Chapter 10
In which Tamashii joins Elias in some light reading
TAMASHII
As a child, I used to visit the Great Library often. In fact, even when I was an adult, whenever I was bored or depressed, it used to cheer me up to go and visit the library. I think Elias must feel the same way, because I always seemed to see him there.
"Hey there," I said. "The style of speech of these younger generations," Elias commented, "Clearly your mother taught you to speak thus. The proper address is, 'Hello again, Elias! How kind of you to let me come.' Or something along those lines." I responded with, "The manners of the older generations. Always correcting based on past grammatical traditions. Wasn't the point of proper speech to make others feel welcome? In way are you doing this if you cling to past traditions instead of accepting that Common gradually evolves, and at least respecting the way people speak it has changed." A long tense awkward moment followed, in which Elias considered that Common no longer uses commas for extended groups of adjectives. Then a snicker followed, followed closely by a a chuckle and a guffaw. Elias collected himself, "Yes, I suppose that is true. In any case, I suppose you have a book in mind?"
While many people instead went over to Crystal Mirror rental, I much preferred the library to movies, even though our family did indeed watch a great deal of those as well. When I got older, it got harder to read, but still I liked how books had unique ideas, while many of the movies of the earlier periods had more or less been tapped out because of issues of marketability. They totally missed the point! Here you had a medium perfect for creating dreamlike imagery, and you instead wasted it on stupid boy-meets-girl stories and movies with a lot of explosions. But with books, you could technically write anything you wanted. For example, I could say write now that while I was explaining the merits of books over movies, Elias's hand began to glow with a bright pink flame as he explained that he had discovered a new power. He didn't, but that's beside the point. With a film, they would have to resort to expensive compositing effects. But I only used regular words to do this.
Elias and I had different tastes in books to start with. When I first came to the Great Library, I was reading children's books, and then being a prodigy, I moved up to novels. Lately, I had gotten bored with novels for much the same reason as many films didn't interest me (seriously, stop repeating the same tropes and create some interesting stories), and had started to read more fantasy and science fiction. But today, I decided it was time to read something else.
The Great Library has books of magic, but as a Soulfire, I couldn't read those without an interesting experience. Psionics and magic are two different things, and even sorcery and alchemy were incompatible with conventional magic. Most books of magic were... let's say, difficult reading. Think queasiness, unconsciousness, or just inability to remember what you just read. Regular people would typically distinguish themselves from talentless hacks by being able to continue after several tries. But people like me with a different affinity of magic simply had a lifelong learning impediment with regards to magic. This ruled out the entire Magic/Sorcery (MAG) section. Now, I could learn psionic magic from the Mysteries (MYS) section, not to be convinced with the mystery novels section, but unfortunately that section was lumped together with writings authored by Cthulhu. I didn't feel like going mad if I picked up the wrong book.
That just left THM, OS, S, and BLU. BLU was blueprints (typically models that a talented engineer or alchemist could use to make something), OS was oversized, S was sometimes abbreviated SCR for (you guessed it) scrolls, and THM was for thaumaturgy (clerical books). Mystery books could make you insane, books of magic were often protected by runes. What about books of thaumaturgy? Well, for actually, anyone could read them, and probably anyone could use thaumaturgy regardless of affinity. This was because thaumaturgy wasn't really magic but more like prayers. Your own affinity shouldn't matter here because you are requesting outside help from a higher power. But, actually real masters of thaumaturgy were incredibly rare. While these books wouldn't hurt me to read (they would hurt Lilith though), most people who weren't prophets or something couldn't actually use these prayers except under miraculous circumstances. Mom couldn't read any books of magic, thaumaturgy included. She had what was called a Major Effect, a condition where a curse, blessing, antimagic, or words to a powerful spell prevented retention of other magic. But having my own Soulfire power be a curse, this led me to wisely instead choose a nonfiction book. "I'll pick..." I paused while deciding, looking through books on that shelf, "this one!" I pulled out a book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains because the cover looked interesting. The book talked something I didn't understand at all. It talked about the dumbing down of society as a result of searching on the internet, how social media and memes made people argue about stupid things and post silly cat pictures, about the GIFT theory, and so on. I just had one question, "What is the internet?"
Elias had to reference other books for the answer to that one, because it was ancient history. After an hour of reading, it was time for Elias to leave. He had seen everything. But when he tried to walk off, I kinda grabbed him and forced him to explain everything. "All right, I'll tell you," Elias began massive exposition, "Thousands of years ago, cellphones and computers weren't like what you see today. They weren't run by runes, they didn't directly yield answers based on direct questions. You weren't asking God the question, and having him show the answer as it happened. You instead had a web page run through person-to-person connections with a lot of hacking, extra pages (since they didn't really know what you want), distracted searching and time wasted on videos and images, and a great deal of drama." I still didn't understand, so he demonstrated by grabbing my phone, "Show us what the internet looks like." The phone lit up with runes, and God immediately showed a webpage, and a user vainly trying to search for information only to get a close but not exact search. Elias said, "Words like internet and cellphone is appropriately named. You are inside a space that is connected to many things, but unlike a direct search, more often you wound up wasting massive amounts of time, being caught in the net or a prison cell, so to speak. More direct was Alexa, but..." He asked the phone to show that, and I got to see how Alexa claimed Jesus was only a mythological character and not an actual historical person (Mom had met the guy, and even had him cook her some eggs), and another showed a person asking Alexa if they were spying on them and I got to see from the device they asked all the to the person listening at the other end.
Elias then followed up with several thousand horror stories, most of which involved Reddit or 4Chan. My eyes went from concerned to horrified to temporarily traumatized. I later wouldn't remember most of his explanation, remembering only the context surrounding it. To this day, I only remember being shocked beyond imagining.
GOD
As Elias explained the horrors of social networking, memories flashed back to the other guy named Elias. You probably know him as Elijah. They couldn't be more different. Not because this Elias is unrighteous, but he's just so calm and bookish. The Elijah I knew was very troubled for most of his life.
Let's go back a bit. The Ancient Earth was a very turbulent place to live. There were all manner of high tech weapons, they were a lot of political protests and angry people largely because very few people knew me. They had devices much like these so-called smartphones, but they were constantly staring into them. They were usually desperate for money, as they were constantly struggling to pay off fees. In this environment, there was also harsh class competition, as some people were living in mud huts while others lived in the closest thing to skyscrapers that existed in this timeline.
Not that the Hebrews were totally the ones living in mud huts. There was just a great deal of technological inequality, because the people who were in charge of science convinced people in lower classes that they could build such things because they had the power of the gods. In actuality, this was somewhat true, only it was because I allowed them to be prosperous for a time that they were able to do this. The Hebrews had devices of their own as a blessing from God, as I assured them of several blessings. They would always have some way, either through miracle or science, to have a fertile land whenever they occupied it while their land would turn into a desert if others tried to rule over it, for weapons of destruction to turn against their enemies (such as a missile system that blew up things like nukes in midflight, to name one such effect), and they always had a land filled with good things and clean water to drink from a well. Their enemies drank from wells that were filled with arsenic, but I gave them living water. The Hebrew people might look uncivilized though, because their works were in balance with nature, while those of their rivals were technology based on power. The Hebrews developed for knowledge and defense, never for power. Like the light side of the Force.
While all of this was going on, Elijah challenged the priests of the day. The story was adapted to fit more ancient mindset, as later, people understood this technology about as well as Tamashii understood the internet. So it was set up as some sort of altar scene. But the actual event played out more as a competition between technology and the power of thaumaturgy. Back then, as now, only prophets had thaumaturgy. This was before Jesus offered the gift to work miracles to virtually anyone who believed.
Elijah put them to the test. "Your technology, your gods, against the God who created all things. I apologize, God, for putting you also to the test." The challenge caught the attention of local social media, and went viral. A group of service technicians responsible for the national satellite coverage responded and word was sent to Elijah arranging a meeting time and place. It was difficult to reach Elijah because he was technologically illiterate, but they managed to send a snail mail letter that reached his address. He showed up and was offered to name the challenge. The service technicians asked him, "Name your challenge! For our technology can do anything!" And seemed true. They had managed to sync the 8@ΔL server (pronounced "Baal", this was the equivalent of Alexa today) to the weather using advanced cloud seeding and other weather technology, to food delivery systems, and even to systems that could modulate the sun and moon. Oh sure, they told the public the Earth was round and that the sun and moon were distant, but they knew as well as the Hebrews that both were within Earth's atmosphere and thus able to be controlled. Neither were their satellites actually in space, they were blimps and weather balloons. It was a smokescreen of lies and half-truths. It was an impressive-looking power that could seemingly do anything in the natural world, but it wasn't unassailable. God however, existed outside the Yggdrasil, the visible "solar sytem" reality. This weather system could seemingly maintain perfect weather, so he said, "As the Lord God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word." Then he walked away for awhile, leaving his challengers dumbfounded. They could not produce any rain due to some sort of interference. Nor could their surveillance devices send any data to locate him, in order to force him to make rain. All this time, Elijah drank water from a brook near a ditch, and received food from ravens. I don't mean he ate ravens. I mean the ravens brought him bread and meat. Yes, really. Eventually though, the river dried up and he had to move to another country because there was no rain within the country for years.
Oh sure, the weather forecasts claimed this day or that day would be days when it would rain. But they would be wrong again and again. Just like snow forecasts for Virginia in 2023. The people began to distill water in order to survive.
Elijah went to an old widow named Zarephath. She gave him water, but when she asked for bread she said, “I don’t have any bread - only a handful of flour in a jar and a little olive oil in a jug. I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it - and die.” Instead, Elijah told her that as long as the drought lasted, she would have enough bread and enough oil. And she did. Day after day, there was enough for her, Elijah, and her son. But eventually, he became ill and died. She wanted to blame him for killing her son, but Elijah cried out to God, "Lord my God, let this boy's life return to him!" And God performed a miracle. Life was restored.
Elijah returned to the city, after having been gone for three years from the country and an additional six months from when the drought dried up the brook. The technological leaders wanted to kill him, but as far as regular people were concerned, Elijah was trending. He had clout. They called him an influencer. Elijah was unconcerned with such things, but it became increasingly obvious that his rivals were simply posers like people from TikTok that we're supposed to care what latest thing they are up to. They had no real power. These service technicians said, "I think this drought was a fluke. You have no power any more than us. Give another challenge, and we will prove that your God cannot do it." Elijah shrugged, "Very well, kill two cattle and place them on a platform. With your state-of-the-art devices, you will direct heat to the area and burn your sacrifice, and I will do the same to mine using prayers." A similar story is in Journey to the West between Taoism and Buddhism. But I digress. In theory what Elijah asked was possible given their connectivity, they could simply refract the sun's light at a target. But before even the drought began, I had arranged for their satellites to permanently fail due to a DdoS attack. I could have also hit it with an EMP or simply erased it. But I thought hacking was a lot more fun. It hadn't been operational for years, and despite a full team of experts, it never would be again. I got to see them frantically trying to debug bad code and reprogram the satellites to do their whims. As soon as they saved the changes however, the program reverted to previous save. Elijah laughed as we watched them fiddle with no effect on the systems, "Maybe you should try turning it off and turning it on again?" These satellites were up in the atmosphere, it wasn't as simple as pulling a plug out. But they tried to reset their satellites by signal. Instead, the devices shut down completely and fell to the ground as a molten scrap of metal. "Is that your god? A cheap bit of man-made metal? I don't know much about these advanced technologies, as we are simple Hebrews. But, if you'll permit me, I'd like to show you what God can do," Elijah said.
Elijah commanded that the bull be made soaking wet from the water that had been distilled. And he prayed to me, and the energy of thaumaturgy emanated from his prayer. And I decided to answer it. The bull at his plaform was burned, and with that sacrifice I brought a torrent of rain, enough to make up for the years of drought. These idiots who trusted the science were now standing soaked while rain continued to fall.
Not that science itself is a bad thing. Now and then I and my followers used technology in order to spread teachings to distant people. Irrigation brings water to areas where one land has more than it wants, and another needs it. Medicine heals people so I don't have to deal with a nation or cripples or lepers. It's when people make it a god that the problem starts.
In any case, these technological leaders were pissed. They ordered their groupies to chase after Elijah and kill him. It appeared that Elijah had been betrayed. It appeared that everyone had turned away from God. Elijah became depressed, and hiding in the wilderness while they sought his life, he said, "I have had enough, Lord. Take my life, I am no better than my ancestors." He cried himself to sleep.
Elijah was not a powerful man, he was not a confident man, he was just a man who had faith in me. And so I appeared to him in a dream and said, Arise and eat. When he woke up, he found a cake baked on hot coals near him. There was a jar of water near him. He drank and ate but the jar slipped out of his hands and broke. And so I appeared to him in a dream and said, Arise and eat, for the journey is too much for you. There in the same spot was an identical cake (only this one was decorated with nuts and rose petals) and the water jug was whole and full as if it had never fallen. He traveled forty days to Mount Horeb, a mountain that survived from Ancient Earth to the modern world, despite geographic shifts and ice rims changing all other landmasses. How? Well, you may know this mountain by another name. Kunlun. This is a area of land that immortals who learned my ways came to live, it's an area that I moved at will to serve my purposes. It was in Ancient Earth now, but unlike the Temple Mount where massive amounts of unsightly sacrifices took place, this was a mountain where I found it comfortable to talk to humans. Not that I needed to, but because they needed a place where they could see me in my awesome power, just as Moses had sometime earlier. Most maps fail to pin down where Sinai or Horeb are, precisely because I move it around. When Moses encountered it, it was in the outskirts of Egypt. But when Elijah went to Horeb, it was near Israel. Other times, it was in Ancient China.
In any case, Elijah climbed the mountain and hid in a cave. I asked him, What are you doing here, Elijah? Elijah explained, "I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too." I told him to go outside so I could hear him better. Outside, a wind powerful enough to tear the mountains apart passed by. But my heart wasn't in it, and Elijah lived. An earthquake powerful enough to shatter the rocks happened. But my heart wasn't in it, and Elijah lived. Flames hot enough to turn the mountain into lava came next. But my heart wasn't in it, and Elijah lived. I asked him, What are you doing here, Elijah? Elijah explained, "I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too." I rolled my eyes, and told him to go back and stand up for Israel. I told have that there were still plenty of people who didn't bow to the influence of those who sought Elijah's life, and that I would appoint people to help get rid of his enemies. And they did. Elisha in particular became his successor after he died, and I appointed many prophets after him, though none had faith as great as him (until Jesus came). But these prophets did foretell the coming of the future Messiah.
