Jason E. Perkins
Your death will make me king!
Registered: Mon Jan 20 2003
Posts: 22578
|
Timothy K. Webber graduated from Columbia University at the age of seven. By fourteen, he was a doctor of five separate sciences and two branches of applied mathematics. Timothy K. Webber was a true genius. Unfortunately, he was also a jerk.
One afternoon, while eating a box of French fries, Dr. Webber had a thought, and on a stray napkin, disproved the Peccei-Quinn theory of CP violation. Once he was done, he left the restaurant, caught a taxi, and boarded a plane to Cambridge, Massachusetts, just so he could pull the napkin out of his corduroy jacket and press it firmly against the face of MIT’s head of nuclear research. Dr. Webber was a pompous bore. Even Stephen Hawking didn’t like him, and Stephen Hawking liked just about everyone.
Fact: Dr. Timothy K. Webber had never married.
More facts: Dr. Webber was a messy scientist. His home laboratory was littered with unfinished notes, leftover experiments, and abandoned machine parts. No good wife would have let him get away with being so untidy. No attentive wife would have left that reduction coil on the laboratory floor. Thus, if Dr. Timothy K. Webber had married, he may never have tripped, thrown his unfinished solution to Hilbert’s sixteenth problem into the air, and activated his experimental electron-term amplifier with his elbow. And if that hadn’t happened, Dr. Webber never would have slipped out of time.
Now, this is not a conventional time travel story. Dr. Webber did not find himself swashbuckling with pirates or challenging a broad-chinned cowboy to a fast draw. He didn’t cause any paradoxes by killing his own father or teaching a younger version of himself the importance of cleanliness. Though he did meet someone, it was not his own great, great grandchild (actually, he never had any) or an Eloi.
If it makes you feel any better, though, there was a brilliant flash of multi-colored light as Dr. Webber left the quantum moment and entered the Great White Nowhere.
The daunting thing about the Great White Nowhere was its total lack of absolutes. It had no color (thus the name), no gravity, no entropy, or heat. There was no floor. There was no up or down. There was no air either, but Dr. Webber never had to worry about that since he was able to breathe quite normally. How this occurred would take too long to explain, though. It’s best not to think about it.
However, as promised, Dr. Webber did meet someone shortly after arriving in the Nowhere, and that someone was a point.
If you’re one-fifth as smart as our abhorrent hero, you know that a point has no definite size or shape. This one didn’t either, but it did move and approach, and it addressed Dr. Timothy K. Webber as Tim.
“Hi, Tim,” the point, now the size of an average kumquat, said in a soothing voice.
Tim didn’t say anything at first, a fact quite notable. Many people would have said something—anything. A good scream would have been reasonable. However, Tim merely floated and considered.
Eventually, he decided this was a grand opportunity. He would be the first to document actual contact with an alien life form. Soon, those bastards at NASA would be cursing his name.
Meanwhile, the point continued floating, steadily and patiently.
Step one: identification. “Do you have a name?” Tim asked.
“I have many names,” said the point, “but you would call me God.”
Tim found that answer surprisingly alarming. Yes, it was even more alarming than having a conversation with a talking point.
“You can’t be God,” Tim said.
“Why not?”
Tim told the point that there was no God.
“I’d beg to differ,” said the point.
This wasn’t going well, Tim thought. Perhaps a different question. “Where am I?”
“Nowhere,” said the point.
This wasn’t going well at all. Tim took a deep breath of nonexistent air. “You don’t really believe you’re God, do you?”
“I know who I am,” the point replied. “Do you know who you are?”
Tim laughed at that. "The very notion of God doesn't even make sense."
"Why not?" the point asked.
"Because the very notion of an omnipotent being is a contradiction."
"Really?"
"Alright, fine." Tim straightened himself as best as he could. "Can you, as God, make a boulder even you can't push?" It was a base-level paradox, but it would do.
“Yes," the point answered. "I would make the boulder too heavy to push. That is, of course, until I decided I wanted to push it."
"And then?"
"Then I could."
"But don't you see?" Tim pumped his fists, triumphant. "For that one moment, when you couldn't push that boulder, you weren't omnipotent."
"True power is the ability to set the rules," the point replied. "I would only be unable to push the boulder because I willed it so.”
"And you set up all these rules?"
"Yes."
"And you made the rules for us humans as well?" Tim asked. "You watch over us to make sure we follow them?"
"Yes."
"Then why is there so much evil in the world?"
"I gave mankind rules, but I also gave you free will. Often, your capacity to choose leads you to terrible ways. However, it is because of injustice that you know justice. It is through choosing the righteous path, while faced with the alternative, that you realize your great potential."
"While so many people get hurt." Tim crossed his arms defiantly.
"Nothing can hurt you, Tim, not in the light of what is to come. Plus, the good Man can do far outweighs the evils he shall ever see."
"This is silly," Tim said. He no longer wished to study this alien...thing. It was toying with him now and obviously quite self-important. "You're just a dot! You're a little point floating in the middle of wherever this is!"
"And so are you," the point countered. "You are but atoms, Tim, tiny points floating. The planet you live on is nothing but a point floating in the darkness, and the moons and stars are no different. And, as I see it, the universe in which you live is but a single point slowly expanding into the even greater scheme—everything in my image."
"We’ve now gone from silly to ridiculous," Tim said. Again he searched the white around him. "How did I get here in the first place?"
"Your electron’s terms were amplified, forcing them from their intrinsic rotational motions. This catapulted you out of time."
Of course, you already knew most of that, but Tim was stunned. It actually made a sordid sort of sense. He would attempt to duplicate such an event as soon as he returned. "But how—"
"I told you already, Tim. I am God, The Alpha and The Omega, The Beginning and The End. I am Time, and to leave Time is to leave me. To leave me leaves nothing."
Tim had had enough. "You can’t be everything. You’d have to be—"
"Bigger?" the point asked, growing rapidly. And suddenly Tim was inside the point, and everything he could see was inside the point. Time itself was born and it was beautiful. All around him were flames and swirls of every color, igniting, and forming, and becoming everything new. Soft reds, yellows, and blues coalesced into stars. Oranges and violets became planets paving their oval paths. Hydrogen begat helium, and soon all the gasses, and metals, and everything danced to life. The Milky Way spiraled then, and a simple organism dared to leave the murky depths to explore the world above. Soon it would learn to walk. It would learn to call this new thing it had found “land.” It would learn to kill its brother for more. And when that wasn’t enough, it would learn to sail the skies above. Then, one day, long after it had forgotten the murky depths, it would look down and watch as the planet which birthed and held it for so long became a tiny blue dot in the sea of black eternity.
Then, just like that, the point was merely a point again, no larger than the average kumquat, floating quite steadily and with unwavering patience.
"What are you?" Tim asked again, sweating though there was no heat or gravity.
"I’m God," the point said again.
"No," Tim panted, arms crossed again.
"Here," the point said, and Tim’s favorite notepad appeared between them. Something unseen flipped the pages to Tim’s latest scribbles. New graphite lines and swirls appeared, crossing out mistakes and adding final touches.
Tim grabbed the notepad and read the new print. Meanwhile, the point continued floating quite steadily and with unwavering patience.
It was perfect! Tim had been working on it for weeks. This point had solved Hilbert's sixteenth problem in mere moments. "You really are God!" he relented.
"Yes, Tim, and you are my child. And I love you so much that I made you just like me," the point told him, “with the power to shape your world and the knowledge to choose that which is right.”
Then, with a flash of white light, Tim was back in his laboratory.
For the first time that he could remember, he had no idea what to do. It wasn’t every day, after all, that a man got to meet his creator. Time was an occupation of scientists, but God was a matter for saints.
Then he remembered. He could still make it, but he was running out of time. Stopping only to grab his favorite corduroy jacket, Dr. Timothy K. Webber ran out his front door (forgetting to lock it, of course) and hailed the first cab he could find. He was sure he could catch the late flight to D.C. if he hurried, and if he were lucky, he would be rubbing his notepad in the noses of those NASA scientists by breakfast.
|
