Time(0): Oh What Tangled Webs We Weave, God!
His real name is Ba^ag'n (emphasis is on the fifth syllable) and he's a catalyst Light. It's so simple, it's absurd. Certain Lights, like Ba^ag'n, live among mortals in order to ensure that certain mortals have certain, necessary, experiences. To qualify as a catalyst, one must be absolutely unswerving in one's commitment to the Plan, be resourceful (because humans will throw curves at you like you wouldn't believe), and be willing to die over and over again. Most catalysts are fixated on mortality. Whether or not this obsession is an Eternal flaw is hard to say, but it is an exception. Most creatures are glad to get out of Mortality...as glad to get out of it as they are reluctant to leave it. Not catalysts. They want to go back.
Catalysts are reincarnated only in the strict, scientific, sense of the word, i.e., after death, they are alive again in another body. The concept is dissimilar to eastern theological thought in that they aren't returning to mortality in order to jack their souls through a couple more stages of progression; they're back to guarantee a result for someone else. What they get out of it is dead...again.
Ba^ag'n had never worked directly with God before. He hopes he'll never have to again.
It was Ba^ag'n's idea to double up on the name, Harvey. First, he'd be Harvey, the boss. Then, after Harvey drowns in a vat of coleslaw, he'd be Harvey, the janitor. God would have preferred different names. God thought there were enough goofy names in Frog Blankets, what with three or four Becky's, two Tinker Bells, Hansel and Gretl, C.A.R.L.O.S. and Pear Tree, but in the end, he let Ba^ag'n have his way. Good catalysts are very sensitive, and become frustrated if given no artistic latitude. Besides, God knew Ba^ag'n was going to have a tough time of it with the second Harvey. Being unremittingly stupid would not be easy for Ba^ag'n, nor would it be easy to share his head with God, nor, considering how stupid he'd be and how messed up his head would be from God living in it, would it be easy for him to be resourceful and guarantee the result. God knew Ba^ag'n could do it, though. And, Ba^ag'n had wanted to do it! It was a plum assignment! They'd all wanted to do it...all the catalyst Lights.
(It was the first Harvey that made the job attractive; the tough, smart entrepreneur who would become rich as the owner of Undarling Corp and would spend his entire life in luxury and cheating on his wife with the already famous (before her birth) Becky, whose sexual guru would be none other than Gretl, the Great Computer, who would be programmed by the Computer Prophet himself! His infidelity wouldn't be discovered until the day of his death, which death would be instantaneous (it almost always is with catalysts...it being considered bad form to make them suffer when they are dying all the time). Finally, the chain of events affected by the catalyst would be the longest since the beautiful catalyst, Eve, messed with the serpent in the Garden (it could be argued that that chain of events was still going on, but most historians accept that it ended with the Flood), for, in addition to the chain connected directly to God and His computer prophet, was a secondary chain involving Harvey's long-suffering wife, who would be tried for his murder in an historic trial that would alter the lives of the judge, the defense attorney and his brother, the prosecutor, four of the jurors and the head waiter at the restaurant where Harvey dies!)
Yup, they all wanted it.
Catalysts don't necessarily have to be born. Sometimes, they just appear, with a false set of papers, and start from there. That's the way it was with Harvey. He appeared, walked into Undarling Corp when it was a back room outfit on a dirty downtown corner, and plunked down his money. Bought the place. Three years later he had a mistress named Becky and a secretarial pool in which she could swim. He had a systems engineer named Jonathan Bell. Within a year of that, Becky was using moves that'd put a suit of armor in heat!
Cluttering up a catalyst's head with a lot of detail about his mission is not a good idea. They work better if they believe their own role as a Mortal. They are like Method actors who "believe" their character, who "feel" his emotion, but who guide and temper those feelings with an awareness that it's all an act.
Thus, when Harvey began to show signs of restlessness and boredom in his affair with Becky, he was barely aware that it would spark the greatest computer program ever written. And thus, when she showed him Kundalina position 48 he was very aware of the position, but was hardly aware at all of his role as catalyst. And thus thus, when Becky up and announced that she was leaving Undarling Corp. and, by extension, him...Harvey panicked! But, not because he was Ba^ag'n, the catalyst, who was supposed to have a life-long affair with her! No! It was because he was crazy in love with her! Sheesh!
Being in love, Harvey was primed and ready to do something stupid. He picked up the phone (a weakness of Ba^ag'n's, apparently) and called his wife. He told her all about himself and Becky, and he said he loved Becky and was leaving his wife. Was that stupid? Not half as stupid as calling his wife before he talked to Becky! Because Becky didn't love him back! Becky had had a motivational-self-discovery-break-through that would make any pop psychologist proud and wanted to stop being the boss's little girlfriend! Didn't you read Chapter Nine, where Jonathan said just exactly the wrong thing? Remember? Well, Harvey said exactly the wrong thing, too! Harvey said, "I love you!" Can you believe it?
God was fit to be tied.
Becky took off like a shot, of course. Had her baby anonymously at St. Bart's Jewish Family Hospital and gave the little girl up for adoption. (You didn't know that Becky was pregnant when she quit Undarling. I saved it for a surprise.) Some cowboy adopted the kid and named her Becky and moved her to Palm Springs, Wyoming to grow up. She damn near did, too.
As for Harvey, when his office hussy lit out, he had no choice but to crawl back to his wife and let her beat up on him for the next fourteen years. The whole chain with the wife, the judge, the judge's brothers (the lawyers), a bunch of jurors and the head waiter was a bust, God figured. Harvey was so whipped he couldn't sit up straight, but he tried to take it like a man.
"I miss her, Jonathan, but I got what I deserved. I never should have said I loved her. Don't you miss her?"
"Ummmmm," Jonathan would say, guilt oozing over him like a spreading oil slick.
"I miss her. And boy, the sex--"
Jonathan would try to close his ears. (Have you noticed that you can't do that?)
"--the sex was...it was...well, you know!"
"I do?"
"Sure! You wrote that program! The sex program! What a program!" Harvey would often sigh at this point, ruminating upon his sexless relationship with his wife, then, ". . .too bad it's going to waste."
"Gretl likes it," Jonathan would say.
"Hummph! You talk about that computer like it was a woman." Harvey would always say. "Well, how's Beck--er, Anna...and that boy of yours?"
Harvey was always very solicitous about Beck--er, Anna and that boy of Jonathan's. Jonathan wondered, sometimes, if Harvey thought Jonathan had stolen Becky from him and renamed her Anna. Fourteen years it went on like that.
Then, one day, while Harvey was polishing his putter, he realized that he was the boss and, in reality, he could love just about any secretary, so why didn't he rename one of them Becky and have at it? (I told you Ba^ag'n was resourceful.) Which was what he was doing when his wife walked in to get some more money, and which was what got him drowned in the coleslaw that night and restarted the whole chain with the wife, the judge, the judge's brothers (the lawyers and the four jurors) and the head waiter (the wife's lover). God was impressed. He'd about given up on Ba^ag'n.
That was the same day Gretl started Working... on Jonathan's file. It was the next day that David beat up Lizzie, the Dyke. And, it was that evening that Jonathan first told Anna about the Universal Principle and got zip for a response. Things were back on track.
Now, all we have to do is find Becky, the new owner of Undarling Corp.
During His career as God, God has paid lip service to the notion that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Lip service. You see, at the outset, He put into action what He said was the perfect perpetual strategy. He called it The Theory of Voluntary Orderliness. His idea was that the cosmos had, built into it, all the mechanisms necessary for the "optimum use of itself," i.e., perfect order (Chapter 10). You'll recall, also, that the ultimate value of an entity lies in its usefulness, i.e., how efficiently it contributes to the optimum use of the whole (Chapter 4).
Conveniently however, God also theorized that, since He is in the cosmos, any fiddling and tinkering He does to it is merely part of it. Consequently, it's okay for Him to meddle--He isn't violating the first part of His Theory.
So, on the one hand, God says the cosmos can take care of itself just fine and on the other hand, He's always messing around with it. Sounds like He skewed His theory to suit His love for meddling, but then, it's His theory and He is God and....
(I'm getting around to telling you where Becky's been since she quit her job at Undarling Corp.)
Palm Springs, Wyoming.