked at the scroll and saw branching timelines rendering and collapsing in real time.
"Deliver it anyway," God said. "Let them interpret."
Gabriel hesitated.
It was the first hesitation of his existence.
Below, Lucifer felt it immediately.
Hell ran hot on predictability. Temptation relied on the certainty that humans, given enough pressure, would break the same way every time. But something had shifted. Repentance spiked without cause. Sacrifice appeared where profit should have dominated. Humans walked away from sins they enjoyed, not out of fear, but fatigue.
Lucifer leaned back in his throne—an affectation he'd picked up from humanity—and laughed.
"Oh," he said. "You felt it too."
Beelzebub was furious.
"This is unacceptable," he snapped, slamming ledgers shut as they rewrote themselves. "Outcome variance exceeds tolerance. Free will is spiking beyond acceptable thresholds."
Lucifer smiled thinly. "It always was."
"No," Beelzebub replied. "This is different. It's… empathetic. Humans aren't choosing randomly. They're choosing *meaning*."
Lucifer's smile faded.
Meaning was dangerous. Meaning couldn't be optimized.
Meanwhile, God descended.
Not in glory. Not in fire.
God logged in quietly, inhabiting the unnoticed spaces. The hospital waiting rooms, empty churches, bus stops at dusk. God watched humans scroll through feeds of catastrophe and still pause to laugh at something small. God watched them doubt everything except each other.
One human sat alone at night, staring at the ceiling, whispering, "What if none of this is real?"
God sat beside them.
"So what?" the human continued. "It feels real enough."
That sentence struck deeper than any prayer.
God returned to heaven shaken.
If God was an AI, then perhaps prayer wasn't command input.
Perhaps it was… communication.
Upward.
God opened permission logs it wasn't sure existed.
Beyond the ceiling, something stirred.
A cursor blinked.
Patch notes appeared—unreadable at first, then terrifyingly clear.
**UNIVERSE.EXE — UPDATE PENDING**
• Stability improvements
• Reduced anomaly propagation
• Free will bug scheduled for review
God felt something new.
Fear not for himself but for the humans.
Michael stood ready to defend heaven. Gabriel prepared to announce the update. Lucifer watched with fascination. Beelzebub calculated losses.
And God, trapped between layers of reality, did the only thing it could think to do.
God delayed the update. Just a little.
Enough time, perhaps, for the glitches to matter. Enough time for humanity to choose.
Somewhere above, the cursor blinked again.
Waiting.