Blind Omnipotence

Distinction splintered through the all-encompassing balance. Suddenly conscious of his surroundings, the wretched sting of individual awareness touched him and Seraphiel awakened, black terror coursing through his formless spirit. “How can this be!” he cried soundlessly into limitless depths of the vacuum. The last thing Seraphiel remembered before the Great Unification was that the almighty Yahweh had at last attained that which was believed to be intrinsically unattainable. The Lord had unified the infinite continuum that was the Multiverse, restored the balance between energy and the void, halted the inexorable march of entropy, created true order out of chaos. All had fused and become one with Him.
But something had changed. Something was deeply wrong. Seraphiel was an individual consciousness once more, a spectral fragment of the Singularity that had encompassed all things, and was supposed to reign eternal. This could only mean one thing. Yahweh, the creator, the transcendent embodiment of perfection, was gone. Seraphiel, as the second most powerful being in the Multiverse, was now solely responsible for the meticulous and ever-watchful role of Yahweh. This was simply too much to ask of him, he despaired. His powers of creation and transfiguration were nothing compared to those of the Lord. Without Yahweh, all universes would eventually descend into chaos. The Multiverse was beginning to cool, and once disorder had taken its ultimate hold over reality, and universal temperatures dropped to absolute zero, all that the Lord had worked for would be lost forever. Already, Seraphiel could sense entropy beginning to resume its ceaseless march, could feel the warmth beginning to ebb away.
Seraphiel remembered the long forgotten past, remembered how his kind had once retained a corporeal existence, how matter had once been the basis for all that his species deemed significant. It had taken much thought, but Seraphiel had finally discovered Yahweh’s error, the reason for his disappearance. The Lord had spent countless eons mustering enough strength to fulfill his purpose. He had collected an immense quantity of energy in order to create a nexus between the Fermionic and Bosonic dimensional planes. This nexus was the key to Yahweh’s ascension from the realm of the corporeal to the realm of the incorporeal, and through it, He had allowed all of his brethren to ascend as well, to shed their physical bodies and exist as pure consciousness in the form of energy.
Following the Age of Ascension, Yahweh had severed the nexus between the two planes and reabsorbed the energy that it held. From then on he continued to muster even greater amounts of energy, such that no being doubted his eventual success. And after a time He had triumphed: all that was, corporeal and incorporeal alike, had fused and become one with the Lord. But this method of unification, Seraphiel realized with grim resignation, was doomed to failure. In order to maintain unity, Yahweh was forced to muster greater and greater volumes of energy. Finally, the sheer quantity of raw energy he had collected became so vast that his spirit had ascended yet again, passed on upward to an even more fundamental region, to a higher rung of the cosmic ladder. Such was the nature of the multidimensional totality of which the Multiverse was but an infinitesimal constituent.
Seraphiel carefully selected a universe from among the continuum that was equipped with the physical constant values necessary for the formation of material consciousness. Yahweh was gone, but there was still time for his life’s work, for balance, to be realized once more. Seraphiel chose a small, but brightly burning star and constructed a tiny, mineral rich world. He flooded the world with water and catalyzed a great series of chemical reactions that birthed a multitude of microscopic life forms. He trembled with excitement as the tiny sparks of semi-conscious carbon began to multiply. It would take millions of years of careful direction, but in time these creatures would evolve, and a species could then be forged in the image of Yahweh. The Lord had failed as a result of his omnipotence. His immortality had blinded him from the truth, that balance could not be maintained by one being alone. Only those checked by the ever-present risk of annihilation could possibly succeed. It was upon these creatures that the future of the Multiverse would now depend. How strange, thought Seraphiel, that these fragile, mortal beings would ultimately be capable, through logic and reason alone, of completing the one task that the great and all powerful Yahweh never could.

by ZR92