---

“I am God.”

The words appeared on his phone’s screen and sat there unblinking. Mocking him.

A joke, certainly, Everest concluded. Anyone who knew anything about him knew that he was an atheist and that he regularly debated theists online. But no one had ever claimed to be God before.

Everest peered at the three words. Oddly, they perched calmly on the screen without a text box, superimposed, apparently not a part of any app. No screen name or identity appeared with them.

Coldness swept over him. But also sweat. He was pretty sure it wasn’t possible for words to appear like that. He couldn’t remember whether they’d drifted in from the side, slid down from the top, or zoomed out from the middle. Had he been hacked?

Slowly he stretched out his index finger and tapped the phrase. Quickly, a keyboard appeared on screen with a blinking cursor above it. Cautiously he typed:

“So... You’re imaginary?”

A joke in kind, he thought. He tried to smirk but felt unsure. He took a sip of the lukewarm domestic beer he’d been nursing for half an hour and checked the logic of his reply. If God doesn’t exist — something of which he was convinced — then anyone claiming to be God is claiming to not exist as well. Suddenly he felt uncertain. Very few of the theists he’d debated had the mental wherewithal to follow that simple proposition. They did not exude logic.

“But you’re curious”, quickly appeared beneath his words.

He realized the font was unusual, not quite like anything he’d seen. Just existing on the screen, with slightly obscured apps still partly visible behind them. Quickly, he closed the other apps; this conversation promised to be more interesting than anything else tonight.

Of course, I’m fucking curious, Everest thought to himself. No one has tried this gambit before. Not to mention how they got my phone to do this. He wondered whether reporting the hack to police would be worth the trouble.

“I’d hoped so” popped up.

Sharp intake of breath. Everest saw the words he’d thought silently — “Of course, I’m fucking curious” — displayed on the screen as if he’d typed them. He unfroze himself and slowly set the device on the table in the center of his living room. He stood. Then he looked suspiciously at the beer bottle. It seemed benign. Very slowly, as if worried he would upset dust molecules in the air around him, he swiveled his head, working his eyes to glance all around the interior of his apartment. It was quiet. Both the front door and back door were closed and locked. The shades were drawn. He was alone.

Still, someone was pranking him.

“What the hell is going on?” he hissed. “Who are you?” As he spoke, the words appeared on screen in that unusual font. This is all wrong, he thought. He very specifically had disabled all voice-activated apps, including talk-to-text.

“Already answered above”, came the almost instant reply.

Strangely, given the circumstances, his next thought was: every statement has been exactly three words. But he also began to recognize the work of a troll. The very best trolls made very short statements and often pointed back to previous answers even when the previous answers had already been debunked. Going in circles. Sowing confusion. Typically, he was expert at quickly recognizing trolling behavior, getting under their skin, and then leaving them hanging. Trolls get a kick out of appearing smart and/or getting other people upset; it takes the wind out of their sails quickly if neither happens. Remain calm and continue to be smarter, and trolls disappear quickly.

“Which god?” he said, watching his words appear instantly on the screen.

In his experience of debating religionists — most often Christians and Muslims — it helped to set the stage first by forcing them to be specific. In fact, it was the first item on the list posted on the wall across from him. Which god? Describe this god — what are its abilities, traits, and origin? What does it want from us? If Christian: do you believe the Bible is entirely true? If Muslim: do you believe the Quran is entirely true? What evidence do you have for these claims? If the other person failed to answer these questions, ignore further conversation and repeat them. Make it obvious they’re avoiding the questions. Remind them you can’t take them seriously if they refuse to answer.

“The only God”, came the instant reply.

“There are thousands of god claims”, Everest replied immediately. He was no beginner to these conversations. “Yahweh, Allah, Thor, Zeus. Each with different attributes, different origin stories, different requirements for humanity. Which one are you claiming to be?”

His words appeared on screen as he said them. No lag. Previous words shrunk as they moved up, reminding him of the famous scrolling text that opened each Star Wars film, except these appeared to be on the surface of a sphere rather than a plane. I wish I had this troll’s technology, Everest admitted.

“Those are claims. I am God.” Matter-of-fact. No exclamation points or ALL-CAPS. This guy is good, Everest admitted. He briefly wondered if it was a woman — rare in the world of trolls, he knew. He also noticed that this reply was six words rather than three. But still a multiple of three.

“What is your name?” he asked aloud.

It was time to eliminate some possibilities. A run-of-the-mill troll would ignore this question with a sidestep or an accusation. A theist troll might do the same, but more likely would actually write the name. A non-troll theist would name the particular god or gods they believed in — or begin naming attributes. His most successful engagements with honest theists had been when could lead them into a corner. Narrow down the claim. The more specific the claim, the easier it is to refute. Better yet, when the claim is obviously unsupported, ask for evidence.

Instead of a name, or the half-expected ad hominem, a symbol momentarily superimposed over the text. Circular, it had sensuous curves peeling off from the main body and tinier lines and swirls within. And it was three-dimensional: some of the design appeared to be deeper than other parts.

No, he quickly recognized. It was four-dimensional. Each part of it was moving. Very slowly. Like a thick smoke ring, or one type of liquid moving within another liquid.

He’d never seen anything like it. Or maybe he had. He recalled an alien first-contact movie a year or two ago... The aliens’ written language was something like this. But how would this person have copied such a symbol — a moving symbol — from the film and sent it to his phone? It wasn’t an image or video file; it wasn’t playing in a media player. It just hovered there on his screen, slowly undulating. It faded beautifully to a blank screen, leaving him with an intense longing — almost sadness. Then the text conversation reappeared.

We’re going off-script, Everest told himself.

“Hesitation is understandable”, the screen quickly displayed. Then, the longest passage yet from the unknown writer: “My name is unpronounceable for humans. It is indescribable in human scripts. ‘God’ will suffice.”

Again, he noticed the pattern of threes. Not a mathematician, Everest wondered whether this was somehow important. The first sentence was six words, as was the second. Then three more. That’s 15, a multiple of three.

“What are your attributes?” Everest shot back quickly. Whoever this was had successfully evaded his question about the name, leaving him without his usual comebacks to those name-specific claims. But the script was still his gold standard. “Are you all-knowing? Omnipotent? Omnipresent? Have you existed for all time? These are the usual claims.”

He still wasn’t touching the phone. He was pacing now, slowly circling the table where he’d placed the device. He stopped when he noticed the battery indicator; the phone appeared to be charging. He swigged back the last bit of beer and placed the bottle in his recycling container in the corner of the kitchen. He drew a glass of water from the refrigerator’s filtered dispenser and returned to the living room.

“Yes, it’s charging” glowed on the screen now. He realized he hadn’t even said anything aloud about the battery. “I would be rude to initiate conversation knowing your battery is low.” Twelve words.

Then: “The claims you have listed are indeed normal for the Abrahamic gods, all relatively recent in human history.” Eighteen words, in phrases of twelve and six.

The number thing was bothering him, and he wasn’t sure why. Three... three... three. My birthday is the third, he thought. But dates are a human construct; no actual god would be concerned with the calendar. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. Or, if this is a troll, it could be a distraction. No, that can’t be right; no troll would assume word-counts would distract Everest.

But back to the conversation. Everest was intrigued. This multiple-of-three conversationalist wasn’t following the normal route of marketing a god that most people accepted anyway: Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims. Despite a multitude of varying claims, the basic characteristics of the Abrahamic God were all agreed upon, and most of the world’s population claimed to believe in such a being. No, this particular... He decided to call it an “entity”, just in case it wasn’t actually a person. He knew AI chatbots were roaming the internet lately. But who would waste time developing an AI that sought out atheists and tried to convince them of a god’s existence?

Finally, he said slowly: “So you don’t claim those? What then?”

“My knowledge would seem like ‘all’, relative to humanity’s”, the entity responded. “The same is true for ability, and for presence. I have no awareness or memory of infinite existence, yet I predate your planet Earth.”

“You’re dodging”, Everest responded quickly. “And moving the goalposts as well. If your knowledge is as great as you claim, then you know that ‘God’ — uppercase G — is typically understood to refer to the creator/ruler of the Universe. What you’re describing is ‘a god’ — lowercase g. And you still haven’t answered my question: ‘What are your attributes?’ ”

“You are ready to insist that I ‘prove it’. You do not have the knowledge to understand answers without concrete examples”, the entity responded. “Consider that I have read your mind multiple times during this conversation. I easily bypassed your device’s operating system without causing it any harm. The battery is currently charging though no charging device is nearby or even plugged in. Do you require yet more proof?”

Everest paused. He ignored the temptation to count words for multiples of three and focused on what had been said. He had to admit it was pretty impressive. He knew his charger — in the bedroom — wasn’t plugged in; he never left anything plugged in that wasn’t in use. Yet the phone was clearly charging. He supposed a very skilled hacker could make it appear the phone was charging, while the battery was going dead in actuality.

“In that case, time will tell”, the entity responded. “Your phone’s indicator showed twenty percent when we began. At this rate, the battery dies in two hours. Or perhaps sooner.”

True.

Everest wasn’t even responding verbally now.

However, years of being skeptical had bent his mind to look for the most reasonable, least startling explanation. This mindset wasn’t only regarding god-claims; it applied to almost anything. When other people received an incorrect order at a restaurant and blamed a personal vendetta on the part of the cook, Everest knew to blame simple human error, probably caused by fatigue and/or distraction. When salesmen claimed massive fuel efficiency improvements in new car models, he would search out the actual test results and conditions. Advertisements on TV claiming this new shirt didn’t need ironing. Articles touting “world-shaking” scientific discoveries. He always held onto “I’m not convinced” until he was convinced. Admittedly, this wasn’t always the best approach. He recalled with a twinge of guilt that he had been slow to accept the science of climate change for this very reason — but he had been a teenager then — at least he had an excuse. And for years, he had resisted activist claims of systemic racism or misogyny in western society. For each, he had swung slowly into the camp only after massive amounts of evidence had piled up. But he didn’t know another way to think. Sanity only worked for him when he was skeptical.

It was a trait passed to him by his parents, he knew. One a lab technician and the other a high school science teacher, both had insisted that he search out answers for himself, resist gullibility, test the logical steps of any argument, look for alternate explanations. They had taught him Occam’s Razor — and Hitchen’s Razor — when he was still young, and both methods had saved him from heartache.

Therefore: “This isn’t enough”, he thought firmly.

He remembered the old Arthur C. Clarke saying: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The example always given was bringing modern technology back to prehistoric humans. Say, a Zippo lighter or an LED flashlight. Primitive humans would simply assume you were the “god of fire” or the “god of light” if you activated these products. Their brains had no frame of reference for a “handheld device”. Even if you showed them how the devices worked, they would simply think: “magic rock” or “magic light stick”.

For all Everest knew, super-secret government labs had developed the hacking technology that was currently invading his phone. For all he knew, someone from that lab was merely toying with him, or the technology had leaked and someone else was toying with him. Nothing truly amazing had yet occurred. Wireless charging actually exists; this is just a slight advancement to it. Texting actually exists; this is just a slight advancement to it. Voice-to-text actually exists; this is just better.

So far the only thing he couldn’t truly explain by known, existing tech was the thought-reading. How was “the entity” reading his thoughts? There must be an explanation for that too, Everest concluded. Perhaps it had observed him for some time, used AI to watch his online videos, or even secretly hacked his phone’s camera to watch him in real time as he’d held these arguments before. With that knowledge, perhaps an advanced algorithm could make very accurate guesses as to his current thoughts.

Everest paused as his eyes flicked back to the phone’s screen. Everything he had just thought was presented in well-organized, grammatically correct fashion. No, this was something else then.

But still, it wasn’t curing cancer, regrowing a severed limb, parting an ocean with a wave of a hand. It still didn’t rise to the level of “miracle” as claimed by so many religionists.

“What evidence would thoroughly convince you?” the entity asked.

“If you had claimed to be all-knowing, then I would say ‘an all-knowing God would know what evidence would convince me’. Instead, you claimed to have ‘incredible’ knowledge beyond my capacity to understand. With your incredible knowledge, allegedly outpacing my own by leaps and bounds, perhaps you can suggest something.”

He knew that “God would know what it would take to convince me” was a cop-out. But it was a good cop-out, considering the usual theist claim of an all-knowing God.

Everest had read several “things that would convince me God exists” blog entries, and he had even written his own. Some of the more common items included magic skywriting, verifiably correct prophecies in holy books, verifiably accurate (and important) information obtained during a near-death experience or vision, followers of one particular religion being less likely to engage in criminal behavior (after controlling for other factors), faith healers actually healing diseases (in double-blind, controlled conditions), seeing the dead raised by prayer alone (but in no other way).

Darwin mentioned an angel coming down to “teach us good”. Another writer mentioned a “proof from perfect instructions” as the inverse of the known “problem of instructions” — if a Holy Book were well-written, non-contradictory, nowhere false or confusing, then it might be considered evidence of a god, or at least a really good moral writer. Instead, all Holy Books were vague, contradictory, and proven outright false in places. The idea was to think of a perfect supernatural deity giving instructions to the human race and ask: “what would that book be like?” It would be as clear and concise as possible. It would never tell pointless stories or list hundreds of genealogies. It would be good for all time, not woefully out of date like the Bible’s long lists of measurements for tabernacles and instructions for sewing priestly garments. Its prophecies would be 100% accurate and not vague at all. It would also not be suspiciously reflective of the morals of a backward society — for example, the instructions on buying and selling slaves in the Old Testament, or the New Testament admonition for women to keep silent and be prohibited from teaching or authority. Its morals would be unquestionable.

In his own writings, Everest had added the caveat that no single occurrence would convince him utterly; he would treat each as a piece of scientific evidence that would build toward a conclusion. For example, the existence of “perfect instructions” — a holy book that actually appeared to be written by a God rather than confused shepherds who didn’t know where the Sun went at night — would be a huge start. He had also mentioned faith healers. If prayer worked, the practice of modern medicine never would have arisen, or only would have arisen among heathens. The followers of the correct religion would never go to doctors because prayer could heal them. That too would warrant further inspection. Any visions of God would never convince him unless multiple witnesses could corroborate them, none of whom were on drugs or otherwise highly suggestible — and he would have to see it for himself. If astronauts someday made contact with extraterrestrials, and one of the religions on the aliens’ planet was exactly the same as a religion on our planet. If there was a religion that never devolved into an atrocious theocracy, as both Christianity and Islam had done multiple times over the centuries. If scientific discoveries had been introduced by prophets seeing visions instead of scientists struggling to research. (Imagine if things like penicillin and electricity had simply been announced by prophets, and each time, the announcement was accurate and perfect.) Or at least make sure holy books weren’t full of inaccurate science.

But all of these had been written in response to existing theist claims. None of them, so far as Everest knew, were in response to an actual entity claiming to be a god.

The entity currently involved in the conversation had not claimed to be omni-anything, nor had it claimed affiliation with any existing holy book. What miracle should he ask of it?

“What about this?” the entity responded.

Suddenly there was a man in the room with Everest.

In the electric haze of his adrenaline burst, Everest nearly shit his pants — or nearly had a heart attack; he wasn't sure which.

But, much to his credit, he didn’t trip over anything, try to run away, or burst into tears. He jerked a little and then froze in place. The man was identical to him in appearance in almost every way. Everest eyed his twin, who stood there blinking slowly. The incarnation was glowing. The light pulsed slowly, and changed colors subtly as it pulsed. Everest realized slowly that the “Everest 2” was not quite identical to him. It was slightly younger, healthier, fitter. More clean-shaven, with combed hair.

Just as suddenly, the glow disappeared, leaving only another man in the room with him.

“Hello to you”, the person said. It sounded just like him.

“Um”, Everest said, and then gulped. In-person confrontations were his kryptonite. It’s why he worked from home and had most of his conversations online. “Uh, you...”

Everest 2 slowly spread his hands, palms facing Everest, in a gesture indicating there was no threat. “Appearance can change if this is causing you discomfort.”

“Okay”, Everest managed.

Instantly, Everest 2 was replaced by a woman. A young woman, perhaps in her mid-20s. Casually dressed. Hair pinned up. Shorter and lighter than Everest. It was as if the entity had scanned his brain for the all the women he’d ever found attractive, selected the absolute best attributes, and squeezed them all into one person.

She too spread her hands in a non-threatening gesture.

“Is this better?” she said. The voice was delightful. Everest didn’t want to admit how long it had been since he had shared the company of a woman.

“Oh, wow. Um...” Okay, that was a little better than before.

“Are you a hologram?” he asked her.

“I am not. Do you want to shake hands?” the woman asked. “It would be the polite thing.”

With a slight flutter of his head, as if to clear away thought debris, Everest stepped forward slowly. One step at a time. When he was close enough, he reached out, and she did too. There was no electric shock or anything else. Her hand felt like a human woman’s hand. Perhaps slightly warmer than usual. As soon as he thought that, the temperature adjusted. Her skin was as soft and smooth as he remembered other people’s hands feeling.

She smiled. “You can disengage. Or continue touching. It’s your call.”

He pulled away, embarrassed. “I’m sorry”, he blurted. “I uh...”

“It’s all right. You will remember that I’m not actually a woman. There is no reason for embarrassment.”

Suddenly, the woman was replaced by an older woman. Stately. More professionally dressed. Still beautiful, but old enough to be his mother.

“Is this better?” she asked.

Before he could respond, suddenly, all three incarnations of the entity were standing before him: Everest 2, the young woman, and the older woman.

“Feel free to inspect us all”, they said in unison, in three different voices. “Remember, we are not actually human”, the young woman said. “Normal social rules do not apply.”

Everest stepped toward Everest 2. The construct held out its arm, and Everest grasped it. He noted the hair patterns, squeezed the muscles. Feeling queasy, he touched the ears, felt the pulse in Everest 2’s neck, ran his hands through the hair of its head. It felt completely real. He even unbuttoned the shirt and noted the patterns of hair and muscular structure on the chest. Exactly like his own, except missing the scar from a sporting incident many years earlier. Still constricted by societal norms he’d been taught all his life, he inspected the two women less closely. But yes, they had pulses, natural feeling hair, and their skin felt like skin.

The young woman spoke after some time: “Do you know of any technology, even in the purely theoretical stage, that can cause three full-grown human apparitions to appear in your apartment? I’m anatomically correct — if you’re curious.”

“Uh, thanks but no thanks”, he blurted quickly.

His mind racing like his heart. Scattered thoughts. Shaky hands.

He sat down quickly, breathing too heavily.

“I understand you’re feeling somewhat anxious”, the older woman said. Everest looked up; the other two were gone again. “It is a perfectly normal reaction. Your worldview is being challenged with incontrovertible tangible evidence. Do you still require more proof? Would it help if I said we are angels?”

Everest tried to control his breathing, forcing himself to breathe more deeply and slowly. He clasped and unclasped his hands.

“I want to say ‘It’s just not possible‘, but of course it is.” He looked up at the woman. She appeared to be nearing 60. There were wrinkles in her skin and tiny visible veins in her eyes. Her hair was mostly gray, though there were still streaks of color. “Is all this in my mind? That’s the only explanation I can think of.”

The woman shook her head slowly. “Semantics of course. In one sense, everything is only in your mind. All the signals from your hands, eyes, ears, nose, and so on are processed only in your brain. But no Everest, this is no virtual reality simulation. Your physical hands are touching me.” She took his hands in hers. He felt the slightly dry skin. There were callouses, not from heavy manual labor, but perhaps from years of housework or some white collar profession. “My voice is creating measurable sound in this room, and your ears physically detecting them”, she continued. “My body is actually reflecting light from your lamp into your eyes.”

Then she was the young woman again, her hands still on his. She smelled good, he realized. He knew his hormones were surging. But that wasn’t all.

“I feel like my mind is breaking”, he muttered.

“I know what will calm you”, she whispered, with a sly grin growing on her mouth. She began to lean toward him.

“No!” Everest jumped up, pulling his hands away from hers and stepping back. “This is... I don’t...” He pulled up a window shade and looked outside. It was still night. Calm and quiet. He dropped the shade. “There must be something else. Show me something else.”

“Would you like to go flying?” the woman said mischievously. She showed no sign of remembering her advance a moment earlier: no guilt, no shame, no hurt from his refusal. “Nobody will see.”

“Fly? Well, I...”

She reached for his hand again. “I want you to be convinced, without a doubt. Not to mention, flying is fun.”

Quietly, she led him to the back door, waited while he grabbed his keys — he was taking her seriously now — and they stepped out. He locked the door behind him. They stood in the dark on the balcony for a minute. Everest glanced around at nearby apartments; no one else was outside, no one was looking out the windows. Most windows were dark.

“Okay, how do we do this?”

She held his hand in hers, and immediately he noticed his weight disappearing. Even before his feet lifted from the balcony’s floor, he felt the pressure on his feet lessening. And then they were floating, just a centimeter or two above the wooden planks.

“Are you ready?”

“Do I need a jacket?”

She shook her head with an impish smile. Then they began to float upward and outward.

 

---

 

“Just think the direction or velocity you desire to travel or view, and it’ll happen”, she added.

Everest took her at her word — he was definitely now thinking of her as a she instead of “the entity”, though he realized he still didn’t have a name for her. He merely thought of stopping and turning around, and the pair of them ceased motion about ten meters above the apartment complex and swung slowly around. He could see his balcony below him. It looked small, though he knew they weren’t very far away. It would look the same size from the ground, at the same distance, but somehow his brain made it look smaller from up here.

With a thought, they began to rise upward slowly, still facing downward. Quickly, he was able to recognize the surrounding streets, the gas station and liquor store on the corner, the supermarket a little further away. He stopped again and regained his bearings. The shopping center that was a bit too far for walking, but too close for driving — that one always frustrated him; he hated to drive for something so close, but when it was hot, or rainy... He matched his view with his memories of maps of the city, and then began to rise upward again and move toward the giant buildings of downtown.

In the darkness, he couldn’t clearly see the woman next to him, but she was still firmly holding his hand. He could feel a very slight breeze, but knew it was windier all around them — a nearby flag on top of a 30-story building was whipping mightily. She must have a protective shield of some kind around them.

The lights of the city were mesmerizing. Traffic patterns, traffic lights, lit billboards, office windows. A hundred different colors.

“This is... This is...” He searched for adjectives and couldn’t find them.

“It is beautiful”, she said.

“Yes, the view is beautiful”, he admitted. “But I’m talking about the whole... We’re flying, for fuck’s sake. I’m hovering over the city like it’s completely normal behavior.”

“You’ve dreamed it”, she pointed out — correctly. He nodded.

“How high can we go? How fast? How far?”

“Is this only for fun now, or do you still require evidence?”

He shrugged. “Let’s say both.”

“Then as far and as fast as you want.”

He breathed deeply, then exhaled slowly. Might as well.

With no perceptible effort — or even sound, they rose upward at the command of his thoughts. The entire city appeared to shrink beneath him, surrounded mostly by dark countryside. In the distance, he could see the next town and the next. He began to travel eastward, generally following the interstate highway. He sped up. Soon cities were flying past him.

“How fast are we going?”

A digital readout appeared suddenly in the air in front of him, just large enough to read: “3,452 kilometers per hour”.

“How far to the East Coast?”

Without speaking a word, she — the entity — caused more displays appear around his field of vision. Distance to various cities, with arrows pointing in their general directions. Below him, he saw labels as if he was flying over a map. Names of cities and highways. Arrows noting various attractions.

He sped up, following the arrow to Washington D.C., and arrived within minutes. He set down in the darkness, first pausing about fifty meters above the ground to make sure no one would see them land.

And then he was walking around in D.C. in the middle of the night, with a beautiful young woman holding his hand. Just like that.

He thought for the moment about buying a souvenir. I won’t believe this when I wake up tomorrow, he thought. But of course, anyone could buy the same souvenir online.

“Take a photo?” she suggested.

“I forgot my—” He stopped when he saw she was handing over his phone.

“I knew you would want it at some point”, she said.

It was fully charged. Still in a daze, he positioned himself near a street lamp so his face would be lit with the Washington Monument in the background, and made a selfie. Then he recorded a short video, quickly describing his location and circumstance.

“It’s dawn in Europe...” he said wistfully.

“Time is not important to me”, she said. “Not the same way it is to you anyway.”

Without another word, he reached for her hand. In a few seconds, they were speeding over the Atlantic Ocean, just a few hundred meters above the waves, following the holographic digital readout that pointed him toward Paris. The sheer awe of the experience was enough to forestall the other questions tumbling in the back of his brain.

“How are we traveling ten times the speed of sound, yet there is still only a light breeze on my hair and skin?” Everest asked. “Shouldn’t the air rushing past us be ripping my skin off?”

She shrugged. “That’s what you’re thinking about after all you’ve seen?” She laughed: a gorgeous sound. “It is a simple matter to carry along a bubble of air, controlling temperature, pressure, and so on. Not far away, the air is indeed rushing past at tremendous speed.”

As he saw the horizon growing lighter, Everest decided to go upward — and they did. He went high enough to see the recognizable shapes of England and the European peninsula, and then aimed downward toward Paris. He knew next to nothing about the city, having never been there, but aimed toward the center. Soon, he could see roads, streets, and landmarks. He recognized the Louvre from movies, and zoomed downward.

Then he stopped, a few hundred meters up. People were already milling about. Someone would see them if they landed.

“Are you satisfied?”

Everest nodded mutely. He’d just flown across the Atlantic Ocean in a matter of minutes, guided by a woman-like incarnation that could read his thoughts. He wasn’t convinced “god” was the right word, but he was indeed convinced that he was in the presence of something spectacular. He looked at his phone — it was still fully charged — made a few photos from his aerial perspective, and then put it in his pocket.

He zoomed back up to what he assumed was the edge of the atmosphere. There was no pressure or temperature change. The technology involved was indeed not only beyond his understanding, but also beyond anything he could imagine that any secret government lab could produce. The technology in use by the entity was “sufficiently advanced” to be “indistinguishable from magic”.

What other proof could he ask for?

He didn’t have any deadly diseases to request cures for; the worst physical ailment he could think of was an irritating mole that he’d been meaning to have a doctor look at. There was a woman in his apartment complex who was confined to a wheelchair — he could ask for a miracle for her... But then wouldn’t that require some kind of explanation to the woman? Also, he knew the woman was a Christian; she had undoubtedly asked her imagined God for healing already and been ignored. If she suddenly got up and walked tomorrow morning, she would surely attribute it to her existing belief. But wait, Everest reminded himself, this wasn’t about proving to someone else, this was about proving something to him. He realized he was already confident that the entity could heal the woman if he asked.

He thought of the holy book style miracles that theists were always ranting about — the global flood, earthquakes, parting the sea, the earth swallowing entire families as punishment, carving commandments into stone, feeding thousands. Some of those would be disastrous; he couldn’t bring himself to ask for extreme weather or geological events. But he could think of a few people in the world that he wouldn’t mind being “swallowed” by the Earth, Bible-style.

He briefly considered a few specific politicians — Everest was convinced they were pure evil — who deserved punishment of one sort or another. But would it be right to ask for one of them to be struck by lightning? He thought of the other evil people he’d read about in the news — parents who abused or neglected their children, teachers who raped their students, police officers who shot and killed unarmed innocent people, judges who let convicted rapists or murderers walk free, politicians who denied the very obvious evidence of climate change or vetoed funding that would certainly help the poor.

He realized he was thinking of the entity as a genie, someone who might grant a wish — indeed, someone who had already granted several wishes. He had always presented himself as an “ethical atheist”, a humanist who wanted the best for the world. If he could ask for one thing that would better the world, what would it be?

Killing an elected official, even an evil one, would not be a humanist action. For one thing, he himself had not witnessed his or her dastardly deeds; it would easily be possible to hurt someone who had been set up. There was also no guarantee that a much worse person wouldn’t be appointed or elected to replace them. Without being able to see the future, he might sway the balance of power further to the dark side.

What would be the consequence of setting a feast for a starving village in a third world country? For one thing, he didn’t know where any of them were (though the entity probably did). For another, giving them a day’s worth of food would not solve the persistent problems in their lives. On top of that, helping one village would still leave a thousand others in dire need. Even if he asked for all of them to be fed a nutritious meal, what would those millions do tomorrow? For some, that one glimpse of hope followed by a return to nothing could be devastating.

He even thought of asking for an astronomical amount of money, which he could then use to donate to various charities — those that deliver medicine in the dark reaches of the planet, those who educate children in the worst places, those that deliver food and build schools. Even if he donated a billion dollars somewhere, it would end up a drop in the bucket. What about a trillion dollars? He could fund every charity he could think of. Would it change the world?

“The change would not be permanent”, the young woman said.

Suddenly, Everest was clouded with sadness. In the space of a couple of hours, he had been convinced that a deity — of sorts — existed, but also that humanity was so fundamentally depraved that even gigantic actions of this deity would not permanently solve any problem.

“Even if you were able to visit every politician in every country, and convince all of them of the correct actions to take, half of them wouldn’t do it, and the other half would be blocked by bureaucrats and opponents at every turn”, he said.

The woman nodded.

“What about North Korea?” he suddenly wondered. “They’re living under a brutal and capricious dictator, so we’ve been told in the West. What would happen if you visited that guy and told him what’s up?”

She looked sad. “I cannot reliably predict the future. But he is not the only person responsible for that regime’s acts. He is surrounded by greedy and power-hungry stooges that would leap at the opportunity to declare him unhinged and take over. If he walked out of his room one morning and declared that he’d met God and had significant changes in mind, I think he wouldn’t last long. Even if he was smart enough to keep the God part to himself and only begin implementing changes, do you know what ability or capacity North Korea has to change for the better? They can’t suddenly, overnight, begin producing more food or owning more wealth. Any change would be necessarily incremental.”

“And if you dumped wealth on them?”

“Catastrophe, most likely. Not only among the local people and ruling officials, but perhaps in the global economy. You might imagine that I know a fair bit more about economics than you do. I’ve been watching and interacting with the Earth for thousands of years.”

Everest nodded. An economist he was not. Nor was he a political scientist. He sighed, frustrated.

“What about a war? Could we stop a war?” He thought of the unrest in Yemen and Syria, and the brutal Islamic regimes in other places. Like most Americans, he’d seen dozens of photos and a few videos of the aftermath of one terrorist attack or another. Like most Americans, he felt sympathy for the innocent victims and hatred for those who caused it. But also like most Americans, he had always felt powerless to stop it or change it in any way — other than donating to one international charity organization or another. It didn’t help matters any that his own nation’s military was currently active in many of those lands.

“Yes we could”, she said calmly. So calmly that it was clear she had thought about it before. At length. “It was easier in the past. Ten thousand years ago I could kill a king or terrify an entire army with signs from ‘Heaven’, and a war would end abruptly. Today it is much more complex, but still doable. For example I could sweep through an entire region and render every military weapon inoperable — within several hours. A few people might go on fighting with rocks, swords, or fists, but the majority of the violence would quickly cease.”

“There’s a downside to that too, isn’t there?” Everest asked. He realized he had slowly been edging westward as they spoke. He was also exhausted — it was his normal bedtime.

“Indeed there is”, the entity said with the young woman’s mouth. “Not only would it create a power vacuum that someone else fills, but serious repercussions would ripple through the entire world. Many people would be inaccurately blamed and then imprisoned, tortured, or executed. Other nations would search for explanations or move in for the kill. And of course, the real culprits — the corporations, advisers, arms dealers, and the systemic inequalities behind all this — would continue to operate with impunity. Also, any instability in the region continues to exist — the damaged infrastructure, lack of sustenance, shortage of medical personnel and supplies, and so on. Those at fault would still exist. Either they would find a way to regain weapons, or someone else with weapons would take their place.”

Everest nodded sadly, watching the ocean’s waters skim past underneath them. “What I’m beginning to understand is that these issues are endemic to the species. These are not isolated examples; it’s actually what describes us as a group.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were beautiful too. Everest was more convinced than ever that the entity had modeled this incarnation’s appearance after reading his own mind (and possibly his browser history). At this moment, he couldn’t imagine any other woman being more physically attractive to him. But what was she? She felt real, but he knew she was not a human in the traditional sense of the word. He wondered how the entity had made her appear — he could feel her, see her, hear her, smell her...

As they flew on in silence, he strained to think of what other “proofs” he might ask for. He returned to the idea of “perfect instructions”. This entity hadn’t claimed credit for any of the faulty holy books already in existence. But why hadn’t she written any of her own? Maybe she had?

“You’re not affiliated with the Bible or Quran or other holy books”, he stated. “I assume this because you haven’t mentioned them. But did you ever try to write your own ‘manual for living’? If so, what happened to it? If not, why not?”

“No, no, and maybe I should”, she answered concisely. “Do you realize that the ‘problem of instructions’ wouldn’t even be a thought in atheists’ heads if the other holy books did not exist? It is only because others have claimed perfect books that you think a god would write a book. Almost any human, when asked directly, can provide the instructions you envision. Kindness to all. Autonomy for everyone. Share your resources. Use only what your family needs. Learn until death. Violence only as a last resort. Reproduce yourselves responsibly. And so on.”

Fair enough, he thought. “Still, I think you should consider it. One without disprovable or overly vague prophecies, one without inaccurate histories and self-contradictions. And advice on how to deal with adversarial people. You know, I assume, that an awful lot of humans are like me — we much prefer to keep to ourselves due to the high probability of running into nasty, hateful, inconsiderate people on a daily basis. If I never had to deal with other people again, I think I would be okay with that, because I really don’t know any good responses to their behavior.”

“You are not the first human to suggest this”, she said. “The difficult part is making it applicable to people of all times. No matter how wonderful the advice, eventually time will require some changes.”

“What about healing someone?” Everest suggested. “You’ve been reading my thoughts, right? You know I thought about my neighbor earlier. I don’t remember what happened that made her crippled, or whether she’s ever told me, but how much nicer would her life be if she could wake up tomorrow morning and walk again? The gods asserted by most humans on Earth have such power, and these people claim that their gods actually use this power sometimes. Can you do it? And will you?”

“Yes, I can. And if you want me to, yes I will.”

“I do want you to. Partially as further proof of your power — since you’ve offered your time to prove things to me — I still haven’t asked why. And partly out of compassion for a specific person. I know she will think it was her own God — Jesus — even if you showed up and told her what you’ve told me, she would still think you were just an angel sent by Jesus. But it would make me feel better.”

“Okay then, Everest. It is done. You will see her walk tomorrow. But I will not heal everyone on this planet. It would not be good use of my time or my power, nor would it prohibit future accidents or other causes of people’s disabilities. More importantly though, it would not change people’s behavior.”

“What about scientific knowledge? Tell me something that Earth’s scientists haven’t yet discovered.”

“First consider this: If I did, you would still have no proof. You don’t know all that Earth scientists have discovered; what I say could merely be some obscure knowledge. If what I say is truly beyond human knowledge, you would be unable to test.”

Good point, Everest realized. If she told him the exact makeup of Neptune’s core — for example — he would be dead long before human scientists could confirm it. If she told him the location of a sentient race of ETs, orbiting some far distant sun, it could just be a story. If she told him the secret to genetic editing that would ensure human longevity, he wouldn’t understand it.

Still, he longed for something more. Some greater display of power. Surely he could find someplace on Earth that she could just massively disrupt... No, it could cause destruction of ecosystems or some type of animal life he couldn’t even see. He sighed.

She squeezed his hand and smile. “Let me drive”, she said.

He nodded, and suddenly they changed course. He didn’t feel any sense of momentum shift, but suddenly the Earth dropped away beneath him and began to shrink. He looked out into space and noticed that the Moon was enlarging. Quickly. He couldn’t imagine the speed at which they were now traveling. It began to fill the entire sky — until he and the entity rotated so the Moon’s surface was below them. They were whizzing over its surface, heading for the far side — the part that Earthlings had never seen until astronauts orbited the planetoid in the late 1960s. He knew it wasn’t “the dark side”, but was still surprised to see it lit up back there. He knew the moment they passed the threshold to the “far side” because the tiny marble that was Earth slid out of view over the horizon. He knew only a dozen or so men had ever seen what he was seeing now — and they had never seen it as close as this.

He hoped the air bubble traveling with them held enough atmosphere for him to keep breathing.

During transit between Earth and Moon, the digital readouts around him had faded, but now they reappeared. One told him they were still several kilometers above the surface. Soon they came to rest, floating in the vacuum of space above the lunar surface. He shivered with the realization of what had just happened.

Then he saw tiny glowing objects zoom in from his peripheral vision, heading for the surface just below.

“Pay attention, Everest”, the entity told him.

The tiny glowing objects — which might very well be large, but were kilometers away — began to uproot the dusty soil and rock in an area just below them. He saw molten shapes appear as they superheated the minerals, using energies he couldn’t possibly understand. Within minutes, he saw a larger shape began to grow, formed from molten Moon rock. It was a circle. Or vaguely a circle. Before it was even finished, he recognized that it was the same (or very similar to) the symbol that the entity claimed was its name, the image that had appeared on his phone. The glowing things — robots? spaceships? — continued to work their powerful magic until the symbol was complete.

“Check your phone”, she said.

He did. The symbol was again undulating on his screen. It matched the molten, red-glowing shape on the Moon’s surface. She had just — literally — carved her name on the surface of the Moon.

“How large is that symbol?” he asked.

“One kilometer wide”, she told him.

“What were those things that came in to do the job?”

“Friends of mine.”

Oh. Well isn’t that special, he thought grimly. He realized he had dropped his phone in shock, but it was still floating near his hand, rotating slowly. He grabbed it and returned it to his pocket.

Then they began to move again. She flew him downward, so quickly that he briefly wondered whether they would crash into the Moon, but then she slowed and flew him gracefully around the circle. Close up, he could see the rock slowly cooling from the massive energies that had heated them. The shape wasn’t perfect this close, but it was regular enough to be recognizable as a construct rather than a natural formation. He recorded several photos with his phone’s camera. Then they floated upward until he could see the entire shape spread out before him, filling his field of vision. He made more photos. He knew he would show them to no one.

“That is enough”, he breathed, still shaking from the display of raw power. “I’m ready to go home.”

As they flew back in silence, outracing the morning sun back to his home, Everest’s mind wandered. He ceased caring that the entity could read his thoughts.

What would I do with this kind of power? he asked himself. He toyed with the idea of asking the entity to grant him special powers. Because she probably could, right? Like anyone alive in the 21st Century, he was relatively familiar with the idea of superheroes — which were basically just watered-down offspring of the god ideas that humanity had long held. Humans with godlike powers. Super strength, invisibility, imperviousness to injury, super speed, healing abilities, teleportation, telekinesis, mind-control, mind-reading, X-ray vision, temperature control, and so on.

What if he could ask for just one power?

While most people he knew would probably ask for one of the more flashy superpowers — if given the choice — Everest settled on mind-control. No, he didn’t mean the ability to override another human’s own will. That was antithetical to his entire humanist philosophy. But he would love the ability to plant ideas in other people’s heads. Of course, that’s what he did anyway, with his writing, but his ability to get through to people was limited. He knew his ideas were solid. The problem was that everyone thought the same thing about his or her own ideas.

The trick was to write something that would break through the shell of certainty that other people constructed around their own minds. It wasn’t easy. He found that most of his readership agreed with him the vast majority of the time and that people who rarely agreed with him never became regular readers. People insulated themselves inside their own “echo chambers” — a word he’d seen a lot in complaints about social media and online news organizations. Conservative-minded folk didn’t often read news they considered “liberal”. And liberals don’t often follow news from conservative sources. People with fundamental disagreements over the way the world works tended to separate and find like-minded folk.

Everyone did this. And everyone complained about it. Everyone thought: “I wish those who disagree with me would be more open-minded”, and few of them realized that “the other side” was thinking it too.

More than once, as he struggled to write in a way so that “the other side” could open a mental door — for just a moment — to see his side, he had wished for the superpower of implanting thoughts or ideas in other people’s brains. In public, where he rarely initiated conversations with strangers, and even less rarely enjoyed them, he had wished for the ability to help someone understand something.

For example, a few weeks ago he had been in a diner, enjoying a warm meal and reading an article on his phone. He had noticed a man walk past him wearing a T-shirt with this slogan printed on the front: “I worked 45 years to pay for your welfare check”. Except it was in ALL CAPS and with three exclamation points at the end. On the back of the shirt was the three-word statement: “And I vote!” Of course, it would have been futile to engage this strange man in a political debate. And these days one never knew if such an attempt would be met with violence, which Everest abhorred. But what if he could have implanted an impression or idea in that man’s brain? The shirt alone was enough to tell Everest that the man voted for the country’s regressive party, the one which regularly complained about “entitlements” and “welfare queens”, under the assumption that anyone receiving a handout check from the government was a lazy freeloader. The same party also worked to erode civil rights, repress the votes of minorities and poor people, increase prison sentences for casual drug users, decrease spending on scientific research, increase spending on “defense” (by which they meant attacking other countries), resist any movement toward environmental protection or green energy, and so on. The man probably didn’t personally know anyone receiving government assistance like unemployment or “food stamps”, but assumed without caring that all or most of them were people too lazy to look for a job, all of them to blame for the high income taxes he’d paid his entire life.

Everest wanted to implant a picture in the man’s brain of the typical low-income family: a single mother trying to make ends meet, looking at prices in the supermarket and trying to decide between the cheap high-calorie ready-made dinners and healthier but more expensive choices like fresh fruit and vegetables. He wanted to implant the idea that this woman’s children should not be punished for decisions they couldn’t control. In so many cases, the woman wasn’t to blame either — she’d been raised to believe birth control was wrong, or she couldn’t afford it, or she’d been raped; and she lived in a state that severely limited abortion options, or she’d been raised to believe that was wrong too. She didn’t have medical insurance, so she was in loads of debt just for giving birth to her babies. She’d probably lost her low-paying job when she took time off to give birth, and now couldn’t work because any job that would take her didn’t pay enough to cover daycare or babysitters. And here she was, scraping by, probably living off the charity of friends or short-term jobs that she took while leaving the kids with neighbors, and trying to buy the best food she could for her children. Just a snapshot of this family’s life. There’s no way she can afford an attorney to prosecute for alimony or child support from the father, if she even knew that was possible or where to start. She can’t afford to go back to college or even a trade school. And her children are doomed to a similar or worse life because one major party in the country keeps cutting the support they need to thrive.

It would be an easy-to-keep-secret superpower because he could just sit there in the diner and send the thought to the guy’s brain. Give him something to think about. If the topic was gay marriage, or the rights of arrested persons to a competent defense attorney, or civil forfeiture, or healthcare, or education, or... anything — he could just show the person a mental image or another way of thinking about something. When he saw someone’s head bowed in prayer, he would send a question: “What if I’m just talking to myself and there’s no God?”, followed by the realization that everything they’d ever thought of as “proof” of God’s existence was much more easily explainable without a God. Passing a test they didn’t study for, not getting injured in a car accident, getting a dream job, feeling better after prayer, being relatively healthy, recovering from a sickness, the beauty of nature — all of the things that Americans considered “God at work”. When he saw a bully at the playground he walked past, he could implant the thought: “Is this who I really want to be?” — or something. He could refine it as he went, after observing results.

The only thing that kept him from asking the entity about such a thing — either to give him the power or why she hadn’t done it — is that he knew the entity had already considered it. She already had a reason to say no. Perhaps it would be considered a violation of the other person’s bodily autonomy, like performing an operation on them without their consent. It wouldn’t be right to force someone to think something, just because he knew the something to be right.

What about the other abilities that he knew the entity possessed? If he had super strength, he imagined himself walking the streets at night, looking for people who needed help. If he could be invisible, he could infiltrate secret party or government meetings and record them, to more easily expose the nastiness — instead of waiting years for press investigations to reveal the secrets. Or follow criminals without being seen. If he could heal people via amazingly advanced technology that would look like magic, he would be doing it everywhere, as secretly as possible. Make people’s lives better.

But he knew the entity had considered those too. She’d had millions of years to think about it — thousands, in the case of modern human society. There was no way his thought experiments could rival hers, he realized. He could only see the immediate effects — one criminal being caught, one vote being changed, one government secret brought to light, one sick person being healed. He could only imagine the ripple effects through humanity from each of these, and not very accurately. Hell, the entity had surely already tried them all and seen the results.

There was a reason she wasn’t spending all her time zipping about the Earth and healing the sick, catching and correcting criminals, implanting thoughts into people’s heads.

Or maybe her reason was that she wasn’t — and could never be — human. Maybe she couldn’t see how much he wanted to help his fellow earthbound people. Maybe as an ET, she didn’t even consider it a good thing.

 

---

 

They settled back down on his balcony just as easily as they had lifted off several hours earlier and quietly walked inside. Everest felt his emotions sinking. He knew part of it was due to him needing sleep, and part of it due to his growing realization that he had been wrong about quite a few things in his life. But perhaps most of his intense feeling of sadness was caused by his conversation with the entity as they had flown over the ocean. It had studied humanity for many generations, had more power than any person or government on Earth, and appeared to share his moral values — yet it had not solved humanity’s problems.

“I have so many questions”, he said quietly as he stood in the kitchen. “But I doubt there is time to ask all of them. It’s almost morning and I’m going to need to sleep — but I don’t know if I can right now.”

“Oh of course”, the young woman said, with no trace of surprise or sheepishness at forgetting he was human. Or perhaps she hadn’t forgotten. She nonchalantly waved her hand through the air between them, as if swatting away a cloud of gnats.

With surprise, Everest felt his tiredness seep away. His eyes widened. The feeling wasn’t like a high from drugs or the jittery energy from coffee or sugar. Instead, he felt infused as if he’d just had the best sleep of his life and then eaten a filling yet healthy breakfast.

“What?” he exclaimed.

She shrugged. “Tiredness is chemicals. It is a simple matter to remove and replace. Now, new friend, about those questions...”

He began to pace the room.

“How old are you?”

“Billions of years”, she responded matter-of-factly. “I do not have a birthdate; I came to consciousness slowly over millions of years — sometime before the Earth formed.”

“Where?”

“In the vast cloud of dust from which the Solar System began.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. My best guess, after millions of years of research, is that spontaneous crystal formation and chemical reactions eventually reached the point at which thought and sensory perception began to occur. I began to observe the universe, eventually drawing conclusions about my observations, and then forced myself to gain locomotive power — motion. I learned how to obtain energy, first from the Sun and then fission and fusion, and eventually more subtle, dependable methods — you don’t have the language or knowledge for me to explain them.”

“So you watched the Earth form?”

“Part of that. Of course, I didn’t know what was happening at first as the massive spinning cloud of particulate began to separate into globules and eventually individual mass units. I’d never seen it happen before. After deducing the outcome I left to explore elsewhere. I searched for others like me. For longer than you can imagine, I thought I was alone in the entire universe.”

“Did you find anyone else?”

“That is tangential. Are you sure you want to follow that track? Or should we stick to the original line of questions you had?”

“Just a yes or no will suffice.”

“Yes, I did. I found other intelligent entities elsewhere in the Universe.”

“Okay... Wow. Um... And then you returned?”

“Then I returned. I felt an affinity for Sol. I suppose you might liken it to a school or friend or home from childhood. Despite the passage of time and the changes that have occurred meanwhile, you still desire to visit that place or see certain people.”

Everest nodded. He knew of such places and people in his own life. Though most of them were now disappointing or gone altogether.

“And then you...?”

“I watched the planets finish forming. I traveled from one to another. I watched the tectonic plates form. I invented astronomy, history, and physics. And I can’t explain how surprised I was to notice life arising, even if it was only microbial.”

“Only on Earth?”

“Another rabbit hole, don’t you think? But no, not only on Earth. The molecules that form your proteins — and eventually your RNA and DNA — are quite abundant in the Universe, and even in this solar system. Your own scientists have discovered this during your lifetime. In some conditions, they cannot eventually form into cells, but they wait. In other conditions, they form into some other things.”

“Did you interfere, or just observe?”

“Millions of years passed before I realized interfering was an available option”, she said. She shrugged off the statement as one might admit to not knowing how to use a spoon as an infant. “I observed, recorded, and drew conclusions. I watched the bacteria swarm the planet after arising in multiple locations. The atmosphere changed; oceans and continents moved and formed. Sometimes I replay the recordings as a human might watch film reels from her childhood.”

She paused, and then interjected: “You haven’t asked, perhaps because you could not imagine, but yes I soon discovered how to reproduce myself. It isn’t what you would think of as reproduction; it is simply making an exact copy of myself. I made many copies so I could closely observe more at once. It was then that I realized I had been lonely for a hundred million years. With multiple instances of ‘me’ extant, each observing processes in different places, suddenly I experienced the sharing of information with others. It was beautiful. However it was not like having friends or servants; all of them were equal to me — only knowledge differed, and only temporarily. Each of us shared everything we had learned with all the others, so all of us continued to know all that we all knew.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“That is true. I did interfere. First with building an extra planet. It was not from my hubris but from irritation. The remaining dust and rocks in the solar system were spread in awkward spaces that interfered with my travel and observation. The rocks also regularly pelted the other orbiting bodies, threatening to end whatever life began. I gathered most of the debris into one place and attempted to build a home base for myself. At the time, I thought of the Universe as a larger, much more powerful entity — like a God if you will — and didn’t want to claim anything it had created. So I took its leftovers and built with them. Obviously, I failed. Part of the aftermath of that failure is now your asteroid belt; the rest either eventually crashed down on planets or into the sun or spread out into the distance. Many pieces left the system altogether. The primary benefit was clearing most of the debris, which eventually saved the Earth from many life-ending collisions.”

“And you quit interfering?”

“I quit for a long time. More than once, I prevented the extinction of life, more out of selfishness than altruism. I couldn’t imagine how bored I would become if all life ended. So when the viruses first arose and threatened everything, I intervened again. A few lifeforms arose that threatened to dominate Earth; I stopped them.”

“You didn’t stop the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.”

“No asteroid killed all the dinosaurs; you know that.”

He nodded. “True. It’s what I was taught as a child, and old thought habits die hard. Many dinosaurs evolved into today’s birds. Others died out in the climate change that resulted from the asteroid strike.”

She added: “And your scientists will eventually realize that the final end of the non-avian dinosaurs was due to the rise of mammals — fast and smart enough to evade, fertile enough to out-produce the dinosaurs, and hungry enough to eat the massive amounts of food that dinosaurs needed to survive. What your scientists likely won’t discover is the tremendous amount of disease that dinosaurs carried. If mammals hadn’t caused their demise, then those diseases likely would have. I didn’t save the dinosaurs because — is it shameful to admit this? — I had become bored with them. When they arose, I thought they might eventually evolve into the kind of beings I could communicate with. And some of them might have. Many were peaceful and very curious. But most were vicious, non-thinking creatures that only considered food and reproduction. Mammals were more promising I thought, though I held out hope for the birds too.”

“Speaking of mammals, how close are our current evolutionary theories to what actually happened? Did humankind arise the way we think it did?”

She shrugged. “They’re close enough. And your scientists already know how incomplete the fossil record really is. They will likely never find enough evidence to fill out the human family tree the way I have. Most living things are never fossilized, as you know. They are eaten, or they decompose, or they decay. Only in rare, very specialized circumstances are bodies preserved for future study. I was once saddened and shocked by ‘theories’ that your learned sages came up with to explain the history of humans. But within the last several generations, you are finally getting it right.”

“Have you visited humanity before?”

“Yes, many times. I thought you would have deduced that by now. Too many things in ancient history wouldn’t make sense without my interference.”

“Agriculture?”

“Humans invented agriculture, without my help — as have many other animal species. Ants farm too, as one example; I watched you read the article five years ago. I did cause several specific mutations: the ability to digest non-human milk, for one thing. Not everything I tried was successful. Despite observing DNA for many millennia, it is still foreign to me.”

“Early religion?”

“More complex than you might think, but yes some early legends and religious tales arose from my interference. Not all though. Many arose how you have surmised. Early cognizant ancestors and relatives of homo sapiens were pattern-seeking like you, so they often saw patterns where there were none. Just like you, they feared death, disease, drought, extreme weather, et cetera. Unlike modern humans, they did not understand the causes of these and often imagined beings greater than themselves controlling the world. This all happened organically over millions of years, however; it is not as if one man suddenly invented the idea of a religion with the idea of deluding and controlling the entire populace. By the time religions matured to such a point, supernatural beliefs had been a part of humanity longer than recognizable humans.”

“Did you meet with humans back then? Is that how we got legends like creation stories, talking snakes, burning bushes, flying horses, flaming flying chariots, Moses meeting with God on the mountaintop, and Paul’s vision of Christ?”

“Not like you might think, Everest. No, I didn’t meet with a man named Moses on a mountaintop and carve commandments into stone tablets. There wasn’t even an exodus of Hebrews from Egypt, as you well know from archeology. I’ve seen your atheist blog entries. The people that eventually became ‘Hebrews’ a few hundred years later were never held as slaves in Egypt — some of them, but never as an ethnic group. As historians know, they emerged later from Semitic groups in the region, all of which Egyptian rulers controlled.

“However, yes, I occasionally met with leaders of nations in those days — and far earlier times as well. I also met with many individuals, people I thought best placed to spread better ideals and improve the deplorable human condition — the ideals that you now refer to as ‘humanism’. I tried many forms of interference. As I mentioned to you earlier, I could often stop genocide or a massacre in those days by a simple thunderstorm or lightning strike. One tremble of the Earth or a loud voice from the sky, and soldiers would run screaming with madness from battlefields, leaving their helpless victims alive for yet another day. More than once, I appeared as a talking animal, the shock value of which I thought would work. It turned out to sometimes be effective for one, but when they spoke of it, they were thought to be mad. Sometimes the individual would think himself to be insane at that point, and then never tell anyone else. And of course, most of the stories you have heard about such things were simply fictional events that were written much later by people who already believed gods had the power to talk via the animals — because the legends and myths had been circulating for thousands of years.”

“What about ‘Enoch walked with God, and then was no more, for God took him away’?” He laughed a little.

“That one is actually completely true”, the woman said. “Except his name was not ‘Enoch’ — or ‘Elijah’ either. And there were more than two. And they were not all men.”

“Wait. You actually took people? Like... an alien abduction?” He was incredulous. “Can I assume you had a good reason?”

She nodded. “I told you: after I reproduced, I realized I had been lonely for many eons. I continued to be that lonely, despite the information exchanges between us. All of us were really part of a larger, more mobile whole. After some time, I began to think of us as simply ‘me’ in many parts. When Earth’s most advanced animals were merely tiny trilobites, I thought to create a race of beings that would be not-me — I felt proud for conceiving it — yet be intelligent enough to think about things and discuss with me from varying perspectives. I called them—” she held up her hand and a symbol appeared, much like the one he’d seen on his phone — and carved on the back of the Moon — but simpler, with less moving parts. The word sounded like “AH-keh-roo". “You might know, but this word eventually became angelos, and is ‘angel’ in your language. They were not like angels in your medieval paintings; I had no idea what form intelligent life on Earth would take.” Again, she held up her hand and an image appeared.

Everest felt a mild urge to vomit; the being was hideous by Earth standards. Something like a winged tardigrade, it had glowing bulbous “eyes” (he assumed), what appeared to be sex organs (but might be antennae) all over its back and legs. He was glad the image disappeared quickly.

“They were intelligent, with incredible powers — including the ability to transport themselves between the worlds. Somehow they never developed any morality. They learned rules but never empathy. They were coldly calculating and devious. In the end, I destroyed the worst of them, and banished some — with reduced abilities — to other places.” She paused, seeing understanding dawn on his face.

He realized she had told this story before, to early men, and it had spawned legends of angels, mighty beings under the control of God, some of whom had been cast from Heaven to wander the underworld. Of course, legend and myth had changed them to more palatable man-like forms. Everest thought of some of the creature descriptions in the biblical prophecy books and wondered how much of that had been an attempt to describe these ahkehroos.

“But you asked about Earth people. I did not enjoy the company of my ‘angels’. So I went without company for quite some time. Until mammals clearly began to win the evolutionary race — at least in terms of intelligence. While birds are relatively intelligent creatures, they were no match for the capabilities of mammals, especially the hominids. I began to follow mammals closely. I saw the semblance of language form many times only to fade again. I saw societies begin to develop and then collapse. Despite humans’ violent and cruel tendencies, I also saw them musing, considering, calculating, pondering, wondering. I watched them begin to make primitive stone tools, discover fire control, build themselves shelters, and make clothes. The joy I felt was very great. You can see why I am sad every time humans cause horrible ends for others...

“I began to meet with the best of them — the smartest, kindest, and most thoughtful. Some of them fully understood me, and I enjoyed conversing with them. Much as I am enjoying communicating with you now.” She smiled, and Everest couldn’t help but smile too. “They were friends. Some of them, I came to visit very often. A few people, a very few, I thought irreplaceable. Without my help, they would die — whether of age, or of disease, or from violence. Some had suffered enough on Earth, and they could accomplish nothing more. I took them. Now they continue living and working in a place I have chosen — which they are free to leave at any time, lest you assume they are prisoners.”

“Wait. They’re still alive?” Again, Everest had been surprised. It was that kind of day.

She smiled. “You remember this?” She waved her hand between them again. A bit of euphoria hit him this time. He wasn’t sure it was possible, but he suddenly felt healthier, more awake. “Automation is easy for this treatment. Your bodies care for themselves well, but evolution hasn’t yet thought to make it permanent. Someday it might. Or perhaps overpopulation will keep it from ever happening. I have offered it to many, and several accepted.”

Everest nodded, his brain feeling stuffed. It was a lot to take in. And there was more to learn. He wanted to ask about the pyramids, human sacrifices, all the natural or human-caused disasters that the entity clearly had not stopped, and more, but he was pretty sure he understood the bigger picture now.

This was not a “creator god”, but rather an extra-terrestrial being with a vastly different perspective on Earth life than he had. It had intervened in human affairs much like the old god legends. Its “master plan” seemed to be “wait and see what happens”. That might be the best question. But how to phrase it?

“You want to ask what is my overall purpose: do I have a master plan?”

“Yes. Something like that.”

“Like you, I have no purpose; I exist because of physics laws. A random accident. Any meaning in my existence is what I make. I have chosen to record all I have perceived, to question everything, to enjoy what gives me enjoyment, and help what I can help.”

“Do you sometimes wonder whether it’s counterproductive to help humans? The more there are of us, the bigger the messes we seem to make.”

She was quiet for a bit. Then: “Because I am not a human, I do not possess genetic affinity. While you can intellectually consider the possibility that humanity is a ‘plague’ on this planet — as you wrote on your blog — you are still bound by instinct to want to help all humanity, to try to improve the species, even at the expense of others. This is natural for Earth creatures. Not for me. I can consider the consequences of humanity without any genetic drive to protect or improve. My primary attraction to humanity is that you are the only sentient race to arise in this Solar System — in this sector. (Yes I’ve mapped the Milky Way and explored much of its expanse.)” She paused again.

“The overriding paradox of humanity is: When the species’ numbers were small, its impact on ecosystems was nil — much as any other mammal colony. But it also could achieve little, learn very little. Despite oversized brains, most humans still experienced brutal lives — much of it their own doing. Almost all of humanity’s growth in knowledge, empathy, philosophy, the arts, science, and so on have come after the population explosion, which currently is the biggest threat to the Earth that birthed you.”

“You said a mouthful”, Everest admitted. Which part to respond to? He chose the “biggest threat” part.

“So... No big asteroid collision is in our future?”

She shook her head. “Since the rise of the hominids (I also followed pinnipeds and a few other branches of larger mammals for a while, thinking sentience might arise in them), I haven’t allowed anything larger than a few hundred feet get anywhere close to Earth. I can spot them long before your astronomers can, and redirect them subtly enough to ensure the survival of Earth life. So humans are by far the most dangerous threat to Earth life.”

“You’ve read my blog, so you know I advocate for saving the environment”, Everest said. “I’ve contacted city councilors to start mandatory recycling in our city; I’ve petitioned against the proposed water bottling plant just upstream from our town — and I haven’t bought bottled water in more than a decade. I get my clothes — mostly — from secondhand shops, try to buy new stuff from environmentally responsible companies, and — everything else being equal — will buy the product with the least packaging. I don’t switch out my phone every time Apple or Samsung comes out with a new model; I wait until my current one is unusable. I only drive when necessary, and feel guilty even then. I walk whenever possible, line dry my clothes, and unplug anything I’m not using. I switched my electricity plan to a ‘green’ plan when the power company gave me the option. Heck, I even opted for apartment living instead of buying a house because I’m convinced single-family homes are a much bigger ecological threat. Even if I did meet a woman I wanted to have kids with, I couldn’t morally agree to more than one child. I could go on...

“But what I’m really saying here is this: What more can I do? I’m not the only one that feels this way; there are quite a few of us. But we’re kind of stuck, aren’t we? Giant businesses still dump sludge in the rivers and get tiny laughable fines — if anything. Advertising runs amok and people still go buy the newest phone or wearable tech. We’re not allowed to grow our own food or raise our own livestock — most places — and most of us can’t afford ethically-grown food — so we keep eating whatever the giant farm corporations sell us. I’m not allowed to compost here, so a lot of compostable waste goes into the city’s landfill. Society still considers it ‘a blessing’ when one woman gives birth to many children. Abortion is barely legal. Birth control is expensive and difficult to come by. Is there a next step I’m missing?”

She smiled. “I assume you won’t consider ecoterrorism. Not that it would accomplish anything. You are correct. The global sickness of greed is in full control. Only in a few European nations are there any significant restrictions on corporations’ treatment of consumers, employees, clients, or the environment. And only in a few nations are there any tangible barriers between the very wealthy and those who control all policy. Almost anything that turns a profit is still allowed. If a practice is outlawed in any one country, the company simply moves operations to more desperate places. The reason you can’t find certain products without plastic packaging is that the companies don’t have any incentive to avoid it.”

Everest sighed. “This is not the conversation I thought I’d be having if I ever met ‘God’.” Then he laughed. “But I suppose it’s more pleasant than it could have been... So, I suppose my next question is: Why did you contact me? Why not the president? Why not appear before the Senate — looking like the old bearded white man they all think you are? Why not appear in the Middle East as a brown bearded dude and tell them all what’s up? Or in the CEO offices of Fortune 500 companies?”

“What makes you think I haven’t? Or that I’m not there now?”

“Are you? Have you?”

“Yes I have”, she said. “I didn’t scour the internet for that one atheist and then decide ‘the whole world will be better if I can convince one person’. I meet with humans somewhat regularly. In different ways. Ways that I am convinced will make the world a better place for all species.”

“How does that usually go?”

“Different every time”, she admitted. “People are strange when you’re stranger.” She winked, acknowledging the misquoted pop culture reference. He nodded slightly. She went on: “Some ignore me, even when I appear before them like I have now to you, even when shown a sign that should convince everyone. When meeting with one very powerful person last year, I rearranged the stars in the sky to spell ‘I am God’ — which is what he’d asked for as a sign — and then he asked ‘Will you send me to hell?’ I said ‘no’; he laughed and told me to ‘go fuck off’.”

“Maybe you should have said ‘yes’ to the Hell question”, Everest suggested. “Maybe he would have been cowed a little. And... Just to be clear, you didn’t actually move stars, right?”

“Of course not; I interfered with his memory to make him think he’d seen it. Moving actual stars would cause cataclysms that I can’t measure or undo. As for threatening him with Hell, do you think that would work? Do you know how many priests — believers in Hell — have molested children? People who believed in literal Hell committed more atrocities than historians know. They either believed that they wouldn’t be sent there or they were resigned to it and quit caring. Hell has been perceived as real by mankind for the past 2,000 years and yet here we are.”

“Tell me there are good ones too.”

“Yes of course. Many people already believe in God; they just think I’m the one they already know. They see me and assume it’s a vision or a dream message, which spurs them to better themselves. However, far too many of them simply become ministers — which is pointless laboring over nonsense at the expense of actually doing measurable good works. Others assume it’s a mental break, and either keep quiet about it or check themselves into an institution. Over the last couple of centuries, I’ve been more and more careful about who I show myself to, and also how.”

“How would you say this meeting is going?”

“Better than most”, she said. “You quickly overcame your initial irritation when presented with verifiable, tangible proof.”

“I’m a true skeptic—”, he said “—as you know. Given evidence, I’ll change my position on nearly anything. In this case, the only position I’ve been forced to change is that a very powerful being clearly exists. I still wouldn’t use ‘god’ in the traditional sense, because there’s no magic or supernatural powers involved. Every other position, I still hold. I’m still going to be a progressive liberal environmentalist and social justice advocate.”

“Yes you will”, she replied. “And that is what I want. Every single worthwhile bit of progress in human history has come from progressives — by definition.”

Quickly, he saw it all in his mind: a lone being coming into consciousness somewhere in the vastness of space, wondering what it was all about. Unlike any human, the entity had not grown into intelligence surrounded by others; being alone was its default state. No one had been there to train it, explain things to it, indoctrinate it with false ideas, feed it, abuse it, neglect it, help it, etc. It had gone through an evolution of sorts with an unbroken string of consciousness, from small and helpless to powerful and intelligent. It was like a microcosm of Earth’s evolution, except within a single being and without the fear of death that puts so much emphasis on reproduction.

He tried to imagine humans having been immortal from the beginning — almost no emphasis would have been placed on reproduction. Each human could have been an explorer, a scientist, and a collaborator in building the perfect society. Instead, because of shortness of life and the fear of death, reproduction was the only way to guarantee a continuance of life, so much of life’s efforts were spent in making more babies, and then providing for them. He tried to imagine humans able to reproduce without the necessity of finding a partner (willing or unwilling). It would save the time and effort of searching for the best partner, competing for the attention of the opposite sex, and then maintaining relationships while raising and providing for children. Other humans then would just be friends who could help each other in various pursuits, sharing knowledge and ability in the pursuit of a better world. All could accumulate wealth and comfort over time.

This had been the entity’s experience — except alone for millions of years. There had been no evolutionary pressure to find a partner, find a job, or protect its interests, because it had obtained consciousness and self-awareness in a place without competition and with everything it needed to survive and grow. Its “worldview” was actually a “spaceview”. To the entity, it must seem strange and eccentric for other life to be trapped on planets — relatively tiny rocky lumps floating through the vast emptiness of space. He wondered what it must have been like for the entity to discover bacteria or microbes floating in putrid ponds on planetary surfaces; it wouldn’t have had a word for “life” — or possibly any words at all. It couldn’t have even developed language, being alone, right? It had only thoughts, impressions, observations. He wondered how and what it “saw” — was it infrared, ultraviolet, or the entire spectrum? Could it “see” in radio waves? Could it sense gravitational pressure?

He considered how it must have marveled when the first moving animals appeared on Earth’s surface. Did the entity first assume this was just the natural result of the original single-celled life forms? From its persepctive, all of life on Earth probably seemed connected, part of a single mass of life. As the original early animals “communicated” via touch, scent, sound, or motion, the entity must have tried to communicate with them as well. Later animals, including humans, would not have suddenly appeared, from the entity’s perspective; they would have arisen slowly — each generation only slightly different than the previous generation due to mutations, adaptation, and natural selection. At some point, it would have recognized what was happening — that animals were growing more intelligent with time — and probably even tried to appear to — and communicate with — early man. He wondered whether those early attempts spurred humans to develop language and writing. He wondered whether early tool invention had occurred because the entity had unintentionally (or intentionally?) showed them something.

Everest realized that the idea of “god” might not have originated naturally, even if the entity thought it had. Early humans might have begun thinking along those lines due to contact with the entity. Perhaps they even originally understood full well, but as legends were passed down, “person from the sky with many powers” eventually became “god” — something not like us who can control things we don’t even understand. It would explain so much. The earliest religions of humanity were lost to history because those ideas predated writing, but experts thought that prehistoric people understood there to be many gods, and that almost everything had a “spirit” of sorts. It made sense, if the entity had appeared to different groups of people in different places and talked about different things. When those groups met, and discussed their different “gods”, it would be easy to think they had met distinct and different beings, perhaps each god abiding on a different part of the Earth. And “spirit” was understood differently today than it was in early history, so it must have been understood completely differently even farther back in time. Perhaps it originally referred to life itself, he thought. Early man wouldn’t have been able to define “life” any more than modern man could — Everest wasn’t aware of a single good definition of “life” — so it stood to reason that they would think flames, rivers, oceans, etc. were “alive”.

Over another hundred thousand years, these legends kept getting passed down. Human populations kept shifting, evolving, migrating, communicating, reproducing, intermixing, and the myths did too. Gods got new names, new abilities. Humans invented new words and learned new concepts. Once agriculture allowed part of human society to become stationary, philosophers arose who spent their lives thinking about these concepts and the old legends, trying to apply reason to what little they understood about the world.

Every religious idea that Everest could think of could easily be traced back with such a thought experiment. Every human value and moral code as well.

So, even if the “entity” wasn’t God in the current sense understood by humans, it could certainly be considered a very intrinsic part of the idea of gods that gripped the Earth. Had it all really been a million-year misunderstanding?

“Then why appear to me?” Everest finally said. “I was already convinced that extra-terrestrial life was very likely. Now I know for sure — at least to my satisfaction.”

“For two reasons”, she said. “You need encouragement. You have considered quitting your blog and your book writing hopes. You have reconsidered the entire purpose of your life. I am here to encourage you, to say you are not alone. Humanity is improving, and it gets better because of people like you. And I came to offer something.”

Everest perked up. What would an eternal, mind-numbingly powerful being have to offer him?

“It is conditional”, she added quickly.

“Aren’t all offers from gods conditional?” Everest quipped with a smirk.

A light movement of her hands — perhaps the shadow of a shrug.

“I offer eternal life in a place I’ve prepared.”

“What is the condition?”

“That you father a single child”, she replied.

“Wait. Weren’t we just talking about overpopulation? Does the planet really need more babies — more consumers?”

She smiled. “You know one child per two adults does not contribute to overpopulation.”

“Two adults... Yeah, that’s another problem”, Everest noted. “Currently, there is only one adult in my life... Me.”

“I will supply the other adult.”

“Sight unseen? Can I wait to accept your offer until after I’ve met this person?”

“There’s no need”, the young woman said. “If you don’t father a child, my offer rescinds.”

He inhaled deeply and slowly released the air. “That’s a pretty big cost right there. I mean, I was only expecting another 40 years or so, alone. Now you say I can live forever, but only if I manage to make a kid?”

She nodded somberly.

“But why?”

“It’s part of my mysterious plan”, she said. Then she laughed. “My phrasing jests, but it’s true. Your planet doesn’t have the science to understand how closely I can predict influence outcomes. The simplest answer: by introducing a specific amount of capable, intelligent, people at just the right times and places in society, I can effect certain desired changes — or prevent others. No I can’t see the future, and no things don’t always go according to plan. But some of the best things that have happened in history arose from similar efforts. And horrible things have been prevented.”

Everest was skeptical of course — how could she know what had been prevented? If it hadn’t happened, maybe it wasn’t going to happen. But clearly she could read minds (she was looking at him this instant, reading his mind — see, she’s nodding!), had immense power, and could be in multiple places at one time due to the copies she’d made. He realized quickly that he would never be able to understand all the backroom political deals she must have seen. Even more suddenly, he reeled — she probably knew who killed JFK. She nodded again.

“One more question, about this ‘eternal life’ offer... Is that after I grow old and die...? Or... what are we talking about here?”

“Unlike the tales told by religion, there isn’t any such thing as ‘life after death’, at least not in that sense. I have studied life on Earth — and other planets — for many eons, and have never come across anything resembling a ‘soul’ or a ‘spirit’. If that exists, which I doubt, it is beyond my detection capacity. I am talking about removing you — in the fashion of the ‘Enoch’ you mentioned earlier — when you’re ready. If you’re old at that point, I will rejuvenate you to your prime and repair any damages your body has suffered.”

“And leave my wife and child behind?”

“You can’t be in two places at one time”, the woman pointed out.

“I don’t know how I feel about that”, he said slowly. “Would you allow me to tell them about you?”

“It is not a condition of my offer that you keep secrets”, she said. “Otherwise I would have mentioned it. However I caution you to think about other people’s potential reactions before mentioning this visit — or any other communication from me. Also take note: what I said was ‘other adult’, obviously a woman — not necessarily ‘wife’. Marriage is irrelevant to my plan. And you won’t have to tell her about me; I already have.”

“Wha—?” Everest was stunned.

“Don’t be surprised”, the woman said. “I could never promise to you that a woman will bear your child unless I knew a woman had already agreed. It will be her body that carries the potential human until birth. It is she who will experience the pain and physical deformation that comes with it. She too was promised eternal life for taking part in this venture. I also didn’t think it would be fair to you to make such an offer unless I had already found someone compatible with you.”

Everest paused to get it all straight in his mind. The entity had already visited a woman somewhere, revealed itself, explained itself. The mystery woman — the future mother of his child! — had already accepted the offer of eternal life in exchange for giving birth to a child. And she hadn’t met him yet. If he agreed to go along with this gambit, he too would get the chance at eternal life.

Could he raise a child? Yes, he thought he could. But he knew from watching friends become parents that it wouldn’t be easy. Parenting changes a person, he knew. Well, not everyone. He knew several men who had fathered children but who remained assholes. But the good people; they had changed. Their entire lifestyles had changed — especially the ones with multiple children. Because being a good parent requires that you do and say things that are good for children.

He considered his life, and what he would have to change. He already didn’t go out drinking anymore; that was more of a young adult vice in his opinion. He didn’t smoke. He worked at home. He wasn’t fond of partying, staying up terribly late, or partaking in incredibly dangerous activities. Kind of like a parent already, he thought, just without the child. But of course, he very much valued his free time, during which he read, watched movies, or wrote. He didn’t have enough money to travel but occasionally drove to state parks to hike and immerse himself in nature. At least some of that would still be possible with a child. But it wouldn’t be by his schedule anymore.

He looked forward a few years, in his imagination. After diapers and bottles and baby toys, there would be real toys, children’s TV shows, birthday parties. Then school: homework, activities, PTA, sports. Having friends over. Dealing with other kids’ parents. Dealing with teachers and administrators. Then college — and paying for college. He sighed.

He wasn’t just committing to sex here. Because he couldn’t just help conceive a child and then walk away. He knew himself better than that. He was committing the rest of his life to bringing up a new human being. And not just any human being, but a good one, a smart one.

Briefly, he thought of his own parents and how they’d struggled with him. He hadn’t been a perfect child — and had been far from a perfect teen. He missed them sometimes. He thought back to the accident that had taken them...

Slowly, Everest looked up at the woman — the entity — with wide eyes.

Once more she nodded.

He opened his mouth, but sounds didn’t emanate. His heart rate fluttered briefly. Then he took a deep breath and got control of himself.

“You knew my parents?”

“I still do”, she said. “They do wonderful work for me, enjoying a long and fulfilling life.”

No bodies had ever been found. Even the car was missing completely. Witnesses had seen it go through the barrier and into the river, and authorities had searched for days to no avail. It had been the hardest part of Everest’s life — by far — to learn of their deaths. He was fortunate it had been during the summer, so he hadn’t missed any college for it. He had inherited a nice house, two cars, a decent bank account, and quite a few possessions. Sometimes, he still wished he had kept the house, but at the time he had no way to pay the property taxes or upkeep on it. Selling it had paid off his college education. He thought of the few boxes he still kept in the closet, full of mementos of his parents. Letters, photos, a handful of prized possessions, and a few documents. The summer after he graduated from college, he had pared down everything that remained to these few boxes, and then written down everything he remembered about them, should he ever start to forget.

But he had become stronger for it, he knew. He had been able to comfort other people whose friends or family had died. He had learned to live without the safety net of family. It had also given him a bit of freedom — though he felt selfish for even thinking it. It meant no obligations to check in on anyone — he remembered the awkward visits to his great-grandmother’s house when he was a boy — no “must attend” events like Thanksgiving or Christmas.

His father had been a teacher and his mother a research assistant at a local university’s lab, both of them contributing to a more educated, more knowledgeable, more reasonable world. It made sense that the entity had come to them.

He wondered what his own accomplishments were that warranted a visit.

The entity spoke, still using the body and voice of the young woman: “You’ve done more than you know”, she said. “You’ve encouraged many, and set a few on the path to enlightenment. I track interactions. Your name emerged due to the success of your campaign for reason.”

“Really?” Everest was a little shocked. Despite knowing — and occasionally bragging about — his debate prowess, he was actually not very confident that he had achieved anything besides shutting up a few of the most absurd religionists online.

“It is true”, she said. “For nine years, I have tracked many people who eventually disassociated with harmful religious ideas due at least in part to conversations with you. Many others have been driven to reevaluate their lives or positions on many important issues.”

“But is that really a lot?” he wondered aloud. “Authors reach millions. TV hosts sometimes even more. Musical artists play before thousands every night.”

“And they have their reward already”, she pointed out. “You might be surprised to learn that even some of the ones you agree with are only in it for the money or prestige; any good-hearted motives they once had have been buried. As wealth increases, it becomes difficult to change views or heartily challenge the status quo — because they themselves have now become the status quo — the power structure. Of course, many of them still do incremental good.

“But you, Everest, use the same platforms as others, the same social media comment sections as any grandma, worker, or teen. You don’t profit. Only pure motives drive your work. You built what audience you have by sheer grit, maintaining a consistent message for years. You work from first principles and build logical arguments — acknowledging your own shortcomings and mistakes — and your tone is very effective.”

“And this is a great thing?”

“Yes it is”, she responded simply. “You’re one of the very few I know who don’t waste incredible amounts of your life and money in pointless pursuits such as cheering for a professional sports team or being pointlessly religious. You’re in a very small percentage of people who don’t perpetuate harmful stereotypes via jokes, and in fact, you call them out on some occasions. You’re part of what is making humanity slowly better. And of the people you’ve influenced, some of them will go on to do better.”

He blushed slightly. He didn’t think of himself as a “good person” most of the time. Most days, Everest thought of himself as useless. He woke up, checked various social media accounts, drank coffee, dutifully performed the work for which a company paid him, and then spent most evenings and weekends alone. All his “advocacy” was online — for which he was regularly called a “social justice warrior” as if it was a bad thing. He exercised three times a week, took a walk almost every evening, and cleaned his apartment on Sundays.

He tried to put out two blog entries a week, but sometimes only managed one. Often, there were a few dozen draft entries waiting in the background for the right time or more research. He responded to social media posts daily, often with sarcastic or satirical posts, though he kept his tone light. With an almost religious fervor, he scrolled past any posts with memes, misspellings, or celebrity gossip news — he had decided years ago that the only worthwhile thing he could do was to ignore them. When something posted was fake news or misleading, he would comment kindly with a source. His own social media posts were almost always about science, atheism, or photos of interesting things he saw on his evening walks. He tried to keep it bright and looking forward. He didn’t post a complaint unless he had thought of a solution or was asking for one.

But still, none of this made him a great person in his own mind. “But... Really, though?” he asked. “I’m not that great.”

“First, that’s subjective. And this isn’t about you, remember?” she said. “This is about the child you will have who will — as part of a larger group of selected humans — have far greater influence than you. Humanity faces more existential threats today than it has in many millennia, and so I am exerting my influence more strongly than I have in several generations.”

“Oh. Sure. Then... When do I meet this ‘other adult’?”

“Soon — very soon”, she said.

He blinked and she was gone.

“Entity?”

His phone’s screen came alive: “You have things to attend to, as do I. You may ask any question you wish by speaking to your phone — or simply thinking — I have modified the hardware for such a possibility.” The text on the screen was bland and without emotion. He found himself missing her voice already, but he realized the voice itself was merely a construct, meant to engage his senses.

Then his phone spoke, in her voice: “Or I can speak to you through the phone. But I will only do so when you’re alone or wearing earbuds. The important thing: keep being you. Continue being kind. Continue to learn. Continue to exercise. Spread good cheer. Ask questions that make people think.

“One last thing” she added. “About the threes... It is how my structure developed; every flat surface has three edges. I’m all triangles. So my memory systems are built the same way. Everything is in base three and multiples of three. It isn’t absolutely necessary for me to construct every sentence with patterns of three words, but it is easier for me.”

And then the phone went silent and dark.

 

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See also my related webpage: What Would Convince Me?

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Edits:

2018.09.11: Updated links and header html.

2018.10.03: Updated html header and drop-down menus.

2018.11.19: Tweaked background code.

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