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 Chapter 1 of I Am Your Creator Dude.
Enjoy, and stay tuned for more chapters to come. 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
Chapter 1
“Helen, come here and look at this.”
She padded in with bare feet slapping the floor. Looked over his shoulder at his work station’s holograph.
“How long was that meal?” Ed asked.
“Oh, eating didn’t take long. It was the wine. You passed out after 2 ½ glasses.”
“That’s not true. I don’t pass out on wine.”
“I’m not arguing with you. Why do you care how long you were out?”
“Because look.” He wiggled his index finger at the large spinning blue, green and white planetary game sphere floating before them. Well, lots of it had suddenly gone brown.
“Oh,” Helen said, moving closer to examine the floating globe. “What happened to those forests?”
“This is what I’m saying.”
“We just had some dinner and a little too much wine. You weren’t out for that long.”
“I know. When I left…” He gazed at the spinning world, “the whole top of Eurasia was green and frozen. Look at this.” He showed her the gasses read-out at the equator. “Amazonia is now producing carbon and spewing it into the atmosphere.”
“That can’t be possible,” Helen objected. “Didn’t you create it as one of the great carbon sinks on the planet?”
“Of course I did. That, and the boreal forest of North America and Siberia. Siberia is 100° in some places. And it’s melting. It’s fucking melting!”
“Didn’t you put it on pause when you came in to dinner?”
“I don’t know. I thought I did. Obviously I didn’t, but Helen, this happened too fast.”
“Bring up more detail,” she said.
“Where?”
“I don’t care. Britain. China. The US.”
He pulled up the city he’d named “Washington.” The American governmental Simulons had eventually settled on it as their capitol. They’d tried nine other cities first. It was one of the meaningful choices he’d given his players. The overview of D.C. looked all right. All major buildings and attractions intact. But wait… “Do you see what I see?” Ed asked.
“Is that smoke in the air?”
“As far as the eye can see in every direction.”
“Coming from…?” Helen was beginning to sound alarmed.
Ed checked the weather read-out for the continent “You’re not gonna believe this. It’s coming from the other Washington.”
“That’s impossible.”
You keep saying that, but I’m showing you…” He was starting to feel annoyed “… It is possible. It’s happening.”
But she was silent, head tilted in toward the globe’s northern hemisphere. “Ed,” she said ominously.
“What?”
“What happened to the glaciers? Here and here? And here? Where is the Greenland ice sheet?”
“Okay, okay. First of all, sit down.”
“I’ll sit down if you sit down.”
“I’m sitting.” He sat in his office chair, the one with all the cool adjustments so he never suffered from back pain.
I’m sitting,” Helen said, pulling over the chair from her workstation.
Ed brought up some gov-data from The States. He liked the abbreviation he had whispered in the “Founding Fathers” ears. Helen had never liked the wigs he made them wear. She thought they looked stupid. “Well, they were stupid, Helen,” he had told her. “They were just a bunch of rich white dudes from Britain,” he explained, then defended them in the next sentence. “They weren’t all bad. Hey, they picked up the gauntlet I threw down – the “Democracy Play.” That had given him hope, but as a whole the Americans were first and foremost beholden to their ridiculous religions and ideologies. Of course he had to take some of the blame for that. It’d taken a lot of imagination to cook up all those crazy-assed Gods and Goddesses and half-baked myths to explain the unexplainable. He’d had a little too much fun with the conspiracy theories. Devil weed! But you could tell a lot about a Simulon by the ones they chose. The ones they grew rabid about. He really hated the players who’d chosen Puritanism. It was one of the few things Helen and he agreed on in the entire game.
She actually thought he’d made Earth too beautiful. Two fecund. Too diverse. It’s not going to be much of a game, is it? she liked to say. Who would be ignorant enough to destroy this world? On purpose? She liked it when Ed threw in the natural disasters. The comet falling on a two-mile thick ice sheet covering the entire North American continent 12,800 years ago. The first advanced civilization back then had acted like dumb shits and caused the end of Ed’s last Ice Age a little over a thousand years later, but plenty of survivors picked up where the idiots had left off. The Sumerians and Egyptians had roared back into the game first. Helen’s all time favorites were the great waves. The bigger the better. Nothing showed the little worms down there how insignificant they really were than a thousand-foot wall of water coming at them. Like the entire ocean was a big bowl that just kind of tipped over. The volcanoes were a favorite of Ed’s, mostly because he loved magma. It was so dramatic. So gorgeous. So versatile. It could shoot straight up. It could blanket a volcanic mountain like a blazing orange cape. Slither in sinewy streams across the land and into the ocean sending up billowing clouds that turned to rain and that…”
“Helen. You’re not going to believe this.”
“You keep saying that, Ed. You don’t have to convince me anymore. Something went terribly wrong with this Simulation during dinner… and you passing out.”
“Will you stop saying that I passed out?”
“So what will I not believe?”
“You know that troll-haired goon I made President of The States?”
“How could I forget him? I never realized what a sick sense of humor you had till you came up with that guy.”
Well…” Ed was scanning the read-out. “He’d already started wreaking havoc when you called me in to dinner. Other stuff, too. A thousand year drought. The racial mess. A whole lot more mass shootings. Families starting to hate each other…”
“You knew that, and you didn’t put it on pause?” she accused.
“Will you stop?! People make mistakes. Anyway, he just took the country by the back of the neck and shook it like some mangy old dog.”
“People let him?”
“Let him? A bunch of them encouraged him. A bunch of them loved him. Oh, hang on. It sounds like…the next major war is going to be over water.”
“Will you give me a break? That planet is 70% water.”
“How could somebody like that do some much damage so quickly?” Ed asked himself.
“And nobody assassinated him?” Helen wanted to know.
Ed shook his head.
“Pussies.”
“Well, after all, I hadn’t programmed him for assassination. Meanwhile the guy just made mincemeat out of everybody. Holy crap… He pulled out of the Paris Accord!”
“The American Simulons allowed him to do that?!”
“Well, I did do a little stacking of the deck,” Ed said with a guilty smirk.
“The Russian?”
“And the Brit with moldy hay hair.”
“I love that guy,” Helen said. “He may be one of your funniest creations.”
“Oh my God,” Ed muttered. “This is like… wait a minute, did I write code for this?”
“What? What?!”
“Over in China…”
“Not China again. Everything happens in China. You really do overuse it.”
“No, this time it was natural selection. One of my viruses…”
“Ed?” She leaned over and got up in his face. “You just said it. It was your virus. You designed it.”
“Okay, Helen, back off.” He waited till she did. “I did design it, but I didn’t program it to proliferate like it did.”
“Did they?”
“Can’t tell by the data. It’ll take a bit of analysis. But it killed a lot of people. 600,000 just while we ate dessert. Wow. It’s a nasty bug.” Ed was reading. “Now it’s got a mind of its own. Mutating like crazy.”
“Eh-ed!”
“Well I’m sorry. Wait a minute. Why am I sorry? It’s my game.”
“Yes it is. It’s your game, and you let it get all fucked up.”
“Maybe that was my plan all along.” He gave her that neh, neh, neh, neh face.
“No it wasn’t,” Helen said. “You wouldn’t have made it so beautiful.”
He hung his head. “It wasn’t my plan all along. I never counted on sapiens sapiens – one of my finest creations, you gotta admit – being such fuckwits. I’d give them something good, and they’d play with it a while – the artists were a big success – but then the first meaningful choices I gave them – WHAM!! They’d dive straight into the abyss. But this mess…” He heaved a huge depressed sigh.
“OK, honey. It’s up to you. Stay awake all night trying to fix the unfixable…”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m exaggerating? Right. See this huge island in the middle of the Pacific? It’s made of plastic. Miami regularly goes underwater when the sun is shining. The tundra has melted into a swamp.” She pointed to an atmospheric read-out. “Methane has already started belching out of the ground in the Arctic. Eight billion goofballs…”
“Goofballs I created,” Ed said, feeling humiliated.
“Like you said, we all make mistakes. Those Simulons are like insane lemmings running over a cliff committing mass suicide!”
“You know that lemmings thing is a myth.”
“One of your best.” Helen smiled sexily. “Or just put an end to this failed experiment and come to bed. Let Mama make it all better.”
“I don’t know.”
“Termination is just one little click away…”
He pulled her onto his lap. “Let’s negotiate.”
“Oh, you want to negotiate?”
“How about if I let Mama make it all right first…?”
Helen gave one of her phony surprised looks. “So you get the treatment first…?”
“Right.” He was praying she’d go along with it
“Question,” she said slowly. “Will you pause it, or leave it running?”
“I think I’ll leave it running.”
“Sadist!”
Helen laughed. She wiggled a little in his lap. He was sure she could feel how hard he’d just gotten.
“Then you can shut it down after.”
“So you want countless gazillions of my Simulons to get bleeped out of existence?”
“You could just do the sapiens sapiens. I love those little tardigrades. Tiny piggies…”
“I don’t know. It’s one of my favorite games.”
“That’s true. But I can see that the possibility of ending it is giving you a huge boner…isn’t it, Ed.”
He made the herculean effort to stand and simultaneously lift Helen up in his arms like a superhero without throwing his back out. When he succeeded he gave her his most wicked grin.
“That’s right,” he said. “It’s good to be the King.”
Image by Luke Hancock
Please visit Robin’s website:
www.RobinMaxwell-GodsOfAtlantos.com
Astronomers have spotted an incredibly bright flash of light beaming halfway across the universe. The strange light was estimated to throw off more light than one quadrillion Suns, and in an ironic twist came from one of the darkest objects possible.
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is an observatory that watches large swathes of the sky at once, keeping an eye out for transient events – pulsing lights like supernovae or moving objects like comets. And on February 11 this year it spotted an absolute doozy, as an incredibly bright spot of light flared up in an area where there’d been nothing the night before. Astronomers roughly calculated that it was brighter than a quadrillion Suns.
Over the next few days, telescopes from all over the world were trained on the light, studying it in X-ray, ultraviolet, optical and radio, to find out what could possibly be throwing off that much energy. And in a new study, scientists report the most likely candidate.
https://newatlas.com/space/flash-light-quadrillion-suns-black-hole-star/
GRB 221009A also known as Swift J1913.1+1946 was an unusually bright and long-lasting gamma-ray burst (GRB) detected by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory on October 9, 2022. The gamma-ray burst lasted for more than ten hours since detection. This is one of the closest gamma-ray bursts and is among the most energetic and luminous bursts. This allows researchers to study it in detail. GRB 221009A came from the constellation of Sagitta and occurred an estimated 1.9 billion years ago.
The burst oversaturated the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory in China recorded five thousand high-energy photons during the event, including an 18-TeV photon that, if it originates from the event, would be considered anomalous and would point to new physics such as axions or decaying sterile neutrinos. The size of Earth’s ionosphere was detectibly altered for several hours by the burst. Some astronomers referred to the burst as the “brightest of all time”, or “BOAT”.
The afterglow at X-ray energies is a hundreds of times brighter than seen before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRB_221009A
Yes, I’ve read about this extra-bright gamma ray burst. There are so many mysteries in the Uni-Multiverse, like this one, I hope to explore in later chapters of “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”
Robin Maxwell is fabulous!
everybody needs a sidekick!
Thank you, Kim! More cosmic surprises in store for Ed and Helen.
From one of the tardigrades: “I hope he lets us live until the end of this book!”
It may not be up to Ed! There are Multiverse-sized events at work. But Ed likes making Helen happy, so he’ll try his very best.
Meanwhile, Anne, the Sagittarian, notes way, way, way too many coincidences stacking up for the last 6-8 months for them to “just be coincidences.”
Hi Anne the Sagittarian. I assume you’re referring to what’s happening on Ed’s game and what’s happening on our planet? I am a “word synchronicity” freak. hynchronicity in all its forms will be a theme in later chapters.
Talk about coincidences! The moment after I answered your comment, I opened today’s online version of the Los Angeles Times, and on the front page was an article about coincidences and a psychologist who is not only studying them (he’s written a couple of books about them. I hope you can open it. If not I’ll try to send you a link that you can. https://enewspaper.latimes.com/desktop/latimes/default.aspx?token=42e23962a5d74614be16bae3d62d13e7&utm_id=78602&sfmc_id=2552367&edid=ebb9f783-2230-4d74-a7bf-da60500c4b29
I don’t generally read fiction and I’ve not read any fantasy, so this is a departure for me. I’m liking it so far! I enjoyed the patter between Ed and Helen, I’m picturing them looking somewhat close to my age, probably younger. I got what’s going on to a degree, so now I’m curious as to what’s going to happen next. Not sure yet what is real and what isn’t, so this will be interesting. I do like the similarities to what’s going on here on Earth 1 (if this is, indeed, Earth 1).
I would appreciate an email to let me know when the next chapter is up.
Hey Marianne. Don’t think the website will post reminders for new chapters, but I will let you know in an announcement. Chapter 3 is now live, and 4 is on the way.
It’s out of this world! Congratulations! Can hardly wait to read on!
Incredible job, Robin! So excited to see this universe you’re crafting expand even further 😉
Well, there you go! Everyone seems to think this story is fiction. Funny how often that occurs.
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.
Wow. I’m totally hooked! Can’t wait to read more.