It was a perfect Friday morning. Bright orange flowers bloomed upon verdant grassy hills while birds sang the songs of spring; The sky glowed vibrant blues and dandelion yellows. A ray of sunlight seeped through the windows of an old, dusty, abandoned, yet cozy condemned schoolhouse as a young man named Mikeal Fox awoke from his slumber at exactly thirty-nine seconds after 6:23 AM. After awakening he was meant to subsequently realize he needed to rush out of his makeshift home and pick up his clothes from the dry cleaners in order to prepare for the college graduation ceremony he had been working towards for nearly half a decade.

  Mikeal Fox was an optimistic young man with a head of red hair who was to live for a couple more years, see minor success in finance, and then tragically die in a boat collision off the coast of Auckland, New Zealand while on the first days of his honeymoon with a girl he married because she had the money to bribe him into a green card marriage.

  An unfortunate ending, but that was how it was meant to be, that was his destiny. Similar to every event in existence, this path had been divined years ago and was set into motion at the beginning of creation. Everything had always followed its set path, down to the individual molecule. The motions of reality within the universe do not follow free will, and it should have been impossible for anything to have gone against what had already been decided upon.

  And yet Mikeal Fox did not wake from his slumber thirty-nine seconds after 6:23 AM on that friday morning, instead he woke up thirty-eight-and-a-half seconds after 6:23.

  It seems inconsequential, and maybe in the immediate effect it would've been, maybe no major abnormalities would have been caused for millions of years, maybe Mikeal Fox would have still died three years later in a boat collision and his body would have been lost to sea just as intended.

  But in a cosmic scale, half a second is a very noticeable amount time. The instant destiny was betrayed, even if to such a small extent, was the instant the undoing of the world began. The human body acts very differently when awake than asleep. An awake human has a higher body temperature, slower cell reproduction rates, and most importantly quicker breathing. Half a second change in airflow could cause the concentration of all the little components of the atmosphere to shift ever so slightly into the wrong place. A little too much oxygen here, a little too much nitrogen there, it could have become an utterly unresolvable mess.

  Needless to say the ripple effect of that half second could have eventually driven the whole system of order and predestination into the ground. And order, well order is all that the gods care about. It is their providence after all.

  And so the three Administrators, of whom are the deities that created this universe and forever oversee its stability, decided to hit the metaphorical reset button.

  They decided the simplest option was just to destroy the universe, verify the integrity of predestination, and set it back into motion from the very beginning. And they did just that. And for 13.7 billion years it worked, yet on a Friday morning of birdsong and sunshine Mikeal Fox woke up thirty-eight seconds after 6:23 AM. This time he was even further from his intended path, and the potential for extending errors in fate only grew.

  This had admittedly become more than a simple abnormality, after all once is a fluke and twice is a pattern, however the administrators knew that the divine plan could not have been wrong, it had never been wrong before in the countless other worlds that had been created and destroyed over the expanse of infinity, so they reasoned that it must have been their execution in the proceedings of the world that was at fault. They tried again, recording every single action, every transfer of energy, every random creation of microscopic antimatter particles in the void of space to ensure that everything was enacted perfectly.

  And it was a perfect execution of the divine plan, there was not a particle of sand improperly moved by the tides, nor a stone melted into magma too rapidly within the core of the earth, nor even a beam of light that bounced in the wrong direction by a fraction of an angle... until Mikeal Fox woke up thirty-seven-and-a-half seconds before 6:23 AM on the day of his college graduation.

  It was a frustrating occurrence for the immortal beings, however the divine plan is completely infallible. So the Administrators tried again, and again, and again, and again...

  But the young man just kept waking up earlier and earlier. It went down to thirty-seven seconds, thirty-one-and-a-half, twenty-three, eleven. Each time they remade the world he woke up further and further from the path described by destiny until there was an eventually instance where Mikeal Fox woke up exactly at 6:23 AM on a Friday morning, and the Administrators decided that they had enough.

  Obviously no naturally generated Mikeal Fox will follow the motions of destiny on that Friday morning, so it was decided that he needed to be replaced. And so the world was reset one last time, and 13.7 billion years later at 6:00 AM on a Friday morning Mikeal Fox was taken to the white void between worlds and instantly a perfect replica, completely under the control of the Administrators, was put in his place, leaving no proof on the fabric of the physical world of the switch.

  The replica was made to enact predestination to the letter, and at exactly thirty-nine seconds after 6:23 AM it awoke from its slumber. The administrators rejoiced in their success, at least as much as such ascended creatures can rejoice, and quickly moved on from this little unfortunate disturbance in their task. It only about a trillion years of correcting the universe to fix this little roadblock, a mere drop in the bucket compared to how long their lives have been and less than a drop compared to the infinity awaiting them.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The rest of the replica's life was perfect. Every instant went right according to the outline and the replica died exactly how it was supposed to; its corpse being consumed by the various creatures of the sea and eventually being pooped out and acting as fertilizer for phytoplankton. And as time passed, trillions upon trillions of years and hundreds of worlds and species rose and fell as the three creators watched and waited from above. Until the end of time the Administrators forgot of the human man that they put in the space between worlds. Only when they finished their project did they have to face their mistake.

  Only when it was time for their universe to die.

  When all physical matter in the cosmos was destroyed, when all light and hope and darkness and despair had vanished from the world that used to be, when even the concept of nothing stopped existing and all form of direction was null, only then did the three Administrators return to the empty white void between the worlds to form their official report on this universal instance. It is not a necessary action by any means, but nothing the Administrators do is necessary.

  It is all tradition, every single thing they do and will do. For all powerful beings, they are quite stagnant in nature. They are timeless. They do not grow. They are not people. They are essentially cosmic programs, set to run on their traditions forever. That is why they make these universes, and that is why they commune for their official reports in that empty void.

  However, they did not arrive in an empty void, and what they saw was, just like all their past experiences with Mikeal Fox, unexpected.

  One must be aware that there is no time within the space between worlds, there is no aging, no temperature, no physical movement. For all logical accounts Mikeal Fox, as a creature made of matter, should have been frozen the moment he entered that realm. But the Administrators did not see a frozen man when they entered the void, in fact they did not see a man at all.

  They instead saw four... abnormalities... gruesomely fighting each other. The... things... were somehow standing on a physical platform suspended in a world without physics.

  There was a moving corpse, rotten and fetid, swinging part of its ribcage like a blade. There was a blue ectoplasmic soul letting out phantasmal screams that vibrated the very nothingness around it. There was a dark and shifting figure with mist emanating from its form like rapidly moving whips. And there was a floating brain surrounded by the vague outline of a clear body that pulsed with telepathic power.

  These were all Mikeal Fox, yet none are were really Mikeal Fox; he was somehow disassembled whilst spending his infinity of nothing in the void. These were four of his five core components, his body, his spirit, his shadow, and his mind. His fifth component would have been his destiny, the part of one's being that operates solely in the future. Yet obviously Mikeal Fox was unable to keep that aspect of himself when he was brought out of predestination. His destiny was killed when he was taken from the timeline. That very well could have been the reason he split apart in the first place, when one component left the others likely destabilized. In a means to protect the order of the world, the Administrators unknowingly broke the order of Mikeal Fox.

  How strange it must have been, one's very being being torn apart in a world without death. And how long it must have been too, it is no wonder they all resorted to violence. No mortal was meant to experience anything for so long. Not even the Administrators' minds could last for infinity. To stay somewhat opinionated and individualistic they have to erase their memories and emotional intelligence every couple universes.

  The Administrators could instantly tell the fight between the four components was entirely worthless, twas more like a dance than a fight. Only physical mass can harm a body, only light can harm shadow, only astral attacks can harm a spirit, and only mental stressors can harm the conceptual mind. None of the forms were even slightly disrupting each other, yet their anger did not subdue with time, in fact they seemed to only get more ravenous.

  The youngest Administrator, of which was only a few quintillion years old and had recently reset themselves to the state of childhood, jumped back in fright. "Ahh! It's a bug! Step on it!" while exclaiming in the voice of a low-pitched eldritch creature.

  This was an entirely understandable action given how deconstructing a sentient creature is the largest taboo for any deity. The other two were similarly shocked.

  The eldest administrator bared a slightly calmer disposition at the sight, likely because they ascended from a world without significantly developed emotions and were in fact comprised of thousands of consciousnesses at once. "What do we... do with it?" The eldest pauses for a second, thinking to herself and allowing the myriad of voices that make up her mind to confer into reasoning.

  "We have to get rid of it!" Says a final malicious sounding voice with clear hostile intent.

  Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it sounds like the voice of a fairy and holds the refined grace of an angel. The middle Administrator does not speak, does not think, does not exist unless others believe it to. Even to other ascended beings it can only be heard when one knows to hear it, can only exist if it is in the perception of others. Its form can change in the eyes of whatever views it, and every way it is viewed is true simultaneously, even if paradoxical It may be a man and woman, an angel and a devil, it can even be a formless being of light if one wishes to see it as such. But its intent belongs solely to itself, and however one chooses to interpret its words, it will speak nonetheless.

  Ultimately as the universe is now dead we will view this god of creation as a god of death, and therefore perceive its words negatively.

  "Curses we must declare upon it! Ban it to the lands of chaos and desolation! It holds neither destiny nor itself together!"

  The youngest Administrator held no disagreements with the idea of throwing them to a fateless world, only wishing to be rid of them sooner, and the eldest was too busy sorting through it's own thoughts to contribute.

  So a portal was opened by the vague concept of the second administrator, and all four components that once made up Mikeal Fox were sucked into a space-time tunnel and reborn into a world of chaos and free will. Separately.