February 27, 2615

Memo from Gregorevich to all ethertravel targeting stations:

If you ever find a target on the planet referenced in Ethertravel Report #2 (report and transmission data attached), contact me. I am available 24/7 for this at attached number. Hold target for me. I will head to nearest station ASAP to ethertravel there.

I informed the board of Ethertravel, Inc. of my decision. We are now at the point where we are evacuating the Earth due to the expectation it will become unlivable within the next few decades. We have five thousand transmission stations sending up to two million people a day to the stars, if they find targets and have the people on hand to transmit. Average actual throughput is just over one million per day, with complete evacuation expected in about 7 years. There is no more need to do any exploration whatsoever. We have over ten thousand suitable worlds on which people are born with regularity to serve as targets and with no hindrance to sending them.

All twenty-four billion of us will get one more chance at life, and most of us will leave descendants. However, those descendants will be of thousands of different species throughout the galaxy. The human race, as we knew it, will cease to exist, but it will also live on in thousands of modified forms on the Djinn Worlds which make up most of our targets.

The board relocated to a high-tech world where they (and only they) have already redeveloped ethertravel, but for monitoring purposes only. We’ve committed to keep that world from becoming the ecological disaster we made of Earth. If the stations do not find me a target on report #2’s world, I will head out as we are winding down the evacuation.

It took 6 years for them to find it, but with every station including it in the rotation, they found what might otherwise have been missed. I drove to the nearest station, arriving in 30 minutes, and soon found myself awakening in an egg. Which is what I expected, because it was how the report from this world described being born.

Johnny had to figure this out, but I already know. I’m a god. I willed myself out of the egg and directly into full Djinn form.

My parents were a little taken aback by my forceful emergence from the egg. One of them, who I learned was my mother, was made of granite, and my father was made of quartz and you could see right through him. When it came to mealtime, Mother’s meal was made of small pebbles that crackled with electricity when she bit down on them, Father’s consisted of multi-colored faceted gemstones, and Mother made me a plate of what seemed to be mixed vegetables, and provided a spoon. They weren’t especially tasty, and I can’t say exactly what vegetables they were; they came diced in small pieces like that stuff you get in a can, but they were edible.

What was most interesting was seeing the fragments of gemstones go down into Father’s body. Even though I couldn’t see the boundaries of the organs, I could see how they acted on the gems, crushing and eventually melting them into a mass that retained the colors of the individual gems as they swirled and mixed together and eventually spread out around his entire body until the color completely vanished.

Apparently I’d arrived in the morning, so after the meal they took me out to get registered. I gave my name as God, and they accepted that.

When we got back from that, they transformed, but pretty minimally. Mother went from gray granite to pink granite and Father changed from clear quartz to rose quartz. They didn’t ask me to change, perhaps because I had only arrived a couple hours before.

Afterward, I questioned my parents on various subjects, basically trying to confirm all the facts about the world Johnny had reported. I could see the report in my head just by asking about it, and I could mentally mark off confirmed items. So it was pretty easy to go through it all.

They let me make my own meal for the second meal of the day, and I made a big steak, rare, and a baked potato with all the toppings, and a fork and a big steak knife to eat it with. And a beer. My parents were clearly excited to see how quickly I’d figured this bit out, but I wasn’t planning to stay here long.

I did stay the night. Mother’s bed was basically a wooden box filled with soil. Father’s was a big cushion covered in velvet, with regularly spaced spots where it was gathered tight together. And they set up a bed of wooden slats for me which I immediately transformed into a thick, soft feather bed.

Before I fell asleep, I worked on that ability to learn things just by thinking about them. And I learned that Johnny is no longer on the planet. I learned the translator guy is named Brez, and I learned his location. Then I slept.

In the morning, before my parents even ate, I told them goodbye. I went out and found their nearest community sand pile. The first thing I did was turn a bit of the sand into an ether communicator. I was probably the only person in the universe who could have come here and done that instantly, without any preparation. I used the knowledge trick to find the bulk of the board on their new planet, and sent them the message “Plan is go. I have reached report #2’s world. Made communicator at a thought. Now to find the Djinn. Gregorevich.”

There was actually one other thing I wanted to do first. For this, I transformed myself into a huge bird, but I incorporated the communicator into my mind so I could hear any response. I used more sand to make six sides of beef and ate them to prepare for my flight. I stopped at the registry and told them I was moving out. And I flew to where Brez was living. He had a metallic body, not like a robot, but like a metallic sculpture of a heavily muscled man. Unlike most of the people, who had only a tiny space to call their own, Brez seemed to have an acre or so of open space around his house. Well, not entirely open. There were a number of large statues and monuments around, and piles and piles of sand. No doubt, for the people who wanted to bring something here it was hard to transport, so they simply made it here. And I could also tell, though not through any of my normal senses, that he had huge vaults underground full of more modestly sized gifts that people had brought him. As I landed, I changed into a man form and deposited a fair bit of sand on top of what he already had.

“Brez, they tell me each of us is expected to make a pilgrimage here once in our lives and bring you a gift.”

“Oh, yes, that does seem to have become the tradition. Millions have left their gifts. I require nothing, however.”

“Betcha don’t have one of these.”

I grabbed one of the piles of sand and made him an ether communicator attached to a computer with all the languages of this world programmed into it. That, too, merely required the thought, and yes, it duplicated Brez’s translator as a component of the device. They could all have done it if they only didn’t think their power limited in artificial ways. I linked to the new communicator from the one in my mind and left the message “Hello, Brez” on it.

“Hmm, what is it?” Brez mumbled, as if thinking aloud rather than asking me. After a moment, he said, “Oh.” This was followed by three more Ohs of increasing volume and surprise. Finally, he said, “I see that it’s a way to communicate with your people. How many of them are there?”

“I believe there are about 25 billion. But they are spread among thousands of worlds. If you included the entire populations of those worlds, they would number in the trillions. But I’m after only one, Johnny, the only one of them who visited here and left before me. He is singlehandedly responsible for the existence of a majority of those trillions.”

“He left to circumvent the birth rule? No, that doesn’t seem right.”

“No, he left to experiment with the great power of this world. Your people have access to immense power, but they don’t realize it because they live all their lives here. Johnny and I come from another world, the same world, and we understand what the power really means. And I think Johnny got bored, and he did something that may have been intended as a gift, but it got wildly out of control. I’m not sure what I am going to do when I find him; it depends on just what sort of condition he’s in. The answer could literally be anything from help him to kill him. But we can communicate through this device. I named myself God here, and you can use that name to reach me. For anybody else you’ll have to establish contact. But I see that you understand how to learn things here; you can use that power to learn what you need to know about the device.”

Brez said, “Thank you,” but it was clear he didn’t fully understand why he’d want to contact any of the trillions of strangers, but he accepted the gift anyway, as he had millions of others. Regardless, it was time for me to leave. I picked up a pile of sand, and as I dropped it in front of me, turned it into a portal to where the Djinn was now, walked through it, and made it disintegrate behind me after I passed through it.

Johnny was there and saw me approach. He was in standard Djinn form.

“Hey! You shouldn’t be here!”

“I followed you. I’m Mikhail Gregorevich, though I suspect you already figured that out.”

“Right.” Johnny paused. After about thirty seconds he continued, “You found some of my worlds, I guess.”

“Some of them, yes. We ended up with more of your worlds in the catalog than natural ones.”

“Oh, I created a lot of them, didn’t I. How long has it been?”

“Just over 200 years since you sent Earth your report.”

“Feels like 5000. When I come to one of these worlds, I go back in time. I don’t know how; I just do it.”

“Why do you do it?”

“I was bored. The world made me a literal god, and any of the other people there could have done the same, but they were so small-minded, brainwashed by their system that told them not to reproduce, that they just lived out boring little lives, using their power merely to give themselves interesting bodies and to make whatever food those bodies needed to eat. They could have gone anywhere! Literally every world has some kind of life that can live there, and they could assume the form of that life. Or they could do as I do and remake the worlds. I’m running low; I’ve terraformed nearly all the Earth-mass worlds in the galaxy. I’m either going to have to take a new model soon, or move to the next galaxy, but I don’t think your instruments are precise enough to hold a signal to reach those.”

“Yeah, don’t bother. Earth is in the end days. The conservation efforts were not enough, and it’ll be unsuitable for human life before half the people you’re transforming on this world would have finished out their lives. We are no longer searching for new worlds or trying to get feedback; we’re just sending everyone out to their choice of world as fast as we can.”

“I didn’t actually do it to create ethertravel targets for you. That was just a side-effect. But you know I took precautions, right?”

“Yes. You only used Earths well in the past as models for your worlds. That ensured that the changes scrambled things thoroughly before anybody followed the path we did that led to us ethertraveling all over the galaxy. Is there a reason you picked that particular era?”

“The late 20th and early 21st centuries on Earth are the most interesting times in its history that are sufficiently far into the past for those precautions. They are advanced enough to do interesting things on their own, and free-thinking enough to come up with lots of original wishes. Not that they didn’t sometimes repeat.”

“So what’s happening on this world?”

“We’re about to find out. I’ve stashed a genie-style lamp in an antique shop in a small town north of Dallas in 1994, and when anyone other than the shop-owner rubs it, whether or not they buy it first, I’ll insert myself in the scene and give them a wish, and try to come up with a creative way of fulfilling it. You’re welcome to follow along, but make yourself invisible or something.”

A short while later, Johnny snapped his fingers to make a portal into the shop, hiding it behind a cloud of smoke, and I figured out how to turn my body invisible and followed him through it. A young man had picked up the lamp and was rubbing it, and Johnny was doing the genie thing.

“Are you really a genie?” the man asked.

“Yes and no. I am called The Djinn and I am not quite the same as the genies of your myths. You get one wish, but it can’t be personal. You have to wish for something that everybody in the world will share in, something that will improve the world.”

The man thought for a moment and then said, “I wish people would stop destroying the environment.”

Johnny snapped his fingers and said, “Let it be so!”

Johnny grabbed the lamp and faded out, and while I could still see him, it was clear the man didn’t. Whether that was because Johnny was actually invisible to the man or because the man was marveling at what happened to himself wasn’t clear. He now had branches with leaves growing out of his head instead of hair. Not an incredibly large group of branches, but bigger than the biggest hairdo.

We stayed on this world for a month watching them, sometimes as invisible man or Djinn forms, and sometimes in visible forms imitating the tree-people. It was clear that the people had an urge to get outside and soak up some sun with their leaves, and stretch their roots (extending from their toes and heels) into the soil for a time. Most of them did, but there were some that couldn’t or wouldn’t go outside, and about a week later, crews were seen removing those people from their houses, looking like dead plants.

The ones who lived developed a thin, flexible bark on much of their skin. Their hands, parts of their face, and interestingly their genitals remained covered with normal skin. Women’s breasts retracted and became completely flat before we left. Listening in closely on some of their conversations revealed that the genitals are now only used for sex. There is no more urination or defecation, those functions being replaced by ejecting wastes into the soil when extending the roots into it, while other nutrients and water are pulled out of the soil.

They can still drink water, but their bodies are no longer capable of digesting meat and many other foods. Simple starches work; the closer to pure sugar, the better. indigestible material is vomited up when a sufficient amount of it accumulates. The people figured out while we were still there what they could and could not eat.

We left them in the midst of them trying to figure out their economy. They still want to have houses, as they still spend some of their time in them, and most everybody spends their nights there. And they still use electrical devices that don’t take well to the outdoors. But they no longer need most clothes (generally only covering the genitals), and they can no longer eat most of the kinds of foods they used to eat. So a lot of the jobs they used to work were no longer needed. But there was already an increase in the production of sugar and of the kinds of fertilizers they had figured out work well in making the soil good for people’s roots. Some people were starting to remodel their houses, replacing unneeded bathrooms and kitchens with sun rooms with dirt floors, which might enable them to stay indoors all day, but the whole idea was pretty new and we didn’t stick around.

Johnny felt compelled to go seek out another planet, and made a direct portal to it. I noticed that, just as with his other changes, he didn’t sprinkle sand to create it. He had figured out how to bypass that perhaps artificial limitation of the world where we were reborn. His portal had no matter component at all and was simply a hole in space, so it needed no matter.

“Take Djinn form before passing through this portal,” he warned me. “That form can tolerate whatever sort of extreme heat, cold, lack of oxygen, caustic environment, or other sort of situation exists there before I terraform the world.”

He made it another copy of Earth, first transforming the environment, and when that was done, bringing in people and animals and all the things of everyday life. This took years, but by using one of those knowledge wishes, I found that we were centuries in the past from the time we were in moments ago. At some point while he was doing this, I asked him, “Are you compelled to keep doing this?”

“Yes. I think I somehow trapped myself in this sort of life when I was escaping the world where I was reborn.”

So when he planted the lamp, I changed myself into man form and took it and rubbed it. Johnny was compelled to grant me a wish.

“I wish Djinni would live among mankind here forever and ensure everlasting peace and tranquility.”

“Oh, thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

“You’re welcome.”

He was still trapped, and in fact, the wish forced me back into Djinn form, and so I trapped myself there too, helping him. The people of this Earth recognized us as the ultimate arbiters in disputes. And we were not subject to the laws of man in making those decisions. If we felt like somebody was trying to take advantage of loopholes in the law we could just find that person guilty or at fault or whatever term applied to the situation, ignoring the letter of the law. If the laws of two different places were in conflict, that didn’t matter. We would simply make a decision and render one or more laws null and void as a result.

We made some pretty capricious decisions, too, like deciding all the combatants on both sides of a war should be turned into sheep. In the furtherance of the goal of establishing and maintaining peace there was no limit to the punishments we could impose upon man. So they learned. All the religions of the world accepted that there were now two gods who ruled this world known as Johnny and Mikhail, whether they liked it or not.

At some point, time advanced to 2622 AD, and I found that the evacuation of Earth was done. I contacted the board of Ethertravel, Inc. on their new homeworld. I let them know about both this planet and the treefolk one, but they opted to stay away from both worlds. In fact, they were staying on that world, establishing a miniature version of the kind of everlasting life the entire population of Earth had settled into, transferring each of them in their old age into a fetus borne by another or the wife of another. They did that just for themselves, while the rest of the people of the world lived and died normally. And in time, all the other ethertravelers lived out their lives and died, and there were just the few of us living on for eternity.