The Last Testament: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

ziggurat;
8 And when the Babel Development Board ruled in my favor by a vote of 6 to 3 (with one abstention), an immediate motion to cease construction was filed with King Gungunum; which was clearly a tactical ploy on the part of the Chamber of Commerce to bide time until the reinstatement of the planning committee . . .
9 Anyway, long story short, I wound up confounding all the languages of the earth.
10 And from that day forward the peoples of the world no longer all spoke good old-fashioned English, but instead blathered incoherently in thousands of tongues; each more un-American than the next.
11 But other than Babel, I spent most of those four centuries doing something I should have done much sooner: assembling my staff.
12 I mean this in two senses: first, in the sense of finding a large piece of cedar wood, whittling it, varnishing it, and affixing unto it an ornate golden handle.
13 It came out nice.
14 It was shiny.
15 But secondly, I mean it in the sense of gathering unto me a team of agents, representatives, subordinates, messengers, interns, and temps to help me run all facets of my ever-expanding enterprise.
16 Perhaps thou art asking thyself why a supreme and self-sufficient God would need a celestial support system of any kind.
17 That is a fair question; one I myself mused upon often in the antediluvian period, always arriving at the conclusion that no such system was needed; for I am the L ORD thy God, King of the Universe; I never give myself anything I cannot handle.
18 Yet in looking back on the Flood, I realized there were several occasions when the deployment of an associate on my behalf would have been useful.
19 For example, informing Noah that all his friends and extended family were going to be destroyed forever due to my wrath . . . there was no reason I had to be the one to tell him that.
20 The piteous cries of the wicked and their children as they fought in vain against the relentless surging of the waters . . . there was no reason I had to take that call.
21 The unremitting continuance of the torrential rains for 40 days and 40 nights . . . there was no reason that repetitive task could not have been delegated to an aide; a younger aide, perhaps, eager to work his way up in the machina.
22 Moreover, my failure in the days before the Flood to appreciate the full scope of the growing wickedness had been partly a result of my over-reliance on my own omniscience; a fact that, in retrospect, I should have known.
23 But now I saw that, in the post–9:11 world, the vital job of gathering intelligence would be best served by an aggressive team of “wings on the ground,” charged with monitoring the goings-on in the region of my principal concern, the Middle East;
24 Thus making that area safe and stable in perpetuity.

CHAPTER 11
1 S o I began assembling an elite group of subordinates—Genesistants, if thee will—to do my bidding, deliver my pronouncements, oversee the earth’s natural processes, and manage the inevitable papyruswork produced thereby.
2 I quickly decided it would not do to use transplanted humans; for few were worthy, and those few were needed on earth; where good men were, and remain, hard to find.
3 (Verily, ladies, am I right?)
4 No; the only thing for it was to create an entirely new class of creature; and this time not of the dust of the earth, or aught else terrestrial, but of immaterial chunks of pure spirit I would rend from the mystical heart of my own essence, and then futz around with for a while.
5 It went very smoothly; within a few days I had over 3,000 employees; I gave them halos to help them see better, and wings to make air travel less burdensome;
6 I called them “angels”; and collectively I called them The A-Team; or at least I did until 1983, when I dropped it for reasons thou mayest well imagine.
7 I wish not to speak in great depth of my angels; partly because much of their work is classified, and partly because I value their privacy.
8 Also, I assume