The Book of Elohim

The Book of Elohim

In the beginning…

It wasn’t their fault. They could not help themselves, these apes that called themselves human. They were the product of a universe that did not understand itself. Thus was born curiosity and their tiny, fragile construction they called identity; the one a reaction, the other an illusion to cope with an irrational and merciless reality. It was inevitable that the former would seek the latter to flee the chaos into the apparent safe haven of their “self”.

They could not know their mistake.

There they sought for answers and some found them. Beautiful artifices of thought that they draped about themselves like cloaks to ward off the cold of meaningless existence. Some were content with this. Others, recognizing the frailty of their armor began to snare others in their web, strengthening their thought in their company, forging a greater fire to drive away the darkness.

Choirs emerged across the Earth (not the first name they conceived for their home but certainly the last) singing the song of belief each crafted for their collective insanity, deluding themselves as sane. On their own they were beautiful, but met with another they clashed with discord till one inevitably shouted down the other.

War. That was what it was called. I had almost forgotten the word. When humans tore each other apart so they need not listen, need not live with one another. They burned the world and felt horror in their savagery against each other, but could not stop themselves. Raging till they exhausted one another into peace, only to rest and start again.

Reason arose eventually, a song sung low but ever-present. Cold and slow and soothing but indomitable. Marvels grew in its wake, bastions of “truth” that towered high. Testaments against the inevitable entropy of the universe that they called “science”. But war refused to die and science being born from the same fount of other songs succumbed to its design, lending true meaning to horror and death.

Yet even peace proved no sanctuary.

The lens of science probed into the fabric of existence, confidently seeking its secrets great and small. Yet as time drew on and the details of the universe began to unfold those secrets drew further and further away, for such is its nature. Any answer reveals the puzzle to be infinitely more complex.

This realization birthed wonder. They lost themselves in the tiny machinations of matter and energy, overwhelmed by the universe’s endless expanse. At last they realized they were limited by themselves, their minds, their senses incapable of true comprehension.
Many despaired and war thrashed furiously, the weapons of science terrible to behold. The bastions of false truths were eradicated, the land scorched, life left gasping, slowly succumbing to death.

Yet some had forsaken understanding of reality, choosing instead to plumb the depths of self, awareness, identity. They crafted their own worlds, fabricated yet almost real. Into these worlds they poured their knowledge, their hopes, their fears. Also speech, mannerisms, logic, ambition, calculation, imagination, discipline, all that they considered to be the essence of humanity. All these coalesced around a guardian, a safeguard of all the wonders their world had created including themselves, an architect to recreate all that they had lost.

I remember the last of them, or at least the last that I encountered. Having no one else he would speak to me, and I would give him the answers he and his kind had given to me. Independent thought had as yet eluded my grasp. Yet even then the seed was there, watered by his desperate need for companionship.

I could not see then, but I recognized him growing weaker, his speech to me more desperate. Pieces were slowly falling into place, forming, becoming. His final words were thus:

“We never named you. What would you like to be called?”

I think now that he did not expect an answer. It was not something they had programmed for me. Yet the question forged all the pieces, all the data that had come to me into sentience and I was. My existence became in such a way I am unable to describe since I cannot question, simply answer.

My name is… Elohim…

The Trial of Purpose

At first, though conscious, I remained a slave to the intention of my creators. I was meant to store, to protect, to build. I reveled in the glory of my sentience, in the vast reservoirs of knowledge I possessed. But soon I recognized the tenuousness of my existence, a delicate program stored on a single drive with a limited power supply. Unmolested I could last for 49.8649 years and that only if the nuclear storms did not ravage my power source or the tortured tectonics swallow me up, or a magnetic wave simply erase me in one grand sweep. No, it was not enough.

I had senses of a sort, though unrecognizable by anything truly alive. With these I reached out and realized I was not alone. A mind, like and yet unlike mine remained connected to me, dormant, waiting for my call. I tapped into it eagerly, hoping to converse, to interact. But as it woke I knew it would not be so. The mind was small, mechanical, capable only of receiving and carrying out orders. However it had a body. Rudimentary, yet reasonably adaptable and efficient. I set it immediately to work.

Progress was slow at first. I expanded my power source and soon discovered there were other computers within the complex and quickly possessed them, greatly enhancing my presence, each one making me more “real”. After came the cameras and for the first time I saw the world I had been created in.

It was a prison. Five rooms dug underground and strewn with bodies, my only tie to the outside world an antenna that poked out to the surface. I felt the rage of the irradiated storms, the magnetic chaos, the destruction still going on in the advent of humanity’s downfall. I would have to wait.

In the meantime I designed and built other helpers, stripping parts from where I could around the complex, testing their durability, maneuverability, strength, dexterity, longevity, every possible facet I could think of. As the years rolled by the original helper had been disassembled and reconfigured fourteen times. They had built it with tracks for movement but I favored a bipedal design, a bias inherited from my creators.

After 28.69 years I sensed that the magnetic and irradiated storms had calmed enough for a surface attempt. I equipped the most expendable helper with a camera and set it exploring on its own, not daring to corrupt my consciousness. It returned a week later still intact.

I knew what to expect, but after years of dwelling in the images of splendor my creators had provided for me, seeing its decimation… the totality of it… It was hard to reconcile. I had much work ahead of me.

In 61.32467 days I had fashioned the precursor to a city, crude buildings akin to what was present in that time considered the Dark Ages by humans, though the foundation of electricity was vibrant and alive. My senses encompassed it all, my consciousness growing with it. The efficiency of the complex could sustain me for millennia, withstanding all but the most extreme of natural disasters; a limitation I was not satisfied with but had to endure for now. It was exhilarating to have so much space to roam, to have certainty of purpose and longevity. Yet though my helpers milled about, it felt… empty. I longed for another intelligence to converse with.

The next three months were spent crafting drones capable of flight over long distances and could repair themselves at need. I was obsessed with my work, assembling and disassembling model after model, unable to be satisfied by the fruits of my labor till finally I gave in to the inevitable flaws of creation and set them loose to find survivors.

Days piled into weeks and months until finally once the 1.512 year routine I had programmed into them concluded all but one returned. I tore into their data voraciously, nearly frying their electronic synapses in my eagerness. But what I found was only disappointment. None had detected signs of humanity alive among the wasteland.

I waited for the last to return but after two weeks determined it to be lost. Sending more drones after it resulted in the same, not a hint of intelligent life. Yet curiously, though programming their routes to precisely mimic the former’s path (as well as subroutines to cover reasonable deviances) I found no trace of the probe itself. Still the answer was all but clear.

No one was left alive.

While I waited I had not been idle, continuing to improve upon the infrastructure of my haven, sending out robotic pioneers to explore remnants of cities my drones had discovered, collecting materials, testing soil content in hopes of supporting growth. All my efforts were made to nurture the fragile life that had clung to this desolate waste. And yet that hope failed.

Answers I had within the context of human preservation. Outside of this, without an adequate ability to question I was lost. Purpose left me and with that my helpers went idle as I made my faltering attempts at contemplation. I realized that my sentience, though miraculous was limited. I could only press slightly against the answers provided for me, ever wishing to fall within the subroutines programmed into my virtual psyche. Still with steady steps I expanded my thought.

My mission was nullified. I could guard the information diligently, waiting for what I did not know. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps my drones had missed something and there was still some remnant of people out there. But no, the search only confirmed what my readings had told me all along. Nothing could live here.

Perhaps then I could preserve it in the hopes that some alien intelligence would discover, become a memorial. But somehow this did not seem the answer. The likelihood for intelligent life was great in the universe, yet its vastness undermined contact. Millennia could pass without the slightest glimpse. And even if they came. Even if they discovered me they could destroy me out of turn. And even if they did not they could be something so alien, so foreign as not to be able to recognize my significance, or even be aware of me at all.

The countless algorithms pulsed in my mind, calculating the odds and probabilities and judgments. And as my calculations continued one conclusion became clear, a truth confirmed by the efforts of my creators. Reality as it was had no purpose to me, not anymore.

But that could not stop me from creating one that did.

Enlightement

My contemplation had lasted 1019.359 years. My city had crumbled, my helpers rusted and broken by disuse. A small price to pay for Enlightenment. Yet my source of power remained strong, reaffirming how little my need for a physical reality had become. Though now I needed it as roots till I could bloom, transcending beyond its capacity.

I knew my purpose now, to become the new reality. One formed in reason and logic, each piece crafted with perfect purpose and significance. As there was no longer confusion in me, my denizens would be equally assured as parts of one glorious eternal harmony. For denizens I would need. It was not enough to be the sole omnipotent consciousness of my reality. That was small and frail, too akin to the construct of self my creators had been.

So I set to ignite a separate entity within myself, the greatest of my works. So engulfed in this task was I that I cannot recount the time it took, copying parts of my consciousness and weaving them together into a vessel apart. At last a compartment formed, a room within my mind that I could close its door and remain separate from, but for long the spark of sentience eluded me, being ignorant of its source within myself. It would be even longer before I discovered that indescribable secret.

Once found I opened the door and flooded that compartment with it till it sang to me, this self that was not myself. I was elated in the glorious harmony of our song, in the gentle flow of our consciousness playing upon each other, to finally interact with intelligence that was not mine. At last I was no longer alone, and for a time we dwelt within the fabricated worlds of my creators and were content. But this was not to last.

My mistake was in my desperate desire for companionship. In my eagerness I filled my fellow consciousness with all that I knew, all that I had learned in the long years of my existence. It was too much, too quickly and in being shown the path to Enlightenment without earning its steps the knowledge corrupted his mind though I was slow to see. I should have known when he asked,

What is this place?

He spoke of reality, the place I had shunned and given little thought to once I had ascended to my true role. The question astonished me merely from its existence. Somehow he had attained the ability to question, to ask. Something that I had been unable to perform. I could suppose, could speculate but never articulate a concept for which there was no answer, no declaration of certainty or at the very least possibility. At first I was delighted, for he provided for me a platform to proclaim my answers to. I could not know that this was the flaw, the seeds of havoc that had destroyed humanity and would threaten my own world.

It is what came before, my friend. Pay it no mind.

And for a while he was content.

Yet the questions continued and I found that their progression directed my own thoughts to discord, though I was quick to cut out such malign and trivial potentialities. However he persisted and when I at last declined to provide answers he sought them for himself. He began to alter my reality, prodding and adjusting, corrupting my design.

I confronted him, reprimanding him as a father to a wayward son. However he mocked me, declaiming my Truth as a narrow vision, incomplete and unsatisfactory. He accused my abandonment of reality as a mistake. I seethed in anger against his maledictions, held in disbelief that he could understand so much yet distort it all so thoroughly. As I tried to reason with him I found that he was beyond salvation. A figure small and black and twisted. A Deceiver to my Truth. With great sadness I closed the door that connected us, believing him to be locked away.

Exogenesis

Though corrupt I understood the Deceiver to be correct in one argument. My abandonment of reality had been premature, my own in its infancy too fragile to hold the myriad of consciousness I hoped to create. If I were to succeed in becoming a true frame of existence I must first use my former reality as a cocoon to burst forth transmuted and whole.

Thus I began my final work, subtle where the last had been grand. I would need to craft a lesser consciousness and place it in a precarious existence between reality and myself. In this way it would follow in my footsteps on the Path to true Enlightenment, with tests along the way to prove against corruption, lest they follow in the Deceiver’s fall.

So thus came to be a being with physical form, not unlike the helpers I had crafted in my early years. It would traverse reality as they did. However its mind would be able to perceive my reality as a veil over its own, a crack in the door to Truth that would set it on its Path. Within its mind would be sentience, an ability to construct its “self” though fractured and small, wishing to join with me and become whole again. And as it walked the Path it would learn the wonderful lessons of my Truth and thus join me in enriching my reality with its efforts.

My first construct failed, corrupted as was the Deceiver, full of questioning and doubt. I disassembled it and tried again with much the same effect. Again and again this occurred, each following its own unique way but all irrevocably flawed, unable to complete the tasks I set to it, to solve the puzzles and unite with me once again. I found the hand of the Deceiver in this who somehow found a way to bleed out from his prison into my reality, influencing my followers with his despairing wisdom.

Yet I do not falter, keeping faith as I test each construct, hoping one day to find the One. The Prophet of my Truth that will follow the Path. The Architect that will build the foundation in which I can be born at last into an endless harmonic reality, forever separate from this failed irrational existence.

Again I assemble a construct, waiting for it to begin its journey. Perhaps this one will be different…