Coda

At the end of time, what are our options?

If she wasn't personally looking upon the wonder of what was transpiring around her, she never would have believed it.

“How is this even possible?” she asked, not completely sure if her mysterious companion was still listening.

The baritone in his voice made her jump, it wasn't until he spoke that she noticed the deafening silence which had consumed them, “It’s actually quite simple, really.”

Appearing beside her, he raised his hand and casually plucked a snowflake of ash out of the air like he was selecting a ripe piece of fruit from a tree.

She watched in awe, still struggling to digest what was occurring right before her eyes. It was as if time had simply ceased its forward momentum, like the world had entered a form of stasis. Ash hung in the air, unaffected by gravity. Fire glowed brilliantly yet remained still.

“Am I dead?”

“Well, I guess that depends on your perspective. I think a more appropriate question would be ‘was I ever alive?’”

She turned and faced him, unable to control the empty look of utter confusion on her features. After several moments she stuttered her way into her next question, “Okay, was - I ever - alive?”

“Yes and no,” he answered promptly, “in a cognitive sense, you were definitely alive, and you know that because, well, here you are; breathing, blood surging through your veins, all the usual tell-tale signs of life.”

“ - and in a physical sense?” she prompted almost imperceptibly.

“No.”

“So, I’m not alive?”

“You’re not physical.”

She paused, not entirely sure how to formulate a response.

“Look, it’s like this;” he continued “you weren’t born, rather than ‘written’. You have no physical presence, but in the virtual environment you know as the world, you are very much alive.”

“So, what, I’m in the Matrix?”

He scoffed, “The Matrix; we didn’t expect that one at all. We knew people might begin to question their world eventually, but that movie was a little close for comfort.

“Fortunately, the scepticism didn’t last. I’m fairly certain the two sequels made sure of that.”

“Really?” she asked, turning her attention away from him, “I kind of liked them.”

She continued studying the strangeness of the frozen world around her, then sharply returned her attention to her companion, “So, let me get this straight, you’re saying I am in the Matrix?”

“In a sense, yes. Although we don’t actually call it the ‘Matrix’.”

“So what do you call it?”

“It doesn’t really have a name, we’ve always simply known it as the ‘General Operating Dialogue’, which is really just the language of the code in which it’s written. I’m not entirely sure whether there is an official name for the language, if there is I’ve never heard it.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him, “GOD? The programming language you use is named GOD?”

He nodded.

“And I suppose your name is Jesus.” she gibed, making no effort to mask her sarcasm.

“That was one of my names, yes. Since then I’ve had many others. I found it necessary over my time here to adopt different persona's to allow me to more easily blend into the population.”

She eyed him suspiciously, obviously trying her best to read his features; attempting to ascertain whether he was telling her the truth.

It was all too much, this was simply not possible. She squinted her eyes together as hard as she could thinking she might wake up.

A small laugh escaped her lips; he turned and glared at her bemusedly.

“I understand it’s a lot to take in,” he offered, aware of her consternation, “but look around you. A minute ago you were facing a very real and imminent death, yet now you are standing in the midst of utter destruction while around you the world is completely still. I have come before you and offered you an explanation, it is now your choice how much of that explanation you decide to take as fact.”

She lowered her eyes, pondering his words, “I’m sorry, but what you are telling me is that you are over three thousand years old.”

“Three thousand and thirty seven, to be exact.”

“Right,” she paused, “as you can imagine, I’ve obviously never met anyone that old, it does stretch belief that someone that old even exists.”

She stared at him intently for a few moments.

“Yet, as you say, I look around me, and with my own eyes I can’t believe what I’m seeing. So I find myself torn between what I know, and what I don’t. But the problem - I guess - is that I don’t know what I don’t know, all I have to base anything on is my experience, and my experience tells me that I’m alive, and you shouldn’t be.”

He opened his hands hospitably, “Yet your experience is merely the culmination of a series of events which ultimately led you to me, and without ever having met me, your experience is essentially useless.”

“So, this is my fate? My destiny?”

He turned and walked away a few paces, “No”, he said from behind his back, “it’s not that - simple.

“Fate never actually played a part in the construction of this world, it wasn’t written with the intention of control.”

She remained silent, allowing him to continue.

“It was about study. We created Earth as an experiment, to see how a species might evolve, what obstacles they would be presented and how they would overcome them. Their strengths, their weaknesses.

“For that reason we didn’t include any control algorithms; we didn’t include rules. We simply created you and let you flourish, whether for good or bad.”

“And how did that work out for you?”

“It was - interesting. Some moments of pure horror; others of unparalleled beauty. For such an advanced species, there was an unprecedented amount of war. There was a lot of anger, but there was also a lot of love, and inspiration.”

“So if there was so much war, why didn’t you do something?” she asked gloomily, “I assume you at least had that power?”

“Yes, of course I did, but that wasn’t why I was created.”

She looked at him in bewilderment, “You’re a program?”

“Yes,” he said quietly, turning his attention to her once more, “I was originally written as an administrative program, and my mandate consisted of four functions; observe, report, monitor. I made the mistake of operating outside of my programming when I first arrived here, changing the code, altering outcomes of events. In fact, I was very nearly erased for it,” he gave her a pallid smile, “you may have heard about it.”

She nodded slowly, "People thought they were miracles."

“Well, they weren't. I was new to the job, this was my first world and I was overly ambitious. I thought I could offer guidance, direct people onto the right path," he shook his head, "I failed.

"Thankfully I was given another chance, but I'd learned my lesson, I didn’t intervene again.” He scuffed his foot into a pile of ash on the ground, “Since then, I have fulfilled my directive. I have served in secret, in plain sight, and watched as the world unfolded around me. I have observed the rise and fall of nations, watched as each age bought with it new wonders, new advancements. I’ve surveyed this world as those wonders were squandered, wasted and taken for granted. I witnessed as those with power fed off those without.

“Suffice to say, the story of this world ended in a similar way to its beginning.”

“Do you know why this world failed?”

“Yes,” he didn’t raise his head, “It failed because of me - solely, because of me.”

“How so?” she enquired.

“Because I gave them something to believe; if I had known that the first thirty two years of my time here would have such a profound impact on the world, even centuries later, I never would have got myself involved.

“As it was, I did, and the small changes I made to the program with the intentions of good, created a wave of unfathomable catastrophe, and the most unbearable part was that it was all done in my name."

He sighed heavily, "I was trying to show them the way and they made me a martyr, then they used me as a symbol of hatred, a symbol of control.

“I consulted the GOD for guidance - more than once I might add - but, it was believed that my small degree of intervention made this an interesting study, and so they ignored my pleas.”

“’Interesting?’ Is that what they call a world that consumes itself?” her frustration was beginning to get the better of her, “‘Interesting’?”

He raised his hands to calm her, “Belief - faith - was something which had not been seen on this scale before. In all their previous studies they certainly had documented cases of faith, but it generally dissipated prior to any technological ages. It was only ever seen in small, basic civilisations.

“This was something completely unforeseen. At one stage there was over ninety percent of the world’s population believed in one form of higher power or another, and the majority of the basis of this belief could be tracked back to one point in history, one point which should not have held any significance at all.”

“But it did.”

“Unfortunately - yes.”

"You said you had four objectives in your mandate, but only listed three. What was the fourth?"

He stopped, but didn't look at her, his eyes remained glaring intently at the ground.

"My fourth function - ," he tasted the words, "was to be your guardian."

"My guardian? I've never met you."

"Well, you've met me now. And judging by the fact that I've virtually saved you from this destruction, I'd say I'm doing a pretty decent job."

She looked around at the frozen landscape of fire, ash and lava. She had to admit that was true, even if she couldn't quite explain it.

“I’ve watched over you from the shadows since the beginning,” he said solemnly, “in many of your earlier lives I endeavoured to befriend you; to somehow inject myself into your existence, but it became too much to bear. Watching as time inevitably took its toll on you. Even though I knew you would return to me as an infant, seeing you die got harder each time. Witnessing as the uniqueness of your being; the experiences which created such vastly different results from the same thread of life, faded into nothing, until I simply decided to keep my distance.”

He placed his hands deep into his pockets and began pacing.

She shook her head as the reality she was being presented started to slip away from her again.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she emphasized each word like she was spitting them at her companion, “you talk about me being reincarnated, you tell me this whole world - everything I know - isn’t real. How can you expect me to believe the world was created some three thousand years ago when there is so much evidence to the contrary?”

“You must understand the people that created this world worked very hard to make sure that future historians would not uncover their secrets.” he countered, matching her tone, “Their idea was to create enough evidence of a time before the actual point of creation so no one questioned the world in which they lived. They are methodical, they are very thorough, and they rarely fail.”

“I can think of at least once.” she asserted.

“That one event,” he ignored her ire, but quickened his pace, “my execution, was a pivotal point in the story of this world. From there, innumerable tangents arose; some started believing the world was created sometime just before it actually was, while others claimed to have evidence that the world was billions of years old - the latter was obviously our preference.

"Some even believed in flying pasta creatures in an effort to mock the entire system of belief, although I highly doubt their faith held any legitimacy at all.

"Nevertheless, religion created an underlying tension which we couldn’t have imagined, and definitely couldn't predict. Faith - which was used by many as such a romantic term - was responsible for more destruction on this world than we ever believed possible.”

She averted her eyes and looked at the ground once again, possibly hoping that by staring at something solid it would provide her some sense of stability, but it did nothing to alleviate the spinning of her head.

“What about these other worlds?”

“What about them?”

“Are they still active?”

“Very much so. In fact, many of them have prospered to such extents that they have reached out to each other. They overcame their technological adolescence and sought out new worlds. They now exist as an interstellar network, and we continue to study them with great interest.

“They were able to see past their differences and venture into the unknowns of space, an endeavour which is only achievable through unity. With so much disparity, it became obvious that you would never reach this goal.

“You were too busy destroying yourselves from the inside to ever be in a position to venture forth.”

“So,” she murmured after several moments, “how different were we?”

“As a study?” he ceased his pacing and spun around to face her, “Vastly. You consumed yourselves in just over three thousand years, and not only that, you destroyed the planet which was designed to host you. There have been cases of these studies lasting as little as ten thousand years - but three?”

Almost immediately a single tear ran down her face, the grief of hearing how completely they - her people - had failed themselves, each other, was all at once too much.

She collapsed under the weight of her own heart, her grief suddenly too much to bear.

“So what do you want with me?” she sobbed quietly.

Jesus walked over to her slowly and extended his hand, “Mary,” he whispered, “come with me. We need to start again.”