My Turn As Pope

I’ll never forget my turn as Pope.

After a few tense hours in a Vatican waiting room, drowning in a sea of humanity, a young man in a suit approached me, confirmed my identity by scanning the QR code in my Conclave app, and led me to a pair of double doors that reached into the gothic stone archways of the hall. He murmured something into his headset, waited for confirmation, then opened one of the doors and raised a hand for me to wait.

He listened a moment longer, then began a silent countdown from five to zero. I watched each of his fingers tick down, growing more expectant as his hand slowly snapped into a fist. Then, on zero, he shoved me across the threshold and into a dark corridor.

Before I could turn to ask what was happening, the door slammed shut. Before me, the hallway twisted into a whirlpool of cosmic nothingness. Cotton-candy nebulae and streaking fireballs — comets, maybe — spun past as I was pulled down, up, and through all at once. Like a marionette jerked around by a toddler high on cake and soda.

When I landed, I was standing in what could only be described as a soundstage. That in itself was upsetting; this was supposed to be my moment to meet God. Where was St. Peter? I had hoped for a quick tour of the pearly gates.

I took a tentative step, then another, and stood in the cold void. Clearing my throat, I looked around for anyone or anything to address. The ordeal was already taking longer than I’d planned for, if planning was even the right word.

This had all started at the DMV, trapped in that fluorescent purgatory while I tried to update my license to a Real ID. I’d already been once the week before, but had brought the short-form birth certificate instead of the long one. The lady at the desk had seemed pleased to inform me that I would have to come back again another time with the proper documentation.

Three hours into this second round of waiting, my phone had chimed with a push notification from the Conclave app.

‍ ‍Shit, I’d thought, glancing up at the board. D23 was up. I was D25. Was now really going to be my time to spend one second as Pope? You can probably see why it felt like an imposition. Think about how much of my time, up to this point in the cosmic soundstage, had been taken for a one-second audience with God.

A local member of the Papal Conclave had to find me through GPS data shared by the app, then whisk me to an airport, fly me halfway around the world, and deposit me in a waiting room. The first words anyone from the Vatican had said to me in all those hours were, “You may take a seat and wait for your turn.” No one offered me water. No one asked how my day was. All I had eaten was the shitty cookie on the airplane.

But I’ll admit, the process was as efficient as it could be for what it was trying to accomplish: giving every living human a one-time, second-long audience with God, and helping Him to guide the fate of the species. 

The everyone-gets-a-turn-to-be-Pope policy had always struck me as strange. Honestly, I’d hoped I’d die before my turn came up. History books say it began as a side effect of the scientific discovery proving  God.

You’d think proof of God would come written across the heavens or through some subatomic truth. It was more direct than that.

As the story goes, the scientists at CERN were about to run an experiment that would catastrophically kill us all. God, for seemingly the first time in His long and disappointing career, made Himself known — apparently just to tell the kind scientists to knock it off. Turns out God was almost exactly how the monotheists had described Him. He apologized for the hands-off management and said He’d be stepping in more often, really making an effort.

Not everyone took it well. You can imagine the chaos when God hard-launched Himself and every major faith had to issue a public statement. Every war and near-nuclear incident that followed, He stepped in to resolve. It was so much work that the only solution He could see was a fully democratic system where He could hear from as many people as possible.

Prayer wouldn’t cut it. Most of His so-called inaction came from not being able to make sense of what was being asked through the noise of a billion prayers. Questions, concerns, and ideas would have to be handled one on one.

Bureaucracy, of course, grinds slower than revelation. Conflicting cultures, power structures, and governments made even divine reform a nightmare. Looking for a workaround, God decided He liked the hierarchical model of the Catholic Church. If everyone got a turn at being Pope — a single, direct conference with God — then every voice could finally be heard.

To their credit, the Church adapted fast. The Vatican rebranded as something between a tech company and a logistics provider. Local dioceses became regional branches of those same functions. Other religions joined in, pooling their resources, and within a decade the world had a full network dedicated to anointing a new Pope every second.

When your name was selected by the AI algorithm, you were notified almost immediately. Most people in developed  countries just downloaded the Conclave app. If you didn’t have it installed, you got a text, email, or call, depending on what you’d opted into.

There were protocols for everyone: babies, the elderly, the unstable, uncontacted tribes — every edge case accounted for. It all ended the same way, though. The Papal Conclave sent agents to whisk you off to Rome, where you’d sit in a waiting room and eventually have your audience with God.

In the time it would have taken me to explain all this, shafts of light began to crisscross down to spotlight me. The rest of the space glowed softly, just enough for me to notice obsidian prisms floating in the distance and onyx monoliths towering from other platforms far beyond.

A pen tapped, impatient and precise, a sound I recognized immediately, though my brain couldn’t understand why it belonged here.

“Step forward,” said a voice both thunderous and mellifluous at once, cutting through whatever veil separated us.

I did as I was told, stepping further into the space, where four forms sat in modern English club chairs. The scene would have looked almost ordinary, like a pitch panel at some tech conference, if the judges hadn’t been biblical horrors.

The first was a wheel within a wheel, its rims lined with eyes that blinked in slow, uneven rhythm. Each rotation shimmered with a new color of flame: soft amber, cold blue, a static white that hummed in my jaw. 

The next was all wings and teeth, feathers sharp as glass and folded into impossible geometry. A thin filament of light cut through where its head should have been. Its presence brought a taste of metal and storms.

Beside it sat a shape that might once have been human, if it had not been made of ink and hands. Dozens folded in and out of themselves in constant argument. Faces surfaced on its chest, muttered brief words in a language that felt like rainfall, and slipped back beneath the surface.

The last was almost familiar. Skin smooth, features arranged with engineered precision, eyes shifting faintly beneath the surface. 

They regarded me in silence, not the way you might regard a fine piece of art, but more like how you take in an accident that has happened on the other side of the highway.

"Proceed," a voice said. It sounded like crystal shattering on marble, only higher, almost delicate. It came from the being with the shaft of light for a head.

"Uh," I managed. I shifted my weight back and forth, trying to find a rhythm that might calm me.

"What is your pitch?" another voice asked. This one came from everywhere and nowhere, filling the space until it pressed in on my ears. I guessed it belonged to the inky being.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand," I said.

"What is it that you believe the divine Lord our God should bless humanity with next?" asked the one with the elegantly fragile voice.

"You did not prepare?" said the figure made of wheels of eyes. Its voice was the same thunderous one that had first told me to step forward.

"I'm sorry, I didn't know I was supposed to be prepared. I didn't even know if or when my number would be called."

"Tch, tch," the most human-looking one said. I saw the words in my mind more than I heard them.

"Everyone has something they believe would make humanity better, or at least something they simply want," said the inky being, or so I guessed. Its voice filled the air in that unsettling way that made direction meaningless.

"We must not waste any more time," said the wheel-being to the others seated in the chairs. Then it turned to me. "You may be on your way."

The distance between us began to stretch, slow and deliberate, as if God Himself were pulling an invisible dimension apart like saltwater taffy. My chance to influence anything at all was about to slip away with it.

I threw out a hand and shouted, "Wait! Tree nuts!"

Reality snapped back into place like a rubber band. The recoil hit every part of me. My lungs felt a half-second out of sync with the rest of my body, collapsing and expanding against pressures they hadn’t been built for. The air tasted wrong, thin in one moment and crushing in the next, as if the room had not decided what laws it wanted to follow.

"Tree nuts," I said. My chest heaved in sharp, uneven bursts, each breath forcing itself through whatever aftershock that transition had left behind.

"Go on," a fifth voice said. It was distinctly soothing, and it seemed to shower down on all of us from somewhere behind the beings in the chairs.

"Tree nuts," I repeated. "To be more specific, tree nut allergies. They’re on the rise in the United States, but also globally. Estimates range from less than one percent of the population to as much as five. Reactions can be mild, like a rash, or they can kill you."

There was no shortage of hills to die on, but as someone with a severe tree-nut allergy, this one at least felt familiar.

I kept going. "And it impacts more than the people who have the allergy. Schools, at least where I live, have to take great care to protect kids with food allergies. There is an opportunity cost for everyone else. Consider the medical bills, the burden on health systems. And that is nothing compared to disparities in care globally. Also, I’m no capitalist, but the cost to the food industry has to be astronomical. All the procedures to reduce contamination, labeling, recalls, and on and on."

My brain hit a wall. Everything I knew about tree-nut allergies had already been thrown out in a panic. While I paused, the pen began tapping again. The four beings in the chairs watched me with expressions I could not read. It felt like being lowered into a cosmic tank full of heavenly sharks.

"And I’m extremely allergic," I added. "I miss pistachios more than I care to admit." I looked down, trying to find something else, and got one last bit of inspiration. "Because that’s the other thing. You can be fine one day and then, bam, deathly allergic the next. No one deserves that."

Silence settled over the room.

"Is that all?" asked the fifth, unseen voice.

"Yes. I think so." I said it sheepishly, now that I finally had the room to realize how ridiculous I sounded.

"You would like God to eliminate tree-nut allergies?" asked the human-looking one. The words appeared across my mind again, clear and intrusive.

"Yes," I said, and I could feel the heat rising in my face.

Without another word I was thrown back through the interdimensional washing machine and dropped on the other side of the double doors in the Vatican. I was sent to a secondary waiting room, which was far less warm and comfortable than the pre-Pope area. After several hours I was placed in a town car, driven to the airport, handed a boarding pass, and left to navigate my own way home.

Traveling back was the antithesis of being taken to Rome, but eventually, after many delays, too many Ubers, and a few favors called in to family and friends, I found myself a few blocks from my apartment. I stopped at a corner store on the way and grabbed a bag of pistachios.

Outside, I held one for a long moment, then slipped it back into the bag. I figured I could decide later, preferably somewhere near a hospital.