The man in the silver chair clapped once, and the beings of every shape and size stopped squirming.

 

"Welcome to the Earth session of my Universe Conference. Version 6.0. Seeing as you guys got shafted the hardest in this build, I figured it would be most benevolent of me to let you all get the first shot at my Grand-Design. Now...who's first?"

 

A woman in the front row stood up. "Humanity has a number of complaints, sir."

 

God raised an eyebrow. "Go."

 

All things bright and beautiful got one request for the new build. Humans got three.

 

"After convening with world leaders in a plethora of fields, we have arrived at this conclusion: we request that humanity's pattern-recognition skills be reconfigured in G-D 7.0. Right now, humans get too aggravated when they find something that doesn't coexist with a pattern they believe to have found. This causes intense racial divides, as well as poor decision making skills. It would be beneficial to increase the base intelligence factor as well as decreasing religious fanaticism values."

 

God took a second, mulling it over. Then he nodded.

 

"Fair enough. It's a lot to reprogram, but I can make it work. The whole-pattern recognition thing was exceptionally complicated...I figured if I didn't put a little bit of dissonance into the system, there'd never be an incentive to progress. It'll be a few hundred years of re-calibrating but I might be able to improve on it. Next?"

 

Next was an elephant, who represented the remainder of mammals. For the sake of clarity, God had set UniversalLanguageDetection to true for this meeting.

 

"We would like to reduce the humans' dependence on the general mammal population for meat and other products. It has proven detrimental to the advancement of Earthbound societies as a whole."

 

"I can do that," God said. "Next?"

 

A small frog-barely bigger than a quarter-hopped up onto the table. "Less bad fungus. Humans keep helping all the bad fungus."

 

God nodded. "That's pretty simple."

 

A strawberry plant in the front row rustled its leaves, and each member of the conference took meaning from the sound. "Please demote wood from its status as a beneficial resource. Humans are abusing it."

 

This went on for several minutes, with each group sending up a single representative to give their one change recommendation. And every last one of them demanded a human nerf.

 

The woman in the front row had become one with her chair by the end of it.

 

The room fell silent as the last representative-a blacktip reef shark-lodged his complaint. For a good minute, the entire comittee was still. Normally God would've frozen them all in place so he could get some quiet to think things over, but for once, he didn't have to.

 

"It seems to me," God said, after a moment, "that I programmed humans incorrectly from the bottom. It took me millions of years to get you all to where you are, but...every time, I've failed. First, you destroyed the universe. Then you enslaved half of the galaxy. Then you destroyed planets that disobeyed you, and after that, I took away your deep-space-faring capabilities. You were never going to get them in this version, not since 3.0. You blew that chance."

 

The woman sat still.

 

"4.0, you had permanent slavery. 5.0 was fine until Hitler killed half the world's population. 6.0...I thought it was going to be right, for once. You had slaves, but you saw the error of your ways and freed them. Hitler and Stalin and whatnot came to power, but they were eventually defeated. But I see now that once you have found no error in you fellow man, you turn to the ones who can't speak. I've patched you all for too long. There's no hope for you anymore."

 

She stood up, the chair clattering backwards. "Sir-"

 

God took a deep breath.

 

"I'm rescinding your rights as the prime species of Earth and giving it to the insects, who were the only ones with no complaints. Votes in favor?"

 

All things bright and beautiful got one vote. Humans-superior for so long-only got one when it mattered most.

 

God tallied it up-instantly, he had no need to count. "A landslide," he declared. "And I guess that settles the whole matter. I trust you to handle the planet as best you can..." God made an odd clattering noise, which the rest of the congregation interpreted as the insect ambassador's name.

 

The ambassador-sitting next to the frog-buzzed its wings and made a number of small sounds. "We will do well by you."

 

"Good. We're done here. You're all dismissed."

 

The woman threw out a hand. "Wait-!"

 

The congregation disappeared.

 

God, in his silver chair, rearranged the chairs at will, stacking them in neat rows in the back of the room.

 

Patching the universe is hard.

 

Dropping the ban-hammer is not.