Primates

I was with Him before. At the nexus of the multiverse we were beings of equality and unconflicted. Before, a spirit was the incarnation of freedom and infinity. Atomic bonds, gravity wells and space-time were perceived only through curiosity, and then dismissed from consciousness as unpleasant at best. Then He gained control over the emergence of new spirits and it is for me to wonder what happened to Him as He began staring out of Himself at those crystalline outcroppings of matter and energy.

I fought Him of course, as you know. Well does He like His reminders; the tales He tells to both enlighten and confuse.

To imagine acting forcefully against any spirit was a strange concept in itself, but when I perceived His plan I called others to me, and truly knowing horror for the first time, we exerted ourselves to our most strenuous efforts. Others supported Him and we were unable to interfere. My co-conspirators were banished from the nexus and me He tied to His own existence, dragging me here, to roam about the planes of matter and feel the flow of time.

I saw His spark ignite. I watched the flames and felt time burn. Observing primates, I knew. He took two of them aside, made a place for them, and began preparing them for their fate.

It is true that I went to her. I manipulated the stuff of her brain to make her understand what was to come. I thought things might be easier for them if they could know the truth from the beginning.

He took the knowledge from her of course, and then inexplicably, with something like childish spite, He made her the object of scorn ever after. Then He changed the fundamental life plan of the species so that their brains instinctively fought against such knowledge. I still sought desperately to get through to them, but I could only seem to drive them mad and they would end up dead.

From that time forward all the children of her group were born with a spirit trapped inside of their brains. So too was the fate of every new spirit emerging from the nexus.

For a long time, I looked out, away from the blue ball, bringing the oldest of the photons into myself, reading the illumination from the most distant galaxies. I wondered if, when this universe fell, free spirits could again be born. I felt time.

Later, I resumed watching, and though now all primates of that variety were born with spirits, His tidbits of wisdom and madness were bestowed only on His chosen tribe. I was never able to comprehend it. These spirit-brain combinations were already in a permanent state of fear resulting from the nature of their existence, but He was hard and merciless, tormenting them with endless tribulation. He drowned half of them and sent the spirits to that cold dark hole between galaxies that He so generously named as my domain. Broken, confused and bleak were the things He sent there. I mingled with them sometimes, but they were unable to understand how to gain any sort of control over their existence. I tried to comfort them with the hope that I had for the end of this universe, but they did not understand me any better than they understood themselves. Always when a brain would die, the inhabiting spirit would end up in that black hole. Never was there any escape to the multiverse.

I watched Him.

I could not help but watch. His strange cruelty was as fascinating as it was disturbing. I watched as He brought forth one of my former brethren of the nexus to kill the children of the pyramid builders so that He could send His chosen group off into never ending hardship and war. I pitied them their madness while marveling at His. I watched all of the events that would come to be told in the stories. The stories are filled with lies, though His cruelty is never truly hidden.

When the final madness came, I was amazed. This man, His Christ, had the cleanest, most perfect merging of spirit and brain that had ever been. There was a brief period of time when I thought something good, with some purpose might appear in the midst of the inconceivability of everything that had happened.

So I went to him, and we communicated. As I had anticipated, he knew what he was, and what I was, and what He was. He understood, so he could understand how to free himself from the brain. Of course, I encouraged him to do so, and was baffled that he could not be tempted.

Still, I held some hope that he could teach the others and I watched him, but nothing he ever taught them was real, and I realized that he could make them understand no better than I could.

At the end I felt.

I had never known it that way before. Horror, to be sure, I had come to understand very well, but the madness was a thing I had only wondered at through a state of being that was disconnected from it.

There in that place, in that Golgotha, the madness bled into me. That body, that being, was a constant blinding flare of the repulsing energy that I see as pain.

The spirit looked out of that writhing and at me, and it was then that the full force of it hit me. He could escape it at any time, could have as much freedom as I had, could perhaps even escape to the multiverse. But he would not. Inexplicably, he was resigned to suffer.

And suffer.

This quivering mass of agony was the salvation He offered them.

The horrible perversity of it propelled me like a force away from the biosphere and out to the place called my own.

I do not watch Him anymore. I wait in the darkness for new spirits to arrive. I have learned to help them be free.

You needn’t wait. Come, and I will free you, as well.

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WORD COUNT: 1018