“How is it you’ve known the truth all this time and never told me about it before?” Alex asked.
“I didn’t tell you this time…you figured it out for yourself.”
“But why didn’t you? Before.”
“I’m the Guardian of the game… I run the projector, the lights, the sound; I keep it all there for you. Besides, you told me not to.”
He stood in front of Alex, looking directly in his eyes. “It’s time to make your decision.”
“I know,” Alex sighed.
“So, it all comes down to this: Pick a role, go back and play the game, and do your best to forget all this…or find a way to tell all your identities what you now know to be the Truth, and see what happens. Good or bad.”
“Yes.”
“So? Choose.”
“I…” Alex said, then hesitated.
He turned and looked down on the empty canvas of the stage, on the unidimensional void where all his lives had been played out, as if he could see them still.
“I think…” he said, still hesitant, uncertain. “I’ll go back as Alex, yes.”
Then He began to smile, just a little bending at the corners of his mouth at first.
“And I think I will….”
His smile broadened into a great good-humored grin, bright as the sun and as oblivious of the shadows it threw.
“…tell,” he decided. “This should be fun.”
THE END
* * *
Epilogue
Uriel/Alex looked on, running the projector while Alex returned into the womb of his virtual mother as she stood at her bathroom mirror putting on lipstick. Only a slight flinch, a little pause in the application process, as if she had a sudden thought that disappeared as quickly as it came, marked the moment.
He then walked outside the compound, looking up from the icy plain of Europa towards the great banded orb of Jupiter. It was beautiful, majestic in its austerity and simplicity, this world. Perfect for its purpose, now served.
With a playful smile the Uriel/Alex lifted his arms, and Jupiter suddenly glowed bright green; another gesture and it turned a blazing yellow.
“Aaah, that’s better.”
Magically, under the warmth of the new sun, Europa transformed before his eyes into a verdant planet of tropical warmth and life. Where frozen wasteland had been there was now a quiet blue sea resting against a rocky shore, fringed by tall trees and thick green brush. But it was totally silent and motionless.
Uriel/Alex whistled happily and a pulse of golden energy shot forth from his breath, filling and enlivening the scene, readying it for the new game. Waves began to crash on the shore, turning rocks to sand: Birds flew up to fill the air with the sound of their wings and voices, chasing fat buzzing insects. Great whales and fish leapt upward from the ocean’s skin and fell back again beneath it in joyous thunderous splashes of white. The trees burst into fragrant bloom, filling the air with their perfume.
In the virtual mother’s womb, the new life that was Alex quickened, as cells began to vibrate and divide again and again.
And beyond this magical Europa, beyond the smoke and mirrors where Alex had begun to live out yet another game, encompassing it all the singular Source looked on. He within whom all the rest exist, yet whose viewpoint rests outside them all; He who sees simultaneously all the games played by the One throughout this eternity of endless nows, and who knows and tracks them all without confusion or conflict, dispassionately detached from all outcomes, ever the interested observer; He, the Whole who is so much more than all the parts, He in whom pi finally closes; He the Watcher, simply watched.
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