“I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter VI

Robin Maxwell, a historian, screenwriter and bestselling novelist, is writing a novella 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 6 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

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Chapter 6

Helen yelped when he’d bored a tiny channel through her skull to insert the implant into her brain.

“Oh stop. It doesn’t hurt.”

“It actually does…a little.”

“Well if you want to come with me…”

“Just shut up and get it over with.”

The neural implants alone would have conveyed them into his globe game, but the perfect re-creation of the Trekkie “Transporter” in the spare bedroom was one of his only nerdy self-indulgences.

There were not that many genius moments in a writer’s life, he knew, so he was proud of the original literary contrivance and the entirely non-functional teleportation device in the corner, as well as that single ubiquitous command to the Starship Enterprise’s engineer, Mr. Scott. People just loved saying it. The icing on the cake? Sim scientists the world over had forever after racked their brains attempting to figure out how to “dematerialize” human beings, “beam” them to a target and “rematerialize” them without scrambling their molecules like poor Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly.”

“Done,” Ed announced. He held Helen’s eye with a seriousness of purpose that they’d never shared before. And for once she thankfully, silently, spared him the sarcasm. “We’re going to get this done,” he told her. “With time to spare.”

“I believe you,” she said. “I believe in you, Ed.”

It was one of the nicest things she’d ever said to him.

“We just have to make one quick stop before we start. Come on.” He took her hand and led her to the Transporter’s circular platform. Stand here, and I’ll stand here.”

“Seriously?” she said.

“Indulge me. On ‘one’, you tap once.” He pointed to the spot on her temple where the implant was lodged. A last shared smile. “Three, two, one…”

*****

It was Helen’s first time inside the game. Ed watched her stare in wonder at the expanse of aqua blue ocean and the pearly white beach. Behind them was a palatial beach resort, its lawn, gardens and Olympic-sized swimming pool. He was thinking, a little sadly, that she’d changed out of those yellow leggings. She would have looked right at home under the fringe of palms.

“You know,” she said, closing her eyes and sucking in lungsful of air, “It smells really nice here.”

“Yeah,” Ed said, “sea air is one of the good ones. Deep forests are nice. And mountain meadows in the Spring.”

She grinned at him crookedly. “And now you’re a poet.”

“Come on. We gotta get going.”

“If we’re in such a hurry why did you ‘beam us down’ here?”

“Something I have to take care of now, or I won’t be able to concentrate properly on the other stuff.”

“Yes, Sir,” she said, snapping to attention, then breathing deeply one more time, knowing the rest of their mission would not offer such delightful surroundings.

He turned to face the sprawling edifice. Mar-A-Fuckin’-Lago. He’d had fun designing this epitome of obscene opulence, but now it stood in all its tasteless glory mocking Ed with its very existence. Every time he laid eyes on Donald J. Trump Ed would ask himself, ‘Why did I do it? What possessed me to code this loathsome creature into existence?’ Helen was right. He had been bingeing on those pretty red-with-white-polka-dot mushroom when he’d done it. And yes, the shrooms had indeed, at an earlier time, inspired the mythical Saint Nick. Really ridiculous what the western world had done to the sweet-hearted image and the holiday. Christ, he’d done it to celebrate the birthday of one of his finest Sapiens, and the masses had sullied it beyond redemption with rampant consumer-antics and stupid candy canes. Santa’s only saving grace had diminished to giving kids a bit of magic for a few years before they were forever ruined.

No, “The Donald” – who had actually become as well known and popular as Claus and Jesus – had zero redeeming social value. He couldn’t even be considered a Cosmic Joke. But all this MVE (MultiVerse Entire) extermination business had been sprung on Ed so quickly that he hadn’t had time to write an elegant deletion code, one that would tie up all loose ends in the game. Ridding the world of “the rump” (Ed hated to say or even think the name too often) would be no small task, as the avatar’s Manipulation Rules, Goal Rules, Meta Rules and playable items had become hideously woven into every system of the simulation the whole Earth over. The social fabric of America had been shredded nearly beyond repair.

The embarrassment for Ed was unendurable.

A too-simple termination code could be disastrous in the most – and least – likely of circumstances. But Ed had no choice. He had to do something, and the time was now. He was confident of finding the MVE saboteur before The Suck was initiated, but if he was completely honest, it was going to be a nail-biter. He just desperately wanted to know that once everything was saved, his globe game’s modern history would have a fresh start without the odious presence of “45.”

There were of course other dangerous twats out there, but they at least had interesting histories and idiosyncrasies. Ed had decided, since coding Mao, to let the Chinese play out their scenario the way they wanted. After all, Ed had given them their “5,000-Year Battle Plan,” and that resulted in endlessly interesting plotlines (from the Cultural Revolution on the downside, to seriously delicious cuisine on the up) without Ed having to lift a finger.

But the American ass-wipe needed to be written out of the story altogether.

“Okay, we’re going in,” Ed told Helen. He was briefly tempted to rewrite her skinny black slacks into the yellow Capris, but he knew he’d catch shit for it, and left well enough alone. He tapped the new coordinates on the implant’s keypad below his ear…and they were gone.

*****

“Hey Melania…” Cheeto Man said, pacing in front of his Great Wall of Monitors.

Ed, standing invisibly with Helen in the Mar-a-Lago Master Suite, always regretted that this trainwreck of an avatar had forever corrupted the image of one of Earth’s most beloved junk foods.

“Come over here and suck my…”

“You suck yourself,” Melania said, not bothering to look up from the Versaille knock-off canopy bed where she was poring over Vogue Paris with herself on the cover. “Your mushroom dick is long enough to reach your own mouth, I thought.” Her beautifully nipped-and-tucked face cracked into an amused sneer.

The rump’s disappointment appeared short-lived to Ed, as though the man hadn’t believed she’d actually consent to the act in the first place.

“I was perfectly good Slovenia Geisha,’” she complained for the millionth time, “and look what happens. I am now most hated woman in world.”

“You were for a while,” he conceded absently, turning back to ogle the blond weather woman’s breasts overspilling a skin-tight, deeply decolletage sheath on an eye-level screen. “Nobody thinks about you anymore.”

“Nice of you to say, pile of shit.”

“Sticks and stones, Melania,” he said with that brainless out-flapping of his hands. “Sticks and stones…”

“Oh Ed, please.” Helen pleaded. “I can’t stand this. I’m going to hurl in my mouth.”

“Just wait. At the end you’re going to love seeing the guy’s head explode.”

“That’s childish. Can’t you just uninstall him?”

“I can’t just write a single line of code. He…” Ed’s own head started to throb thinking about the damage this…this…whatever he was…

“You’re thinking ‘monstrosity,’ Helen piped in, doing that telepathy thing she did which alternately infuriated and delighted him.

Now Ed honed in on the implant’s cerebral keyboard, line after line of new code streaming out to encompass the great expanse of the “djtrump1.0 Github Repository.”

There’d been times when Ed had tried to place the blame on his mother. After all, it was her brain in the creature’s head. They’d had the same fight before, over Hitler. ‘You killed ten million of my sims!’ he’d shouted at her. But she wasn’t having any of it. ‘He was your creation, darling. You’re the one who gave him free will. If you hadn’t, he might have stayed Adolph Schicklgruber and a made his living as a second-rate watercolorist.’ It had hit a nerve with her then, and it had with the rump as well, so she punched back even harder. ‘Evolution. Mutation. And all those viruses you allow to proliferate in your game,’ Catherine wheedled, ‘and then you blame me.’ She was right of course.

Anyway, in a few moments, when it was all in place, Ed would reboot the miserable toad back onto the set of “Celebrity Apprentice,” his stupid red tie splattered with Big Mac grease stains and his suit jacket three sizes too small so that his belly threatened to pop its button. There was a live audience in the bleachers – jeering double-masked Blacks and Hispanics, the female Middle Eastern avatars in hajibs, with some turbaned Sikh men thrown in for good measure. If all went according to plan, at the precise moment the Emperor of Assholery would shout “You’re fired!” to his executive victim his head would erupt with thrilling photorealistic gore – gooey gray matter with a 6-foot diameter splat of blood.

“Ed,” Helen said, “why are you doing this now? Don’t you think you have bigger fish to fry?”

“He’s got to go. I really won’t be able to concentrate on the rest with this massive blunder still in play. Then it’ll take another second or two to do a tempus fugit retro roll-back. Re-set the clock, maybe six years…”

“You’re planning a global do-over?! Honey, get a grip.”

“Imagine how sweet it would all…”

“Ed! We’re running out of time!” Her top and bottom teeth clenched together on the last word.

“Almost there…” Ed was doing the terminal fine-tuning of the codes when a loud “Zeep! Zeep! ricocheted through his temporal implant. “Report,” he thought.

‘Yellowstone,” came the answer through his device.

“‘Yellowstone?’ Tsk, not now…” Ed replied, annoyed.

“I thought you said the network picked the series up for five more seasons,” Helen said to him.

“They did. It’s a ‘cash cow’ for the studio,” he said, shooting her a jaunty, I’m-making-a-‘funny’ grin. “Oh. Oh…” His face crumpled. “Oooh…” He fixed Helen in his gaze. “Not the show. The volcano.” He spoke aloud to the voice in the implant. “The Yellowstone Super-Volcano, you mean?”

“That one, yes,” The comm voice stated calmly in his head. “It is about to blow.”

“Fuuuck,” Ed moaned. What had he been thinking when he’d re-set the eruption cycle of the damn thing? 631 million years ago its planet-killing blast had been a lark. He’d been continent-building, rift-digging. He’d had a ball creating the Ring of Fire subduction zones all around the Pacific Rim. And the 6-mile deep underwater Marianas Trench. That one had given him goosebumps. All those crazy creatures he’d designed for it. Gigantic tube worms that fed off of volcanic heat. The fish with the silly overbite, a wicked set of teeth and a little phosphorescent lantern hanging over its head. Yes, he’d given North America a doozy of a volcano, but back then he hadn’t coded any Sapiens into the game yet. The big blow had taken out a bunch of mammoths, horses, bears, wolves and his all-time favorite – the goofy giant sloth. It just hadn’t crossed Ed’s mind that a re-set of the “super-V” for this particular week would have any repercussions. Truth be told, he’d forgotten all about it.

“You forgot about it,” Helen accused, unfairly peeping into his brain.

“Yes I did. And we have to go. Now.”

“What about him?” She jutted her chin at the monstrosity.

“He’ll have to wait.”

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since we got here.”

“C’mere,” he said and pulled her to him, taking the opportunity to give her butt a little squeeze before he in-sync-beamed them into northwest Wyoming.

*****

Under a sky roiling and grumbling with black and silver thunderheads, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder staring out on a near-future Hellscape. To Helen it was probably no more dramatic than Yellowstone’s 50-mile diameter caldera, bare earth with patches of trees surrounded by low, forest-covered hills, a regular looking lake and its knoblike “West Thumb” protrusion, all of it, Ed knew, created in the last three super (and not-so-super) volcanic eruptions. More unusual were the dozens of geysers and steam vents venting, boiling mud pools and scorching hot springs, and an eye-popping blue/green acid pond with its golden corona scattered below them.

Off to the north Old Faithful was getting ready to spew, park visitors waiting breathlessly on the boardwalk ranged around it.

“Where are all the animals?” Helen asked. “I thought there were, you know, buffalo herds? Wolves?”

“They always know when to take off.” Unlike the party of Park Rangers, Ed thought, who were now fishing what looked like a human foot out of the hot pool. There was no end to the stupidity of tourists. He checked the count-down display. “We’ve got time. 2 minutes and 24 seconds.”

With his temporal device he scanned what was beneath the ground, 360 degrees around, and just a few miles below them – a reservoir of lava (itself five miles deep) fed by a massive plume of molten rock welling up from hundreds of miles below. Two magma domes, one north and one west of the lake, underlaid many of the hydrothermal features, causing the entire caldera – but particularly the crust above the magma domes – to surge upward periodically and alarmingly, then subside again.

He made a 56.5 GB dump of this data into Helen’s implant.

“Oh my god!” she cried. “That magma chamber is…” she was helpless to find the descriptors.

“Twenty-four hundred and fifty cubic miles of material.”

“Jesus, Ed.”

“Magma,” she whispered, awestruck. Helen was rarely awestruck. “Wow, look at it down there. Powerful. Sexy. Just the way it moves, slow and undulating. Even the word… ‘Magma,’ she intoned, hypnotized by what she was seeing.

Her reverie was fractured when the ground, with impeccable timing, began to rumple under their feet.

“Once it starts, it’ll erupt for months. The lava flows will be pretty much confined to the caldera. But the pyroclastic ash…that’s another story.” He could see by the way her eyes were shifting under her closed lids that she was reading the internal data with horrified fascination.

“Only a third of it will shoot into the upper atmosphere, I gather, but it’ll be enough to start a global Winter.”

“And the rest of it…” Ed was starting to feel kind of guilty. “…a mixture of, you know, splintered rock and glass, would be ejected miles into the air and kind of…bury Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Colorado under three feet of volcanic ash. The Rockies, too.”

“Kind of?” Helen said to him, wrested from her reverie.

“And blanket the Midwest. Just a few inches there. Some of it would…” he could hardly bear to say it, “…make it as far as both coasts, depending on the wind. It’ll kill life on every continent and acidify the oceans…”

“All sea life, too?”

 “Kaput.”

“Everything gone? Penguins and puffins? I love puffins… and baby goats in pajamas.” Adorable baby animals of every kind, Helen thought. Even – she had to admit – baby humans were cute. But only till they were four-ish. After that they were little horrors. Why any Sapiens would ever want those noisy, whining, ungrateful poop-factories, those little bags of germs running around after them, she’d never understand. “Wait a minute. Hang on here.” Her tone was outright accusatory now. You planned this.”

 “Of course I did. These things are always cyclical. Yellowstone is 200 years overdue for a big blow-out. But not to worry. I can de-program it and…”

“You forgot about it, didn’t you?”

He looked sheepish. “A lot was going on…”

“You can’t keep using that excuse, Ed! ‘A sloppy designer is a dangerous designer.’ Isn’t that what you always tell me?”

“You know you’re sounding very judgmental, sweetheart.”

 “No wonder everything’s running amok down here.” Her face was set in a scowl.

“Well, I’m fixing it. Right now.” He began inputting the DELETE code.

But Ed had cut it a little too close for comfort. The caldera in front of them was beginning to steam and heave. Uplift, they both thought at the same moment. Small rivulets of lava were popping up all over the surface, and within seconds becoming not-so-small riverlettes, burping with melted rock in a golden-orange color, starting to coalesce into a small molten lake.

 “Almost there,” he told her. “Almost…”

But he’d run out of time.

With a heaven-ripping roar, a great fountain of lava, actually a mountain of it – at its uppermost region already transmogrifying into volcanic ash – rose up like a nightmare in front of their eyes. Steam vents all around them became great gushing geysers. Boiling grey mud splattered in every direction.

 “Honey…” she said, grabbing his arm.

 “No worries.” Ed’s features creased with acute concentration. “Done!” he barked, then exhaled with relief.

As violently as it had erupted, the mountain of lava and ash started falling back to earth in a massive orange avalanche. The mud and steam began descending, too.

“Squeaked that one out just under the wire,” Helen said, trying for nonchalance. “I think it got you hard, mister.”

“Maybe a little.” He smiled jauntily.

“You are such a dope. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Then all at once, and to their great astonishment, Ed’s triumphant geological reprieve simply ceased in “mid-pixel.” Worse, it appeared that everything else in his game had also just…frozen. The breeze rustling their hair went still. Birdsong halted. The sky’s roiling dark clouds stopped roiling. The first sharp crack of thunder – normally followed by gut-punching booms growing to a furious crescendo – went instantly silent.

“Did you do that?” Helen asked guardedly.

“No, I did not.” His mind was racing a jillion miles a second.

Then from all around them came a stentorian voice declaiming a single word. A name.

 “Ehuuud!”

So unexpected was the utterance that Helen, in a very un-Helen-like move, flew into Ed’s arms. He flung his arms around her in what appeared to be a brave, manly embrace, but he was in truth clutching her with as much terror as she was him.

“Who’s there?!” he shouted the moment his paralyzed vocal cords unstuck.

“Ehuuuud!”

“What?!!! Who’s there?! Name yourself, avatar!” he called into the chaotic Yellowstone Caldera.

Ed knew every one of his key players – their functions, profiles, psychology, responsibilities and backstories – by sight and by sound. And he had no earthly idea who this voice belonged to.

Trying to regain the high ground he called out with his most almighty delivery, “I AM YOUR CREATOR, DUDE!”

“Good one,” Helen whispered into his ear. She was still pressed close to him, but trying to gather her wits and regain her chill demeaner.

“Encouraged, he added “Show yourself! Now!”

Nothing happened. No one appeared for, like, 90 really uncomfortable seconds. And then, on the hilltop close to where he and Helen stood, out of an extremely clichéd white mist, stepped a female simulon.

She was – Ed recognized all at once – “Mother Nature,” from a series of 1970s margarine commercials and the identity Shan-Alla’s younger sister had adopted —a “lesser god”, who in all of her forms was prone to ire, outrage and even violence.

Even though as she stood before them no longer (as Ed had tweaked her fifty years before) a middle-aged white woman of the TV ads — her poofy helmet hairdo transmogrified into a wild black mane and her once demure long-sleeved chiffon gown now encasing a libidinous, fully-packed gym body — there was no doubt it was her.

 

In each of the commercials, having been conned into thinking the margarine was actually her own ‘pure, sweet butter,’ the actress had boomed out – to an accompaniment of either lightning and thunderbolts or a wild herd of stampeding elephants – “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!” The punchline was so popular that it had actually become a meme… with its own extensive line of tee-shirts.

“Don’t say it,” Ed ordered the woman before she could open her mouth.

“Say what?” she asked slyly.

“Do not fuck with me…”

“Don’t you sound serious?” she shot back with attitude.

“He is serious,” Helen said, pulling out of Ed’s arms and taking the measure of this B-actress suffering from delusions of grandeur who was even now daring to give her the beady eye.

“’Mother Nature’…” Ed began, as she sashayed toward them, her large shapely breasts swaying dangerously.

The avatar cut him off. “Call me ‘Gaia.’”

Okay, Ed thought. The name was a fancier affectation than he’d given her for the vegetable oil spread. More 21st century. More new-age-y. And the current look was pretty unnerving. He was never intimidated by his own codes, but this one was not exactly his. It had only been her inferiority complex — all the lesser gods suffered from it to some degree — that had allowed Ed to use her in his game in the first place.

“So this is your work?” he asked her, sweeping his arm around at the catastrophe stuck in mid-eruption. This creature had actually managed to PAUSE his game. Clearly, somewhere during the last 50 Earth years, Shan’s sister had taken back some of her powers and decided to rule the elements for real. It was shaking him up, he had to admit, and he wondered how he could have missed this. He had a very short window before real hell broke loose in the MultiVerse. Places to go and people to see. It was clear that this fem goddess embodiment-on-steroids didn’t suffer fools lightly. On the other hand, it wouldn’t do to grovel.

“Look, I’d love to chat…”

“Chat?” was her scorching riposte.

“State Visit then?” Ed had almost instantly lost his patience with her. “Seriously, lady, you need to explain what you’re doing to my game.”

“Everyone needed to be reminded that nature trumps politics,” she announced as though she’d been practicing the answer in front of a mirror for hundreds of years.

“No argument there.”

“You, my dear man, have been asleep at the wheel. Out to lunch. Woolgathering without the sheep!”

“So I’ve already been reminded.” He didn’t dare look at Helen.

Within and around the outline of the avatar’s body, moving images began to appear. Lightning bolts shot from her head and fingertips. A fire tornado tearing through a forest of giant trees replaced her facial features. Her upraised arms broadcast buildings collapsing into rubble as the ground shook in violent quakes. The shriek of a Cat 5 hurricane issued from her mouth as its 50-foot storm surge slammed into a coastal town, obliterating it in seconds. Her belly was a wind-driven frozen wasteland. The skirt of her gown was fucking Pakistan still underwater.

“Sorry,” Gaia said, shifting back into her ad agency format. “I’m just fed up. We gave your simulons a magnificent world.”

“We?” Helen scoffed. The nerve of the woman, she thought.

 “I feel you. Honestly,” Ed said, “and I’m sorry I’ve been a slacker. But right now we’ve got a prob…”

“… and look what they’ve done with it. Well, I won’t have it. I thought I’d start with this.” Gaia gazed out over the caldera, its steam plumes frozen in mid-spout, the magma a static orange mountain 300 feet high. She raised her hand in the direction of the volcanic discharge. “With just a flick of my little…”

“You realize what she’s doing,” Helen said quietly to Ed. “Power grab. She’s jockeying for a condo at The Arms.”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you have your eruption,” Ed told the self-proclaimed Earth Goddess. “It’s shit timing, and I really don’t have time to explain.”

“Oh la-dee-dah,” she sang sarcastically. “I really don’t have time to ex…”

With that, Gaia suddenly stiffened. An e-timeout. As frozen as Elsa of Arendelle (another of Ed’s movies that he really loved).

“Sorry, bitch,” Helen muttered, extremely pleased.

“It wasn’t her fault, Helen. I had it coming.”

 In the next instant the globe game that Mother Nature erroneously believed she controlled came back online under Ed’s original algorithms that overrode hers. Everything began moving. With an earsplitting roar the lava mountain collapsed back into the Yellowstone Caldera. Steam plumes were sucked back into their vents, and all the uplifted magma domes lowered back into the ground, once again as flat as a school of flounders.

With an extra tap under his ear Ed even got a small herd of bison to meander back onto the scene.

“Don’t say it,” Ed said to Helen.

“I’m not saying a word. Have I said a single word?”

“Thank you.” He touched the keypad under his ear, and Helen put her finger on hers. “On three… two… one…”

And then they were gone.

 

 

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www.RobinMaxwell-GodsOfAtlantos.com