Up, up, up I went. I hated heights. Nothing was very
high in the city, except for this bizarre construct
housing God at the very top. The lift taking me up
was exposed on one side to allow a view of the Earth. It didn’t
ease my mind in any way.
Then the doors parted and I got out as fast as possible.
Emerging onto a sturdy floor didn’t assuage my fears: the top
floor beneath the pyramidal cone of the spire was completely
glass-walled. I could see everything. Everything. It was like
floating above the world.
Clear, outside walls enclosed a walkway around glass
inner walls to an office or meeting room decorated with little
more than a large table and chairs. Corners of the floor outside
the room had round openings allowing spiral staircases to go
downward. These were places where attendants and assistants
would emerge to help God carry out his rule of the Earth.
It also allowed entrance and exit of four, large stewards
without the use of mechanical devices. Those four men stood
backs to the central room at each wall within the corridor
around; arms crossed, expressions stern. Creepy. Until that
day, I never knew why God would need such assistance.
No one stopped me or even recognized my trespass into
the central chamber. I was expected, no doubt, but it was as if I
didn’t exist in the world: a ghost gliding nervously along.
Inside that room was one, obvious thing: the old
man from last night. He made my skin crawl. As I entered,
I became tense and cagey; my skin seemed to be contracting
behind my shoulders and in my neck, causing me to hunch and
ready for trouble like an awkward creature. Those elderly eyes
merely watched as I rounded the room’s edge while facing him.
This was the most important moment concerning my future. A
smell of strange emotion began to rise like essence off of my
body. It was a feeling I never felt before. This was true fear.
He was challenging me with his presence.
“Pill,” he commanded me. Perhaps he stated. I didn’t
know.
Within a frigid silence was a pointed claw motioning
me to a bountiful bowl of Still-Pills in the center of the table.
Those capsules were the only vibrant color in the room. Their
yellow and purple ends seemed seductive. He was a fool,
though, and I would enlighten him to his stupidity.
“Pill,” he reiterated.
My hand slowly slithered towards the glass bowl. I
made it seem as if I was reaching for one, then fluidly rotated
my hand before contact and slowly scooped up the heavy object
with that outstretched appendage. Raising the bowl to my
mouth, I put lips to the rim and tilted the vessel while working
my mandibles until I was eating hundreds of pills. A painfully
forced sound came from me as I stared at the ancient man out
of the corner of one eye.
That force feeding seemed eternal. I wished to eat
all day to avoid what would come after, but I hadn’t enough
stomach space or pills. Half of the bowl consumed, I lowered
it gently and continued chewing while we stared at each other.
His eyes widened. He knew I knew. We both knew
something we shouldn’t have known. We both did something
we both shouldn’t have done.
“Murderer,” he whispered with a venomous hiss.
“Accident,” I rebutted.
“You killed her,” he kept voice low.
Presumably he didn’t want the minders to hear. I
understood.
“I aided you in your intended task,” I smugly
countered.
With a tad of arrogance, I sat in his presence. I was at
the opposite end of the table and faced him with calm hubris.
“Broke bond!” he declared.
“And you did nothing about it. Tell me your reason.”
There was no answer.
“I know what you were doing,” I told him.
“You know nothing,” came a hasty reply.
“I could talk.”
“I could stop you.”
My eyes wandered to the minders facing away from
us. I had no doubt he could make good on the threat. Inside
me came a surge of survival instincts. All cards were now mine
to use, even those I had no possibility to possess, but he didn’t
know what I had close to my vest.
I chose silence. For now.
“Red eyes,” he noted.
I stayed silent. There was a smugness inside of me.
He knew I knew something. Something about me was valuable
enough to probe instead of eliminating. He didn’t alert the
stewards last night and requested this meeting today. It gave
me bravado. Something about me was of temporary value to
the old man.
“Never was I notified of any births with unusual iris
pigmentation,” he continued.
Reluctance to come to the core issue meant he was
stalling. My silence remained.
His city was a fault through and through: my existence
proved it to me for decades. Those idiots in the birthing
chambers were probably too narrow-minded to record
something so slight as eye color.
“The pills have no effect,” he openly deduced.
More silence.
“You know they have no effect,” he continued.
Silence.
“Tell me what made you so!” the old man demanded,
“I authorized no one like you. You are an anomaly and an
abhorrence. Explain why I should allow you to live.”
“I knew it would be something like this,” I began.
His ultimate threat was crushing my inner organs.
Something was strangling me under the muscles. Outwardly
my demeanor was kept very different. This lie of the flesh was
exciting, but it hid the worst sensation I had ever felt inside.
“A lie,” I concluded.
He remained silent. Beads of sweat from my arms and
back were felt emerging. My face tried to remain calm during
his quietus.
“Those pills are a lie,” I brashly began to explain,
“Drugs to still the inner disquiet: a lie. They are tricks for
weak minds wishing to remain blind to the greater lie you
support and have built.”
Silence.
“This world is a lie,” my speech continued, “because
you are a liar. Those pills are a lie. Your commandment is a
lie.”
“Repeat the commandment,” he demanded ferociously.
“Do no wrong,” I automatically repeated back to him,
almost overlapping his words.
My programming had been very thorough in youth,
much like everyone else’s. Though I knew something contrary
to this Earth, I couldn’t escape what was hammered into me
through endless lessons and social reinforcement.
“You did wrong,” he explained to me.
“I did what you were doing,” I told him flatly, “but I
did it quicker and better.”
“You killed!” he hissed at me.
Again, he kept tone low to avoid the stewards hearing
us.
“I did as you were doing.”
“You have been murdering long before last night,” he
stabbed at me.
It was a good ruse. I fell for it. My inner control
snapped and I sat stiffer with widened eyes and pursed lips.
“I know what you have done!” the elderly man
declared.
That was a lie. I relaxed in my silence. He could see I
knew his game.
“I’ve been tracking your murders!” he added.
“Do tell,” I purred.
“We know what you have done!”
“I have no doubt.”
He knew I knew he was lying to me. It compounded
his problems.
“You challenge me!”
“You challenge yourself,” disdain dripped from me.
His words were now moronic and desperate. “Mr. God sees
all. Mr. God created all. Mr. God knows all. Tell me what you
know.”
“Mister God: you blaspheme!”
He was becoming offended on top of being ridiculously
out-classed in a game of lies. I had no idea who I was until that
moment. It was clear that I had no true power in the world, but
I had power over the potentate of all creation.
“Mister.”
“Explain before I terminate this conversation and you
with it,” he hissed.
“Mister: you aren’t God. You aren’t a god. I fell for it,
too, until last night. Now I know for certain. Look at yourself,
listen to your words; you are cornered within your own
impotence. I now know more about you than you probably
know about yourself. All those lies tell endless facts without
you ever directly stating them.”
He remained silent and digested what I had told him.
His veins bulged. The old man’s face strained and burned with
helplessness. Lack of challenge had made him and his creation
a soft pudding. Every day of my life this existence inwardly
challenged me, I would challenge myself, and I have become
strong and clever within a world sleeping through a pointless
dream.
“Mister,” I said again.
“You rescind that insult!” he thundered.
“Tell me my sins,” I honestly demanded, “prove my
lowly self wrong, and I will conform to your every word. I will
stand abashed before my God.”
The fraud cooled down. He was going to attempt to
catch me.
“Hooke,” the creator exclaimed.
He knew my name. It meant little to me.
“Hooke 5-302,” proudly continued the elder, “living on
Avenue 265. I know everything about you.”
“Tell me all. Tell me more. Tell me my
transgressions.”
“Access way Avenue 46 crossing through to 121st
Street.”
He knew. I am sure he saw it in my eyes: I knew he
knew and now he knew I knew he knew. My hands didn’t
move, but I wanted to wipe sweat from my brow.
“Basement level at corner of Avenue 21 and 89th
Street,” he continued, empowered by my obvious fear,
“Rooftop of Building 912 on Avenue 103. Body laying in
street, thrown from a window on 41st Avenue. Choked on pills
in an apartment last week on 72nd Street. Head smashed from
a presumed trip in bathroom on 2nd Avenue.”
“NO,” I declared.
“Explain no,” he commanded.
“No: 2nd Avenue,” I obeyed in triumph, “I never did
that. I never touched anyone on or near 2nd Avenue. If one
died there, it wasn’t me. Probably was an accident.”
“You lie!”
“No.”
He could see outrage in my eyes. The old man pressed
a bluff.
“You lie! I know!”
“You know nothing!” my words were true, but insults
to him, calling him out on his lie, “I know what I did. I have no
shame. I did what I had to do.
What I had to do.
My actions were not a trifle: what demands it is
something beyond me. It is above us.”
“You are sick!”
“I do what I must!”
“Evil!”
“I can only be what I am. However, you are not allknowing.”
My open declaration stilled the ancient architect of the
Earth. He took moments to stare at me and exhale his angers
and distress before attempting a different approach.
“I thought they were all accidents until last night,” he
continued with a quiet resolution, “They seemed accidental,
but I was curious why deaths were multiplying so ferociously
in the past years. My city can’t stop all accidents, but the
mortality rate of my subjects, my children, is close to nil.
Then you appeared. At first I felt my task was
compromised. I believed, at first, that there would be
reckless complications. Then you completed my intended
maintenance.”
“Maintenance,” I said. Such a word. It was not a word
I would expect someone, anyone, to use to softly polish such
supreme crime.
“You are an abhorrence: an anomaly, a mistake, an
aberration in my flawless mechanism I structured with my
hands alone.”
“Then it is not flawless.”
“I--,” he choked off.
“You are flawed,” my accusation hit hard, “This world
is like you: it is a lie and a feeble contrivance. It is a mask for
sloth and ignorance.”
“Quiet!” his straining voice hitting a high.
None of the stewards flinched. I figured they
would have come in by now, or at least turned to witness
the confrontation. Those stalwarts must have had very
precise commands that would dictate their required services.
Obviously I was still safe and this conflict, this fiery challenge,
was not so heavy a depravity as we were all told it was.
In the real world below us, such a display would have
had the combatants hauled away for revision and repackaging.
Not here. Not here. I contemplated the reason. Within these
walls was a corruption lingering above and over the entire
world. Rules meant very little in this glass chamber. There
were two sets of rules on Earth: one for everyone and one for
him. Sickening.
“I have lived in your enervated cage for decades,” I
explained, “My life has been a flaw. Every day has been a
testament to your failure.”
“Explain.”
“My happiness: it never appeared. Those pills: they are
useless. My life is empty. I hate. There is no bonding.”
“You haven’t been pair-bonded?” he was shocked.
“Never. I am a singularity. I am alone.”
“You are so old.”
“You call me old.”
“Old for...,” his face froze a while before he spoke
again. “My plan, my intricate and beautiful realm within
which you were born, leaves no room for such a possibility.
Impossible.”
“I sit here, a corporeal impossibility.”
“No...”
“No: define no.”
“NO: it is impossible. I won’t accept it.”
“You are a fool.”
“I am God!”
“You are Mr. God: I already discovered your
limitations, lies, sins, and mortal frailties. You delivered them
all up to me as we talked. You aren’t omnipotent. You don’t
even know what I have done or why I have done any of it.”
“But my plan is perfect!”
“Look at me.”
“If you haven’t pair-bonded... that is the key.”
“It is the greatest imperfection.”
“No! It is the ultimate perfection.”
“....explain.”
“I crafted all of it. I made it myself. I deduced and
distilled the most perfect and complex function--the function of
the human mind and the human society. I can use numbers and
magical knowledge you will never comprehend, and I use it to
see the future and predict everything. This world is flawless in
how it works: I made it.
You exist at this time to do what you are doing because
it is necessary. You are part of the plan.”
“Part of the plan you didn’t foresee.”
“I never would have thought!”
“You can’t be wise or perfect or God if you can’t see
things that you supposedly made to happen. This means you
are a blind and stumbling God.”
“But, my creation is perfect. It is perfect--it must be
perfect!”
“Thus I am perfect.”
“Yes.”
“This torment I live in is perfect.”
“Yes!”
“This is not perfect.”
“You do not exist for yourself. Like all of us, you exist
for the community, for the world, for all of us.”
“And I must kill.”
“Yes.”
“Explain,” I requested.
This was a tedious and frustrating path locking me
inexorably into a life of perpetual anguish. He was saying my
entire existence was sculpted to be something miserable and
twisted inside of paradise.
“Everything within my realm is held in perfect control.
All aspects of life and necessity are provided. Everything is
meant to cater and maintain and sustain our lives here. We lack
nothing. Nothing! I made it so.
Our bodies have been made to live forever. We might
die one day, but as of yet there is no upper limit we have found.
I am older than all of you, and I am nowhere near death. We
all live in a perfect world without end.
Explain why you must kill.”
CONTINUED....
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