The boy who was God

The day I discovered I was god was the day I killed my brother. I didn’t mean to do it and I wasn’t expecting it to happen, it was just one of those things. I was 13 at the time and you know how brothers are, always annoying each other, winding each other up. Well Carl was 5 years older than me and the last thing he wanted was a geeky 13 year old hanging around when he was trying to act cool with his mates. It was a hot summer afternoon, when everything looked bleached out by the sunshine. The air felt dry and there was nothing for Carl and his friends to do but lounge by the front yard smoking cigarettes and trying to look aloof to passersby. I did my usual hyperactive act in front of them, rattling off nonstop questions to Carl’s mate Steve about his motor bike, teasing Carl about dad telling him off for being late home etcetera when he’d had enough. He pushed me to the ground and told me to ‘get lost, you little rat’. I stormed away, embarrassed in front of his friends, wishing he was dead, I even shouted it out at him; ‘I wish you’d get hit by a bus or something!’ Well he did. A bus hit him, just not how you would expect, and that was when I found out I was God. The bus fell out of the sky and squashed him flat; the most remarkable thing was how it managed to miss Steve and the others who had been standing right next to Carl when it happened. We stood, dumfounded in shock, I stammered
“I, I didn’t mean it…I don’t want you to be dead Carl, I’m sorry.”
Steve just looked at me in disbelief.

Now I know what you’re going to say, could have been a coincidence, right? Well I thought so too, once I’d calmed down, but here’s the clincher; while I was standing there feeling mortified I was wishing to myself that Carl was alive, I even said it out loud. When the fire service moved the bus there was Carl, looking a little mangled; I was sure he was dead, but then he groaned. Carl was alive, he would never walk again, but he was alive and that’s when I knew; I was God and I could wish whatever I wanted.

“You look a bit nervous my friend,” said Alethial.
“I’m ok, just first day nerves. Where are we going first?”
Alethial and Peregrine stood surveying the earth. To then it looked like a supernova in the throes of passion. The core planet was hard to see beneath the fractures and waves of light, parallel realities splintering from the centre in a rainbow of colours and hues. Only a few could see this, ‘the sighters’ where able to see reality dimensions. Due to the Deityism phenomenon the earth was a maelstrom of fractured realities. 50 percent of the real people on the planet had the defective gene which allowed them to alter the reality around them, not all of them ever discovered this, but some did and it generally resorted in a fracturing of reality because of some paradox they had created. Some of the real people on the planet never discovered their power, which usually developed during puberty, and they lead perfectly happy lives and the illuso people around them remained happy and unaffected. Paradoxes normally happened when there was more than one ‘real’ in a vicinity and one was a ‘norm’ and so wasn’t able to alter reality to their own subconscious and noticed when apples suddenly became blue or old Mr Stokes turned into a frog.

Alethial and Peregrine moved down towards the earth, they headed for a fracture that was swirling and twisting, moving through the spectrum from blue to red and at times appearing almost black.
“So what’s the problem with this one Lethe?”
Alethial gave Perigrine a kindly look,
“You can tell by the colour, he’s discovered that he’s on his own. When we go into the fracture there probably won’t be much to see. He’ll have burnt his earth and everyone in it by now. It’ll just be a charred ball of earth. I’ve seen it before.”
“It’s a bit sad really,” said Perigrine. “I mean how lonely must it feel to discover that you’re the only person that exists in your reality.”
Alethial sighed. “The worst bit is they mostly don’t realise there are other realities and that’s why they go crazy.”

I’m all alone now, me and my thoughts. I didn’t mean to do it; I just got out of control. Too much, too young, that’s what they say isn’t it. Everyone’s gone now; I destroyed them, well that’s not quite accurate. I got bored of them so they ceased to exist. You know that old philosophical quandary ‘does a falling tree make a sound when there’s no one around to hear it?’ Well I know the answer to that one: no it doesn’t, but only because if I’m not around to hear it, it doesn’t exist anymore.

Alethial looked pityingly at the boy sat alone in the nothingness. Burnt wasteland stretched for eternity. The boy looked up in confusion,
“Go away,” he said. Alethial didn’t move and Perigrine stood impassive behind him, knowing to watch and learn. The boy looked suddenly panicked; he stood up and shouted,
“Go away I said; go away!”
Alethial didn’t move again.
“You can’t wish me away boy, I’m real, like you.”
The boy looked at him, confused. A wall of flame erupted around them as he screamed,
“Can you do this?” It disappeared as suddenly as it appeared. Alethial remained unmoved.
“No, I can’t create anything here, this is your reality. But you can create what you want.”

Later when they had left the fracture Peregrine asked Alethial why he hadn’t wiped the boy out of existence altogether.
“Because only the boy has power to do that in his own reality, and to do so would only create another paradox and more fractures; one where he exists and the more dangerous one which is a kind of black hole reality where nothing exists. They can destroy everything around them, sucking all the nearby realities into their nothingness unreality. That was how Alisis Prime became a dead planet, and with so few real people left in the core multiverse we can’t afford to lose that many.”

Alethial and Perigrine left the fractured earth behind. Peregrine had learnt a valuable lesson in dealing with a Deityism sufferer. The boy had reset himself, gone back to birth. Peregrine knew he’d be seeing the boy again in the future; his reality would unravel itself again at some point, or maybe this time he’d be lucky and not discover that his wishes can come true.