It was daytime in Babylon. Merchants were hawking wares in the marketplace. Buying was desultory: most could not afford the prices. The new arrivals had settled over in the big makeshift tent colony outside the city walls. They preferred to face the dangers of night predators – four-legged as well as human and for all they knew inhuman – than pay the high rents that were the going rate in Nimrod's new kingdom.

Workmen were scrambling up and down ladders carrying hods of brick. Occasionally, one would fall: the sharp cries were unsettling to newcomers, but those who had been there a while merely ignored the shouts and the sickening thuds that followed. Teams of what Ori presumed were at least nominally medical men ran with stretchers, to render assistance in rare cases – or, more commonly, to take away the corpses.

Ori had ceased to be surprised by anything these people did. Ori walked across a fairly empty square on the other side of the marketplace. The clock pillar cast its shortening shadow over the mud-brick plaza; it was late morning, said the sun. Ori refused to hurry to the appointment with Babylon's CEO.

'Let Nimrod wait,' Ori said inwardly. Still, Ori was on time arriving at the portal to the HQ Palace, a spacious high-ceilinged structure adjacent to the ever-growing Tower.

Servants met Ori at the door, where Ori was frisked to make sure he wasn't carrying anything more lethal than a cuneiform stylus (they allowed the 'scribe' to keep that, after all, this was supposed to be an interview), and then escorted the disgusted angel into the Nimrodian presence.

The 'conference room' was typically modern and designed to impress. Ori stood around waiting. If Ori had learned anything about humans it was that sitting down before the 'most important' person had arrived was considered very bad manners.

Ori didn't have long to wait. Nimrod burst into the room like a pudgy sandstorm, surrounded by attendants waving tablets at him, all talking at once to get his attention. The busy little executive nodded, shook his head, waved this one off and that one closer, muttered replies like 'yeah, okay' and 'not on your life' and 'tell him to go peddle his wares in Arabia,' and generally sorted out his personal universe on the fly. He settled down in his ergonomically-designed reed chair with a sigh and ran the stubby fingers of a heavily-beringed hand through his stiff, unruly hair. He turned a beaming smile on Ori, who had also taken a seat and was waiting to ask questions.

'Mister Nimrod…' Ori began.

'Tell your bosses they have nothing to fear from me,' Nimrod said abruptly. 'We're in the same business.'

'Er, what?' Ori was nonplussed.

'Gods-bothering. The priests and I. Only,' he grinned mischievously, 'I'm better at it. I'm really going to bother those gods. Better than they've ever been bothered in their miserable lives.' Nimrod looked eerily triumphant.

Ori didn't know what to say. This is alarming, Ori thought in the direction of Prajapati. Prajapati didn't say anything, which was even more alarming to Ori than Nimrod's manic grinning.

'Your priests have tried everything to get the attention of those lazy deities. Music!'

Ori thought of what The Penthouse would have said about Sumerian music. Ori imagined the hours-long, nay days-long lectures on contrapuntal theory that would follow and winced. Nimrod saw this and took it for agreement – as, indeed, he took every form of response to his utterances. It was the secret of his business success: just charge along as if everyone agreed with you. They'd be too surprised to stop you.

'Sacrifices and ceremonies! They pay no attention!' Nimrod leaned forward in mock-conspiratorial solidarity. 'Those shabarras aren't into negotiation. What we've got to do is…' his grin became wide enough to engulf the long table, 'storm the castle!'

'Storm the-? Er, surely you don't mean…?'

Nimrod pounded the table with a small, round fist. 'I DO! And I know how to do it! '

To cover confusion, Ori pretended to take notes, hoping Prajapati was listening.

'The secret, of course, is sacred geometry. Oh, your priestly employers think that's a trade secret of theirs, don't they? But they're wrong! I know all about it! And my space programme here is going to exploit it to the fullest to fulfill human destiny, bigly!'

'Bigly?' Ori wasn't sure how to spell that.

'Bigly!' Nimrod leaned back in his chair, which tilted comfortably so that the mini-dictator could cast his gaze impressively toward the ornate ceiling. Which he did. 'Those gods won't know what hit 'em when thousands of Sumerians show up on their doorstep with Big Questions.'

Ori felt a sense of panic imagining the Sumerians loose in The Penthouse. Ori was trying not to think about an encounter between a Warka cobbler and one of Ori's thousand-eyed colleagues.

Ori managed a question – not that Nimrod needed much encouragement to go on. He could apparently talk all day. He probably talked in his sleep and used words like 'bigly.'

'Uh, Mister Nimrod, is this tower connected to your plan to, er, storm Heaven?'

Again the grin. 'Oh, yes. Don't you see? The Tower is our spaceship! That's why I secretly call it The Dragon. It's going to give those gods quite a fright when we start opening doors into their pancake-banquet room!'

Oh, dear, thought Ori frantically. Still no response from Prajapati.

Nimrod warmed to his subject, jumping up and pacing the cavernous room, gesticulating. 'The trick is to generate a wormhole in spacetime. And I've just about done it! Of course, I had a proof-of-concept model made out in the desert. It wasn't big enough to send anything through, but we're sure it works. This time, we'll send everyone through! I'll be the greatest innovator since Whatshisname the Ark Builder. Only they'll remember my name: Nimrod the Great!' He raised his arms as if acknowledging invisible accolades.

Ori tried to bring the interview back down to brass tacks. 'Er, exactly how does a giant apartment building turn into a wormhole? Forgive me, but I'm not conversant with the science.' Oh, harmony, I'm beginning to talk like them now.

Nimrod was confident. 'I'll show you.' He snapped his fingers and an attendant handed him a tablet. He sketched the following with a knife:

'You see, the staircases constantly go up, never down.' Nimrod beamed at the cleverness of it.

Ori studied the drawing. 'You mean a person walking up the staircase never goes down.'

Nimrod scowled. 'That's what I said.'

It wasn't, but Ori ignored this. 'But that's not possible in this frame of reference. It breaks the laws of physics.'

'I know! Isn't it brilliant?' The ever-mercurial Nimrod forgot his pique in the sheer pleasure of contemplating his own cleverness. He flopped back in his chair, steepling his hands, and proceeded to lecture.

'You see, there are two kinds of people. The sheep, who follow the rules, like the workers out there, these guys…' he indicated his attendants, 'and…well, you.'

You don't know the first thing about me, thought Ori, but merely nodded for Nimrod to go on.

'And then there are the geniuses like me: the rule-breakers. The chaos-creators. The disruptors.'

The stealers of others' ideas, thought Ori. You don't have the first idea how that staircase works, do you? You're just mimicking some design you stole from someone. Ori wondered where the person he stole it from was. Or if he or she was still around.

'I know we're breaking the laws of physics!' Nimrod crowed. 'That's the beauty of it! By putting these staircases in we're forcing the universe to move into the fourth dimension! Once all the people start moving in – and climbing those staircases – it will generate one haramen of a wormhole! We'll sail right through to the garden of the gods! Won't they be surprised?'

Ori took notes, all the while thinking, Can he do that? Would that work? That could get messy. Still from Prajapati, in Prajapati's own words, 'crickets.'

'So you see, ' concluded Nimrod, 'With my visionary leadership I have accomplished what countless generations of priests have failed to bring about: the chance to confront the gods. Challenge them about their mismanagement and malfeasance. And make Earth Great Again!'

'And you famous,' Ori said aloud without thinking. Nimrod wasn't at all displeased.

'Of course!' he said expansively. 'After all, I am the innovator who brought this about. I imagine people will be talking about me for centuries to come.'

Millennia, said Prajapati, but not until Ori had left the building. Apparently, Prajapati didn't like any of Nimrod's structures. But not in a good way.

Ori flew off to an oasis in the west – to rest up for the next day. That, he informed Prajapati, was when Nimrod had promised the 'priest's scribe' a tour of the Tower.

We'll have to act then, decided Prajapati. Ori ate dates from the trees, sipped water from the spring, and gazed at the stars, perplexed. Ori still didn't know what exactly they were going to do, but there was a buzzing in Ori's head.

Dmitri Gheorgheni