Marek Vit's Kurt Vonnegut Corner


Who is He?


Marek Vit


(1998)

This is a true story. As most true stories go, it doesn’t have a happy-end (if you want to read something happy, read some Harlequin romance instead.) It is not long, although it covers several millenia. It is a story about people living on a distant planet, a planet as beautiful as Earth.
The beginning is set into a happy era, though. In fact, people were not really happy back then. Most people never are. However, this era could be called a happy era from the holistic point of view. People didn’t really try to understand everything that was going on around them. They still knew God, their Maker. They lived with Him and He lived with them. They knew that their life had sense, they knew that there was a purpose. Everything was going great. So far so good. From now on, however, everything would start to go downhill. The whole humankind would rush headlong into the deepest pit there is, into a pit from which there is no way back. A pit that would consume the soul of every human being.
People slowly forgot God. Their wealth increased and their pride increased and they asked “Who is He?“ And they forgot and went their own way.
It began simply, without any special effects, without any fuss, by an insignificant man. An idea has been planted into his brain to set forth a sea voyage, sail a bit around and study animals in various parts of the world. He was too weak to resist this urge and he did set out. He spent a long time on the sea and an unknown voice in his head talked him into writing a book about everything he discovered about the animals of the world. Again, he was too weak to resist. And so he did write a book, a book thoroughly based on the whispering coming to him through his own brain. The book was a hit.
People accepted the book well. It offered a good explanation of the origin of all the animals living on the planet, and the origin of people themselves. Nobody found very surprising what the book claimed: that they originated in lower animals. Well, as far as logic was involved, they could accept anything. Their brains were not capable of doing any higher logic, so simple logical explanations did the job. And they believed. And somebody or something in the deepest folds of reality chafed its hands. It succeeded.
As time went by, there were other people, who heard strange voice in their head, a voice talking them into research that had never been done before. Through them, the mysterious entity wrote numerous reports on the origin of the planet and the whole universe. The reports claimed that the world came into being billions of years before by a big explosion. They claimed that in the beginning there was nothing which was very heavy and very small. And it exploded. There was just one element in the whole universe, hydrogen, from which, mysteriously, everything evolved in the course of time. Stars, planets, plants, animals, people. Again everyone believed this. Human logic found it acceptable.
And there were even more people with voices in their head. They were wondering about human psychology. They were wondering about how human emotions worked, whether there was a soul in the physical body and so forth. The voice told them the answers. Logical ones: the human body is just a complex of chemical reactions. Their personality, their awareness, their feelings, everything just a couple of chemical elements reacting together. And people cried out in wonder. Wow! This makes sense!
It did make sense to them. It didn’t strike them, however, that everything else in the world, suddenly, lacked this sense. And the mysterious entity laughed to itself. The final step had been made.
Suddenly, the entire world was reduced to chemistry. Environment was no more. There were just chemical reactions. No plants, no animals, just chemistry. No human beings, just chemistry. People figured out that since it was all chemical reactions, there need to be no moral code. Human life had no value, because it was just chemistry. And people started to pursue their own ‘animal’ needs. Chemical needs. No one was ever stopped by anything. People robbed, people raped, people killed. Unborn babies were killed, new born babies were killed... Life had no value anymore. Life had no purpose anymore. Everything was reduced to chemistry.
And God cried out to the people, but they were too blind to see. The beautiful planet, suddenly, was reduced to a filthy test tube with weird chemical reactions going on in it. Some clever ‘sets of chemical reactions’ discovered which chemical reactions could be used to put a stop to other ‘sets of chemical reactions’ which were inconvenient. People died by millions. One day, the whole, once beautiful, planet went off in a great chemical reaction.

Here, the words ‘the end’ should probably appear. What they mean is... ‘the story is over. Gimme another one.’ I won’t put a ‘the end’ here. The Story is not over.


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Last modified: April 4, 2002
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