A story about... Overpopulation © 2000 Damon Diehl, Marg Frey, Greg Gbur, Bryce Graves-Hurst	DAMON	BRYCE	GREG & MARG
				MARG & GREG
			MARG	BRYCE & GREG
				GREG & BRYCE

Those promises bound His hands. As the only perfect being in existence, He would not go back on His Word.

So if He wanted to clean up this particular mess, someone else would have to do the work for Him. Being a stickler for the rules, He wouldn't ask for anyone's help, or even put the idea in anyone's head. That's why He had built a failsafe into the system, from day one. Or was it day six? Anyway, it was in there, one of many such precautions. After a point, they wouldn't want to mate anymore. Then time would wear them down, and He wouldn't have to lift a finger.

"Hold on a minute," the kid piped up, "doesn't that violate their free will?" Damn this Trinity thing, He thought, I get no privacy. For the hell of it, He answered out loud, "No. That's the point. Nobody's forbidding them to mate, they just won't want to. They'll freely will not to mate."

The Holy Ghost just snorted, its usual answer for everything.

"Shut up," He answered, and His word was law.

"Now, now," H.G. replied, deigning to speak complete words for once. "There's one flaw in your little plan, you realize."

"There is no flaw," He snapped back, suddenly irritable. Even H.G. shouldn't question His ideas.

"Yes, yes," the kid piped up again, suddenly excited. "Even I see it now!"

"Can the Creator have a blind spot?" said the Holy Ghost.

Just to shut it up, He asked what exactly that blind spot was.

"You've taken away their desire to mate. That's a physical, biological desire. They no longer want to get down and dirty."

"Correct," said the Father, condescendingly.

"Yet their technology has progressed to the point that they no longer need that physical act to reproduce themselves. They simply look contemptuously towards sex, but intellectually they still realize they want their species to propagate."

"So?" said the Father, carefully.

"This week, the human genome was completely mapped out. In the near future, they'll be able to make carbon copies of themselves, without the need for the mating process."

The Father hesitated.

"Ridiculous," he said at last.

The Holy Ghost laughed.

"True," it replied. "No more need of dinner and a movie, flowers on your anniversary, marriage, something borrowed, something blue."

The Trinity was silent for a time.

"The race will go on," said the kid at last, "Just more and more miserable all the time, because one of the things that brings them together — the desire to mate for life — will have been long, long, gone."

"And we'll have to sit here and watch it, Pops," said the Holy Ghost.

Thus it came to pass that everyone, humans and spirits and deities alike, were absolutely miserable until every star in the universe had burned out into superdense chunks of matter.