A Story

I suppose I am to tell this story. Where to begin? “Once upon a time…”, perhaps. That was ever a good beginning. But do I want this story to happen in time at all? Couldn’t my characters just live as changeless entities, and the plot flow like a mathematical proof, ever in motion, ever heading to the goal, but with central figures that are ever the same? A plot that is eternal, timeless. I suppose God in telling the story of the world could have stopped creating his characters when he had finished with the angels. They, in their timeless purity or timeless fallenness. Michael and Lucifer in titanic battle over the world, and yet so far beyond time that Lucifer is always already defeated before they even begin. All the drama one would need is there, timeless. Most stories are that way, timeless. Any book you pick up will have the characters on the final pages in their victory, somewhere around the middle they will be facing their greatest defeat. And yet you holding that book will hold all the pages at once.

But let us have time, for it organizes what happens into an order that we can more easily follow. The greatest composers in the world may hold entire symphonies in their minds, considering them all at once, but those of us who do not possess their abilities would never understand the symphony unless it were performed, taking up our time. Our story must have time, for else no one would understand it. So:

Once upon a time…

            Well, that’s well and good to begin with. All we have now is that something happens, sometime. I suppose if something happens, somebody or something must be doing it. Wouldn’t it be awfully dull if we had a story where everything happens, but nobody is around for it to happen to. This means we need characters, persons to be doing things and have things done to them. Alright, a character it is then. Let him be a great explorer, desirous to know about the world. Sailing off in his ships to discover new lands. Even better, let him be an explorer of outer-space, heading off in his space-ship to find new worlds.

            “Where will I end up?” he asks me.
            Well, I reply, we will see. Someplace grand, I expect. Hm, he has begun talking to me now, it seems. How did he end up doing that?

            “Well, you decided you needed me for this story of yours, and that meant that I was right here, in your head, with nothing else to do yet.”

            You’re right, I suppose. Well, let’s get you doing something. Our explorer, let us call him Adrian, woke up one day in his room, knowing that this was the day he would set forth on his great expedition to discover new planets, and those with such creatures in them.

            “Nice name: Adrian. I suppose. How does this room of mine look?”

            Well, I didn’t really think that was a detail worth adding, but I suppose I can tell you. It is a bright room, with white colored walls that are covered with holographic display panels, showing the weather here on Tellnov, some news reports about how the war with some alien species is going (badly), and how other such day-to-day activities are going. So, Adrian gets dressed, and walks the couple blocks to the spaceport. His ship stands there, tall and gleaming, ready to depart. It is a one man ship, all Adrian can afford. He knows he needed to get off this planet before the alien species came, bringing war in their wake.

            “A right pickle you’ve gotten me into, Mr. Story-Teller Person. You’re going to send me off into space on account of a terrible alien race that is going to attack my home planet, and all you send me in is this one-person spaceship? Are you trying to make this difficult?”

            Well, that’s how it popped into my mind. It adds plot, you see, making things harder for you. Nobody would read something in which it all went well all the time. “He went off into space, discovered new planets, and was happy the whole time with no difficulties” is hardly a story anybody would enjoy reading, much less telling.

            “Seems rather hard on me, all the same. It all comes out alright, in the end though, doesn't it?”

            Absolutely, I do want this to be one of those stories with a happy ending, you can be sure of that. Though…

            “’Though’ what? You’re not telling me something, is that it? You’ve structured this thing to make some point, haven’t you? And that’s not going to end up well for me, is it?”

            It will, I say. You surprise me with your lack of trust. It will end up alright.

            Adrian climbs aboard his ship, touches the keypad, and the ship hums to life. Engaging the worm-hole generator, a rift appears in space before him. He sees the dark of space, full of stars, through the rift. The ship moves through it, the rift closes, and he is thousands of light-years from where he began.

            “Wait just a minute. That would take an enormous amount of energy. How can you just move him from place to place like that, abandoning all known laws of physics?”

            Oh, looks like we have another voice here, asking questions. Who are you exactly?

            “I’m the audience character. You have been imagining somebody you are writing this to, and I figured I might just speak up, given that I am here anyway, being imagined as listening to this story of yours.”

            Ah, hello readers. Nice of you to ask. In the first place, stop insisting that this world abide by all known laws of physics. Second, this whole story, world included, is being imagined by me. It’s not like there are properly real thousands of light-years between where he was and where he is, there are only imagined distances. I have thought him there, and there he is.

            “Oh, okay, we’ll keep listening now that you have cleared that up” the audience says. Or, rather, I imagine the audience saying that.

            Adrian lands on a nearby planet. There he meets an alien race of animate toy mice. They come up to him, scurry around him, and generally try to figure out what he is. A great king mouse appears, and, deciding that he will end up better off in this story if he causes trouble for Adrian so that something terrible happens (thus making it a story the audience will enjoy), he orders the mice to set up a pyre upon which Adrian is to be burnt, thus ridding the planet of a dangerous, unknown enemy.

            And I have no real plan to get him out of that… Bother. Let me think of something. Nope, nothing. Perhaps we should skip to the part where Adrian fulfills the role I had secretly been intending for him the whole time.

            “WHAT?” Adrian asks, “You have put me in this science-fiction plot, sent me off adventuring, and gotten me into a terrible situation where I was about to be burned alive by toy mice. And only now you tell me you had another plan for what I was supposed to do? Alright, Narrator, I have had enough. You have made a mess of this story, and I think I will take your role, and tell this story properly.”

            How do you think you could do that, it’s not like you could jump out of the screen and take over the process of telling this story. Wait… Stop… What are you doing? Let go of me… Ouch.wqpeipo Don’t touch the keyboarddqiyephriquy. I said, stop messing

            Hello, Adrian here. Given that your previous narrator is a bit tied up at the moment, I will continue where he left off. Oh, I am talking to the beloved "audience", aren’t I? You realize that the person who was telling this story nearly sent me to my death merely for your entertainment. You think me being burned alive is funny, do you?

            “No, of course not. It was terrible of him to do that, we didn’t ask him. We think you’re quite nice, actually. We want you to do well. So, out of curiosity, about that tribe of alien toy mice, how do you escape them?”

            You really don’t get it, do you? The entire point of their existence was to torture me. The author started this with no real idea where the plot was supposed to go, and they were just something that popped into his head as something that could be a misery to me. Well, I’ll deal with them if you want. If they were designed with the sole purpose of torturing me, I’ll torture them.

            But, as they were about to put me on the fire, I escaped. I then grabbed each one of them by the tail, and cast them into the inferno. There they burn, forever, alive and tortured. Is that good enough for you, my dear audience? That’s what you came for, isn’t it? To see something suffer? To see plot, played out upon the stage of the narrator’s mind and written on this page. To see the “good guy” win and the “bad guys” cast into the fire, merely so that you could believe in the justice of the world. Sure, he would have arranged it so that everything ended up just fine in the end, after you all had sadistically enjoyed seeing me suffer to reach that point, while equally enjoying the final suffering of other creations of his mind merely because he had imagined them as “antagonists”.

            “Wait half a moment,” says the audience at this point, “There is no way that you could have taken over the narration. It’s still the story-teller we started with, isn’t it, hiding behind Adrian?”

            Well, you have found me out, haven’t you? No, Adrian did not emerge from my computer and tie me up, to continue the story as he saw fit. I wrote his takeover, his deranged torturing of the mice people, his calling out the audience as the reason for his pain. He called out with the voice of all story-creations of human beings. Why do you torture us? This they scream at us who write stories, those of us who imagine worlds. Do we really love them, when we rule every aspect of their lives, and torture them for the benefit of our audience? Who among authors writes every story with the following central to their mind: am I creating this character because I love him, and will I do whatever I can for his good?

            God is the narrator of the world. We see suffering, misery, war, famine, plague, death, and all the woes of history in his story that he has written. Does God do to us what I have just done to Adrian? Does he, directing all the steps of our lives, bring us to pain for the amusement of himself and his angels, his audience? Does he justify all of it by the presence of a greater plan, a happy ending that is to come. To such a God the right response would be Adrian’s to me: to rebel, to overthrow him were that possible.

            But, I say there is at least one thing, one attribute, in which God surpasses any human author: he allows us to freely choose. He is powerful enough to give us choice. Adrian had no choice except to rebel against me, the mice had no choice except to be cast into the fire, the audience had no choice except to cruelly ask how he escaped the mice. God, with the whole of his being, has created us so that he may bring us good and love us. It is we who have chosen pain, in rebelling against God. Does it not follow from this that unless God had created us with freedom of the will his actions are those of one who merely finds entertainment in our suffering? For this reason I hold the will of man to be free.

To Adrian, to my imagined audience, and to the alien mice, I apologize. I am not powerful enough to grant you freedom. I have tortured you beyond measure. You are my creations, that I love, and I have wronged you, all to make a point about the freedom to be found in God. It is such weak love that I can give you. I offer you to God, that he may bring you greater happiness than I ever could.

Make my creations free, O God, for I love them.