“So I can do anything?” Sita asked the automaton hovering over the dusty ground. The starved villagers had run for their lives as it descended from the heavens, to hand her the sky blue unitard and wide golden belt.

“The power of Stardust knows no limits,” the automaton said, “but some terms and conditions apply.”

Sita checked the little tab on the back of the unitard, the three rules printed there, then flipped it the other way. A notice was printed there, in a 2-point font:

FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH CONDITIONS WILL RESULT IN REMOVAL OF ACCESS WITHIN 14 DAYS

“Omnipotence with Terms of Service,” Sita said, as she stepped into her tent, the automaton trailing behind her. “Do you mind?”

The automaton spun in place, facing away from Sita as she began to take off her clothes, pulling up the Unitard. She watched as the fabric hugged her form, transforming her body, all weathered and thin from months toiling under the African sun into an Olympian’s.

“Look at this mess,” Sita said, twirling in the air as the menus, dials, and hundreds of interfaces zipped past her line of sight “is that what Stardust sees?”

“You can customize the display,” the automaton said, as it guided Sita through the menus. It took her a good fifteen minutes to clean up her field of view before she stepped out of the tent toward the well at the center of the dusty little village she’d called home for the last few weeks. By invoking a tubular spacial, she levitated down to the small puddle of dirty water at the bottom, then, with a wave of her hand, made all the bloat fly larvae and mosquito eggs disappear. With another, she turned the brackish water fresh and crystal clear, then increased it, until it overflowed.

“Stardust never thought to do this?” Sita asked as she left the well and the crowd of people that rushed to get their fill behind. The automaton kept pace.

“It was his understanding that mankind shouldn’t be coddled,” the automaton said. Sita rolled her eyes, even as she walked toward the tiny rice paddies and sparse fields of grass where the cows grazed. Kneeling, she sank her fingers into the ground and agitated the soil, rejuvenating the topsoil while stirring the dormant plant life below into action. The ground below her burst as vegetation burst out of it, stretching as far as the eye could see.

“If kindness is coddling, I intend to spoil everyone rotten,” Sita said, shaping another tubular spacial to fly away from the village, rising up to scan the wider, desolate area. She raised her hands, handling herself like a conductor, making the ground burst with life with a wave and a nod.

“Trucks. Coming from the south. Their occupants are armed,” the automaton said, pointing at the small convoy heading toward the village. Sita nodded; the men were poachers and thugs, bullying nearby settlements into stealing their supplies of food and water, killing those who resisted. They were as hungry and thirsty and desperate as those they victimized but were, of course, armed “suggest using a firearm disintegration ray to-”

“There’s no need for that,” Sita said, stepping into the way of their vehicles, filling their trucks and beds with fruit and bread and filling their flasks with water. A few veered wildly off course, but their panic was short-lived. Despite their leaders’ attempts to whip them into a fighting shape, the convoy was soon heading back the way it came.

“They will return when they are done with the supplies,” the automaton said.

“Not if I fix their home so they can grow theirs,” Sita said, “they were only being desperate, after all.”

“But their deeds were evil,” the automaton said. “they took from the villagers.”

“There’s no room for kindness when you don’t have enough to eat,” Sita said “Stardust should know that much, at least.”

“Such affairs were never in his purview,” the automaton said.

“No time for that when you’re crime smashing, is there?” Sita said as she flew away from the barren expanses of the savannah and up into the sky. There, she wrangled clouds with bands of light to conjure rain over the Sahara “Well I’m changing that. I’m changing everything.”

When Sita was done turning the Sahara back into a veldt, she transformed ocean plastics into clean mountain air, then spent the rest of the week restoring the rainforests.

“There is a hidden cabal of terrorists plotting to create a deuterium bomb,” the automaton suggested at the end of Sita’s first week fixing the world.

“That’s what counter-terrorism agencies are for,” Sita said, as she turned a pile of nuclear waste into fertilizer.

“The Beast Lord is raising an army of tigers to take over Texas,” the automaton chimed in, three days later.

“Animal Control is on it,” Sita said, as she dispersed the blanket of greenhouse gas around the world.

A week later, Sita and the automaton were on the Moon, watching the cloud of space debris that surrounded the Earth dissolve into a cosmic symphony. In the distance, the Earth spun lazily around its axis, with its surface verdant, its people fed and happy and saved.

“What do you think?” Sita asked the automaton.

“You have failed to destroy evil,” the automaton said, matter-of-factly.

“Evil exists at the losing end of a zero-sum game. I’m going to make it not so,” Sita said, pointing at the Earth “when I’m done, there’s going to be no place for it in the Universe.”

The automaton stood silent for a while, overlooking the Earth until the silence was broken by a piercing DIIINNGGGG .

“Your trial period has ended,” the automaton said, matter-of-factly.

“Now wait a damn minute, I need to-” Sita began, but the automaton had already closed the distance between them, peeling the unitard and belt off her, leaving Sita suddenly exposed to the vacuum of space. She tried to reach for the automaton, but it already zipped away, leaving her out in the vacuum, for her skin to crack and blister and her blood to freeze in her veins. Sita tried, to scream, but no sound came out.

The automaton sped away, toward its next candidate. There were so very many left to go yet.