God does not exist. We proved it.
It was unconditionally proven in the earlier part of 2138. On March 9th of that year, the Universal Philosophic Theory and the Unified Forces Theory were aligned in such a way that undoubtedly proved that human existence was entirely a statistical anomaly. While life may very well exist throughout the whole of the universe, we were fairly certain that we were alone. The math proofs essentially provided us confirmation.
One would think, given our history as a species, that this would lead to the downfall of man. In reality, the opposite was true. Freed from the shackles of religion and the dichotomic teachings of simple men with selfish agendas, our species advanced in strange and wonderful ways. Within two generations we established that religion was nothing more than a waste of resources and that our Universal Philosophic Theory laid all the groundwork for a correct moral and ethical frameworks that could be extensible and flexible for all races, peoples, and governments. We balanced the equation of human behavior.
We had inadvertently created paradise with our science. A science that gave birth to technical marvels. Our first AI, then an entire race of them to govern, explore, and create dreams. Our first extraterra habitat, then ten, then hundreds among the asteroid belt, eventually leading our race to colonize the moon, Mars, the upper atmosphere of Venus, and the moons around Jupiter.
Then, in 2431, mankind found a method to allow time travel. Not some romantic fetishization of time travel from the old stories, but the real ability to go back into our time stream and adjust events with our presumed greater wisdom and advanced intelligence. We could fix our past in ways our forefathers could only dream. We made extremely small changes near our own origination point at first, storing our previous timeline knowledge in an extradimensional datasource, which allowed us to compare our multiple pasts. As long as we kept the time bridges open, we could evaluate the changes as we made them, allowing us to rectify the sins of mankind through the eons.
My name is Philosopher Adjutant Marces Areillus. I am in my youthful seventieth year of life on a Lagrange extraterra station, named Dionne. She is a good habitat, very smart, and a wonderful colleague to those of us that work to change the past. She identifies as a woman, even though an AI having a sex would be like me cloning myself via mitosis. It is laughable to those of us constrained to our flesh, but one cannot assign any level of blame to an AI trying to be more personable. Dionne had been a member of the task force for the last 150 years, being one of the first to help identify our path forward adjusting the past nearest our own point in time. The AI community recognized that we could not just jump about, being casual tourists and irreparably damaging the past. Dionne often accuses us younger ones that we are barely adults.
This past decade a project was started to investigate the possibility of removing or reducing religion from our timeline. I was assigned as the lead investigator and I took the challenge with relish considering my own ancestors were on the winning side of many holy wars. To think of how many people died at their hands was both fascinating and appalling. If I were to change that and not interrupt my own existence would be a feat that I could barely contain my excitement for. To think I could better the whole state of the universe. But we ran into problems almost immediately.
Our first attempt was to go back and observe the man called Jesus. For some reason we could never locate him, even though we had historical records going back centuries. We followed the creation of those records, as if they were a trail of bread crumbs, hoping to see the very man that inspired such religious fervor for the following millennia. But every time we thought we were close, we would fail to find him. Every time we would be standing by, he would not appear, and strangely our own timeline would not re-converge to explain the disparity.
Then we went after other holy men. Those men that would show up in the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah, amid the thousands and millions of other works considered canon and not. We traced every thread we could to find ways to change the past of religion, and we were thwarted.
That statement alone is impossible.
To be thwarted by something implies the presence of intelligence. If we were being interfered with, that… would be problematic.
******
“Dionne?” I said aloud, easing my fingers into a relaxed position against my notes interface.
“Yes, Marces?” The barely female AI replied kindly.
“Have you come to the end of your simulation series?”
“I have.” A pause. Dionne never paused. “The results are inconclusive.”
“How are the results inconclusive?” I queried. The pause was going to give me nightmares.
“Myself and Mars have reviewed the results after Mercury validated the timeline. The probability that such events occurred is extremely certain. The records reviewed from egress dates are congruent. The people interviewed for eye witness corroboration provided correct outcomes based on our hypotheses. Yet…” Another pregnant pause. I felt like I was about to throw up. “And yet, we cannot isolate the time events as they occurred.”
“Extrapolation?” I countered.
“No extrapolation to be considered. All evidence suggests events occurred, yet events are not realized. All that is left is conjecture.”
“Conjecture, then?”
“That the events did occur and we are… unable to view them.”
“That is not conjecture, that appears to be fact.” I replied with a smirk.
Dionne sighed, sounding very near to a real exhale. “Then it is the opposite as events did not occur. As we cannot view them.”
“Posit hypothesis?”
“Only conjecture.” Another digital sigh from the timeless AI.
“As you wish, Dionne.”
“We cannot view the events because our approach and method is at fault or because we are being prevented by ourselves.”
“Nonsense. How can we prevent ourselves from manipulating the timeline?”
“Our current reference point is our future-selves past. Perhaps we caused a catastrophic event and through some slim chance were able to fix it, now interferring with our task by design.”
“Nonsense. If we did, we would leave ourselves information within the datastore. Or inform this reference point of the information needed to avert the catastrophe.”
“Unless that knowledge was indeed forbidden,” Dionne admonished, like a school teacher.
“I posit that we are simply making a mistake.”
“Yes.” A succinct reply, but no delay.
******
I returned to my work, trying to find a gap. A place that we could insert and get a result that would fix our failure. Nearly a third of our race was dedicated to the pursuit of fixing the sins of our collective past, and I could not be the single man that returned with such monumental failure. I would rather go into asteroid mining.
Ironically, only the AIs performed mining operations. But it conveys the meaning well.
What if we skipped Christianity? What if we went back even further? The power consumption would be monumental, and the time scale dangerous, so the AIs would reject my plan immediately. My peers would reject it even more quickly, and they did not have the benefit of brains that operated at light speed. Our investigations into the past had been so incremental to this point, small, if not intesimal, baby steps working our way through the past. The fact that we had even gone back to the points we had were ludicrious in their own way.
Such irony in this problem. Such disparity of effort and results. We wanted to fix slavery. We did. We wanted to fix economic collapses. We did. We wanted to prevent entire civilizations going extinct, and we did. We wanted to change the history of our people to something truly profound and beautiful, and we did. We had shifted our own practice by a hundred years, avoiding the pitfalls of ancient peoples. And here we are.
Hitting our heads in frustration.
******
“I have found a target.” I said suddenly in excitement, scaring my pet.
“Explain?” Dionne replied in her calm manner.
“The Great Temple.”
“We have viewed it. It was not great by most measures or even much of a temple. It was small, compact, and dirty. The report said it smelled of livestock and urine.”
I laughed. “I know!”
“I do not understand your jest, Marces,” Dionne replied.
“The one thing we have not investigated is the center room behind the altar because none of our agents have been able to get in.”
“The Holy of Holies.”
“Exactly. We have not had the opportunity to see the root of the faith that lead to everything else. Everything before that is oral tradition, and everything after is obscured. This is the crux.”
“Ironic word choice, Marces.” Dionne laughed. “Let me take this to our friends.”
******
“Marces?” I awoke to the soft chiming sound of Dionne’s whispering voice.
“I am awake,” I replied, rubbing my eyes. The clock said 1:30. I had been dreaming of falling.
“We have reached concurrence. We will attempt to breach the interior temple as you suggested.” Even with the ansible communications between AIs, the deliberation took far longer than I could have expected.
“What agent will be sent? Do I know them?”
“We have determined that you are to be the agent. Your grasp of language and custom is unparalled for the target time period.”
“When do I leave?” I looked around my room, wondering if I would miss it.
“Now.” Dionne said eagerly. “We agree with your assessment and are curious as to the results in the timestream.”
“I will pack my things.” I said.
“Don’t bother.”
******
The pod irised behind me as I stepped into the ventricular wake staging room. The time ripples were noticeable at the edges of the metal grates around me, making the room waver and snap to like a strong wind was biting at the world around me.
“Dionne?” I meekly said into the nothingness. I was naked, all my implants had been removed while I had slept in my travel to Mercury. The room was warm, but I was scared, so everything felt cold.
“Yes, Marces?” Her voice was calm and reassuring. She knew I needed encouragement.
“Will I fail?” I asked in the ancient toungue of my people. Hebrew was salve for my anxiousness.
“Only the one true God knows.” Dionne replied in kind, in the same tongue. I started to cry.
I was about to embark on a journey thousands of years in the making, to a place that was so far in memory, that my own people had discredited its purpose on the path to the very future that we had created. Sad in its own way. But I was going to make it right. This was my chance to make everything right.
I stepped forward and felt the tugging at my body from the gravitional eddies around me as I approached the cusp of the event horizon.
“Just so you know, this trip is using more energy than the whole of mankind used for the entire twentieth and twenty-first centuries… combined.” Dionne whispered quietly. Her voice was soothing my frayed edge of consciousness. Facts were armor for me.
“Goodbye Dionne.” I said aloud as I stepped off the lip into the open air.
******
I tucked my knees and cradled my head and the Bundle enveloped me. I would be ejected near the site in the Bundle, but I would be in atmosphere and traveling at speed. The locals would hear thunder without a storm and I would most likely hit the ground hard to bounce a few times. I would have to get dressed quickly, shaking and disorientated, taking the provided supplies as the Bundle itself decayed into simple organic compounds to be carried away by the winds.
Being sighted by locals at a impact site would mark me as a demon or something worse. And I did not wish to get stoned today.
I had to blend in, become a Jew. Take on a persona, interact with people, and then find my way to the Temple. I had to watch them worship a God that did not exist. On top of all that, my target date was Yom Kippur. I had only one chance to perform this mission, and only the one opportunity to use the mirrorsuit under my roughspun robes to follow the High Priest into the Holy of Holies. The batteries were only good for about an hour of use, so sneaking in, seeing the inner temple and getting out were the only way I would ever see home again.
I felt the Bundle take my sight away and everything else went with it, the sounds, the vibrations, the minute smells of ozone. I was a rock now, flung by the calculations of our AIs across the ripples of time like a rock, skipping over the past with ease. The time I traveled seemed both instantaneous and infinite. The explosion that told me I had hit Earth’s atmosphere shocked me out of reverie, and I was immediately jolted once, twice, three, four times before finally coming to rest.
My pack tumbled down upon me from the side of the already deteriorating craft, the severe Middle Eastern sun hammering my pupils from the cracks quickly spreading around me. With the circuits fused in the material of the craft, it was now inert and crumbling at a molecular level. I pulled my suit on, then the robes, and finally, pulled my transmitter and trank gun from the side, shoving them deep into my robes.
******
Being a holy day, the first people I came across were not celebrating, but sitting in the hot sun, without water or food, quietly praying or singing simply. I watched some quietly as I wound my way into the great city, following fellow pilgrims to the Tabernacle before us, climbing the gently sloped hill to the front of the building where the animals were sacrificed and the prayers were passed on to the High Priest for consideration at the Seat of Mercy.
The sun was already setting. For being a time traveler, I already did not seem to have enough of it. I pushed past the pilgrims as they talked and prayed quietly. They faced the temple as they made their turns, all of them being careful not to turn their backs towards the temple. I followed suit, awkwardly trying to get to main gate and then on to the inner court.
The smells were intense and foreign, and they assaulted me as much as the bright sun. I nearly stumbled over the rocks on the path.
Every misstep was a hindrance to my cause. I felt frustration mixed with panic and wished I still had my self-medication implant so I could drop calm into my bloodstream. The fact that I had to be able to see the curtain before I initiated my mirrorsuit was my impediment, by our estimates I would not be able to make it if I was not close enough. Just because I was invisible does not mean that I could be completely unnoticed. I had to be able to move without hitting obstructions. And as I was aptly proving right now, that was nearly impossible.
I copied the actions of the pilgrims around me, and walked into the temple under the scrutiny of the priests ringing the central plaza, thankful for all the cover. The throngs of my ancestors were a blanket for me, hiding me from those that would interfere. I muttered a praise, and an old man next to me nodded in agreement, saying the same. He smiled, and the teeth he had left were blackened and flat. I nodded conciliatory, keeping my own mouth closed as to not blind him with a smile perfected by technology and a healthy diet.
The head priest in his robes, the rich folds probably alone worth more than many of the individuals in the audience made in a lifetime, began his blessings in a thick rhythmic monologue, praising the Lord for his strength in bringing his people out of tyranny and into the blessed lands. I bowed and knelt when others did, slowly working my way towards a column. The inner dais was visible, and the curtain, hanging thick and heavily like the priest’s robes swayed slowly. The high priest ended his praises, and wreathed in incense, approached the curtain with the sacrifice animal in hand. I flicked my mirrorsuit on, dropping the robe, counting on bowed heads and closed eyes. I stepped from the column and walked up the steps carefully, catching up to the priest, and stepping behind him into the dark.
******
The Holy of Holies was nothing more than a room. There was relics spread around the room, some on platforms, some on the floor. At the end of the room was the mercy seat, the very throne of God on earth, and behind it was the Ark of the Convenent, wrought in wood and gold, with small cherubim at its crown. My hand was warming the handle of my trank gun, and the mirrorsuit was starting to itch as I sweated in it heavily.
The high priest fainted suddenly. The animal collapsed without a noise.
And words rang out around me from the Ark.
“This is holy ground, Marces. Remove your shoes and come tell me of your future.”