Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Venus of Sigma

Venus was a mathematician.

Unfortunately, she has been remembered primarily for her looks. "Seriously," she is wont to say at parties, "you do one life drawing session in college to make ends meet..." At this point she trails off meaningfully - the joke tells itself, really - but women in particular tend to read a slightly bitter undertone into the telling. Men, on the other hand, are unable to grasp how this could possibly be construed as a bad thing, and thus interpret the subtle whiff of sombreness as... humility, maybe? Whatever it is, it is just so hot - 10/10 would totally hit that. She usually takes the ensuing pause in the chatter, where everyone awkwardly sips their drink and avoids eye contact, to make a quick exit. It's basically her only good line, and anyway she hates events like these.  

Ugh, and that Goddess of Love business - speaking of jokes! She was appointed to the Ministry of Human Affairs in a cabinet shuffle hastily conducted after yet another illicit deity-mortal "interaction" scandal. Ironically, she was assigned the post because she was the most studiously disinterested in humans of them all, i.e., voted least likely to take the "Human Affairs" title as a personal challenge. She wasn't even qualified, yet had such unprecedented success in simply avoiding the types of scandalous behaviours that her predecessors had engaged in that she was never relieved from the position, and that ridiculous moniker stuck. Some a-hole reporter from a right-wing rag coined it - she's usually a stickler for ethics but she made the tiniest (and arguably well-deserved) exception for that guy, and pulled some strings over at the Ministry of Human Health. A pox upon his ass, indeed. Literally.

She had done some groundbreaking work in geometry and algebra before joining the Ministry, but the credit went to her male colleagues. Mortals at that! It soured her on academia for a while, hence the ill-advised foray into government.

Uninterested in managing the emotional needs of humans, yet unable to secure a transfer to a department better suited to her skill set - or even an assistant, for Pete's sake! - she set about automating the process. I mean, when you think of the overwhelming emotional needs of humans, multiplied by their incredible ability to, well, multiply, it was only logical. (Which, by the way, she had also dabbled in during her undergrad; you will note her name isn't associated with her advances in that field, either.)

You are, of course, familiar with her system, although you can be forgiven for not previously having recognized it as a system per se - it would be like, as they say, a fish describing water. Let me assure you it was revolutionary at the time, given both that the branch of mathematics governing it hadn't been invented yet, and that it represented a rather substantial departure from the water the fish had been swimming in up to that point: everything used to rest on the tedious approaches of endless praying and sacrificing and other forms of personal appeal, but even with only a few hundred thousand humans kicking around at the time it was obvious that the model was unsustainable. Especially without even a single assistant...

So, with the kind of political will that can only occur in someone utterly disinterested in politics, she developed and implemented a new system. One so ruthlessly equitable (even if not what one might call "fair", depending on one's experience of it) and so unsusceptible to divine meddling that its practical appeal was irresistible; it was eventually applied to all other departments as well. Well, all but the Ministry of Human Sporting Events; guess you didn't pray hard enough last season, folks.

In this manner dis-employed, the various and variously long-overworked deities all cashed in their vacation millennia to catch up on sleep and neglected hobbies. (They received generous retirement packages as well, in case you're concerned about their welfare over the long term - it is government, after all.)

Oh, people kept burning livestock and so on for a while, but most of them have caught on by now that no amount of charred sheep is going to help you find love, luck, health, wealth, a bumper potato crop, a particular gender of fetus or even your car keys, anymore: it's all up to chance.
         

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