Sam's decision

I'm trying to decide.

 

You’re not.

 

I am.

 

Well, when you’re done deciding perhaps you could lend me a hand.

 

Er...

 

Yes?

 

But you're God!

 

What's that got to do with the price of cheese.

 

The price of cheese?

 

Goodness, Sam, it’s a turn of phrase. Don't take everything so literally.

 

Oh.

 

Well, are you or aren't you?

 

You want me to help you?

 

It would be nice.

 

I still can't wrap my head round this. You, God, Creator of the entire universe and all therein want me to help... Like I could possibly make a difference.

Correct. Do I ask too much?

 

No, of course not. I’d love to lend a hand. What is it you need?

 

I need you to kill someone.

 

!?!?

 

To kill someone.

 

I must be hearing things.

 

Yes, a rather delicate matter, of course. Not the kind of thing one usually asks a good God-fearing man such as yourself to do.

 

Am I right in thinking You just said You wanted me to kill someone?

 

Absolutely, yes.

 

But this is impossible. God would never ask me to do that, ever, not in a million years.

 

Well, you’re right about that Sam. It's been more than a million years. Considerably more.

 

It's a turn of phrase. The actual number of years is irrelevant. God would never ask such a thing, period.

 

And yet God is God, no? Infinite, no? His plans or intentions may just occasionally exceed our capacity to understand what they might be, no?

 

Oh, God is infinite, without a doubt, and His plans or intentions are certainly unfathomable, but what's that got to do with me being asked to take another life? If I do so in cold blood then I'll stop being human, and God, whatever He is, will become inaccessible, lost forever. Perhaps if I were a saint, truly holy like Abraham who was told to sacrifice his son, then I could do it, but I’m not, and so in my case it would drag me down into hell. I would simply become a murderer. The deed would nullify me.

 

But you’d be doing my will.

 

Would I?

 

Yes. I'm the one asking for this favour.

 

Well, in that case I...

 

What?

 

It actually hurts, physically.

 

What are you on about?

 

What I need to say is like a knife to my heart.

 

That perhaps means that you’re doing something wrong.

 

On the contrary, i know now that everything’s right.

 

You do? You’re sure about that?

 

Absolutely. I’m sure. Even if this kills me, I know what is what, i know what is right and what is wrong. And that's why, whoever you are or whatever you are, even if you're actually God as I always assumed, as you claim, that it’s the end of the road for us. I would sooner rot in hell, or burn, than follow an order to kill another being.

 

But you fought in the war. You killed people. You know how to follow orders.

 

Yes, but this wasn't an order, if I remember rightly.

 

True. But what if this is not about what i want, or even duty.

 

What else could it possibly be?

 

You yourself acknowledged the presence of infinity, in other words, this could be mathematical.

 

Qué?

 

You heard.

 

Mathematical?

 

Yep.

 

Like what?

 

Like the Mandelbrot set.

 

Not that. Again. Give me a break.

 

What else!

 

I fail to see how murder could possibly be mathematical.

 

Ah, you weren’t perhaps there when I extracted the universe from...

 

From what?

 

That's just the problem. I can't say.

 

Why not?

 

Because i had to open a slit in the infinite, in perfection, and to do that i had to...

 

You're finding this difficult, aren't you.

 

Difficult? You could say. Or wonderful. Terrible. Incredible. Beautiful. Horrendous, in fact, almost any adjective slots in here nicely.

 

You seem to be saying that this act of Creation was bigger than you. That it blew you away.

 

Correct. Well done Sam. Very perceptive.

 

But for some reason you can’t say what is what... Presumably because the so-called Quantum Field has ears.

 

Oh

 

That saying it would require thinking it, and thinking it would short the circuit, would complete what cannot be completed, for to do so would burst the bubble, collapse all time, end everything with a barely noticeable mathematical shrug – value incomputable.

 

Ah

 

That sooner or later Creation runs its course, sooner or later God needs to unGod, to revert to infinite awareness – an infinite awareness that simply doesn’t, or couldn’t, care less.

 

Oh

 

Because You always had to Father Your Creation, in the hope that sooner or later it would establish itself; that sooner or later it would come of age and be able to detach from you and continue as a self-viable entity, independently.

 

Oh

 

So here we are. You can't say what but that doesn’t seem to stop me from reading the tea leaves. The million-dollar question is whether You have succeeded, whether reality, this world, this system, this universe is able to do what every baby does when it exits the birth canal – start breathing independently as a new life form.

 

...

 

And presumably You have to die, to ensure the separation is complete.

 

...

 

But You can't die in or of Yourself as You are everywhere and everything. You are bound to, or by, Your Creation.

 

...

 

So you need a sacrificial lamb, so to speak.

 

...

 

You need me, or someone like me... someone who sees the imperative and who is willing to step into the breach.

 

...

 

Because You can do that. It's within Your power to allow Yourself to experience the totality of my experience. To become completely absorbed and immersed in what I’m feeling, what I’m going through, as You did with Your son.

 

...

 

But this won't be Your son. This will be me agreeing to die as your proxy, miraculously becoming You, so that You can be irrevocably severed from Your Creation, giving it back to infinity, from whence it was merely borrowed into existence as a kind of credit, as fiat Federal Reserve notes.

 

...

 

And thus the artificial wall, the disruption in the Field, will be resolved and this world, this reality, if indeed it is birthable, if you Fathered it successfully, will rebalance, realign, shift into its rightful place.

 

...

 

And me... I will have the pleasure of assisting in either destroying the universe if it was doomed to be stillborn, or saving it by briefly, briefly standing surety, allowing it to ride on my Allness, as You yourself did, way back then.

 

Well, I think we understand one another, Father. Thank You for everything. It's been... Oh, how cute.

A little lamb has appeared alongside the interlocutors.

 

I wouldn't be happy doing this, You know, but something tells me it's time. That the Field is ready.

 

Sam lifts the beautiful white lamb onto an altar. Infinity has no difficulty supplying everything required. God, looking on silently, impassively, in a place beyond words, hands him the knife. The lamb itself seems to understand exactly what is required. Looking into its eyes Sam sees himself, and deeper, looking further he sees the Father, and deeper...

You too, you too, you. A moment poised silently, and then infinity shrugs, or sighs, or moans, I couldn't say exactly which, and Sam finds himself bleeding on the altar, the dagger in his heart, feeling the life he had known leaving him as a torrent of blood pours from the hole. Just when it seems there is nothing more, that he is slipping irreversibly into darkness, a wind picks him up and turns him inside out, and he finds himself lying in bed, as always, unscathed, eyes taking in the light of a new day, breathing, feeling, knowing that it is good to be alive, that God has mercifully gone, that God’s Creation is now complete, that nothing will be the same again, ever, that things have been resolved, implicitly.

 

 

0=1