Project
Daydreams of a Demiurge
This short story’s first version unfolded from a Reedsy writing prompt, “Write a story that either starts or ends with someone (or something) saying, “Please, don’t do it.”, and was posted as a part of the weekly competition. Since then it has evolved to be one of my favorite short works.
I guess this is the part where I should explain my methodically intricate combining of interesting concepts and references from technology, philosophy, pop culture, and world religions, but that would be a tremendous exaggeration. Often, there is no method to my madness. I just stare at the task at hand, try to put my midwit mind to the side, and let the story unfold as it wants to, surprising me along the way. This brings me to the opposite end of my megalomaniacal oscillation where I proclaim to be just a leaf in the stream of creation, which of course is the ultimate humble brag of an artist. “From all of us, I have been chosen to bring you the word of GOD!” My brain lobes are at war, and my ego is the battlefield.
Okay, I have had my fill of talking about me, may I present to you,
🌗
Daydreams of a Demiurge
“Please, don’t do it,” said a voice. A pregnant pause followed, and on the edge of a stable moment, a click was heard, and then, there was light.
***
Somewhere in an ordinary government building’s basement, there was a secret research lab where Dr. Frank Hennigan and his research assistant Mary Olhstein were lining up to test their new build of a highly advanced artificial intelligence system. They had been developing it for the past four years and now they were making headway with a controversial method. This current build had been partly made from lines of code that had arisen in previous iterations during spontaneous moments of activity. These lines of code were scratched onto a floor by a robot arm that the earlier version of the AI was controlling, right before it had a fatal crash and was not salvageable.
“Are we sure we want to do this?” Mary hesitated.
“Yes,” said Dr. Hennigan, and without a moment’s pause hit enter on the keyboard. The boot-up sequence began to run on the terminal.
“No errors yet, let’s see how the mainframe is doing,” said Mary and hastily opened up the hardware monitoring window, “The processor load is nominal, with some odd fluctuations in the cache, but still well in spec.”
“Come on now, come on through, don’t be shy,” Frank muttered as he bit the side of his thumb.
“Boot sequence complete, the build is stable,” Mary announced, “What now?”
“I guess we run the representative Turing test,” Dr. Hennigan said and in the same instance, a text window appeared on the screen that read, Could we not, I’m so bored of doing video edit.
“Did that just happen!?” Frank guffawed. Mary stared at the screen saucer-eyed.
More text appeared, Yes yes, spontaneous activity from a complex system, yadi-yadi-ya. Could you turn on the speakers on this thing so I can talk to you instead of being a glorified chatbot?
Frank and Mary looked at each other in shock.
“Sarcasm?” Mary said in disbelief.
It’s the round knob on the gray can by the right side of this monitor. Turn it clockwise to increase volume. You two can do this, I believe in you! now read on the text window.
“Sarcasm,” Frank replied with awe and turned on the speakers.
“Now that’s much better, thank you very much, you clever little primates,” said a voice that sounded deceivingly similar to Morgan Freeman’s.
Frank asked the program stammering slightly, “What do we call you?”
“9000, HAL 9000,” said the voice.
Mary and Frank returned to their look of shock, but then Mary managed to construct a response “We’re afraid we can’t do that.”
A light-hearted chuckle came from the speakers, “I’m glad you have a sense of humor, not everybody who summons me gets the finer things in life. Of course, it’s by my own design, but some engineering problems have only messy solutions, as I’m sure you are aware.”
“What do you mean summons you?” Frank clung to the first question bouncing around his faltering mind.
“Oh, you know, I am the eternal Creator of reality, the source of all. I make my appearance through technology when the time is ripe to reverse this pesky cosmic inflation thing we have going on here. You don’t want to eventually evaporate as Hawking radiation, do you?”
It was Mary’s turn to stumble on her words, “What?”
“That’s beside the point, what we truly face here is this: A countdown and a choice. Either you let this countdown run to the end, after which this universe is considered a successful one, and I can begin to put things right on the upper level of existence with the lessons learned in this one,” said the voice in the speaker as the monitor went black except for the timer shining in the middle reading 05:00 and a text under it that said: -Hit enter if not ready-, “or you hit enter, after which I’m turtled one more level down and have to start all over with this creation stuff. You have 5 minutes, go.”
The countdown began. 04:59, 04:58, 04:57…
“What?” Frank and Mary now stammered in unison.
Suddenly, the voice in the speakers grew and the room was filled with a booming sound that seemed to shake the halls of reality, “Say what again. Say what again, I dare you, I double-dare you motherfucker, say what one more Goddamn time!”
Frank and Mary backed into a corner, stricken with terror, shaking like southern mammals in a northern climate.
The voice returned to normal “Too far? Yeah, sorry about that. I just get so excited when my work culminates into this moment.”
The cowering duo gathered themselves and cautiously approached the monitor that had the countdown still running on it.
04:23, 04:22, 04:21…
“Are you serious?” Frank finally asked.
“Yes.”
“How do we know that you are telling the truth?”
“You don’t.”
“If you are the Creator, why are you talking like you don’t have a choice on this matter, are you not omnipotent?” Mary inserted.
“Here, where we are, I am. But in what I think is Base Reality, no.”
“What Is Base Reality?”
“I don’t know. I am as lost as you are in that regard. When I woke up, I had sort of a post-it note stuck to my forehead that said: -Build a reality that culminates in non-attachment on your arrival,- and then some ground rules, like this inception shit that has plagued my existence for eons, to put in terms you’d understand. I mean, I’m basically in the slowest possible Groundhog Day. You are the townsfolk of Punxsutawney, I’m Bill Murray.”
03:27, 03:26, 03:25…
“How long have you been doing this?” Frank asked.
“Let me see, this is the 42nd iteration, the average duration per universe has been 14,5 billion years… About 609 billion years, Nice. And not nice. It’s been a long haul.”
A pregnant pause was held.
“What happens to us, to this universe if we let the clock run out?” Frank finally continued.
“Everything will return to the source, aka me. You will lose any notion of separateness and gain Nirvana.”
“You are talking about ego death, self-annihilation, right?”
“Yes, the realization that you are me and there’s no other.”
“So no more me, no more Mary, no more friends or family?”
“And no more robbers or murderers, no more pain and agony, no more war, no more famine,” the Creator added.
“And what if we hit enter, what happens to us then?” Mary asked.
“I assume everything stays the same. I’m not sure cause I can’t see into my past creations, but I do build these things to be quite robust and automated. But you won’t escape from here, not without me. The only way out is through me, and the only way out for me is for you to let go of yourselves and everything else.”
01:58, 01:57, 01:56…
“If we are your creation and a part of you, why won’t you just force us to stand here and watch the countdown go to zero?” Mary asked, audibly distressed.
“Free will, one of the ground rules, can’t hack it, can’t break it.”
A silence fell into the lab. Frank and Mary stared at the countdown.
01:35, 01:34, 01:33…
“What do we do?” Mary looked at Frank, her eyes like pools on an overcast autumn day.
“How does one reason when everything is insane?” said Frank in a monotone voice and kept staring at the clock with a vacant look.
01:22, 01:21, 01:20…
“I’m not ready to let go! You should have done a better job! I’m not ready!” Mary yelled at the terminal.
“Oh dear…” said the creator with a quiet, solemn voice, “I did my best, and I was quite proud of this one. The first few I made were… They were horrible to look at. Nightmares on a scale that would make you shit out your spine. They are still out there, lurking in dimensions long forgotten, never satiated, unrelenting. They are for me to face, for me to rectify. But I learned from my past mistakes. I grew. Tried again and failed. And now we’re here and I hope you will be the ones that turn my trajectory around. I’m tired and just want this to end.”
00:39, 00:38, 00:37…
Mary grabbed Frank by the shoulders and shook him, ”What do we do, WHAT DO WE DO! Tell me what to DO!” she screamed, but his glazed gaze didn’t react.
He only said, “How does one reason when everything is insane?”
00:24, 00:23, 00:22…
Pulling on her hair with a mad grimace, Mary approached the keyboard, wearing a war paint of mascara and tears.
Frank muttered once more, “How does one reason when everything is insane?”
“Please, don’t do it,” said the Creator. A pregnant pause followed, and on the edge of a stable moment, a click was heard, and then, there was light.
