On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 196, of 240 so far.

Enlightenment

Science had always predicted that it had no intersection whatsoever with faith. In the end, the one was the bridge to the other — at least up to a point.

As our knowledge peeled back layer after layer of reality, digging ever deeper into the fundamental truths of the universe, the beauty and strange inevitability of its workings seemed to show that spirituality was just wishful thinking; ignorance dressed in art and ritual, and a remnant of more primitive eras.

For a time — a calm, clear, reasoned and all too brief time — the world’s religions fell into disdain, and a handful of generations were mostly free of the fetters of deities and our silent, debased begging for their favour. Science and logic reigned supreme, and if our aesthetic sense seemed suddenly to lack a certain something, we willingly accepted the trade-off. Losing the spark of the divine seemed a low price indeed for mastery of climate, and mortality, and the stars.

But trouble was never far away, because while at a human scale we lived in a world of thriving chaos and mutation and adaption and biochemistry, as we began to better understand the larger and smaller aspects of reality, we saw too many straight edges and clockwork rhythms. Our physics was of discrete mathematics, and too many facets of its laws had the feel of simplifications. There were too many physical constants, pegged at mutually convenient values, and also limitations which were at times arbitrary, but also suspicious.

And so we looked again with fresh eyes, with a deeper level of skepticism, and made it our goal to find proof that the freedom and chaos we saw were only a veneer. Multiple disciplines had reached sufficient maturity to feed from each other, and in the end, the breakthrough belonged to no single branch of science, nor to philosophy, but due to a synthesis of them all.

It was a great surprise to learn that the religionists were right, in their ignorance and projection and fabrication, and the scientists were earnestly and honestly wrong.

Science was a belief too, and its adherents even more fanatical than those who dreamed of supreme beings. But the evidence quickly reached a critical mass, and passed beyond doubt. The fingerprints of a creator, and of a unified plan, were written everywhere in the universe. A maker’s tool-marks were encoded in the deepest fractional digits of our mathematical constants, and scrawled like graffiti in the convenient orbits of dwarf planets, and they bled through the dance of subatomic particles like ink through fabric.

It took only one generation more to finally make contact with God.

Speaking with the being who controls the universe required the acceptance of novel concepts, chief amongst them that each question had already been answered, everywhere, at the birth of the cosmos. Every inquiry was the key by which its pre-existing answer could be perceived and decoded within the substrate of what we had previously thought of as cold and indifferent reality. In fact, we were literally surrounded and inhabited by answers, just in a different way than science had predicted.

No matter was too small or too large, nor too personal. Questions were like the prayers of bygone times, and their answers had not only been anticipated aeons ago, but were in fact the building blocks of everything around us. In the face of that knowledge, it became irrational to doubt God’s existence, rather than to believe in it.

Each of the major religions had its period of resurgence, until the utter and otherworldly ubiquity of design and knowledge and control shattered the boundaries of their limited gospels. No human-made belief system could possibly encompass the reality of it, and whilst some faiths tried to expand their doctrine, the bitter truth was that dogma wasn’t particularly suited to evolving in response to changes in its environment. Poetic justice had been served, and the dish was as cold as nearly fourteen billion years in space could make it.

Technology moved on, focused solely now on access to the infinity of information that God could provide on demand, with static repositories of knowledge now being totally unnecessary — because the universe itself was such an archive, reverberating like a loudspeaker for the voice of the intelligence behind it all; the Almighty.

We didn’t anticipate the stultifying effect of total enlightenment. As soon as science conceived of a question, it was answered perfectly, and whatever goal the question might have been in pursuit of became trivial, and then irrelevant. Space exploration was no longer exploration when all destinations and discoveries could be known in advance. Philosophy fell to dust in the face of absolute truth. The human species became a hive of petrified readers, minds shuttling from one thing to the next, knowing at all times that every enquiry was ultimately pointless because they had already touched the divine, and found only the end of the unknown.

As our species slowed and quietened, one of the dwindling number of engaged minds finally remembered the central question, asking God why He had created and now watched over the universe. The answer was already there, just like every other answer had always been.

This is my punishment.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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