After witnessing a suicide and knowing there was no afterlife, X tried to grant humans some of the abstract, eternal existence letters have - -angering many of the rest of the alphabet, who have now had to stop their debate because the first human to survive after death has intruded on their meeting.
Each section of this story is told from the perspective of one of the letters.
A's story is here and B's here. C talks here. Here is D. E's version of events was here. F was here. Also, G, H spokehere. Then I, then J . Click here for k, and here for L.
Today's story is, of course, from M:
Meaning
what? Tell me L, tell me others, what
does that mean? ‘Gods create themselves?’ Are we all to bow now to X? Are
we to worship him, let him dictate what happens? Are we to subjugate ourselves
to him and take orders and let him rule? Tell me, L, what does that mean? Gods create themselves. It is
meaningless: for there to be a god, there must be someone to worship and I will
not bow to X, or to any letter. Or any person!
Woman: Stop your meandering. Come here. Come look at
me. Tell me, how you came to be here. Tell us where you come from and what
brought you to this life –
… Yes, L, others, I say life because it is our life
and though you now judge it harshly for eons it has been sufficient for you to
live this way and not everyone wants it differently. A taste of sunshine and
mortality and you wish it were always so, but not me!
Not me.
… tell me, then, woman: What path brought you here?
“Where is
David?”
Forget him, woman.
“I cannot.”
He is not here.
“He must be.”
You say that because you believed, because you
believed that there waited for you beyond death something else, something
other, something you believed was better, something that made being mortal mean something.
But there is not. Was not, at least, until you.
“David died
believing.”
He believed in a thing that did not exist when he
died.
“I must find
him.”
You cannot.
“If my soul is
eternal then his is, too.”
That is not…
Hold, a moment. A minute.
If
my soul is eternal then his is, too.
What… what paths did you take to get here, woman?
“Diana.”
Diana.
“I died.”
We know that.
“I died and
then was here.”
We know that.
“There was
nothing in between. I took no path to get here.
I closed my eyes one last time, listening to David’s record, and then I
awoke here.”
Did you hear that? Others! Stop your reverie. Pull
yourself close. You flicker in and out, you drift away, you scowl – A, I see
you! Hold!-- We debate what we do not know. We are no better than their scholars,
their priests, who endlessly philosophize about what comes next without having
any idea of whether what they say is the truth, only we, we talk about what
comes before and what is without knowing what has come before and what is. If my soul is eternal then his is, too,
she said, and we must think on that.
Must!
We must know: did X create this?
We have been talking, talking talking talking, about
what X did, but we do not know what X did.
I was ready to side with you, A. I was ready to cast you out, X, even if L is
right and we cannot cast you out. I was ready to do so and may still. But I
hold my vote because we do not know.
If
my soul is eternal.
Did X create the soul?
Or did he simply open a door for it?
Woman! Diana! You must tell us! You must tell us
everything you remember, not just of lying down in your bed not just of waking
up here, you must think, think think
think, your memory
Memories!
Must guide us, must help us determine what has
happened in order to decide what must happen.
What fools decide without knowing?
“I will tell
you…”
Good.
“But you must
help me find David.”
Well!
And if we can’t?
2 comments:
I do believe that "M" just cast the first vote to abstain.
Keep the header up. You never know when someone new will jump into the story.
Doing without knowing... sounds like an eXtrovert to me.
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