Short story: The Best of All Possible Worlds

[alexxkay]

Congratulations! You are living in the best of all possible worlds. Regrettably, you are not living in the best of all possible times. This message is my apology.

You may think of me as an Angel, assisting God in the implementation of His divine plan of Creation. Or, since I know that in addition to being a Christian, you are a science fiction reader, you may prefer to think of me as a time traveler from a far-future Utopia, engaged in work ensuring that utopia comes about. Neither of these is quite true, but they should be useful metaphors for you.

In what you would designate the year 7230, the Final Time War concludes, ushering in a golden age of justice, peace, and prosperity, which endures for tens of thousands of years. You, of course, will not be there to see it, though perhaps your descendants will, or at least descendants of people you know. This is, I do not doubt, painful to you, but it is necessary.

There is a classic riddle in Christian thought: "Can God create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it?" Much ink has been spilled over this ultimately nonsensical question. But that is because there is a valid and important question hidden behind it. Does God have any limits whatsoever? And the answer to that is yes. At least for the God I work for. The two major categories of limit can be thought of as physics and logic. God (and his agents) cannot break the laws of physics (though we do know of a great many more clever loopholes than people in your time do). And God cannot violate the laws of logic, cannot make A equal not-A. All of which may seem like a digression, but is central to my point.

God desires the existence of a just and harmonious society, a "Heaven on Earth", if you will. But even God cannot simply will such a society into existence. Societies are made of people and, like people, begin life with very little knowledge, and must learn as they grow. Rewards and punishments, good examples and bad, constant reinforcement – all these are a part of learning, and all these take time.

To be precise, they take until the year 7230. That's the best we can do. The first Utopia didn't happen until the mid-ten-thousands, but once it was well established, we angels managed to push the establishment date further and further back, by exploring various historical options. Our progress slowed as we neared the year 8000, and eventually reached a halt in the 73rd century.

This is what I mean by saying that you live in the best of all possible worlds. Your timeline is the one which is on the shortest possible path to Utopia, the one which gets there quickest. This may not be apparent to you, as, in the short term, it often seems like there is no progress being made, or even that society is sliding backwards. But there are many lessons which must be taught, and most of them must be taught multiple times to sink in. But trust me, we have made things literally as easy for you as is possible. Perhaps I should provide some examples…

It is a cliché in science fiction that time travelers will (or at least should) attempt to kill Adolf Hitler. Indeed, shortly after the most recent invention of time travel, a great number of time travelers attempted just that, causing no end of trouble for us angels of later, more enlightened periods, who had to invest great efforts into keeping Hitler alive. You see, we had already established that World War Two had to happen. There were many reasons for this, not least to show the consequences of the disastrously unkind treaties enforced at the conclusion of World War One. And World War Two had to be horrific enough to be a memorable lesson. Nonetheless, we minimized that damage, by pre-emptively eliminating all of the competitors to Hitler for leadership of Fascist Germany. Each of these other potential leaders were far more focused and competent, fought smarter and harder, and caused vastly more damage. Some of them even won! The sociological reasons that caused World War Two were solidly in place well before Adolf Hitler entered politics. Germany's descent into fascism was a foregone conclusion. Our intervention assured that the fascist leader was an incompetent madman, in order to minimize the resulting damage.

Speaking of inevitable descents into fascism, there's the case of the United States in your own lifetime. As with Germany in the early 20^th century, the USA in the early 21^st had to descend to fascism. In this case, no war was required, as the COVID pandemic provided a gruesome enough example of the consequences. So, again, we found a supremely incompetent person to become the leader of the fascists to minimize the damage involved.

COVID itself was carefully engineered. Even in your own time, some experts accurately described it as "a starter pandemic". It was infectious, but not too infectious, deadly, but not too deadly. We made COVID in order to prepare the world for the much worse pandemics that are inevitable as global transportation gets cheaper. Most of the world understood the danger posed, and learned quickly how to effectively combat a pandemic. Your own country, regrettably, did not respond well, and was ravaged by the disease. This, too, was necessary, for the few countries who failed so spectacularly demonstrated to the rest of the world how great the stakes truly were.

I could go on and on, but time is brief. It has been said that all utopias have pyramids of skulls in the background if you look for them. In our case, the skulls are "the entirety of human history up until 7230 A.D." To know that Heaven exists, in part because of your suffering, does not make that suffering any less harsh. Your suffering, though necessary, remains unfair to you, the only injustice remaining in our society. It is our original sin. We have done a great deal to minimize it, and it is agony to us that we cannot do more. For this failure, I apologize.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no afterlife. The only Heaven is the living Heaven of our future, and it is logically impossible to bring you there. At least, there is no afterlife in the conventional sense. But it has also been said that no one truly dies as long as they are remembered. And you will never be forgotten. Scholars and amateur enthusiasts pore over every moment of your life, and debate their meanings. You may think of yourself as an ordinary, unimportant person in the grand scheme of things. You are not. You are one of the Founders, one of those who came before. Each one of you, from greatest emperor to lowliest peasant, was a unique and integral part of the creation of our Heaven. Each one of you is remembered, is loved, by literally thousands of us. I love you. We love you.

It is because I love you that I give you this apology, beamed directly into your brain in the last moments of your life. I hope it gives you comfort. We remember.

Comments

[cvirtue]

I really like this.

[alexxkay]

<3

[jducoeur]

Marvelously well-framed. May I link to this?

[alexxkay]

Please do!

[pamelina]

Lovely! Illustrates systems dynamics. "But there are many lessons which must be taught, and most of them must be taught multiple times to sink in."

Hmm... the parallels to Hitler with Trump are less scary to me than the ones with Hitler and Putin. Except, is it deliberately optimistic to conclude that Covid rid us of rightwing Trumpian fascism without the necessity of another war?