The gods had a meeting.
This requires some context.
Gods do not, as a rule, have meetings. Meetings are a human invention — a solution to the problem of coordinating multiple parties who have conflicting interests and incomplete information and finite time. Gods do not have conflicting interests in the way that humans have conflicting interests, because the conflicts of gods are resolved through means that make scheduling irrelevant. Gods do not have incomplete information, because omniscience, where it exists, is by definition complete. Gods do not have finite time.
Gods do not have meetings.
And yet, in the spring of 1991, something occurred that could only be described as a meeting — a gathering of the various entities that occupied the upper registers of existence, convened not through invitations or calendar coordination but through the specific mechanism by which beings of sufficient awareness become aware that something requires collective attention.
The something was Chuck Norris.
More precisely: the something was the question of what to do about Chuck Norris.
More precisely still: the something was the dawning collective recognition that do about was not a framework that applied, and that a new framework was needed, and that none of them had one.
The entities present were varied.
The narrator will not attempt a comprehensive list, because the comprehensive list would require a taxonomy of divine and semi-divine existence that exceeds the scope of this account and would, in any case, be contested by at least half the entities on it. What can be said is that they represented the full spectrum of the upper registers — the ancient and the recent, the named and the unnamed, the ones with extensive theological literature and the ones who had operated quietly at the edges of human awareness for millennia without acquiring so much as a footnote.
They had, between them, been managing existence for a very long time.
They were good at it.
They were not, any of them, prepared for this.
The entity who had called the meeting — insofar as any single entity could be said to have called it — was one of the older ones. Old enough that its name had been many names across many cultures, old enough that it had watched civilizations rise and fall with the detached interest of someone watching weather. It had authority. It had, across its long existence, encountered everything that the upper registers of existence had to offer.
It opened the meeting with a question.
The question was: Has anyone spoken to him?
There was a pause.
The pause lasted longer than pauses at this level of existence typically last. Beings of sufficient power do not pause for the ordinary reasons — uncertainty, formulation of thought, social discomfort. They pause when the pause is the honest answer to the question.
The honest answer to has anyone spoken to him was: no.
Not because they had not wanted to. Several of them had wanted to — had observed Chuck Norris with the specific attention of entities who recognize something operating in a register adjacent to their own and feel the pull of curiosity that even very old and very powerful things feel in the presence of something new.
Not because they had not tried, exactly. Trying implies an attempt that failed. What had happened was more preliminary than failure — they had oriented toward him, in the way that entities of their nature orient toward things that require attention, and had encountered something that produced in each of them a response they had not experienced before.
The response was this: they had looked at Chuck Norris and felt, for the first time in their very long existences, that looking might not be sufficient. That looking might not be the right approach. That the correct thing to do, when looking at Chuck Norris, was to wait until he looked back.
He had not looked back yet.
They had been waiting.
The meeting, the oldest entity now explained, was because the waiting had begun to feel less like patience and more like avoidance. And avoidance, in entities of their nature, was a thing worth examining.
The youngest entity present — young being relative, its existence predating the formation of the solar system by a margin that human timescales could not comfortably contain — said: I observed him in Korea in 1958.
The room, such as it was, gave this statement its attention.
He had a conversation with Death, the young entity continued. I was watching. I have watched Death have conversations before. This one was different.
Different how, said another entity.
Death listened, the young entity said. Death does not usually listen. Death concludes. There is a distinction.
The entity who had called the meeting considered this.
He negotiated, it said.
He explained, the young entity corrected. There is a distinction there too. Negotiation implies that both parties have something to offer. He did not offer Death anything. He explained his position and Death found the explanation sufficient.
Another pause.
What was the position? said an entity that had not yet spoken — one of the unnamed ones, ancient and quiet, the kind of entity that speaks rarely and is listened to carefully when it does.
The young entity considered the question.
That he had not agreed to the terms, it said finally. That the arrangement had been made without his consent. And that he did not consider arrangements made without his consent binding.
The meeting was quiet for a while.
It was the specific quiet of very powerful entities confronting a framework they had not previously had to consider — the framework of consent. Of terms. Of the possibility that the fundamental arrangements of existence were not universal but contractual, and that a contract, to be binding, required a party that had agreed to it.
None of them had thought about it this way.
They had existed before thought. Most of the arrangements had been in place before anything was present to consent to them. Consent had not been a relevant concept.
It was relevant now.
Has he broken any of our arrangements? said one of the older entities — one of the ones with extensive theological literature, a being that had been the subject of considerable human attention for several thousand years and had developed, over that time, an understandable investment in its own frameworks.
The question was addressed to the room generally.
The room considered it generally.
No, said the entity that had called the meeting, after a review that took the form of a comprehensive survey of Chuck Norris's activities across fifty-one years of documented existence. He has renegotiated with gravity. With time. He has reached an understanding with death. He has — the entity paused, consulting the survey — he has corrected mathematics, stabilized cosmic ray precision, rewritten a law enforcement handbook, and on one occasion made perfect eggs.
The eggs, said another entity.
The eggs are perfect every time, the first entity confirmed. Fire follows his instructions precisely.
Fire follows our instructions precisely, said the entity with the theological literature, with a note in its register that might, in a human, have been called proprietary.
Fire follows his instructions more precisely, the first entity said, without apology.
Another pause.
The unnamed entity spoke again.
The question, it said, is not whether he has broken our arrangements. The question is whether our arrangements require his acknowledgment to function.
The room attended to this.
We have been operating, the unnamed entity continued, on the assumption that the upper registers are defined by us. That what we are is what the upper registers contain. That anything in proximity to our level is in proximity because we have permitted it.
And? said the oldest entity.
And, the unnamed entity said, I would like someone to explain, on the basis of available evidence, why that assumption should be considered accurate.
The available evidence was considerable and it was all in the room and every entity in the room was aware of it and none of them had a good answer to the question.
The question sat in the room.
The meeting continued for some time.
Not in the way that human meetings continue — not through agenda items and action points and the gradual narrowing of a broad conversation toward a specific conclusion. It continued in the way that conversations among very old and very powerful entities continue — circling, returning, finding the same questions from different angles, the way water finds the shape of what it flows around.
The questions they kept returning to were three.
The first: What is he?
Not in the biographical sense — they had the biography, they had more of the biography than any human documentation contained, they had been watching since before the biography was a concept. What is he in the categorical sense. What register does he occupy. What is the correct framework for understanding something that has renegotiated with every fundamental force and found each negotiation sufficient.
They did not reach a conclusion on the first question.
The second: What does he want?
This one they discussed at length, because want is the primary currency of the upper registers — every entity present was defined, to some significant degree, by what it wanted, what it was oriented toward, what purpose organized its existence. Want is what makes a thing legible. Want is what makes a thing predictable.
The available evidence on what Chuck Norris wanted was extensive and, on examination, clarifying in a way that several entities found uncomfortable.
He wanted things to work correctly.
Not his things — things. The Rangers' handbook had not been his handbook. The light fixture in Wilson, Texas had not been his light fixture. The precision of cosmic ray flux in his vicinity was not something he had sought or cultivated or leveraged for any discernible purpose. Things were not working correctly and he corrected them. That was the full description.
That's it? said the entity with the theological literature, in a register that suggested this answer was insufficient.
That appears to be it, said the entity that had been conducting the survey.
There's no agenda, said the youngest entity. No accumulation of power. No building toward something.
Just—
Correction, said the unnamed entity.
The room considered this.
That is, said the oldest entity slowly, either the most modest thing I have ever encountered at this level.
It paused.
Or the most complete, it said.
The third question they returned to was the one nobody wanted to ask first, and which the unnamed entity eventually asked directly because it had been in the room since the beginning and silence was not resolving it.
The third question was: Do we introduce ourselves?
This produced the longest pause of the meeting.
Not because the answer was complicated.
Because the answer was simple and the simplicity was the problem. The simple answer was: yes. If there is an entity operating in the upper registers, you become aware of it, you introduce yourself. This is how it has always worked. This is the protocol.
The problem was that every entity in the room, when it turned toward the possibility of introducing itself to Chuck Norris, encountered the same thing it had encountered when it had first oriented toward him:
The feeling that looking might not be sufficient.
The feeling that the correct approach was to wait until he looked back.
He'll look back, said the youngest entity. Eventually.
How do you know? said the entity with the theological literature.
Because he fixes things, the youngest entity said. And we are, at present, not working correctly.
It looked around the room.
We don't know what we are anymore, relative to him. That's a thing that needs fixing.
And your position, said the oldest entity carefully, is that he will fix it.
My position, said the youngest entity, is that he'll get around to it.
That's not particularly comforting, said the entity with the theological literature.
No, the youngest entity agreed. But it's probably accurate.
The meeting ended without a resolution.
This is recorded because meetings among entities of this nature do not usually end without resolutions — they are not subject to the human limitations of time and attention that cause human meetings to end inconclusively. They end when the question is answered.
The question was not answered.
The meeting ended because the oldest entity said: We wait, and every other entity in the room recognized this as correct not because waiting was comfortable but because it was honest, and honesty, even in the upper registers, has a weight that preference cannot override.
They dispersed.
They returned to their various operations.
They continued doing what they did, managing what they managed, being what they were — with the addition of a new quality of attention that had not been present before. Not watchfulness — they had always been watchful. Something more specific.
The attention of entities that have realized, for the first time, that something is watching back.
Chuck Norris, on the afternoon of the spring day in 1991 when the meeting occurred, was in his kitchen in Texas making coffee.
He was not aware of the meeting.
Or he was aware of it in the way he is aware of most things — fully, accurately, and without finding it necessary to take action until action was required.
He made his coffee.
He drank it at the kitchen table, reading a book about the migratory patterns of birds, which he had been meaning to finish for some time.
Outside, Texas was going about its business.
The coffee was good.
The birds, in the book, were going where they were going for reasons that made complete sense once you understood the logic of it.
Chuck Norris understood the logic of it.
He finished his coffee.
He turned the page.