Brutalist Stories #19

We need God, that was the conclusion. For all that we’ve done, all the progress that we’ve made, there was still that feeling that we as humans could not get over; are we related to something infinite?

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re here today to try and understand the results of the meta-cognition experiments that have been taking place over the last year. What those results mean, and how we are to proceed.” The chairperson says as I sit in the lab and watch the live stream.

Leaders from all over the world gathered to hear our results. I had always hoped for something else, for some element of reason, but over the decades, the centuries, the millennia we’ve never quite been able to get over ourselves. We’re terrified and we’re lost and we cannot rationally consider there is no real reason, for all this.

“As you are already fully aware, the anomaly was detected approximately 48 hours ago, and we have had a team of our best working to interpret the results. At this time we are unsure of its meaning, whether it is of alien origin or perhaps the answer to what we have been looking for.”

There’s some gasps, just at the thought, the idea that we’re here and that we’ve not gone up and found something above the clouds, but we’ve pushed through and found something on the other side of this fabric we know as reality.

“Our team are working around the clock to decipher the exact origin of the anomaly. Of course, if it is within our own universe, this is still a monumental discovery, but I believe I speak for all of us when I say I hope that it is not.”

There has to be some confused irony to all this, to the idea that science has facilitated first contact with what these people are calling God. I smile at the billions out there across all the planets and everything we’ve given them, and the fact that they still kneel and pray. Where will it end?

“This is a momentous occasion, that I do not need to highlight enough.”

He’s getting all high and mighty now. Where else does he think all this came from? Out and out and out, interstellar travel brought nothing, so we began to search laterally. ‘Let’s go through,’ they said. To what? To find something, to find someone out there that might be listening to our little whispers through the cosmos? To try and know we’re not alone? Well, it would seem something is listening now, but what?

I get up and walk over to the monitor that is signaling the anomaly, a faint blip in the quantum realm that reached out a hand, a voice, a something to our hyper-charged, neo-evolutionary, meta-cognition minds.

“What are you?” I whisper to the monitor and run my fingers slowly over the screen. A miracle? What we need? What we’ve been looking for? The answer or just another question? The beginning or the end?

“The end.” A voice whispers, and there’s a moment there, where it lets me, us, contemplate that, infinitesimal, but what more do we need? We can recognize it, and I smile as the lights go out.

Building inspiration: CONCRETE BRUTAL AXIAL 036-205 @36recyclab