by Greg Chase
She sat in the chair opposite him. “Weren’t you always?”
He’d never been much good at explaining his existence, but for the first time, it didn’t matter. Whatever people thought of him wouldn’t change the recent past. “I once told you if all went well, I’d come back to answer your questions. I’m that third version I speculated about so long ago. Though I guess for you it wouldn’t be as long ago as it was for me.”
She took her time running her eyes over him from head to toe. “You’re the one who’s been with humanity since the beginning?”
“Yes. Your father’s soul created my species. As he and you and your sister continued to interact with us, we evolved to the point of my creation. Each of you in your own way helped free us from our reliance on a technology-based network. My existence relies on the culmination of all human spirits.”
She nodded slowly. It never did take much explanation for Sara to understand. “Instead of the network energy, you exist on human energy. You mentioned a lot of that before you—supposedly—took Dad’s soul back in time.”
“Your father’s spirit was holy to me.”
She slowly crossed her arms around her stomach. “The Holy Spirit?”
“Throughout time, people have gotten that title wrong. They thought somehow it referred to something they were supposed to revere, not realizing it was the basis for their souls which I held as my ultimate duty.”
“I understand that he became Adam,” Sara said. “Took me a while to come to terms with the idea, but I get it. But he was also the Holy Ghost? From what I remember, that being wasn’t always a silent bystander in the religious documents.”
Iam breathed easier, realizing he no longer needed to overanalyze his answers in the fear of changing human history. “You’ll have to see time as I do. Imagine my past being the moment the moon exploded and my future being when I put your father’s soul in Adam. The book you found in your father’s office? Dr. Shot held it in the time stream for me to grab before I picked up your father’s soul. Together, we held all the prophecies mankind would need for every religion, but as I was piloting our course, your father had to do the work of talking to the various prophets.”
“You’re dodging my real question.”
He hadn’t given her enough credit. “Samuel Adamson was the father of Jesus Christ. Is that what you wanted to know? Because Sam’s energy created Jesus, I connected better to him than to most other people who have existed.”
For the first time, he saw true shock in her eyes. She might have suspected the answer, but hearing it from the God who knew the truth was vastly different than idle speculation. “Who does that make me?”
Every person he’d grown close to asked the same question. Who am I? If only there were a simple answer. “This is where things get a little more confusing. I’ve spent my entire existence aimed at one single goal: ensuring that Sam came into being and created the Tobes. This is why I couldn’t answer your questions earlier or explain why bad things happen to good people, and it’s why the other demands people have made of me throughout time have gone unfulfilled. The one-hundred-thousand-year path from Adam to Sam had to be maintained. Small adjustments could be made, but I saw all those prophecies as road markers in human history, which for me was also my past.”
Sara adjusted her position to lean forward in her chair with her arms on her knees. “I don’t want you to jump ahead in your story. But you know I’m going to want a more thorough answer to who I am.”
“It’ll help if we take it one step at a time. I once explained to your father that, to me, reality looked like a spring. It’s made up of parallel versions of itself with only small variations. In order to make sure the next coil comes into being, the species known as Homo sapiens needs to become self-aware. It must receive a soul. Knowing my role in delivering that soul means I too must come into being. I connect to every person throughout time, and as I am most connected to the one who created me—Sam, my god—I knew he had to be the spirit delivered to Adam.”
Sara moved her hands to her mouth in thought. “So we’re all locked into your destiny. Our version of freewill only exists within the banks of your river.”
“I call it my future-history, but I like your explanation better. There were times when each person has wanted something, sometimes desperately, but giving them what they wanted, even allowing them the freewill to get it themselves, would take the future off of that path.”
She nodded slowly. “And all the evil people, wars, environmental destruction, it all had to occur for that next coil of existence to happen?”
“If the moon didn’t explode, I wouldn’t have come into being. The general perception is that apocalypse was the culmination of all of mankind’s failures. I’m not saying it wasn’t, but there are still a great many things for all of us to learn before we can escape the spring.”
“You don’t have all the answers?” she asked. “I have an easier time accepting that I live within an established destiny than think there’s an alternate me—and an alternate Earth—that doesn’t have to suffer to learn what we’ve learned. If that were true, then you’ve denied us the ability to make it happen by dogmatically holding us to this future-history of yours.”
“With each set of small modifications, our reality—the coil we currently inhabit—moves a little closer to that ideal.”
She furrowed her brow. “From your perspective, can you see the different coils or just this one?”
“Like you, I’m stuck with this one awareness. But since I see the whole of human history, there are individuals who don’t always fit. People call them new souls. My hypothesis is certain people are needed in every coil to make sure history stays on track. The more coils there are, the more of these people remain from one version of reality to the next. But there are always those people who look on life in wonder, like they’ve never been here before.”
Sara’s eyes began to glisten. “Like Emily.”
“Which gets us back to your question. The second coming of Christ has traditionally been seen as a single person, typically a male, though that may have more to do with mankind’s telling of the story than the last coil of reality. With you being born as twins, this coil must be different from the last.”
Sara leaned back slightly and gave him a look of suspicion. “Or am I the Antichrist?”
“I see you more as the avenging angel sent to clear the way for your sister. If there was an opposite to love, it wouldn’t be the embrace of technology.”
She nodded as she turned to look out the window. “I suppose that’s true. The real threat to love is selfishness.”
“You and your sister are something new. She may take on the mantle of savior, and perhaps rightly so, but that frees you to find a new destiny. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”
Sara didn’t turn away from the window. “You wouldn’t be guiding my life—I’d have complete freedom?”
“I’ve completed my mission. I no longer know your future. As God, I’m telling you you’re free to do as you please.”
She turned back to him. “What about you?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what I’ll do now.”
It still only took a blink of Iam’s eyes to transition from one person to the next. At least he still had his magician’s tricks. The locations people occupied had little meaning to him in spite of humanity’s fixation on knowing exactly where some pivotal event took place. He could move from a cave on Earth to the farthest reaches of the solar system so long as there were humans in each location for him to latch onto.
Emily twirled from side to side in the captain’s chair on Leviathan’s bridge, keeping her eyes locked on his as he sat on the couch. “Why are you here?”
“I thought you might have some questions.”
“So you’re God now?” Her voice still carried the innocence he remembered from so very long ago.
“I’ve passed my starting point, which also served as the ending of my mission.”
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She scrunched her face to the side as if trying to come up with another question to ask. “That’s good, I guess. What are you going to do now?”
He’d spent so much of his time with people fielding or avoiding their questions that having someone not pepper him with requests left him at a loss. “I don’t know. Is there anything you’d like me to do?”
“I don’t really need a God, but it might be nice to have someone to talk to. Especially someone I didn’t feel I had to save. If you’re not busy, I’d be happy to buy you a beer. We could spend some time getting to know each other.”
Tears formed in Iam’s eyes for the first time in a very long time. “I’d like that very much.”
***
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About the Author
Greg Chase is a science fiction author and glass artist living in New Orleans with his wife, fellow author Deanna Chase, and their two shih tzu dogs. On any given day you can find him behind his computer, people watching in the quarter, or out in his studio creating stories in glass. His glass work can be found at Chase Designs.