Robin Maxwell, a historian, screenwriter and bestselling novelist, is writing a full-length novel for grahamhancock.com that we will be releasing as a serial publication — chapter by chapter — periodically.
With tongue firmly in cheek, her story peels back the veil of existence and looks behind the scenes of our current tumultuous times and the strange, precious multiverse we inhabit. At the center of it all, Ed and Helen are cosmic coders who discover that Ed’s Earth Simulation has gone completely out of control. But there is worse brewing. Much, much worse…
Below is the CODA (the last chapter) of I Am Your Creator Dude.
Enjoy, and make sure to start from Chapter I if you are only just joining this adventure. Read:
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter I
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter II
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter III
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter IV
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter V
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter VI
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter VII
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter VIII
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter IX
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter X
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: CODA (the last chapter)
“I just read your brilliant ‘I Am Your Creator, Dude!’ Your story is great! Funny, clever, thought-provoking and entertaining.” – Graham Hancock
“Many times I have pondered what’s it all about. Spaceship Earth and The Human Condition. You have touched on my reoccurring conclusion that “Earth” is entertainment for the eternal creator. That infinite eternity is a long time so the creator of creators and creations manifest art projects such as Earth. “The Eternal Must Be Entertained” I suspect Channel Earth is one of a zillion creative projects.” – T Crowe Semler
CODA
Ed hadn’t been on a shrink’s couch since his teenage years. He was prone to mommy problems, control issues and one or two Oedipal outbreaks. Nobody ever judged him for it, what with Catherine, the “Brain Lady” for a mother. Therefore his sessions with Dr. Freud had only made things worse. This shrink’s couch – beautiful green tufted silk situated near the Indian Gods’ waterfall and shimmering pool – might as well have been a bed of nails. Doctor Ganesha, cross-legged and taking notes with three of his hands, was scratching his head with his trunk, frustrated and losing patience with his patient.
Ganesha’s roommate Shiva danced past with a little wave, but Ed wasn’t talking to him. His misogynistic little speech about Earth women had been the last nail in the coffin with Helen.
“You’re making no progress with your depression, Ed.”
“I’m completely surrounded by evidence of my failures,” Ed snarled with irritation. “I can’t go anywhere without running into Helen and Hawking. Can you believe it? They’ve gotten their two intertwined ‘H’s’ carved into their front door like Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn! Every time I ride the Infini-Train, they’re on it. Sometimes, he’s a cute, pre-disease 21-year-old university student with a mop of dark hair and a sexy English accent on their way to have drinks with the Physics Men. Sometimes, he’s back in his chair, as twisted as an oak root, but there Helen is curled up in his lap with her arms around him, straightening his tie. I can’t stand it.”
“But maybe there is another obstacle in your path to serenity?” The elephant-faced god-come-psychiatrist murmured.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ed answered stubbornly for the hundredth time.
Ganesha was nothing if he wasn’t persistent.
“Well, for one thing, Trump is leading in the polls,” Ed griped, “and that’s after actually shooting an old woman on Fifth Avenue. He’s going to win in 2024. That teenage girl and her mother who drove across state lines to get the kid an abortion are both on trial for murder.”
“There is always a way around these things.”
“Really? There’s a huge online black market for bundles of stolen checks. All these guys do is wash the ink off a filched check and fill it in the way they want it. They’re using it to crash poor schmucks’ bank accounts! Kid Chaos is at it again. My sims already have A.I. that can create a deep-fake voice that says whatever its ‘user’ wants, employing just three seconds of sampled audio. Three seconds.”
“But TikTok is making those ‘creatives” put a ‘stamp’ on those deep-fakirs’ chats. They will never get away with it.”
Ed just shook his head at the elephant god’s naivete.
“Ew, sounding a bit hostile, Ed.” Ganesha bristled at Ed’s judginess. “Feeling a bit sorry for yourself?”
“Maybe I am. The whole germ-y world has written off an entire goddamn generation of elders. ‘Who needs ‘em? They were ready to go anyway.’”
“Do you think I had it easy?” a prickly Ganesh interjected. I was just guarding the door to my mother’s bathroom when my jealous father chopped off my head and gave me this one instead.” He blew a raspberry through his trunk.
“You want to talk violence?” Ed was sparring now. “There were two mass shootings in two different American cities 90 seconds apart!”
Ganesha looked peeved. “The only reason I don’t have a good come-back for that one is that your ‘Middle East’ is already a pile of ashes. Before it, you know…” Ganesha made a “BLAM!” gesture with his hands “…it was the international shitshow of all times.”
Ed dropped his head into his hands. “I’ve given democracy ‘free will’ for too long to reprogram now.” Just saying those two hideous words made Ed’s sphincter snap shut. Fucking Trump. The man – yes, Ed’s original creation – had done more to mutilate the Earth Sim than anybody since Genghis Khan.”
“Some people claim he’s the…”
“He’s not the fucking Anti-Christ! No such thing. But now the guy’s insane. Him and half the population of the world.”
“You love to exaggerate,” Ganesha chided him.
Ed just stared at his shrink with disgust. “Gotta go, he said, standing up from the green silk couch.
“We still have ten more minutes.”
But Ed was gone through the Indian’s door before it could hit him on the way out. He went next door and walked through his messy apartment – he’d really let it go since Helen left – to his office workstation. There was the Earth Sim globe hanging above his desk, unmoving, mocking him. He’d PAUSED the game as soon as he’d returned from his disastrous visit, as he couldn’t take the chance of allowing any more time to pass or evolution to take place. Not even a little. After World War III had erupted in the not-very-Holyland, Ed hadn’t even figured out how to clean up the radioactive remnants of the Middle East. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to. All those people on both sides had been out of their minds – fighting each other for 4,000 years! Yet he couldn’t bring himself to DELETE, as Helen had suggested.
He’d been too depressed to do anything, actually paralyzed, some days catatonic. Once in a while, he’d get a bright idea. An event in Earth’s history when a slight shift, a “road not taken in a yellow wood”, might actually be taken to change the direction of things. He’d go back down into the Earth Sim – he’d probably done it fifty times – looking for the right time and place in history to revert to and start over.
He’d tried at the start of the computer age, but so much of the damage had already been done. He went further back to Einstein solving E = mc2, and further back to Marie Curie – poor bitch who discovered radium and didn’t know till she was nearly dead that it was poison. Lister figuring out that doctors needed to wash their hands between delivering women’s babies was a seminal moment in science. So was the Industrial Revolution. He stopped the apple from falling in front of Isaac Newton’s eyes. He’d kept Caterina da Vinci from getting raped by her rich, arrogant village neighbor so she could die a childless woman and never give birth to Leonardo.
He gave Genghis Khan the flu so the Mongolian conqueror never invaded western civilization. He stopped the Chinese from inventing gunpowder. He made sure that Jesus never came back from his seventeen “lost years” traveling in India, so he never died on the cross in Jerusalem. He let Eve win the argument with Adam over eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. He decided not to write the Old Testament. And with Jesus missing in action, who needed the New?
But nothing worked. Just arresting human inventions and behaviors was doing nothing to prevent the species from becoming the murderous shitheels they were in the 21st century.
Ed slumped in his chair, gulping down his second glass of wine – yeah, fuck you Helen! But he wouldn’t pass out, he told himself now. He had work to do. He had to get serious about finding the historical set-point. He’d been cogitating on a radical solution, but it was going to take all of his strength. He plopped into his chair, and with a few puffed yoga breaths, he disappeared into the game.
*****
Ed had cold-conscioused himself into a sandy strip of coastline along the steaming Gabonese jungle, and onto a movie set, Greta Gerwig directing. Sony was finally shooting a decent Tarzan movie – a love story from the woman’s point of view, “JANE.” Set in 1907, Jennifer Lawrence had been cast as the studious paleoanthropologist searching West Africa for the “missing link” in human evolution. She’d been expecting to find fossil evidence but instead, to her astonishment, found an entire living missing link tribe who were called Mangani. Hunky Sam Heugan from “Outlander” was playing the orphaned English Lord Greystoke, who had been adopted by the tribe and grew up thinking he was an ape.
Jane Goodall (truly one of Ed’s most irreproachable of human beings – one Helen could cast not a single aspersion on) had been hired as the “ape consultant.” Every filmmaker since the first silent film in 1918 and onward had shown Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mangani as chimps or Gorillas. Goodall had announced to the filmmakers in the first story meeting.“This will not stand,”
In reality, Burroughs’s imagined creations (Ed, sadly, couldn’t take credit) were the closest literary device describing the actual historical missing link. These simians who stood upright but also brachiated through the trees, had actual vocal cords, and the ability to speak in a rudimentary, humanlike language. It made Ed wonder if there’s been some glitch in the novelist’s coding where some pure genomic science had bled through into his consciousness.
But Ed really couldn’t stay on location, much as he wanted to. He shot himself one country over to the east, the Republic of Congo, deep in the rainforest at the headwaters of the Ogowe River. He stood there in a clearing between the towering canopy trees of mahogany, ebony, limba and wenge, down below in the thick underbrush of Coffea canephora, Scaphopetalum thonneri and Tabernaemontana penduliflora (had he had fun coming up with those names!). But there was no time for self-congratulation.
He was here on business.
Without having to look very far, here in front of him was a troupe of chimpanzees lounging in their leafy bower, eating, napping, mothers suckling their young. Adorable babies wrestling with each other in the branches. A young male chimp was picking the nits from the fur of the dominant male, hoping for some grace when he got older. But that grace would never materialize. In less than a year, like all solo males, he’d be chased from the family to fend for himself, and only come back to challenge the bull for a remote chance to breed with one of his cousins. If he was exceedingly lucky, he would trounce the dominant male and take his place in the highest bower to rule the girls.
Here it was. The place where the crucial mutation had occurred – a change in the nucleotide sequence of a “short region” of one female’s genome. In a strand of the real Eve’s DNA, a “point mutation,” an insertion of one nucleotide that replaced another, had occurred, from which further and random mutations of millions of years would evolve to the Homo sapiens sapiens brain. That story had fooled ‘em (except for the Christian far right) for almost 300 years.
And then there was Crick, who relied heavily on DNA research from Franklin, a female colleague, but took all the credit – Damn, Shiva had been right! – who’d theorized “Panspermia” – asteroids and comets with DNA taking a ride through space and seeding Earth (and how many other planets?) with life that eventually evolved.
One of his finest creations, Charles Darwin, who’d written a great book on the subject, had convinced everybody – except for some science-fiction writers who believed aliens had intervened in human evolution, from “2001: A Space Odyssey” to “Prometheus” – but nobody really took them seriously.
Never mind. This was more important than a movie. What!!! He was actually thinking such a thing?
He was. This was the most monumental moment of Ed’s career. He kind of wished Helen could be here watching. Gods, he hated how much he cared about what she thought!
Anyway, he was where he needed to be. It was the “when” he needed to re-program. On his forearm, he pulled up the Earth Sim’s embedded OS and displayed its calendar. 7.6 million years in the past would give him plenty of wiggle room. Trying to not overthink what he was about to do, he reset the clock.
Instantly, he was there. Here. Back then. The rainforest looked pretty much the same, with some variations in vegetation, but nothing to write home about. And in the lower canopy was a band of chimps, looking exactly the same as they had in the present. Same noshing on bugs and leaves and figs, same kids tussling, infants feeding from the sadly sagging breasts of their mothers. Even the poor young male grooming the bull and popping the mites from his head into his mouth, never realizing it was all in vain.
He materialized his mother’s Brain App and it floated there in front of his face. He felt a bit squirmy, knowing what he was about to do. And guilty. All that potential… But look where this brain in this body had taken the Earth Sim. Of course his own decisions were to blame, but this code – above all – was the culprit. The “housing” that contained the tragic flaw. The planetary bad seed.
Concentrating on his forearm read-out, he selected the file for the Human Brain…and tapped “DELETE.” Of course, nothing whatsoever changed in the jungle bower around him. All the modifications, mutations and advances were far, far in the future. Even Ed had no idea how the species would pan out. He’d come visit occasionally. Maybe in a couple of million years, descendants of this troupe might start using a long stick to pull ants out of an anthill. Tool use. Or maybe they’d have figured out how to arrange bamboo to build a better and stronger shelter. Maybe not. Maybe it would always be picking the nits out of old Groucho’s head for a tasty snack.
Ed was done here. Feeling not as bad as he’d expected, he reset his time read-out and zipped himself back to 2024 and the Gabon beach. He wasn’t leaving this jungle without visiting the site of what would have been the “JANE” movie set. He’d have to imagine feasting his eyes on Sam Heugan’s amazing chest and what would have been a stimulating conversation with Jane Goodall.
*****
Ed sat down in front of his workstation and stared at the blank space where, for so long, the Earth Sim had spun. Of course, he’d stored several copies of it in Shan-Alla’s Super Massive Cloud – an infinite network of remote servers scattered around the MultiVerse Entire. He’d let enough time pass so his heart – yes, he actually believed he had one – wasn’t hurting so badly. He’d chosen today, his 27 millionth birthday, to begin developing the new game.
He was actually very excited. He was doing it just to please himself this time. Not Helen. Not his mother. Not the Big Motherfucking Godheads.
He already had the physical globe picked out, and with a single tap, displayed it. It was a simulation of a simulation – so nobody could get hurt. Earth, 2023. All the continents and oceans in place. Top and bottom ice caps intact. Pristine environments and atmospheres. No people.
Taking a long, slow, deep inhalation, he searched the special archive he’d created for the source codes from his favorite films. This choice would be the first, but not the last to be entered into his “Movie World” game. Included were the films themselves, but also the development process all the way back to the book or magazine article (the “Intellectual Property”) from which it had originated, or the “Eureka! Moment” inside the screenwriter’s head, choice of directors, art directors, re-writers, casting, production, studio battles and PR roll-out were all there, too. There’d even be replays of stars swanning before their adoring public at glitzy Red Carpet Premiers.
Ed, of course, could step in at any time and insert himself in any of their shoes, or inhabit the mind of an actor in a particularly juicy scene, like Joaquin Phoenix’s aria on the steps in “Joker.” He could make love to the most beautiful and interesting women – and men and animals – in the world.
He could finally direct!
Ed was feeling a new, unfamiliar sensation filling his being.
Satisfaction.
He had learned from his mistakes and was going to get it right this time. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about what anybody in any universe thought of him. He was his own Creator, and game developer extraordinaire.
His fingers hovered above the choice in the film archive, drifting between “The Madness of King George” and Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet.” With the most contented exhalation Ed had, in his long existence, ever expelled, he CLICKED…
THE END(LESS)
Image by Luke Hancock
Please visit Robin’s website:
www.RobinMaxwell-GodsOfAtlantos.com
Some smart publisher is hopefully going to novelize this very original work.