Friend

(Originally Posted by YearEnds)

I didn't mess around with either my noontime juniors or my afternoon graduate students, or with the graduate student I'm advising when I met him at 3 PM, but as soon as my commitments for the day were over I teleported home, my clothes arriving in a neat pile next to my body.

I sat down on my couch and turned on my TV to watch a late afternoon show. It was a prerecorded talk show, and I amused myself by messing with the bodies of the participants and hosts. I experimented with making what I did affect only what I was seeing, or making it affect what everyone saw, or even making it affect the people on the show retroactively to when it had been recorded earlier that day (and thus watching the dialogue change from boring political commentary to "Oh my God my b**bs are huge!"--I made sure that nothing indecent would be exposed by modifying clothing, and also compelled the producers not to cut for commercial breaks as soon as the changes started flying), while meanwhile I tapped into the network's complaints phone line and listened to all the indignant comments about how scandalous it was for the network to allow this sort of thing on air (and the pleading replies about how they had no more idea about what was happening than the viewers did). Ultimately I settled on only changing what I was seeing, so that my shenanigans were confined and served solely to amuse me. And hey, I don't normally get to watch shows at these times thanks to my schedule and drive times, I deserve a little fun.

Anyway, after that was over I conjured up a full-length mirror, took a moment to admire my perfect body, then materialized ratty, casual clothing (a worn T-shirt, gym shorts and worn sneakers) on myself and telekinetically yanked my cell phone into my hand.

I called the first contact on my list and she almost immediately picked up.

"Hey, Plain Jane!"

I chuckled. "Hey, Commie."

"We on tonight?"

"Of course. See you in an hour?"

"Yeah, of course. See you."

"See you."

I hung up.

Remember how I told you not to call me Plain Jane? Yeah, don't do that. Miranda Baker is my oldest friend, so she gets to call me that. (I call her Commie because she prefers "Mir" as a diminutive.)

I met Miranda when I entered Princeton. She was 18, of course, and had a partial scholarship. She took me under her wing and while she didn't go through her schooling as fast as I did, she ended up following me--we had three years at Princeton, and she came to Harvard for her doctorate a year after I did. By the time she was done that, I had earned my unconditional tenure at Berkeley, and she (at my urging) took a postdoctoral position at Stanford. (I knew it would be unlikely for her to get a faculty position at Berkeley if she did a postdoc here, so I asked her to go to Standard so she'd be nearby, and I knew I could get her a faculty position at Berkeley once that was done.)

Meanwhile, we met once a week (at least) for dinner and then to hang.

So I walked out to my car (which I'd teleported home with me, of course) and took off southward.

An hour later I was parked outside Miranda's house.

Now, the thing with Miranda was that while she's definitely a smart cookie (and, at least before I became God, a way better coder than I am--she went into computer science), and definitely earned her scholarships, her parents are filthy rich.

No, not that filthy rich. Her parents are the sort of filthy rich that ordinary filthy rich folks consider filthy rich.

Miranda's place was a mansion. Literally. She had five cars in her garage, all ridiculously expensive. (She drove herself, though, not that her parents wouldn't hire a driver for her.)

As for Miranda herself, she pretty much epitomizes "hot nerd girl."

She's a looker--no me, of course, but still hot. A nice 36D-24-36 figure, 5'6", blonde hair to her shoulders, and the cutest glasses she could find. (Her parents keep trying to insist she get laser eye surgery. She keeps refusing because she thinks her glasses make her hotter. She's right.)

And the biggest nerd you will ever meet.

Thankfully for her, her parents are wrapped around her little finger. So, for instance, she has at least three copies of literally every comic book ever published in protective coverings to keep them in mint condition, plus another copy for her to read. Other nerds would probably have a heart attack at her well-read original printing of Action Comics #1, and another when they saw her five mint condition ones in protective plastic.

She also had original printings of every science fiction and fantasy book ever printed, DVDs or VHSes or Betamaxes or LaserDiscs or what-have-you of every such TV show and movie ever released in a home video format, and all sorts of other things, including five of the forty-nine surviving Gutenberg Bibles. I didn't know it until now, but she had a top-notch security system installed all around her house. Yet the first time I visited her home (when we were then at Princeton), I took down one of the Gutenberg Bibles and started carefully thumbing through it. (I learned to read Latin when I was four.) Now I know that if anyone else had tried that, her security system would probably have taken off their hand. (Of course, since her parents are so rich, she could go on a shooting spree in broad daylight outside a police station and no one would even think of arresting her.) We'd known each other for a month at that point and already she trusted me enough to give me literally total access to her house.

She'd gotten me into comic books and that sort of thing, and had loaned me her reading copies. It's not like homework had ever been an issue for me, so I had plenty of time to read them. And I read fast, so after another few months I was every bit as much an expert--if not so much an aficionado--as she was.

We'd discussed what we liked about that sort of thing, and she told me that what she liked best were the plots where superheroes went bad. She loved stories about superheroes getting fed up with the expectations laid on them and snapping. (I'd peeked in on her dreams--or, rather, made myself consciously aware of them--last night, and as I'd long suspected, she was unconsciously masturbating to a dream of being a superhero herself, someone loved and adored by the people, only to decide "Fuck it" and start massacring people.)

But what I hadn't suspected--at all--were her father's plans for his "little girl" (as he still thought of her, even though she's almost thirty-one with a comfortable fortune of her own, thanks to judicious investment of her trust fund thanks in no small part to my own astute advice).

In four years' time, as a belated thirty-fifth birthday present, she was going to become President.