by Paul Anlee
Perhaps that part of their strategy failed outright and Darian simply fled in defeat.
The thought inspired Him. He accelerated His attacks against Darak in Heaven and against Darya on the array element.
He threw even more of His consciousness into computing ever-stranger RAF fields to project against Darya and all four of Darak’s manifestations.
He all but ignored His own defenses, shifting replacement nodes into the battlegrounds as soon as an existing one showed any signs of damage.
Days passed in ever-intensifying battle.
His losses grew but such losses were to be expected and, besides, the tipping point toward victory was getting close. He could sense it. His enemies were retreating under the might of His righteous attacks.
His mind felt as great as all of Creation, as powerful and unfettered as the Chaos itself. He connected to the deplosion field and His awareness penetrated to the limits of reality and beyond.
He was one with the multiverse, now, with extant and latent realities. He suffused Himself with all possibilities and He crushed them all, forcing everything that was, everything that ever could be, into His Divine Vision.
His minds raced faster and faster, grew greater and greater, until He was everything and everywhere. He pulled His will from the Chaos and hurled it at His foes. Time itself slipped.
And, then, the fighting was over.
The distortions of reality that had been hurled against Him came to an abrupt end. With no fields to counter, no energies to neutralize, His defenses went silent. His RAF casts fell, unchallenged, upon empty space.
His enemies were vanquished!
Darak, Gabriel, the Aelu, and the strange Cybrid, were all gone from Heaven. Darya and her armies of battle-Cybrids, the Aelu, and the Esu Familiars had all been destroyed or had fled. Darian had escaped or was still trapped on the Alumitum. It didn’t matter which; he would die when reality collapsed.
Creation became quiet.
Peaceful.
No one was left to oppose His might.
Is it really done?—He wondered.
Have I won?
He reigned in His reality-altering fields and listened with all of His senses in case Darya and Darak had only retreated to regroup.
Nothing.
Their attacks were done. They were gone. Whether dead or escaped, He couldn’t tell. The fog of blindingly-fast shifts in reality and spacetime-distorting blasts of energy hid exactly when and how the fighting had ended.
I am victorious; that is all that matters.
The Gods who’d fought against Him had been vanquished. It didn’t matter whether they were dead or had fled.
Nothing would escape the deplosion field.
Nothing was left to oppose Him.
In the anticlimax of uncontested silence, an unaccustomed twinge of disappointment crept up on Him. It was then He realized Mirly and the part of Brother Stralasi that was his Familiar were no longer in Heaven’s Core, either.
He extended His senses throughout Heaven. They were nowhere to be found. Whether they’d been caught in the intense crossfire or pulled from Heaven by Darak, He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember.
No matter.
He realized His own People had also grown silent in the outside universe.
He surveyed the Realm and found the deplosion field had already strengthened to such an extent that starsteps, Cybrids, Angels, and power generators everywhere had failed, likely, hours earlier.
His People were dying, as the physical and chemical reality on which their own biology relied fell into disarray.
No matter.
He would repopulate Heaven with infinitely many more People than the universe had ever supported.
Over the following days, stars grew unstable as the forces of gravity weakened and atomic fusion fizzled. Black holes, even those massive ones in the centers of galaxies, shook with unrestrained energies as the laws of physics changed within them. Across the width of the universe, ultra-novas blossomed brighter than any light since the Big Bang.
As the Chaos flooded back into the universe, into all possible universes, matter fell apart in brilliant showers of photons. The universe flared and fell dark. Soon, all that was left was a single black hole floating in the middle of Nothing.
Sagittarius A*, once the center of the Milky Way, now stood at the center of Creation, alone except for the Deplosion Array that surrounded it like pearls on a necklace.
From outside of that to the end of eternity was infinite Nothing. The deplosion field had even forced the Chaos into quiescence. No more zero-point energy to feed virtual particles popping in and out of existence. No more struggle for new kinds of interactions, new kinds of matter, to evolve. Possibility was dead.
I am Supreme!—Alum rejoiced as He looked out on the nothingness that surrounded His Creation.
He turned off the Deplosion Array and let the Nothing wash up against the edge of Sagittarius A*.
The event horizon fell away, revealing Heaven.
As the vacuum of Nothing lapped against the Edge of Heaven, the Fires of Creation began forming new matter from the tamed energy of the Chaos.
Alum’s perfect universe grew.
His Creation was now the only Creation possible.
For now and forever, I will fill the cosmos with My Heaven.
He looked out upon the universe He had made.
And He saw that it was good.
49
“Does He believe it?”
“Completely.”
“I’m still not sure I agree that it was the proper solution.”
“You think we should have killed Him?”
“I think we could have.”
“But that would have left the Realm in disarray. And it would have left Heaven and its multitude of creatures alone.”
“No more alone than we are in this universe.”
“Sure, but unlike our universe, Alum’s Heaven was created; it was engineered. We evolved naturally through generation of trial and error. We can adapt. Could they have survived without His continued guidance?”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Darak answered.
Mirly watched in stunned amazement as Darak, Darya, and Darian, along with Stralasi in both human and Familiar form, bantered over the fate of her former home and the only Supreme Being she’d ever known.
Before today—she realized. Could any God ever be called Supreme again when there were so many of them?
Billions—Brother Stralasi had said. In another month, there will be trillions.
Mirly stood in a pressurized chamber in Primus, the oldest Deplosion Array element, now lying quiescent like all the rest, and listened to the four Gods (I’m in a chamber with four Gods!) argue.
She was having trouble following the conversation. Her mind kept following her eyes as they peered out the window to the stars outside.
I made it!—she realized. I made it outside of Heaven to the Greater Universe!
It wasn’t perfect like Heaven but it had its own stark beauty. And Stralasi had told her how big it was, how far away the nearest star really was.
“If you could shift a thousand kilometers every second of every day”, the Good Brother, now a God himself, had said. “It would still take you over a thousand years to go from here to there.”
Mirly thought she’d covered great distances during her journey from the Edge of Heaven to its Core but the size of the Greater Universe staggered her imagination.
Her journey had been grueling; she almost hadn’t survived the first part of it, let alone the fierce fighting between Alum and Darak at the end. The RAF fields and energy blasts had splashed off defensive shields and come dangerously close to where she and Stralasi had huddled in fear. Without even meaning to, she’d pulled him outside the walls and into the First Forest, where they’d waited for the end of the conflict.
When she’d realized Darak’s defeat might mean Stralasi’s death, she’d thought to hide him among the trees. In turn, S
tralasi had pledged to remove her to the safety of the outside universe should Darak be victorious.
She’d surprised herself by accepting.
She still didn’t understand how Stralasi could be simultaneously a man and a hovering matte-gray sphere, but he said everything would become clear in a few days. He’d set an enhanced lattice growing in her brain, promising her the gift of knowledge equal to her former Lord’s. The idea of that much understanding, and that much responsibility, terrified her.
“Well, I think it was the ideal solution,” Darian was saying. “Thank you, Brother Stralasi, for coming up with it.”
“Don’t look at me,” Stralasi protested. “I didn’t even recognize it as a suggestion at the time. It was just a question.”
“What would a universe with trillions of Gods look like?” Darak recalled. “A dangerous question, Brother.”
“Call me Ontro. I no longer feel like a monk of the Alumita.”
Darak cocked an eyebrow at the new God.
“Ha! Is that what we have to look forward to? Trillions upon trillions of new Gods with identity issues?”
“Alum was a multitude in and of Himself,” Darian answered. “We needed greater numbers to defeat Him.”
“But we didn’t defeat Him,” Darya pointed out. “We only jailed Him.”
“He jailed Himself,” Darian corrected. “Everything He expected to happen, happened.”
“Virtually,” Darak said.
“Sure,” Darian agreed. “It’s amazing what a billion or two God-minds all working together can accomplish. Feeding a completely convincing-looking deplosion of the multiverse into Alum’s mind through the hacked Alumitum link was a clean solution.”
“Alum withdrew into His very real Heaven voluntarily,” Stralasi added. “We were monitoring His thoughts. He was completely convinced of His victory.”
“And He will remain that way,” Darian said. “Forever.”
“Forever is a long time to promise,” Darak warned.
“It is. But in this case, I think it might hold,” Darian replied. “We pulled Heaven out of Sag A* and embedded it in the thinfinity of the Chaos.”
“Thinfinity?” Darya asked. “Your word?”
“An appropriate word,” Darian answered. “Heaven has a thin layer of the Chaos around it, but distance measurements are impossible without material reference and so it is, simultaneously, essentially infinite.” He smiled, pleased with his ingenuity. “Thinfinity.”
“All surrounded by a filter of our devising,” Stralasi added. “Alum expects the Chaos around Heaven to have the potential to create only more Heavenly matter. The filter makes the Chaos appear only as He expects it.”
“An eternal virtual jail, then?” Darak asked.
“Alum would have to guess at His imprisonment,” Darian said. “And He would have to do that without any evidence. There will be no clues coming from the walls of His jail. Heaven, floating in the infinite Chaos, will look exactly how He expects it to look. A perfect simulation, lasting forever.”
Darak relaxed. It was hard to believe the battle was over. The threat to all of existence had been defeated. He bowed his head, thinking of the millions of lives—Human, Cybrid, Aelu, Esu, Angel, Archangel—that had been lost in the battle with the Living God.
And the untold trillions more we saved.
When Alum withdrew His consciousness into Heaven, He’d left behind vacant CPPU machinery across the Realm. The billions of freshly-minted Gods quickly established new Partial AIs to continue basic maintenance functions on the ringworlds, planetary colonies, and asteroid habitats of the Realm.
They were offering to all citizens of the Realm, and to the peoples of the Six, the very same choice Darian had given them. The civilizations of the other known Gods had come as a surprise to the Realm but it didn’t take the new Gods long to decide to grant them full rights. They could decide their own fates and societal development.
Daily life and society was undergoing rapid change in the Realm. Freedom and knowledge, once won, was not easily contained. It desired to spread, to flourish.
The new Gods of the Realm agreed they would not restrict it artificially, believing that heavy handed restriction would be more irresponsible than opening themselves up to the possible dangers that came with their abilities.
The universe was infinite and the multiverse even more so. There was potential, and room enough, for an unlimited number of Gods.
Across the Realm, trillions upon trillions assented and began the process of enhancing their lattices to God-like capability. Trillions of others decided to remain as unenhanced humans or Cybrids or Angels or Aelu for the moment, preferring a simpler life and the stability of a familiar culture.
Some expected that each of the Gods would immediately lay claim to their own worlds or even to their own universes. The ancient assumption that with infinite power would come infinite greed and infinite ambition was a stubborn one.
But that sentiment lasted less than a second in the hearts and minds of the new Gods. Their power brought contentment and altruism. No longer needing anything for themselves, they turned to making their worlds better places for all life, including those who rejected godhood.
The universe lay before them, an infinite playground of possibility to be molded into beauty and astonishment. Even with what they knew, and they knew a great deal, there was still much to be learned and many places to be visited. They had life and new experience to be enjoyed.
“How will it all work out?” Stralasi asked.
“That, my dear friend, is unpredictable,” Darak answered.
—The End—
Thank you for reading this book. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll leave a review. For independent authors like me, reviews are the best way of telling others a book is worth reading.
Books by Paul Anlee
The Deplosion Series
The Reality Thief
Buy on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XSML7V5
The Reality Incursion
Buy on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074FH1J44
The Reality Rebellions
Buy on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078Q84W9G
The Reality Assertion
Other Publications
Friends in Foreign Places Omnibus Edition
(contains the Paul Anlee short story: Illegal Alien)
Buy on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/Omnibus-Friends-Places-Complete-Anthology-ebook/dp/B01LBDPVC6
Access these books through your local library or bookstore. Ask your librarian or retailer to order them through IngramSpark!
Points to Ponder
Book Club & Study Questions
The Deplosion series is intended
to be more than just a story. I hope it inspires thinking and exchange on a variety of philosophical, religious, scientific, and social issues. The following questions will help get you started. Additional discussion can be found on the Paul Anlee Facebook page, and on my science and philosophy blog at www.paulanlee.com. I encourage you to visit and to contribute your thoughts.
1) Darya is shocked to learn that her own Kathy Liang alter ego once decided to keep the laws of the Reality Assertion Field from her, even going so far as to alter her natural interests so she’d avoid the subject despite her interest in all other aspects of science. Is there any knowledge that is simply too dangerous for humans to explore? What about genetic engineering, nuclear technologies or artificial intelligence (in particular, super general artificial intelligence—SGAI)? Should scientists be free to follow their curiosity, providing their methods receive ethical oversight?
2) “Godhood” (the ability to create universes) could be a technology to which humans might one day aspire. Could you ever view a living being as a God? Why or why not? What capabilities or characteristics would you need to see in a being who claimed to be “God” before you considered them worthy of your wor
ship?
3) In writing this series, I made a serious attempt to create a “Heavenly” universe that would be close to perfection for all life in it. What is your idea of Heaven or a Heavenly universe? Do you believe that Heaven would be like Earth but a little bit better, or a place where every one of your idyllic wishes is fulfilled? How can a Heaven populated with other people fulfill everyone’s every wish?
Is there any distinction between common conceptions of Heaven and some video games where one (real) player gets to live out their every fantasy among an infinite number of (simulated/non-real) other players?
Prior to this book, I blogged about some of the strange (to me) ideas held by different religions about Heaven (https://www.paulanlee.com/2017/09/21/whats-your-idea-of-heaven/). “One of the strangest things I’ve ever read was written after the death of actor James Arness, famous for playing Marshal Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke” for 20 years. ‘Heaven’s a little safer now,’ the headline in The Daily Quarterly proclaimed.” I’ve heard similar pronouncements following the death of firemen, law enforcers, and soldiers. In your version of Heaven, is there any crime or danger, any need for law enforcement, fire, or other emergency rescue workers?
4) Compare and contrast Mirly’s view of Alum, the Living God, needing help with His concerns in the greater universe, with the Christian idea that “God is omniscient, omnipotent, and has a plan for us.” Does it make sense that an omnipotent force could need human help in a “war against evil”? If God is omniscient, omnipotent and has a Plan, why would anyone pray, and why would He respond to prayer?
5) Science fiction authors have been depicting different versions of battles in space since the beginning of the genre. Most such battles tend to be centered on ideas about ships in three-dimensional space and extrapolate largely from naval battles. In the Deplosion series, I tried to present a view that doesn’t rely on hulking monstrosities with large, easily-recognizable human crews. Do you think humans will ever make significant journeys into space with enormous, crewed vessels? Will we ever fight wars there?
