It was late at night. I rubbed my forehead and pushed back the migraine that had been building after who knows how many days of round-the-clock work.

Projected upon the wall was a screen with a system prompt that read “File Transfer in Progress”. The ‘files’ being transferred were the digitized worlds that had been placed into me and Margot’s care.

I was keeping track of the flow of data for each world, making sure that each and every bite was transferred correctly.

Margot lay collapsed onto her desk. Snoring softly. So deeply asleep that she paid no mind to the cup of coffee that had been knocked over and was now mingling its dregs with her hair.

I stood up from my own desk. I stretched. I yawned. Then I cast a cleansing spell on both my wife and her desk, and I teleported both of us home.

It took six months of non-stop work, and barely any breaks for minor things like food, or sleep, or sex, but she did it. I watched her as she did it. I watched as she took countless lines of code and used them to alter, reorder, and finetune the natural laws of the little sandbox that the house of Antipodes and the DPAA had put in our custody.

After two months of brainstorming, using me as a sounding board to bounce her ideas off of, Margot had decided that the best way to do the monumental task that our employers had given her, was to break that first tenant of programming. She decided that she would need to re-invent, or at least redesign, the wheel, because the scale of the job, that we’d been given was too much for what the default console system and digital sandbox to handle.

I watched as my wife did her thing and tried my best to be supportive. Helping her out by making the necessary calls when she needed to make contact with our hyper-dimensional employers in the House. Occasionally, I’d call in a few favors if there was a resource that she needed that the house couldn’t openly give us.

I pulled more favors, and maybe made a few tacit threats, when some of the beings in the House of Antipodes started to notice that she was going a little farther than agreed upon and was maybe poking her nose into secrets that she probably wasn’t supposed to be meddling with.

The two of us worked together to alter the physical hardware of the reality-altering console to a build that was optimized to work with Margot’s custom system.

Beyond that, I just generally let her pick my brain, and I mean that quite literally. I essentially ended up turning the tether that connected us into a massive wiki, that supplied all the knowledge I had accumulated concerning the make-up of cosmos.

With my help and the tools that the DPAA gave us at our disposal, my wife just went to town. While watching it I went back and forth between being extremely impressed and more than a little concerned. At some point, she fell so deeply into her work that she stopped being concretely corporeal. She turned into a vast cloud of sapient energy and directly interfaced with the machines in our office.

That might not sound too bad, but the interim form she took, before she became a glowing cloud of beautiful cyberized-intelligence, was that of a giant meat web. Every floor of our new office-build was filled with pulsating flesh and humming circuitry.

Imagine coming to the office for a week and having to work in that one gross, meat moss, level that shows up in every videogame with aliens or demons in it. I love my wife, but I’ll admit that there were a few times that I considered the advantages of telecommuting.

In any case, her work was done. Or at least the part that would take up the bulk of her effort and energy was done. Now it was my turn to do some heavy lifting. Once I’d tucked my wife into bed, and saw that she was okay, I headed back to the office.

I sat in my chair and my body ceased to exist. My consciousness travelled towards my true-self. I was a little bummed out to find that I’d gotten even stronger and larger since the last time I was paying close attention to myself. It looked like I’d be going through even more growing pains, but that was fine, I’d need the extra power for what I was doing. I normally didn’t put this much effort in, but this was Margot’s big debut in the cosmic world.

Even if the House and the DPAA weren’t placing a priority on the matter of the merging worlds, it was still a big deal. If this project went well not only would we end up creating a very nice foundation for our burgeoning household, it’d go along way in building my wife’s reputation.

Thus I made an exception to my personal rules and invested a bit of myself into the world my wife was helping to construct. I imbued the sandbox with just a bit of my aura to assist the countless heavenly wills of the worlds as they began the transition process.

It would allow my fortune reversing, luck augmenting, peculiarity, to effect the new universe on a fundamental level and make a whole host of things that needed to happen, a lot more likely to happen, in exactly the fashion Margot needed them to happen.

Besides, soaking my feet in what was essentially primordial cosmic broth to make the resulting stew taste better, there were other things I needed to do. For instance, I was putting my partially-computerized mind to work and helping the system crunch numbers, to assist with the calculations required to build our seeded world. Thus hastening the world’s construction.

I also had other duties but for the most part, I was just helping Margot’s machine chug-along, while guiding the work it was doing to make sure it stayed on track.

Margot’s hard work didn’t directly create the world that we’d need to watch, work with, and monitor. It was more that she created the machinery that would construct the world. She’d spent those months, altering the console and a few of its core systems, just for the purpose of generating the ideal playing board for the game the merging worlds would play amongst themselves.

My part in the project was to do what I’d been doing for the DPAA all along. I was meant to observe, adjust, and control the way things in our new, slowly growing, world were unfolding. Then once the world had fully developed I was to serve as warden and moderator. Making sure that the world remained stable and the process of merger happened smoothly.

If any problems came up, I would be the one to resolve them. One could compare this new world we were building to a train. The denizens, the countless souls, that were being transferred over into this new world, were the passengers.

Margot was the engineer and designer, she could also be government officials who decide where the rails get set and where the stops and stations get built. She operated and would continue to operate upon the system as a whole.

I...was, not the conductor. The myriad heavenly wills, planetary, galactic, and universal administrators, and of course the myriad gods...were the conductors. They were the ones who’d control the day-to-day of how the world was run, their authority was upheld by the covenants that the House Antipodes made with each of them, or at least that was the case for the most part.

I was the maintenance man of this train. The mechanic and custodian, with a little bit of groundskeeper thrown in, if you don’t mind me mixing metaphors. If there were messes I was the one who cleaned them. If there were vermin or weeds, I was the one who saw them exterminated. If the train stalled or began to make weird noises, I had enough engineering know-how and electrical knowledge to get under the hood.

Now I was doing exactly that. I booted up the system and watched as the fledgeling universe began to populate itself. Watching as the data, laws, and energy of the world expanded from the seeds that Margot had planted through the development of custom-system.

The universe Margot’s system was constructing wouldn’t be a conventional universe. This new universe had needs that’d require leaving the standard model.

Instead of being luminous spheres of molten plasma, the stars were apertures in space-time, that served as gathering points for the excess energy that would need to be siphoned away from all those other worlds we were recycling.

Instead of the usual collection of planetary masses, the habitable parts of the world would be hosted on a single massive hyper-dimensional sphere. The extra dimensions would allow for all the worlds we were taking into our care to technically be placed in the same, inter-linked, interlocking space.

There were other similar changes to how things worked in this reality that Margot and I were building. The cumulative effect would be a world that was thoroughly controlled by the system to keep the phenomenon that caused the worlds to merge in the first place from happening a second time.

Each world that was recycled and brought in from the console’s storage drive would be placed into its own sub-space in the sphere. The system was even built to accommodate the addition of other worlds, just in case someone out there screwed up again and there was another need to stabilize and store away a whole bunch of cornerstone worlds.

The new world would be like a massive-multiplayer online game where all the servers were both separate and interlinked so that there was free interaction between the differing subspaces, or “channels” of the world.