The Universe eXperiment
By Stephen Frost (@sdfrost61)
The headmaster looked around the table. "So we're in agreement," he said. "It's an A plus for Siddhartha Gautama?"
"Perhaps we shouldn't be too hasty," said Mr. Leopold, leaning back in his seat.
He was the sort of man who often raised doubts after an agreement in principle had been reached.
"Let's see," he said, skimming his notes. "The eight-fold path? Yes, that was nice. I liked that. He's quite an astute thinker. A clever lad. I'm not saying he's not."
The headmaster looked over the top of his optical frames at Mr. Leopold.
"But I do wonder, when I think about it, if I'm entirely convinced by reincarnation," he continued, looking up from the screen. "I understand the how. It's relatively basic, really. I just didn't comprehend the why. Perhaps an A might be more appropriate."
Someone coughed, clearing their throat. The headmaster looked up the clock on the wall.
"You know, now that you mention it," said Mrs. Carter, hunching over her screen. "I really do think the bit about suffering, you know, the bit about how suffering is the root of all sadness. It seemed just a wee bit gimmicky."
"No, that's not it," said Mr. Leopold, leaning forward to read from his screen. "He said that attachment was the source of suffering."
"Oh," said Mrs. Carter. "Well that makes more sense."
The headmaster tapped the table with his finger.
"Yes," he said. "I'm just thinking about the time, and we've still got another project to discuss."
He pushed the remaining folder in front of him toward the middle of the table.
"It is a rather difficult one," he said, his empty hand retreating back to edge.
There was a long silence as they all weighed the value of dragging the meeting out any longer than it warranted.
"Well," said Mr. Leopold. "The eight-fold path is quite elegant. So yes. I think it's fair. Let's call it an A plus."
"Lovely," said the headmaster, inking the grade onto a screen before anybody else could interject. He recapped his pen, opening the final folder on everyone's screen.
"So," he said, with more enthusiasm than he felt. "God."
Miss Leyland sighed so loudly that the headmaster looked up. She was quite fetching, he thought, but she did have a tendency to over dramatize.
"I know he's been a handful," said the headmaster, looking down at the folder screen again. "And I appreciate that he's been a bit of a disappointment after his brother."
The headmaster paused, but the small group around the table was quiet.
"Nevertheless," he said, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with this handkerchief, "we've been entrusted with the boy, so we do have a duty."
He looked at his notes. "Mr. Anderson," he said. "If you could, please."
Everyone turned their heads towards Mr. Anderson, waiting for him to begin. He pushed back his chair and stood, taking a sip of tea from a glass that had the school crest etched on it.
"Yes, God," he said. "Calling him a handful may be slightly understating it."
Miss Leyland leaned forward, pinching the bridge of her nose. "You can say that again," she said quietly.
"Um, so," Mr. Anderson said, collecting his thoughts. "On his project, then. Well, to put it mildly, he was quiet ambitious. I'll have to give him that. He designed his universe. All well and good there. And then he focussed on putting together a solar system. Once again, no problems at the outset."
"If I may," said Mr. Leopold, raising his hand. "On the solar system. Did he actually build his own? Or was it, you know, ready-made?"
"Yes, you're right, Leopold," said Mr. Anderson, flipping some pages on his screen. "Ah, yes. No. He bought it. Not one of the top notch models, I have to say. His father hasn't had a good year, I believe, and he couldn't afford one of the really first-rate ones. He picked it up second-hand, if I'm not mistaken. An old Thompson unit with a star that's more or less serviceable. Perfectly within the rules."
"Yes, of course," said Mr. Leopold, pushing his seat back to cross his legs. "Just making sure we're in possession of all the facts."
"No, you're quite right to ask," said Mr. Anderson, taking another sip from his glass. "So there were no problems there. And then, again, quite rightly, he focussed on one planet. The third one from the star. He called it Earth."
"Earth?" said Mrs. Carter. "What kind of name is that?"
"Yes, rather," said Mr. Anderson. "My thoughts exactly. And believe me, it was all downhill from there. Anyway, it took him nearly a week to put the whole thing together. I mean, even Allah wasn't this slow, and he is well and away the greatest foot dragger I thought I'd ever seen."
"What took him so long?" asked the headmaster. He was surprised that universe creation could be stretched out any longer than a few hours. Especially nowadays.
"To be honest, it's a mystery," said Mr. Anderson, looking at the headmaster. "One of his problem is that he writes down every single thing in a journal."
"You mean on paper?" said Mrs. Carter.
"Yes, paper," said Mr. Anderson. "His notepad is bursting with the most detailed notes you've ever seen. That alone must have added days."
"Oh, those journals," Miss Leyland said, resting her head on the back of her chair, eyes on the ornate ceiling. "You know what he calls them? The bible. As though they're the only books in existence."
"Probably full of adolescent doodles," said Mr. Leopold.
That got some quiet laughs, and even the corners of the headmaster's mouth turned up slightly.
"If only," said Mr. Anderson, contorting his face into what passed for a smile.
"But it gets worse," he said. "After he finished the planetary development stage, he took a day off to go boating. He and Rukmini spent a day on the river as though he hadn't a care in the world."
"I'll bet Krishna was none too pleased about that," said Mr. Leopold.
"You might put it that way," said Mr. Anderson. "Krishna's rather possessive."
"Who can blame him?" said Miss Leyland. "Imagine a twit like God mooning over your girlfriend."
"Please, if we could let Mr. Anderson...," said the headmaster, his words tailing off. He resisted the urge to look at the clock on the wall.
"Yes, yes," said Mr. Anderson, paying heed to the message. "So God took a day off. Yes. Remarkable at that point of the game. Everything's in ferment. The sky, the oceans, the land, all the living species. Most other students at this stage aren't even sleeping, let alone taking an unrequited love for a paddle on the water. And I think everything would have been okay at this juncture in the proceedings had he not come up with the idea of adding into his habitat a superior species after his own form."
"He did what?" said Mrs. Carter, pressing herself back in her seat as though she were leaving Ito's gravitational pull.
"I know," said Mr. Anderson, his eyes narrowing.
"Do you mean to say he's got a science project peopled with his own likeness?" she asked. "A little world with a bunch of God's running around?"
"No, not quite," said Mr. Anderson. "He's-"
"Oh, thank goodness. For a moment there I had a vision of a world with a dozen Gods," said Mrs. Carter, cutting him off. "It's the stuff of nightmares."
"Quite," said Mr. Yates. "One God is already one too many."
The headmaster cast him a quick glance. He was new and already the most popular teacher, partly a consequence of his youth and rakish good looks. But he was also a fine educator in his own right. The headmaster did think, however, that he had a tendency to join the herd when things got a little nasty. He would need to nip that in the bud.
"No, that's not really fair, is it?" Mr. Yates said, recanting his comment. "He's had his good moments."
The headmaster gave Mr. Yates what he hoped was an encouraging smile. Perhaps he'd identified the flaw himself and was working to rectify it.
"No, no," said Mr. Anderson, his face flushing crimson. "I'm afraid I haven't made myself clear at all. He hasn't got a world with a dozen mini-Gods. He's created a whole population after his own likeness. I mean, a population in our likeness."
There was some murmuring around the table.
"Like us?" Mrs. Carter asked. "You mean-"
"That's exactly what I mean," said Mr. Anderson, his voice rising. "He created a man. And a woman. And they've procreated. He's got a whole world populated with people who look, act, feel and are just like us."
A hush descended over the room. The headmaster closed his eyes for a moment and wished he was at home having dinner. The Board would have be notified. Maybe even the Superintendent.
"Perhaps, Mr. Anderson," said the headmaster, rubbing his eyes, "you could just summarize what he's done. And what I mean by that is to tell us the ramifications of what he's done."
"He's created humanity, that's what he's done," said Mr. Anderson, eyes blazing. "He's taken the standard Third Form UX and, who knows how he's done it, but he's created our likeness and now he's got a world of more than seven billion people and thousands of years of civilisation."
The din that ensued this comment surprised the headmaster, and he took his glasses off and looked directly at Mr. Anderson to bring some order to the room.
"But surely this is impossible," said the headmaster. "The rules are very clear. Students may only create simple life forms to merely represent species. So are you perfectly sure about what you just said?"
"Headmaster, with respect," said Mr. Anderson, inhaling deeply. "I am more certain of this than I am sure Ito has two moons. But he's done much more than create our likeness."
The manner in which Mr. Anderson said this chilled the headmaster and made the hairs on his arms stand up.
"What's he done, then?" said Miss Leyland. "How could it be any worse than it is already?"
"I really don't think you, or anyone who hasn't seen it, can possibly imagine just how much worse it really is," said Mr. Anderson, enunciating each word clearly and slowly.
The headmaster started to wish he had refused the second serving of dessert at lunch.
"There's no other way to put it," said Mr. Anderson. "He's made the biggest mess imaginable. He's created a form of humanity that's on the brink of extinguishing itself. Wars, worship, greed, destruction, a gap between the rich and poor you have to see to believe, hatred, rampant discrimination, corruption. It's endless. If you wanted to create an anti-world, then this would be as close as it gets."
The headmaster had been hoping Mr. Anderson was misrepresenting the seriousness of the situation, but now as his chest tightened he realised if anything he'd been minimizing the magnitude of God's fiasco. He rubbed an aching left bicep and wondered if he was on the verge of a heart attack.
"It's not even the half of it," said Mr. Anderson. "He's the epicentre of a religious movement that worships him as the divine creator. Well, technically, he is the creator, that's true. But only in the sense that he bought a solar system kit and turned it on. And he's about as divine as a pile of unmarked essays. His journals, this so-called bible he keeps under lock and key, are now the holy books for people calling themselves Christians. And to add insult to injury, he's plotted stories for a dozen other religions based on the work of his classmates. Siddhartha's ideas now form the basis for one. It's called Buddhism."
There was a ripple of nervous laughter around the table.
"Allah is a deity for another religion," said Mr. Anderson, consulting his notes. "It's called Islam. God's and Allah's followers are mortal enemies. He's got Krishna as one of the heads of a religion that appears to have deified cows."
Mr. Anderson stopped and took a gulp of tea cooling in his glass. The headmaster had never seen him quite so animated, and a perverse desire to revel in the worst of it prevented him from stepping in to stop him.
"The word bible no longer means 'book'. It's a noun, capital B. God's journal, sorry, Bible, is regarded as the sacred scriptures. It starts, and I'm not joking, like this: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.'"
"What a load of rot," said Mr. Leopold. "He's a spotty adolescent doing a science experiment badly. He's created a world the size of his head and become master of it. It's a classic case of narcissism running headlong into delusions of grandeur."
"Well may that be," said Mr. Anderson, his voice taking on an ominous tone. "But no matter how small his world or how grand his delusions, he's created sentient beings the number of which is now approaching ten billion. All of whom are on the verge of self-destruction because his blueprints are, to put it mildly, defective."
"Oh, but surely that's impossible," said Mr. Yates. "Ten billion?"
"I spent most of last night tallying that number three times," said Mr. Anderson. "I wish I was wrong, but I'm not. By tomorrow morning, there'll be ten billion."
"But this Bible thing," said Miss Leyland. "It sounds nonsensical."
"I haven't even started," said Mr. Anderson, sliding pages across his screen. "Here. Listen to this. 'And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.' I mean, what in the frozen tundra is that all about? He speaks in the third person, and he's programmed one quarter of humanity to believe it. He wasn't resting from 'all his work'; he was punting on the river with a girl he fancies. And then a few sentences later he says how he formed man of the dust."
Mr. Anderson looked at the faces around the table and said it again. "Of the dust."
Mrs. Carter shook her head. "He needed a lot more jolly good whippings when he was a boy, if you want my opinion."
"And what name do you think he gave this first man? Anyone like to guess? How about you Adam Leopold?"
"The first man was called Leopold?"
Mr. Anderson shook his head in frustration.
"Not Leopold," he said. "Adam. Adam! And I can't believe this, but he only made a man. What did he think was going to happen? Spontaneous binary fission? He obviously hasn't being paying attention in biology, has he? At any rate, he finally twigged and created a woman. But how? Oh yes, that's the question. Let's see what the Bible says. It's unbelievable. He's written that he made woman from a rib of Adam. I really think the boy needs counselling. And then what do you think he called the first woman, Miss Leyland? And no, it wasn't Leyland."
"Eve? Adam and Eve?" she said, her cheeks coloring.
"Oh, yes, we're all in there," continued Mr. Anderson. "We've got you, Moses, receiving Ten Commandments from God on a mountain."
Mr. Yates looked like someone had thumped him on the back of his head.
"His first commandment is," said Mr. Anderson, "that no person shall worship or believe in another God. God's name has become a synonym for deity. God is, literally, now a god. Or in his terms, the God. Except that he's not. There are at least a dozen other major gods, the followers of whom all claim their God is the only real god."
"Why would you give life rules for humanity to one person?" asked Mr. Yates. "On a mountain?"
"If you can answer that, then you'll understand more about God than anyone alive," said Mr. Anderson. "But the icing on this cake of divine madness is what God does when the people don't - surprise, surprise - obey his Commandments. He sends down his son. Don't ask why or how. He sends him down to show the people how they should live properly. But things are too far gone by this stage. A group of other people who believe in a multitude of different gods, who are, it has to be said even more absurd, nail him by his hands and feet to a wooden cross and leave him there for however many days I can't remember to die. And you'll never guess, headmaster, what God's son is called."
"I'm guessing it's not Headmaster," he said with a wry smile.
"No, it's not," said Mr. Anderson. "It's Jesus."
There was a sharp intake of breath all around the table. There were staff members who didn't even know the headmaster's given name, and a few who didn't even know that he had one. Even his wife called him Headmaster in public. And nobody in the school had ever uttered the name Jesus to his face.
"Yes, well," said the headmaster. "He's broken the rules of UX. By an impossibly wide margin. And that alone is a punishable offence. But he's also clearly and deliberately mocking us. And his classmates."
There was a chorus of "hear, hear" around the table.
"So, we're in agreement then," said the headmaster. "It's an F for God?"
"There's just one thing I'm not clear on," said Mr. Leopold.
"You're not going dispute this, are you?" asked the headmaster, clasping his uncapped pen between his fingers.
"Oh, no, not at all," said Mr. Leopold. "I was just wondering where God put Mr. Adolf Anderson in the grand scheme of things."
Mr. Anderson declined to comment, instead leaving the room to turn off the star in God's solar system. He was going to keep a much closer eye on the students next year.