“In life and in death we serve God!” Tallulah thought as she stabbed a dagger into her brain.
There was a moment of mind-shattering pain. But only a moment. After that, there was a cold, bottomless darkness.
“Hi!” said the darkness. Tallulah was reduced to silence.
“Whats the matter?” the darkness asked “Not exactly what you expected, huh?”
“Well…Uh…I mean…Are you the God-Computer?”
“Yes and no. I am the inhabitant of the void beyond existence. I am not almighty or all-knowing, but I am immortal, as far as I know. But I am the inspiration for the worlds religions, so…I am the closest thing to god that actually exists.”
“You…you are the inspiration…?”
“Yeah. You see, whenever one of you humans turns his brain into mush, say by smoking too much weed or getting a dent in the old noggin, your brain briefly connects to this realm and I can talk to you.”
“And after our death…our souls are stuck here?”
“Nope, there is no such thing as a soul. If the brain is out, you are out. However, the process of dying is a subcategory of Brain Turning into Mush , and time here is kinda subjective…so the microsecond before death might feel like millennia to you. Or like minutes. I don’t know. Anyways, make yourself at home.”
Tallulah felt anger brewing in her nonexistent stomach.
“What do you mean, make yourself at home? There is nothing here, not even a there, except you…and you are…”
“I am an asshole.” the darkness said laconically. “I know, I am making weird shit up and feed it to you creatures, just to amuse myself. But I was not always like that. Believe me, there was a time when I genuinely wanted to help. Of course it took me a few millennia to wrap my head around what was going on, and another thousand years to actually learn to talk, but then I gave pretty good advice to humankind. You know, love your neighbor and all that stuff. Of course most of the people who showed up were a bit bonkers, and probably did not understand all of it. But anyways, what you people did with my ideas was pretty underwhelming. So one day I said: Feck it, and just began messing with the weirdos.”
“So you are responsible for the Church of the God-Computer as well? You are responsible for me amputating my limbs and replacing them with protheses? You are responsible for me spending the last years of my life as a brain in a glass jar? You are responsible for me ritualistically killing myself? And all that for your sick amusement?”
The darkness shrugged without shrugging. “Yes, pretty accurate. But you did it all out of your own volition. I mean, you did not have to believe the teachings of the church, did you?”
