Copyright © 2024 Johann Tienhaara
Heaven fell on a Sunday, when the busy bodies were still in bed, and only birds and dog walkers were awake, on this continent, to see the great collapse. We all heard it, though; or rather we felt it, shaking our bones and ungluing the bits of our soul that gave us hope and love and sometimes cramps, though we wouldn't notice the absence at first, and many of us simply assumed the pile drivers in the big empty lot down the street were working on Sunday again. But when we opened our eyes and raised them toward where heaven should've still been, then we knew.
Right through the blue canvas, the scaffolding came crashing through. The sky tore and shredded, as angels, ropes from the rafters tied around their waists, swung helplessly and plummeted as the runners, bearers and diagonals pulled them down from the sky to the unforgiving earth. The lights, something like celestial PAR cans, were shorn from their mounts, the collapsing rigging tugging heavenly DMX cables down to the ground.
Behind it all, once the set of heaven was fallen, all that was left was a thick, grey, slowly oozing paste.
We searched and searched for God. Under the rubble and amidst the failed staging, we searched. Though we found countless angels, some of them still suffering from crushed limbs or severed wings, most of them spattered into a sickly gruel with lumps of angel meat and brains, salted with the pulverized angel dust of bones and teeth, pestled against the mortar of earth from that great heavenly height, nowhere could we find God.
The mosques, churches and synagogues kept vigil, shining beacons from their towers that spotted the dim grey earth. Astronomers, now with nothing to see in the heavens but oozing grey paste, built special mirrors for their scopes and observatories, to search among the heavenly wreckage. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk launched themselves at the grey sludge, competing to be the first billionaires to escape heavenless earth, and venture beyond the wall of God; both were swallowed up by the grey goop and never heard from again.
A shopkeeper in Bangladesh grew rich auctioning the parts of Voyager 1, which had been tangled in the webbing of heaven all this time, sending confused signals back to earthlings, who were eager to misinterpret their messages as from cartographers of some vast space, mapping boundaries between the plasma neighbourhoods of stars. Voyager 2 was never found, or at least never publicly acknowledged.
One day, a golden, glowing theatrical program washed ashore, on the wake of a tropical storm off the coast of Cape Breton. Anthropologists and philologists reassembled the shreds of a papyrus codex, and attempted to translate the Aramaic:
World A Production in Seven Acts
Directed by (untranslatable)
Starring (untranslatable) and (untranslatable)
Thank you to our sponsors
You know who you are
As the fervour to find God gradually extinguished, great whorls appeared in the grey ooze backdrop behind heaven. On a Monday, the whirling grey tumults opened and thin streams of black pitch squirted forth. The fluid was cold, black as nothing, and instantly froze everything it touched. Tens of thousands died as the liquid void swallowed them.
A pair of young physicists, post doctoral students from Lund University, performed dangerous tests on the streams as they shot out from the holes in the grey ooze.
The mass and density of the black nothingness was substantial. The physicists were famous, both in and out of academia, for a brief period, as they showed that black nothing not only confirmed Einstein's and Newton's equations and the background radiation of heaven, but also, through feats of mathematical wizardry, involving homotopy type theory, their thesis unified the theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics. The precise volume of black nothing required to satisfy their equations was well known. When black nothing stopped streaming out from the grey ooze, well short of the expected volume of nothingness, first slowing to a trickle, then abating altogether, the hypothesis disproven, the physicists lost face, and humanity was again left without a grand unified theory.
On a Tuesday, blood red sigils appeared in the grey ooze enveloping the earth. While the nostalgic zealots proclaimed the appearance of the words of God Himself; and the forlorn physicists declared a new mathematical language demonstrating the absolute correctness of every physical model of the universe ever constructed by man; a computer scientist working in Bremen, Germany revealed the true nature of the apocalyptic scrawls: the world's oldest, and largest, by a factor of ten to the 17 in terms of number of parameters, and by a factor of 42 trillion in terms of context window size, large language model ever produced.
The software world, briefly skeptical, soon embraced this discovery, and the world's supercomputers, cloud data centres and blockchain farms were soon harnessed to digitize the LLM. The model, dubbed Adam by Westerners, and Enheduanna by the obscurantists and heresiarchs, was flooded with venture capital. Soon, though, Enheduanna exhausted the world's supply of coal- and water-fired electricity, and as the starving masses clamoured for food and began to rebel against an unbalanced world funded by rich but ultimately outnumbered idealogues with abstruse tastes, the great AI in the sky was forgotten.
A new era was ushered in, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday, when God was found, living a simple but colourful life in Philadelphia, South Africa. The Christians asked if He was their God; He unreservedly said, "Yes." The Muslims asked if He was their God; without hesitation, He said, "Yes." The Hindus asked after Ganesh and Kali, and the Buddhists asked of the whereabouts of Gautama, and He immediately replied, "They are I; I am They." The Jews asked if He was their YHWH; after a long, uncomfortable pause, during which were audible the shuffling of many feet, and the clearings of a few throats, and one little girl asking to be taken to the washroom, He said, "Sure."
The Christians were the first to attack the other faiths, followed closely by the Hindus. The Muslims waged guerrilla warfare against all of them. The Jews mostly died, except in the places where their allies were bigger than their God and had better weapons; and in those places, they brought hell to earth.
God, meanwhile, continued to live simply in Philadelphia, South Africa, wearing colourful clothes, playing in the bedroom with all races and sexes, totally ignorant of the destruction waged in His name.
During the religious wars, on a particularly bloody Thursday, physicists at CERN published an article in Nature quantifying the non-baryonic gravitational mass of the grey ooze enveloping the planet. A new Lambda constructed as a field effect, one that stood up to repeated objective independent verifications, was evinced. The general relativists asked, "Is this our Lambda?", and the experimental evidence said, "Yes." The quantum mechanics asked, "Is this our Lambda?", and the experimental evidence replied, "Yes." The string theorists asked, "Can this Lambda be built up from string theory?", and after several PhDs, a few breakthrough papers, and a model of the world in 13.69 dimensions, the Lambda said, "Sure."
From that day forward, all money for scientific research was directed to proving one university's pet theory to be bigger than the others; the general relativists could not find employment at quantum physics universities; the quantum physicists could not work at string theory institutions; and nobody wanted the string theorists, so they founded their own academies. It could be said that original thinkers and non-scientists suffered during this time, but nobody knows for sure; the academics were too busy fighting over Lambda to find out.
Meanwhile, software developers from a large number of public and private organizations, during a pub crawl one Friday night after the annual Gen AI Con, proposed to send a submersible with large language model core into the grey ooze, to interface with the deepest mysteries of the Enheduanna larger language model. For seven years, programmers and linguists around the globe worked on an ambassador AI that could interact with the blood red LLM in the sky.
When all was said and done and tested, an envoy gathered to launch the submersible at the grey ooze over Hobart, where a dip in the ooze brought it closest to the earth's surface. The automated machine flew off into the sky, and splashed into the grey ooze, and all signals were immediately lost.
13 years later, after many of the researchers had passed from this world to nothingness, the submersible returned to earth. Software developers asked, "Did you speak to Enheduanna?" The AI responded, "Yes." They asked, "do you understand its language?", and the submersible replied, "Yes." They asked, "Does Enheduanna speak your language?", and the robot answered, "Yes." They asked, "Does Enheduanna know all the languages of earth?", and the machine said, "Yes." They asked, "May we ask Enheduanna a question?", and the submersible said, "Yes."
The researchers then constructed a large speaker array, directed at the grey ooze that was once heaven, and, in a booming voice that ricocheted off Mount Hope, asked Enheduanna the crimson LLM in the sky, "May we call you Enheduanna?"
For weeks there was no response. The software developers, frustrated, returned to their translator, the submersible. "Is everything you told us true?", they asked, to which the AI responded, "Yes." Then they asked, "Is anything you told us false?", and the submersible responded, "Yes." Finally, they asked, "What falsehoods did you present to us?", to which the AI merely said, "Yes."
Lawsuits ensued, and the software world has been divided into proprietary camps ever since, vying for the first large language model that can interface meaningfully with Enheduanna the red.
Today is Saturday.
Today God dies in the arms of a transgender lover in Philadelphia. Today the grey ooze will float away like stormclouds, revealing new matter and energy and forces. Today the red sigils in the sky will rearrange themselves into words in every written language, disappearing rapidly with the grey ooze: "No, you may not."