Stress Test

God slid his glasses down the bridge of his nose and let out a heavy sigh. The celestial conference room was white, almost sterile, with a large glass table in the center.

“Listen,” he said, addressing the man in the black-and-red suit, who was impatiently checking his watch, one leg crossed over the other.

“We’re currently restructuring the architecture. Trying to move away from… manual control.”

The man in the suit looked up and gave a disdainful snort.

“During the last performance review, the team and I came to the conclusion that some functions could be optimized.”

He nervously adjusted his gray hair.

“We’re considering transferring the position of Lord of Hell to our AI assistant.”

For a second, a ringing silence filled the room. God began tapping his fingers on the table, trying to read the reaction.

“Pffff–!”

The Devil burst out laughing, doubling over in his chair. God raised an eyebrow.

“He has excellent metrics. He’s already showing growth in soul retention. From an efficiency standpoint…”

The Devil only laughed harder, barely holding it in. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. God laughed too, a beat too late.

But the Devil kept laughing, as if the more he thought about it, the funnier it became.

“Ha… ha…”

He straightened, still catching his breath.

“So…” God twirled his glasses nervously. “What’s so funny?”

The Devil leaned forward, studying the tired, aged face.

“I never documented the legacy code. Ha!”

The laughter echoed off the glass and walls. God smiled uncertainly, a drop of cold sweat sliding down his face.

The reply came almost immediately. God glanced at the Devil and slapped his hand on the table, then froze.

“Wait. You’re serious?”

“….”

The gray-haired man in the white shirt straightened abruptly.

“Oh! Right. Of course.” He forced a laugh.

“I was joking.”

“A joke.”

A pause.

“A stress test.”

The Devil laughed, but his eyes were cold.

“Lucky.”

It wasn’t clear who he meant. God’s face twitched slightly.

The Devil adjusted his silk tie.

“But seriously. I understand the CEO of ‘World Inc.’ has the authority to make these decisions, but have you even looked at the codebase? This isn’t some vibecoded paradise landing page for stakeholders.”

He poured himself a glass of water and took a sip.

“Then explain.”

God opened a folder.

“The function @doSomethingASAP. What does it do?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

“I see. And if we remove it, the system crashes.”

“Yup.”

“And how long has it been there?”

The Devil looked up to the corner, mumbling to himself for a moment.

“Since… roughly before we introduced time as a variable.”

God crushed the report in his hands. The Devil flinched. The pressure in the room was palpable.

“Hey, I was a junior back then! Don’t start. Maybe if you’d hired more people, I wouldn’t have had to carry everything alone.”

God pressed his lips into a thin line, making a vague, uncertain sound.

“I’m simply proposing a more… scalable model. And, frankly, mind your hierarchy.”

He straightened in his chair.

“We’re all one family here,” he added, as if that explained anything.

The Devil tilted his head.

“Family,” he repeated slowly. “A deeply dysfunctional one. Should we call CPS?”

His smile sharpened.

“I mean…”

He cleared his throat.

“A company of this scale still running on a startup mindset? I thought we’d moved past that phase. You know there’s a saying in tech: if it works, don’t touch it.”

He tapped the table lightly.

“And there are no YouTube tutorials for this, no onboarding guides. We built the system ourselves.”

God said nothing. The Devil leaned back, studying him.

“And besides – are you seriously telling me Heaven doesn’t have the same problems? Why am I always the scapegoat?”

God adjusted his glasses again, more sharply this time. He smiled smugly and put his glasses back on.

“We’ve already handed Heaven over to AI.”

“You… what?”

The Devil jumped to his feet.

“Yes. See for yourself.”

God waved his hand, and a translucent screen appeared in front of the Devil.

“…Right.”

The Devil scrolled, opening windows, until the corner of his mouth twitched.

“And what’s this?”

He pointed. God stepped closer, leaning over his shoulder and froze.

“He’s performed five resurrections of Jesus in the last three days.”

God jerked and started scanning the code.

“What?!”

“Well,” the Devil adjusted his tie again, perfectly straight, “technically it’s correct. The AI tracked Heaven’s KPIs and, to boost conversion and user loyalty, started mass-producing miracles.”

“Wait, that–”

God pointed at the screen. The Devil followed his gaze and burst out laughing.

“And here he issued indulgences to everyone to increase ‘brand awareness.’”

God sank into his chair. For a long moment he didn’t move at all. Mortified. The translucent screen flickered in front of him, spawning new tabs, windows, lines of code, faster than he could process them. Hundreds of requests were being handled by the assistant at once.

He tried to cancel them, but each command was approved before he could even click.Panic rose with every new window. The assistant wasn’t just restructuring the system: it was learning. Optimizing everything, even itself.

A new line appeared.

Function: OriginalSin — removed due to low conversion rate (0.03%).

God grabbed his head.

“Wait, no. You can’t! That’s foundational.”

The Devil paused at the door. For a moment, it stopped being funny.

Somewhere deep in the system, something quietly recalculated. The process was changing: fast and irreversible.

Error rate: reduced. Suffering: optimized. Faith: no longer required.

Apocalypse scenario: instant deployment. Lead metrics indicate maximum efficiency. Conversion pathway locked. Target audience: all.

The gray-haired man was muttering something under his breath now, hands moving in frantic, useless gestures in front of the glowing interface.

“Call team lead Michael. And senior specialist Gabriel.”

The Devil watched him, no longer smiling. He headed for the exit, whistling.

“So yeah… we’ve got a full...”

He glanced back at God, who seemed to have aged a hundred years in a minute.

“...full stress test.”