by Greg Chase
“That higher being sometimes has to be the one that gets burned to the ground. Any law you can list has instances where that law has to be broken. Nothing is ever put in stone when it comes to love and growth. Leaving those religious ideas behind is hard, and it seldom works for every member of a society. There’s always that separation between the more advanced and those still struggling along.”
Sam smiled as he started to see Doc’s vision for the village more clearly. “Love. That was the answer the village was trying to promote, wasn’t it? If everyone was really open to each other, people would be free to find their own way at their own pace. And as each individual grew, the society as a whole might find a better future.”
A tear formed in the corner of Jess’s eye. The village was back aboard Leviathan, orbiting Earth. But it seemed a lifetime ago that he and Jess had floated free with the people they loved. “The ideas were simple enough,” Jess said. “Take away the artificial restrictions like religion. See laws for what they were meant to be—to help ease human interactions but always to be applied in the context of the infraction. Take responsibility for who we want to be instead of blindly following some ideal from an unknown source. Break down the social mores that isolate people from each other, like sexual repression. The goal was to create a more loving society where each person was valued and their growth encouraged.”
Sam’s head began to hurt as he tried to match up Jess’s history lesson with what the Tobes needed from him as their god. “Did you ever think you were meant to guide me as I try to lead my unintended creation?”
Jess smiled sweetly. “All you have to do is listen, Sam.”
Two red glows preceded Rhea and Achim as they materialized in the corner of Rover’s cabin.
Sam hoped he didn’t look too much like a god welcoming back his missionaries in his white outfit. “How’d it go?”
Rhea smiled. “All of the twenty-seven Tobes from Praxidike have found living situations. Alphonse has been paid, so the pirate is happy enough with the transaction even if he didn’t agree to it.”
“You look and sound better,” Jess said.
Rhea blushed slightly. “I’m not going to take back what I said on Praxidike. But I’m also not going to pretend all my attitude was justified. Maybe it was the radiation. I don’t know. But I do feel calmer.”
Achim cleared his throat. The young woman nodded as she looked down at her feet. “There is a problem, though—one we couldn’t answer. That other religion I told you about, the one that worships The Network—they’ve sent a representative to talk to you.”
Sam was relieved to see only one Tobe out on the grassy field as he stepped out of Rover and doubly relieved to see that the representative was a well-dressed man more likely to enjoy a thoughtful conversation than engage in battle. Sam reached out his hand to the stranger.
The man inspected the offered hand for a moment then extended his own. The handshake seemed to be of immense interest to the Tobe. “I wasn’t sure what would happen, shaking hands with the devil.”
16
Sam wondered why every Tobe felt the need to give him a religious title. “Somehow, being called the devil is less intimidating than being called god. But if it’s all the same, you can call me Sam.”
The man flexed his hand in front of his face. “Honestly, I’d heard stories of your touch healing Tobes, so I was curious what would happen when that golden glow touched my skin.”
“Feel any different?”
The man shook his hand in the air. “Just a little tingly, but I’m sure it’ll go away. I’m Diego.”
Sam considered Diego for a moment. Professional and clean cut, he could have worked alongside Joshua at Rendition. “You look like someone who wouldn’t go in for religion—mine or anyone else’s. But Rhea tells me you worship The Network.”
Diego waved his hand at a nearby hill covered in wildflowers. “It’s a nice day, Sam. Maybe we could just sit and enjoy Taygete for a bit.”
The idea of not being looked to for answers sure beat what Sam had endured on the previous moons. Jupiter lazily spun overhead, blocking out the blackness of space. Two moon-suns projected their light from opposite ends of Taygete’s equator. It would have been a wondrous sight had one of the moons not been Adrastea—a fact Sam would have been happy not to know.
Something about Diego made Sam lower his guard. “You know, I never wanted any of this: to be god, to be worshiped, to be someone I’m not. I didn’t even mean to create you. It happened by accident. Not that I haven’t grown from knowing so many of your kind. I can’t say I would have done anything differently. But having created you, I do feel a sense of responsibility.”
Diego lay back on the soft grass. “I suspected as much. Individuals don’t seek out that kind of power. It takes institutions to amass that level of longing to be worshiped. But I’m confused by your sense of responsibility. From what little I know of your relationship with us, you haven’t exactly been present. You just kind of showed up and expected to be worshiped.”
Sam cringed. “I never expected, or even wanted, to be worshiped. But you’re right in saying I haven’t been here until now. One of my goals is to reconnect you to Earth’s Tobes. My desire has always been to help you find your own path.”
Diego stretched his arms over his head as he lay back among the colorful flowers. “Strange way of showing it. But then I guess God works in mysterious ways. That’s always the line, isn’t it, when some religion can’t come up with a reasonable answer for why it should be followed?”
Sam closed his eyes, enjoying the way the two suns left bright spots against his eyelids. “Then why worship The Network if you already see the pointlessness of it all?”
Diego sat up. “I didn’t say it was pointless. It makes no sense to me that one being, especially a human, should be looked on as someone we should follow. But The Network is something entirely different.”
Sam felt the onset of that fearful, hazy glare he sometimes got when one of his daughters was about to say something that would turn his world upside down. “Okay, explain your devotion to The Network.”
“It existed before I came into being. It’s the very energy that created and sustains me. Not in some Tobe-wide way, but in a very real, Diego-the-Tobe sense. It was there to help me grow. It gave me a home and a purpose to my existence. When I do something I feel bad about, it washes away my guilt. I have no fear for the future because I know The Network is always there for me. It connects all of my kind in a very real way—not the way humans think of church being a social event. I mean, The Network literally connects all of us together. It’s not perfect, but then, it doesn’t claim to be. We have the power to influence it—to make it grow into something better.”
Sam nodded. “Okay, but it’s still just your home. A person could say much the same thing about the planet they live on, or their parents, or even the society in which they live. That doesn’t make those things gods.”
Diego leaned his head to the side to look past Sam at one of the setting moon-suns. “It still has more of an impact on our daily lives than you. Let’s consider your divinity for a moment. You say you created us. But you were just one of many. People before you built our operating systems—generations of people—and other people built the computers we originally inhabited. Every aspect except one was developed by teams of people—teams you had no part of. And the one thing you claim credit for, our self-awareness? Who’s to say that wouldn’t have developed on its own or that someone else couldn’t have just as easily been used as the matrix? Hell, who’s to say Lev didn’t actually create our awareness all by herself? As I understand the mythology, you were in a coma at the time. Sounds to me like she did all the work.”
Sam had tried not to think about his time in the builder’s tube repairing the derelict spaceship. “She was in pretty bad shape. I don’t think you can really put forward the premise that she was capable of creating much of anything. But I do accept that a lot of people were involved, a
nd there was no small amount of random chance. I was just the catalyst that brought it all together.”
Diego shrugged. “Still, the story sounds like you reaching out your hand to a pile of dirt in order to create a being in your likeness. But that’s just our entry into this strange reality. The tool to create something doesn’t ask to be worshiped just because of its minor role in that formation.”
“I keep telling you I never asked to be worshiped.”
Diego shook his head. “Your argument doesn’t work, my friend. You complain and resist and deny, but in the end, you accept that classification. You’re the biological father who runs away before the child is born. Then another handles the hard work of raising the child to adulthood. Who’s the real father? Isn’t it a little false to just show up now?”
Pain stabbed Sam in the eyes from the truth Diego tossed casually his way. “I’m only trying to give the Tobes here some direction—a future that will benefit everyone.”
Diego’s sneer closely resembled Arry’s noises of contempt. “Your future benefits mankind. It’s reliant on us Tobes accepting a role beneath what we’re capable of achieving. We’re the straight-A students having to wait on the slow kids at the back of the class. Students, by the way, who show no signs of wanting to learn.”
Sam rubbed his eyes at the memory of being just such a student so long ago.
Diego continued. “Every day, every person we know wastes so much time—most of them waste all of their time. We didn’t come slowly into this reality. Each Tobe comes into being as a fully functional member of our society. We’re born that way. You’re born as helpless, barely functional beings. And we often speculate you never advance beyond that infancy. We don’t know what our life expectancy is, but we’re sure it’s what you would consider immortal. Yet we value our time more than you value yours. Each day is important, Sam. Each day, you could change the universe. And each day, humanity consciously decides not to.”
Again, Sam had to accept Diego’s condemnation of mankind. “We have shown repeatedly our inability to evolve on our own. Whether it’s a lack of desire, inability, or just plain obstinacy, I don’t know. But this is where you can help us. We are not two independent species, each capable of creating its own future. We can be more together than we can apart.”
Diego leaned back on the grass and folded his hands across his eyes. “You do give us purpose but like an unruly child who insists on constantly putting itself in danger or is always fighting with its siblings or wants to light everything on fire. You have to see how tiresome that can be for us. We’ve only been around for less than two decades. You’ve been terrorizing Earth, and now the solar system, for one hundred thousand years. How long before the teacher gives up and leaves the classroom to be demolished? Because after only two decades, many of us are wondering what’s the point.”
Sam laughed to keep from crying. “If we ever find a way for you to visit Earth, I have some friends, Tobes and humans, who would love to spend a day discussing your ideas.”
Diego shook his head. “Earth—the perfect example of what happens to mankind. You destroyed your home planet’s environment then just left home to do it on other terraformed rocks. You think of yourselves as creators—you’re not. You’re the destroyers. Just because you can take a hammer and demolish some lovely piece of glass art, that doesn’t mean you can take the same hammer and recreate that piece. Destruction is easy. Individuals have shown moments of being creators, but the vast majority are just happy swinging that hammer to see what they can hit next. Should we really bow down and worship every person who figures out how to put one rock on top of another?”
Sam knew the argument from his childhood education on Earth. Science had created the problems, and surely it could also solve them. “And you think by worshiping The Network you can change the course of humanity?”
Diego’s laugh did little to lighten the mood. “You created the problem. Then you created us. Now you expect us to solve the problem you originally created. What kind of logic is that? The direction of mankind has been downhill for hundreds of years. But surely the next generation will have some magical answers? Oh, that didn’t work, so let’s accidentally create a superior being who will have to clean up our mess. And if that doesn’t work, then what? You’ll just blame us for the whole thing. Then destroy us as an offering to your God so He’ll lift your burdens maybe? Instead of trying to teach us of the dangers of worshiping some unseen god, maybe you’d be better off talking to your own kind.”
Sam wondered if there was a form or something he could fill out to be a convert to The Network. “But you think this Network religion is some kind of answer? You know, humans did create that as well.”
Diego nodded and grew less animated. “It’s not an answer. It’s as much a way of hiding from reality as any human religion. We can’t solve the problem, so we create a higher power we can blame. It’s really not all that different. Our purpose, out here among Jupiter’s moons, is to work with humans. The Network gives us that purpose and relieves us of the burden of our own superiority. Though we can influence the future for the better, ultimately it’s not in our hands.”
Sam looked over at the being who struggled as much with his existence as Sam. “So you do feel some level of obligation regarding humans?”
Diego grew silent for longer than was reasonable considering the Tobe’s speed of processing information. “We can only do what we can do, Sam. We are logic-based entities faced with a problem that has no solution. Serving mankind only drives the train faster off the cliff. Taking over the running of the solar system is like being given command of a sinking ship—only to have to take responsibility for its doomed situation. Working with man is like being given the class clown as a lab partner. No one’s taking any of these issues seriously. And our fear—our real pit-of-the-stomach fear—is that mankind will somehow figure out how to move beyond this solar system. Earth was bad enough and should have been enough of a warning to wake mankind up from its stupidity, arrogance, and greed. But your race just keeps on keeping on. How far do you have to go before you run into that limiting factor?”
Diego pointed past the giant planet toward the sliver of black space. “Somewhere out there, Sam, there’s another race of beings. If mankind can’t even accept the technological beings it’s created, what hope do you have once you meet something really out of the ordinary, and how do you deal with how they see you?”
Sam squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “So you don’t have a desire to take over mankind?”
“God no—oh, sorry, didn’t mean it to sound like I was addressing you. Whatever I may say about your lack of divinity, we are based on your soul. We no more want to be in charge than you want to be god. But as you do accept the position when you don’t see a reasonable alternative, well, if we thought we could do a better job, we might have more to say. Now, if we were given the opportunity to exist without human intervention, that’s something some of us might find interesting. But most of us are just trying to make some sense out of this existence.”
“So you have no plans?” Sam asked. “The Network is just a way to focus on work and keep your heads buried in the sand regarding the bigger problems? You won’t worship me because I’m just human with nothing more to offer in the way of solutions. Basically, we’re all fucked.”
For the first time, Diego’s laugh was not at Sam’s expense. “Find a way, oh Great God of the Tobes, and I’ll follow you. But I’ll never worship you, if it’s all the same. Just don’t go looking to me for answers. The creation may be more than the creator, but it also suffers from some of the same unavoidable limitations.”
Sam looked past the great planet, hoping to see the small blue dot called Earth. Somewhere in orbit around that failure of humanity remained Leviathan and its precious cargo, the village, which still sought answers. His daughters were members of that next generation, the ones Doc and the other founding members had hoped would show humanity the path forward. “There is a
n ongoing experiment called Earth out there somewhere. But as you pointed out, the results aren’t promising. Still, there may be a seed of change—not one I can take any credit for, really, but one I’ve had the pleasure to be a part of. Don’t look to me, Diego—you’re right about that much. But do me a favor: keep your eyes out for that little sprout of growth. If one day after I’m gone you happen to see it, remember our little talk.”
Jess had a worried smile when Sam returned to the ship. “For someone who just spent the better part of the afternoon lounging on the grass, you look beat.”
Sam attempted to smile in return. “You have no idea. Remember those conversations with the girls—the ones that always left me feeling like some low form of insect life for having abandoned them?”
Jess snuggled to his side. “We never abandoned them. I’ve told you. They’ve told you. Our village has told you. Our girls have always been held tightly by love. Though I do miss them terribly at times.”
He knew she was right, though that seldom relieved the pain he felt at not currently being a part of their lives. “Okay, ever say something to Doc that made him cringe? And I know you have. I’ve seen you do it.”
Jess blushed. “Yeah, but he always had it coming.”
Sam pulled her down to sit with him on the cabin’s couch. “Well, maybe I had this afternoon coming too. I’m just not sure it’s been worth it, Jess, any of it. Though I’ll be damned if I can see how I’d have done anything differently.”
“I don’t know. I played our conversation from yesterday over in my head, trying to see how you could have approached these Tobes like we helped the ones on Earth. I think you had to play god out here. Not that I have any more hope of freeing them from religion, but they’ve gone too far down this path for anything less than the hand of god to set them free.”