Margot and I were sitting in our pajamas watching a live stream of the world we’d just finished building. We’d decided to name this universe Tholos because the overall design of the universe had quite a few features in common with the architecture it was named after.

Margot was still looking a little woozy but I was hoping that some continued contact with my peculiarity, and a prolonged period of rest, would help her recover sooner rather than later. My only concern was that our self-control might break, as could be evidenced by the small tent being raised beneath my side of our comforter, as well as the fact that Margot’s breathing had grown increasingly...breathy for the past few hours.

If we ended up having sex again, we’d both be down for the count, which wouldn’t be good for our plans. Which begged the question of why we were doing this in bed instead of at the office. The answer to that was that today was technically supposed to be our day off, and the two of us were clearly no strangers to playing with fire.

“Wow...Did you see that shit? That was amazing. Do you think I could do that?!” said Margot. Fan-girling over some spellwork that had just taken place on the screen that was formerly our bedroom wall.

She sat up suddenly, revealing a tantalizing bit of nip as the neckline of the very oversized t-shirt she’d worn to bed, dipped low and showed far more than had been intended.

“Yeah, probably...It wouldn’t even be that hard,” I said off-handedly. Passing a packet of memories that would hopefully help her figure out the spell that the war-god on-screen had just cast.

Tholos was in its Alpha stage. Once Tholos was done it would give birth to a secondary world known as Uhrwerk. The final product of all our hard work. Tholos was doomed for destruction. The stress tests exact purpose was to see exactly what it took to break the world we were making. Tholos would pass along all its successes while we removed its failures. Thus the final world, Uhrwerk would be born.

A month before, I’d watched little Tholos grow, and I meticulously parsed the data being generated by Margot’s system to remove any bugs and weaknesses in the code. Now that the universe was up and running it was time for some stress tests.

Fortunately, Margot and I had the perfect trial by fire that we could use to put our little universe through its paces. One of the few caveats, the authorities of the merged worlds’ local powers-that-be was that we got to have a final say in how they ran somethings. That could either be a big or little thing depending on what you were talking about.

We couldn’t affect the day to day running of the world we’d built, but we had a fair amount of latitude when it came to the big picture and how things would be run on the universe as a whole. One of the first decisions we’d made was to have all the pantheons, and immortal authorities consolidate.

The worldly wills would sort things out amongst themselves easily enough. They’d like just merge resources, divvy up authorities and duties, and leave things at that. I’ve met the personified heavenly wills of more than a few worlds.

Their natures ranged from being laid back to being bestial. Regardless of which end of the spectrum they were, they were often kind of zen about everything. I guess it came with being the caretaker of a garden, where the garden was actually you. I noticed a little of that when I first started tending to and developing the inner-realms within my soul.

It was only later when sentient life showed up that the more annoying quirks started to pop up but even then unless one a world’s denizens started fiddling around and merged themselves with the world’s will, you weren’t likely to meet any out and out assholes amongst their type. Up until then, they didn’t have the typical hang-ups and tendencies that other immortals tended to have.

The angels were no problem because of course they fucking weren’t. What did you expect from actual, genuine, not-fallen, angels? There were no dick-measuring contests. No conflicts over ego and reputation and power. I simply just had a chat with them and they all sort of sorted themselves out. Using their convoluted angelic hierarchy and the key facts of their current circumstances to decide who would be in charge and who would be doing what amongst the various angelic hosts.

The demons surprisingly enough were also very easy to deal with. Then again, perhaps I should have expected that. The Nephilim, the fallen angels amongst them, were still very ‘angelic’ culturally speaking, even after they’d left the reservation and joined the dark side. So there was a lot of goal-oriented, hierarchical thinking when it came to dealing with their types.

As for the evil spirits, and demons of chaos, well they were even simpler to deal with because none of their bosses could take me in a fight. Demons were very big on might is right, and while they’d test you to see how far they could go, it wasn’t hard for a sufficiently powerful being to keep them in line.

The gods, spirit kings, and fae royals were the most troublesome lot. However, I’d long ago had a plan in mind for sorting them out. Simply put, I was going to have them live through the first 300 trillion years of Tholos’ runtime.

Of course, this would all be console-accelerated time, but that was fine. It was almost a given really. What mattered was that the universe was going to be put through its paces for an extended period. This was especially true because of the activity that would be taking place during those first 300 trillion years.

A wise man once said that the best way to make politicians do their work honestly was to make a vent for their urge to take advantage and design the rest of the game in a fashion that made it pointless for them to reach for more.

Margot and I had ultimately ended up following this sage advice and constructing a slightly more rigid, much more unified format of pantheon for the merged worlds’ administrators and gods to follow. We didn’t want to risk them blowing up, or otherwise sabotaging, all the hard work we’d done and would be doing in the future.

The opportunity to take full advantage of their influence and power would come in two forms. The main form would take place now, during the world’s alpha test. The future would know this 300 trillion year period as Tholos’ age of myths and legends. However, as far as the various immortal powers-that-be that were currently on Tholos were concerned, this would be known as the great period of war and elections. The age of Pandemonium. The age of the game of gods.

During this period, the various gods, goddesses, spirits, and fae would be fighting amongst themselves. Living amongst themselves. Fighting in a way that would have levelled cities and ended entire civilizations if there’d been any mortals around. Living amongst themselves to get to know each other, build up bonds, a social network, and most importantly, build a social hierarchy.

These beings would battle and politick, loosely following the rules of a suitably convoluted game I’d set up to direct their energies. The aforementioned game of gods. Eventually, by the time this 300 trillion year testing period was over sorted themselves out and a final pantheon would have been formed.

The winners would be those who were powerful enough, wise enough, or influential enough to figure out how to either utterly wreck poor Tholos. This wasn’t the entire challenge of course, the deities would find that Tholos could fight back and wouldn’t just sit there and allow them to damage it.

Naturally, everyone knew this, even Tholos itself knew this. It’s governing AI would eventually be one of three chief heavenly wills that governed Uhrwerk. It would use what it learned from having countless deity class entities make a concerted effort to try and break it, in the defence of the new world.

I’d posed Tholos’ existence as a sort of grand puzzle or final hurdle for the gods to deal with. I’d left a bunch of prizes lying around in the critical parts of Tholos as an incentive for the gods to do their level best in smashing this Alpha world as thoroughly as they could.

They had to fight each other and the world. It was a game of winner takes all, resource plundering and castle breaking. A game where all the players were barbarians from separate tribes and only one tribe could get the prizes behind the castle wall.

The new pantheon would rule over Uhrwerk. They’d find that despite its apparent rigidness, they actually had a lot of wiggle room, which would keep them from trying to screw up all my hard work. That wiggle room would primarily come in the form of more games, more subtle, more secret, games, that they could play to gain more resources and benefits for themselves. This was their second opportunity to legally “cheat” the system. However, that was an issue for later.

Right now, my main focus was in seeing how many times a guy could be suplexed into the ground, with the force of ten million nuclear bombs, without the entire continent crumbling. It turns out the answers was like...ten.

As I watched half of a landmass that I’d earmarked to be the possible home for a sparkling civilization fly up into the sky, while the other half sank into the sea, I couldn’t help clucking my tongue.

I altered a few lines of code and the airborne soil and stone coalesced together to form a new group of floating isles. I left the sunken half of the continent as it was. I left a trigger that would make the secondary world, the final world, Uhrwerk, make the same changes once the Tholos Runtime was complete.

After thinking it over, I made that another kind of "in-game" achievement. An announcement was made to all the beings running across my world that if certain kinds of acts were taken in Tholos they would be reflected in the world to come.

The bed creaked as Margot sat up and began typing into her interface. Frowning at what she was seeing because this stress test was turning out to be slightly more stressful than the system she’d created was intended to handle. Then she sighed and began to change a few things. Tweaking the physics of our newborn universe, so that the next time someone tried to suplex a continent into oblivion the excessive force would be mitigated and the damage much reduced.