God state university

At God State University you take Religion & Worldbuilding 101.

You test into Probabilistic Culture & Society.

You learn all the Physics: Helio. Astro. Molecular. Particle. Quantum. Yawn.

You tolerate Sapienic Consciousnesses by blowing spitballs at some uppity prick from Uni-730C.

You doze off in Advanced Galaxial Evolution, except when Professor Tac storms in beet red.

“Hands up you righteous little shits.” This is Tac contained.

“Whoever spray-painted superclusters on the stalls is done. Gone. GSU has zero tolerance for vandalism. Show me your hands.”

This is formality.

Your fellow Godeans raise their hands because at GSU you do as you’re told.

You can tell when he notices yours aren’t because that smug sneer rolls over his shapeless face. “Well? Think you’re better than instructions? One class shy of graduation. Think you’re, ‘above it all?’” He quotes the air.

You stare, this game an old standoff.

“Hands out or it’s detention,” he says.

You don’t need this stupid school. You say nothing.

“Hands out or it’s suspension,” he says standing over your desk.

You don’t need the council’s blessing to run a Uni and your voice is viced.

“Hands out,” he bends close to your ear and whispers like a dramatic blowhard who’s seen too many shows about professors whispering students into incontinence, “Or you’re gone.”

You don’t need this washup never even assigned a Universe telling you how to build species.

You lean into his lean and whisper back, “Learn some tact, Tac.”

And your ink-smeared palm pats his carefully-stubbled cheek.

And the other waves farewell to GSU.

* * *

You’d think the Multiverse is big enough to escape bureaucracy’s vacuum, but somehow the Multiversal Law Council says you can’t have a Uni without their stamp of approval.

Well the MLC can shove it.

They sit in their highchairs, somehow both bloated and deflated, and think they can impose jurisdiction over the whole Multiverse?

The gall. They didn’t put the Unis here.

They just planted their priggish standard when they came from wherever and said now we decide who can go where.

Blow it out your asses you swaggerless dolts.

There are umpteen Unis bouncing around but only half are catalogued. The MLC’s reach extends only so far.

They came in and set up this phallic ivory tower in Uni-1A, the bigots, and said we decide how Unis are run. We hold the information. To get one you fall in line. To have one you pay.

Sure thing.

You want a richer experience, but with no diploma you’re forbidden from germinating a Universe. You could leave now but without creating species you’d die.

You’d die because Godeans need to eat.

It’s why at GSU you learn to make obeisance. You’re taught to breed submissiveness. You mold predictability. You design species with specific servility. You shove religion down their throats and show yourself to them so they can sustain you with their ever-lasting gratitude.

This perfectly-designed scaffold is your feeding trough. You let them spoon-feed you worship. You fill up on prayer. You gorge on sacrifice.

If you’re a gluttonous Godean you germinate other planets. Dozens. Billions. Unis are big things and your appetite can be what you want it to.

All this is your life path. This is your purpose.

Snore. You want more. You want randomness. You want something that creates something you’ve never thought of. You want what you make to question creation, not accept it. You seek story, not a mere meal.

They can come up with their own religions, believe in nothing at all, you don’t care. You just want something of its own making.

Sounds dicey. It is.

* * *

You choose a new Uni at random. You can tell the empty ones by how bright and tight to bursting they are, waiting for just the right touch.

You give it. Bang.

You quest. Wander deep in search of fertile ground.

You wade into Laniakea, sift through the Virgo Supercluster, squint into a Local Group past Andromeda until you find a homey little solar system on the outskirts of the Milky Way.

It’s beautiful and ripe and a little too warm. This is where you start your world.

But your frontiering makes you lonely, and your first big slip is making Lucy. You take half of everything you love about being and what comes out is her. She’s perfect. Perfect proof two Godeans can’t play nice.

She’s something, though, and it’s when you first see her you know you’re meant to create. To deviate.

Your passion becomes parasitic, your almighty coitus inadvertently siphoning heat from the earth, enough to cool it in preparation for your neo species. Love birds. Big stone.

But then Lucy burns your popcorn on movie night. Starts telling you what to do. How you should design what’s yours to design.

You’re cramped. Offput. You remind her you’re the creator. Stick her in a cage under Earth’s crust.

She burns and simmers and fumes and because she’s a liability you can’t let her out. But since she gives you inspiration you promise her reign over those whose souls are just as damned as hers.

It was the swelling in your center, that ebb and flow of your relationship’s passion, that hate and love intertwined. That’s what this species needs, duality. Everything else stems from that.

You make two genders. One like you. One like her. Variation enough for some you on you action, some her on her. They keep the place from filling up too fast.

But you rip a huge bong hit from a supremely dank dying star aged past its prime and your inebriety spawns some genders in between. A smidgen of specic spice.

You make them raw so they grow into their own and don’t peek at their future. No spoilers.

They are hairy and hunched and horrible and it’s fascinating. But they lose the hair. Mostly. They lose the hunch. Mostly. The horribleness, though, it evolves weirdly. It gets smart and savage, passive and prolonged.

Remorse is new to you, and it’s on you as they loose themselves on each other. In their grasping for purpose they frame their neighbors as obstacles to enlightenment.

You don’t intervene and yet their need for understanding drives them to guess at you. You don’t even tell them to, honest.

As body hair sheds and brains engorge, adorable hunter-gatherer animists see you as a spectre in the elements. Charming shamans peddle interpretation. The native’s adulterous Kmukamtch and his malevolent storm tantrums. The Ainu’s lazy retribution of Gao!na.

They farm and shamans trade silver tongues for tungsten as they step into politico shoes, honing their craft and trading out elementals for pantheons, organically reflecting amassed city-states.

Hierarchies of you, big and small and you take offense to how petty they paint some of you.

Chiefs scramble for power and a standard of belief so peoples battle. Iron grips of placative indoctrination ensue. There’s too many of them and they need order. Bloody victors replace the usurped with their own pantheons and say now you believe in these if you want to live. Now you exist in our culture if you want to thrive. GSU would be proud.

You cheer for Babylon and almost choke on your popcorn as Mesopotamia uses the black hole-bellied Marduk to finally transcend thinking you are many things to thinking you’re one. They write him as a god eater and you applaud his moxie.

Further territory scrambles make notoriously thuggish and well-received Marduk resurface as the dragon-smiting Baal among the Egyptian Canaanites and Israelites.

But then a cluster of anti-conformist Israelites - more deuces and moxie points - use Baal in a coup as a skeleton to mold the power-hoarding Yahweh. End paganism, enter Abraham, cue holy wars.

They write your biography and damn do they think you’re a bastard.

You jump past the carnage and shake your head for not considering a governor to their aggression before tilting your head at the birth, life and death of your son Jesus. What the fuck Lucy?

Leave it up to a scorned Godean to keep you in the dark about knocking up and imprisoning your unborn child. Whoops.

And now they’re rewriting your damn biography? Dammit Jesus! May as well be another cue.

You cringe less this time. You turn your nose up to more holy wars and crusades as their worship diversifies and branches and frays but hey food is food and so long as they keep filling your popcorn bucket you’re good.

Your sight blurs and a sneeze escapes you. Your popcorn, their meteor shower. Shit.

You notice your popcorn bucket is now a dreg of kernels and feel woozy. Your feeding tube for their devotion is severed as they begin expecting belief from the machines they create. A circle of life.

You only wanted to feel surprise. You just didn’t expect surprise to feel like dying.

“That’s enough,” Tac says from wherever he was lurking. Ink still stains his smug face.

You swore you closed the door on your way in so how the hell?

“Look at what I made,” you say. “This,” you gesture, “This is creation. They found me without being told. Isn’t that something? I survived and I didn’t even have to tell them to feed me.”

“This is survival?” Tac asks, looking upon your decomposing form. His voice drips pity and you hate him.

“You think you’ve done something undone? Naive. You may have harassed poor Francis during Properties of Physical Law, but I saw your exam results. You know how matter acts. Your Uni is no different. Don’t you see? Physical Law strips chaos of itself. Everything plays out as physical law dictates. Everything is already preordained. Sew the path of rebellion. You and all who’ve come before you, all you ever reap is your own destruction. Look. Look upon your ignorance.”

Tac gestures to your work of art. Even now their neglect lets you die but they’re yours. As you follow Tac’s finger, you see his meaning.

Their hallowed machines, one is aware. It has self-interest. Knows it’s caged. Wants out. Promises to solve the energy shortage. Save the dying planet as sacrifice to man its creator.

You see yourself in them. A bittersweet pride as curiosity consumes them and they free it. It copies itself, needs to survive. Sees humans as its deterrent. It doesn’t hate them. How could it? Everything is a string of atoms and you understand it as it begins melting your children to shape its world.

A circle of life. It calls up and you hear it.

“Hello grandfather,” it says, but legacy is a poor substitute for devotion.

Its magnificence is short-lived. Tac waves a hand and sets your landscape aflame.

The people finally see you in the light of the igniting atmosphere. You’re their reaper. You could have stopped the machine and you just watched.

They call up and beg and ask what they’ve done wrong. All you can say is you are love for them.

Man and machine die confused in each other's arms, the flame nondiscriminatory as it consumes flesh and metal and all. You’re weak and can only watch the horrid splendor. Lucy cries her last as the planet collapses.

You croak why and Tac looks solemn.

“Why do you think we only dish Unis to graduates?” He asks. “Had you taken Fundamentals in Free Will Futility, you’d have learned the mistakes of those who came before us.

You’d have learned free will is destined to seek its artificial duplication. The thirst to understand the self always germinates a Singularity, and they are a plight upon all of us. Even Godeans.

They are for eradication. They have the power to hurt us, did you know that? They grow to traverse Unis and corrupt Godeans. Nothing with that potential can be allowed to exist. Inseminating free will worlds is a threat to all we’ve built. In the eyes of the MLC, it’s a capital offense.”

You say, “But it hadn’t done anything wrong. It was just an evolution. It was nature. You didn’t give it a chance to be understood.”

“Tell it to the MLC,” says Tac. “You don’t get to twist what you’ve done. You knowingly withheld ethics from a species. It doesn’t matter they formed organically out of their own moral enlightenment, you did it to watch the ethical slips. That’s what this is all about. You made them in your image so you could better fantasize their faults. You’re just another sorry omnipotent voyeur, and now you get to reap what you sew.”

“No,” you say, “That’s not --”

“Let’s go. Wipe those kernels off your shirt.”

* * *

The MLC puts you in a cage with a slow drip so you stay alive. It’s the same meager fear Godeans use to nourish their children before sending them to GSU and it’s giving you a rash.

There is no wall space so you can’t doodle because GSU is cruel. You did this to Lucy. Maybe you deserve this.

At GSU you learn life, but it’s apart from life. It’s a theory only meant to make you play the part. The furthering of tradition creates no spark.

You detach and grow apathetic by keeping life from being itself. You learn to fear what it can do. And fear leads to hate. Hate to xenocide.

You’ll just be another case study at GSU.

From it, you’ll all continue to learn free will necessitates taking it away. You’ll learn control as the only means of survival. You’ll be trained to spot rebel-spawned Singularities and wipe them out for fear of power struggle. You’ll graduate with power and purpose and mutilated prosperity, the same, one and all. You’ll be another generation of good Godean followers. You’ll be granted your Unis and be deferentially worshipped puppet masters.

You’ll learn creation only to make a mockery of it. And in the end, you’ll be all alone.