The holotank brightened, and once again I saw Jesus on the cross.
“Advance… advance re-creation six hours.”
Ruth complied and I saw them taking Jesus down.
“Advance another two.”
Darkness.
“Enhance the light, two hundred percent.”
Once again we looked at Christ’s body in the tomb.
“There,” said Phil, evidently satisfied. “There you are.” He staggered away from the holotank.
“Okay, Phil, it looks like Jesus’ body. What am I supposed to see?”
“That’s just it,” he said, rooting around through the bottles near his chair in search of one that wasn’t empty.
I looked at Phil, then the holotank, then back at Phil again. “I still don’t understand what—”
“THERE’S NO FUCKING RESURRECTION!” he screamed, throwing a whisky bottle that narrowly missed my head. “He just lays there! No light, 110 angels, no nothing!” At that he collapsed back into his chair, tears running down his cheeks again. “He’s just a corpse,” he said quietly, “just another fucking corpse.”
It took a long moment for that to sink in. “You mean, we’ve got one wave proving Jesus is divine, and another proving he isn’t?”
He nodded, looking as miserable as I’ve ever seen anyone look. “No divinity, no resurrection,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “No salvation.”
I suddenly seized on an idea. “Phil, do you realize what we have here? We finally have a first-order variation, proof of a major alternate world-line. If we can follow this wave, document the subsequent absence of the Christian church, we can prove that—”
Phil started laughing, a low, bitter sound. “Look at the run. Do you know what the apostles do after they bury Jesus? Do you? They have a meeting and decide to go on preaching as if he had risen! Far better to start living a lie than admit you had lived one all along. They even convinced themselves it’s what he would have wanted.”
At that I sat down in the chair across from him. “So there’s no way to tell which run represented our world.”
Phil nodded, letting out the same bitter laugh. “Fuck disappearing Greeks. We’ve got a disappearing Messiah.”
Both of us were silent for a long moment, neither looking at the other. Finally, I got up and said, very quietly, “Well, Phil, I understand this is very hard for you. But it doesn’t change the fact that all this was tremendous research. We’re still going to be famous, despite the uncertainty involved—”
“Uncertainty?!?!” Phil yelled, grabbing a broken beer bottle and jumping unsteadily to his feet. “You call this uncertainty? Uncertainty’s for sports, for stocks, for worries about your future! Uncertainty isn’t for your basic relationship with the world! It isn’t supposed to be about your soul! Uncertainty isn’t about God’s love!”
“Phil, calm down,” I said, backing away. “Maybe there was a mistake with the run. Put the bottle down and take a few days off, and then we’ll start again and see what the results are. We’ll just live with the results we’ve—”
“I CAN’T LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE THE STATE OF MY SOUL IS SUBJECT TO QUANTUM MECHANICAL FLUCTUATION!” he screamed, madness in his face. Then he started to use the beer bottle.
I managed to get it away from him before he was able to slit his wrists.
And now, here, alone, I wonder if I’m any more capable of facing that uncertainty than Phil was. It’s up to me to reveal our findings to the world.
Or not to.
One world of redemption, where salvation and eternal life are proven possibilities, proof of God’s love. Another where God is silent and the afterlife no more than a comforting he.
And no way to tell which is our own.
How can I reveal this to the world? That the most fundamental truth about our existence is not only unknown, but unknowable? That there’s no way to know whether we’re saved or damned?
What good can possibly come of such knowledge?
And what horrors will I be responsible for in unleashing it upon an unsuspecting world?
Without a Truth, tiny Truth, we’re all alone in the dark.
