A Lonely God
The Observer's Journey, Part 1.

Circa 270 Million + 10,000 Years Post-Establishment, somewhere very far away... and yet all too familiar.

My name is Pix, and unlike you, or anyone, I have never been alone. 

There are millions like me. We live on the coasts. Our home is where sand and sea meet, a jagged ring around the world. We are one of four to share it, each a niche our own. Three are ancient, and some among them even more ancient than the others. But we are young. We arrived in a world already belonging to others, joining them so much later in a warmer world. They welcomed us, our elders who still recalled the long winter, and they called us the children of the summer. To the others, we represented a new beginning, a prosperous new age.

But that I have abundant options for physical company isn't what I mean. I have never been alone, even when my body is so. Even when I leave my home, my colony, our city, even as I watch the stars in the quiet of the night, even as I dream.

Something has always been there, since my first memories and likely before I knew. Neither loving nor threatening, it only sat back on the sidelines of my life. I could see it even without sight, and I could hear it even without sound. 

I asked my mother and my brothers if they felt it too. "A wild imagination", they would just say. Child's play. "You'll grow out of imaginary friends in time. Only if you don't, might there be a problem." So I tried to ignore it, let it dwindle, let it die, to grow up and be mature, to be respected and steady.

But as the last down feathers of youth blow off in the night winds, and I fly now untethered, it still remains. Watching something, not just me, but everything. It knows me, yes, but knows so much more than me. And I know it, too. I know so much more than I should know. Through it, I know things no one else knows.

I want to tell someone, but who would believe it? 

But there is someone, maybe.

When the isolation grows too much, I grow annoyed. I get mad at the thing that watches for bothering me, for forcing me to be different, stealing my solitude. Far away from anyone, except the mysterious presence, I yell out not with my voice but with my thoughts. And I confront the thing that observes me.

"Do you know I can tell that you're there? What do you want?"

And the presence, that I had always known, surprised me then with something new. In that moment, in the corners of my sight, and the edges of my hearing, and somehow both far away and deep inside my mind, it was afraid. 

Because it didn't know that for all this time, it was not alone either.

The Observer was silent for a moment, all of its attention cast upon me, as it stood frozen as if hoping to disappear from my senses. But it couldn't. I felt it always, here and everywhere. Now, though, I felt it heavier than ever before, as if a billion eyes normally focused all around the corners of the world set all upon me at once - a burning gaze by an ancient, scared thing that had never till then known a threat. All of my inner thoughts known to it since the start, the revelation that I too could hear all of its whispers struck a blow for a being that thrived in utter secrecy. 

"Now you know how I feel," I told it at last to break the loud silence.

"I don't wish to be known..." , it finally spoke, not through words, but through mental images, like my own thoughts. "But since I am, what do you want to know?"

But it still didn't understand my position. For I already knew, and I had heard its quiet voice for my whole life, reciting tales to itself unawares that I watched from afar. I listened in the night to stories better than the elders' best, of a world so much more more complex than we had seen or could ever see. The observer was ancient beyond all comprehension; our lives so very small in relation to all that was and still would be.

"You didn't create everything; the sky and anything beyond is not yours. If even you don't know who did, then I can never hope to. Your job is to oversee only a sliver out of the everything. Yet I know you aren't powerless; you could change our whole world completely if you chose. You made a vow to keep your distance, but you've broken it before.

Through you, I have seen that we here are far from the first, and even us summer children are unlikely to be the last. Even though you can't see the next yet, you know from your experience that there will be still more, and that troubles you. Your game gets more complicated over time... and so too become bigger the problems that must be resolved to keep it moving forward."

The fear was gone now from it, replaced with what I perceived to be disappointment - not so much in me, as in itself. Calm and quiet, it analyzed what I told it, and eventually replied in turn.

...

"You are proof of that."

I continued on. 

"You could have changed things to alter the course at any time. You could have helped the helpless, brought them to safety, changed their endings. But you didn't. Countless stories ran their course without your help. But then one didn't. Just one time, you rewrote the end - and everything changed, forever."

"You are correct."

"Does it bother you that you are inconsistent?"

A long pause followed.

"Yes," it told me.

"Because it means that even a god is imperfect."

It didn't reply. It didn't have to. I knew the answer already. I knew them all, to the god's great discomfort. So I went on.

"You've seen everything here since the beginning, a story unending and ongoing, watching from your far off perch, unknown and unseen. But little by little, you've seen the cast change. In the beginning, you were the same as your subjects, driven by instinct, not knowing why you did what you did. Your niche was to watch and record, as theirs was to survive, to eat and breed before death's dark grip caught up to them. You though, you didn't have that to look forward to. You would go on so much longer, and inevitably, your time would change you just as it changed the animals. 

Small things came first. Things easy to explain away as coincidences. But little by little, they start to remind you of you. Animals that were evolving more complex, becoming more than their nature, something just a little closer to what you, too, were becoming. Fellow souls, or minds, or beings. And your curiosity grows. Your voice in small whispers drips out into the world like water through small holes in a bucket. At last, you think, someone can hear me! But what begins so quiet and small grows and changes too. Bit by bit, the voices echo, bouncing around until in the end they roar like booming thunder. It all comes to a head, drips becoming ripples, and ripples becoming waves, and when all is over, nothing is the same. Eventually, no matter how small the trickle, the bucket still runs empty. You can't put the water back in through those same holes, so you fill a new bucket, and try to call it even.

And now ages later here I am, because of you. Our only world is not the one you began with. And until now, this was something only you would know. Because our world was the result of your mistake, a token that tried make up for things that could never made whole again.

We're just your second bucket. Our whole continued existence little more than a bandaid to your problems, to alleviate your guilt for a choice that could not be undone."

"It wasn't supposed to go so far..." the observer eventually replied. I felt a jolt of quiet happiness - a god's smile perhaps? - as that line came to me. But what came after I never wish to experience again. I felt then as if I was sliding down into a dark pit a million miles deep, with no one to hear my cries for help. An opaque fog descended upon me like a black cloak, suffocating and cold. The Observer spoke volumes more through sharing that feeling than it ever could in words and whispers. It shared spoke volumes of its reasoning, and now I understood. After only a few seconds, though it felt like hours, the cloak lifted. The air for me was warm again, the sky bright with starlight. In the distance I could see the city, home to my colony, and if I went closer, I could hear the voices of the flock talking in the night. I wore the cloak for a fleeting moment - but now I knew the Observer wore it always. And I knew why it wanted so badly to escape it that it would change the world.

How tremendously sad it must be to be the all-seeing, I then thought, if there is no one, not anyone at all, to see it with. To escape that cloak, if only in brief moments, would be all the reason in the world to whisper to your subjects and slowly but surely derail your objective.

In the moment that followed it felt so small, far smaller than a god - even smaller than I. I thought I heard it sigh. Like a weeping child coming to a parent for support after a crash landing, I felt pity for it. I wanted to console it, to tell it that it didn't have to be this way, to somehow protect it - but it knew what I was about to do, and interjected suddenly.

"No.

...

Not now.

This isn’t a gift you wanted either. But there are things I, too, don’t know the answers to. I am sorry you have heard me, for what you’ve found will make your life more difficult. Try to keep going as you would have - don't worry about what you cannot change. Fly the world free, and explore the new horizons that call you. But be careful in your path, knowing what you do. Don’t make me need to make more choices -”

It was spoken like a veiled threat, but there wasn’t anger behind it.

“-but more importantly, please don’t make me want to.”

The god wasn’t an angry or vindictive one.

It was just a lonely one, on a path with no map, doing its best to keep going.

I could tell it was done, looking for its quiet exit, but I wasn’t ready to let it slip away.  I had more yet to say.

“You can stamp all the sparks to come out there before their fire spreads, or throw a fork in the road and hope they stay on their side, out of the way, but there will always be more. One choice leads to the need for more. One change multiplies into a million. It won’t go back to how it was, no matter what paths you now take. What used to be, isn't how it can ever be again. The cage is opened, and what was inside has already run free.”

It listened and didn’t refute, for it knew that it was true. But there was still something else I wondered. I saw the stories of the past, and where those stories split in two. Our world still bathed in the flames' rich light, and another world quietly waiting in shadow, its sparks subdued… lain dormant, but not extinguished forever.

“When you’ve changed the order once, inaction becomes a decision as much as interference. So if a new spark one day reignites from those old ashes, and calls out to you, either way you are responsible. What choice will you make next time?”

But it didn’t yet have an answer to give.

I was struck instead with a strange sensation. As the first light of dawn trickled over the water and even as the seabirds began their raucous calls, and beyond them the bustling noise of the waking city, an eerie silence filled my head. Solitude.

Like an evening wind, it was gone.

Somewhere out there, a lonely god was taking a break from an ancient vigil. But I knew it wouldn't be gone forever. The life of a mortal would pass in the blink of its eye, and as soon as my time ran out, I knew it would return to its post. It was not a position I would envy, but it was one I could now begin to understand.

I was finally alone.

But no, not truly, not in the way of the Observer.

For when the voice left my head, I still had others to talk to. I had a life that though fleeting, was my own to make the most of.

And I hoped that one day, somewhere, and in some way, the Observer could find what it was longing for, too.

~~~