Ladies and gentlemen, we can re-build us. We
have the technology. The Office of Genetic Intelligence has seen the future,
and that future is truth. Today, we embark on the greatest medical adventure
the world will ever know: the elimination of God.
Ladies and gentlemen, the OGI brings you iDeus66.
They’d
messed with her head, those God people. All those lies. Waking to find an empty
cage and her mother and father telling her that Ted the budgie had flown away
to a hotter country. Convincing her that Mij the otter in Ring of Bright Water
had not been decapitated by the clumsy workman with his axe; that it was a
distant cousin of Mij, whose death didn’t matter because he was a naughty
otter.
The fairground fish, Daisy and
Bill; the dogs – Nancy, Jock and Poppy; Napoleon the cat; Prince the toad. All
of them, she was assured, having a fun time in the pet heaven, where she, too,
would one day join them in the house next door, but only if she was good.
Christine Bryant, the most hated
girl in school, who stole your hopscotch stone halfway through every game, had
also been to see Ring of Bright Water and told her, the next day, that her
parents had lied: that Mij was well and truly otter meat, and she grieved all
over again, but thought that maybe the pet heaven would be able to put him back
together.
They took her to Sunday School
for the first time one Easter, in a straw boater held in place with a piece of
elastic that cut into her neck while she sang There is a Green Hill Far Away.
She liked the countryside and thought that the green hill sounded as if it was
quite a nice place, probably with an ice-cream van, until the bit where it said
that it was where a man was crucified to save us all. She struggled with the
meaning, but, in time, she learned that the crucified man had said that you
couldn’t have something called sex unless you were married to the other person,
and that you must never touch yourself, whatever that meant, too. He also said
that if you ate your greens, he would give you more pocket money and you would
get nice things if you prayed for them, although at Christmas you had to say a
different kind of prayer to a man called Father Christmas, who was somehow
related to the man on the cross. And if you did all these things, you would
have your reward in the same place as the crucified man, who was looking after
the animals; although she hoped that he wouldn’t ask her to put her finger in
the holes of his hands, as he had made the people do in her Children’s Bible.
Her fear kept her close to God –
fear of repercussions, fear of punishment, fear of one day being separated from
everyone she knew; but most of all, it was fear of the unknown alternative. All
she had been told was that there was a place called hell that was very hot, and
that the man with horns who lived there was very bad indeed - worse than the TV
Daleks on Doctor Who, worse than the Cybermen - and there would be no turning
back, no second chances, once you were banished to that place. So, at thirteen,
she was baptised by total immersion, water filling her ears and emerging to
hear the congregation singing “Praise ye the Lord, Hallelujah!” She was told
that from this point on, everything would change, now that she had given her
life to the Lord; but after she dried her hair and changed out of her wet white
dress, she had difficulty summoning up the emotion she was told she would feel.
Sipping her tea - barely warm, too weak - as the church deacons fussed around
her, she was filled with nothingness; if anything, she felt as if a piece of
her had been taken away, handed over on a platter like John the Baptist’s head
– another picture that terrified her in the Children’s Bible. Desperate to be
one of God’s Chosen People, she continued to study the Scriptures and tried to
resurrect emotion in prayer, but now there was a hole where once there had been
stories she believed. Then the minister who had baptised her ran off with the organist’s
daughter and she decided to stop going to church.
Still, though, she tried to stay
in contact with her maker. She took Religious Education as one of her three ‘A’
Levels; she listened to Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven; she visited art galleries
and tried to make sense of Blake; she sat on the beach to watch the sun go
down, and the world she had been told was created by God daily filled her with
wonder. Two years after she last stepped foot in a church, she went on a school
trip to Venice and took a boat to the Island of the Dead, where she lit a
candle in the church, giving thanks for her family and friends. But it all felt
like the actions of an intruder into others’ emotions; every effort, an attempt
to stir those same waves of emotion within herself, but failing. Art and beauty
did not bring her closer to God; they were a constant reminder that the world
was greater and more mysterious than the tales about the man in the sky; so
vast and so unbearably painful to comprehend, that generations had sought to
contain it under the umbrella of a supreme being, who was able to exercise
control over the chaos.
Mary Donald finally lost her
faith the day her parents died. Celebrating their 50th wedding
anniversary in August 2005, they had travelled to New Orleans to indulge their
love of jazz. On their first ever meeting, at the Regent Ballroom in Hove, they
had danced to the Syd Dean band playing Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful
World and had always vowed to visit the city that had given birth to their
beloved “Satchmo”.
Along with over 1800 others, they
lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina. They had been in the city just two days
and their bodies were never found. For weeks, Mary ranted at the kind of God
who could authorise such a tragedy; but then, just as suddenly as grief had
struck, it was as if the light of her parents’ lives extinguished her darkness
as quickly as the hurricane had their own. One morning, she woke to feel her
father’s hands brushing sand from her feet, when he sat her on a wall at the
beach: the sadness of the closedown of day and the now distant sea, being
replaced by the comfort of warm sock; the same cool hand she felt that held her
forehead over the toilet bowl when she was sick, the powerful cup of his
fingers bringing stillness to her hot, trembling head. She felt the warmth of
the kitchen where she grew up in the small, terraced house that echoed the sea
wind, and could taste the toffee her mother decided to make as a late night
treat, the sweet smell of soft brown sauce that turned to brick; and, just as
clearly, the cloying scent of her mother’s Lancome face powder, the finishing
touch before her parents left the house for an evening’s entertainment at the
Regent; the Imperial Leather soap in her father’s cheek when she reached up to
kiss him goodnight; the Chinese food they brought to her on a saucer, long
after she had been put to bed, hating to leave her out of any of their treats;
and waking, like a newborn bird with open beak, for its parent to jump-start
its belly into life. Her stomach once more leapt with the excitement of waking
on New Year’s Morning, to the whistles, sweets, and foil hats with crepe
streamers her parents left at the foot of the bed after their late night out.
They came fast, now, the memories.
That’s when she knew, and she felt as if she had never been more certain of
anything. This was everlasting life: the things passed on. Of course. The
thoughts, the memories, the ideas, the laughter, the love. She felt high on
insight. She wanted to run into the street and tell everyone of her great find.
Suddenly, she felt as if she could take the hugeness of it all. This was what
it was to be human, and we lived on in every word, every gesture, in every atom
in which we had ever shared. William and Anne Donald were living on in
everything they had ever been. As a child, she had cried when the old Dr Who
transformed into the new one, but she soon forgot; he was just living on in a
different body, but the old Doctor was still there. Her parents had not gone
anywhere; their history was their future, the everlasting life that she, too
would pass on. Yes. That was the moment that Mary Donald lost God. She was 21
years old and it was a relief, finally, to be free.
*
The Office
of Genetic Intelligence was familiar with the God gene long before the
geneticist Dr Dean Hammer announced his findings to the world in 2004. The man
who had one time declared that he had discovered a gene linked to homosexuality
designed a 226 question survey, aimed at determining an individual’s propensity
for feelings of spirituality, or willingness to believe in a supernatural
phenomena. He found that those with a tendency to embrace religion shared the
gene VMAT2, which was said to dictate the flow of mood-altering chemicals in
the brain. His findings had been met with derision and scepticism, which
mattered little to the OGI, who not only believed that they had correctly
identified the God gene, but also developed the necessary technology to
eradicate it. The gene, iDeus66, was, said Dr Matthew Gosling, in his
introductory speech to the new recruits to the OGI in 2008, essentially a truth
drug. Truth was the very antithesis of God: a truth that had no need, nor
desire for the constrictions imposed by the fiction of a superior being; a
truth that would annihilate mankind’s fear of the unknown; a truth that would
outlive death.
It was as a result of reading Dr
Hammer’s findings, however, that Mary Donald became familiar with the work of
the OGI. Just over a month after her parents’ death, and beginning a PhD at
Lancaster University, she found herself surrounded by like-minded people for
whom faith was an aberration of the standard genetic code. She immersed herself
in Bentham, Mill and Nietzche, researching the feasibility of building a moral
structure in the absence of God. Having successfully eliminated God from her
own life, she concluded that a godless society would be more conducive to
Bentham’s greatest happiness principle, and, she suggested, the elimination of
God was not only desirable, but essential, in bringing about the greatest
happiness for the greatest number.
She had been dating fellow
student Robert Mentorn for nearly three years when she completed her research
in 2008. He was, by everyone’s reckoning, a brilliant student. She had fallen
in love with his mind before emotion took over, and although neither of them
believed in marriage, they had talked of their combined futures during their
first week together, as if it was an inevitability, rather than a decision that
had to be made. Mary was glad that they had never felt the need to suffer That
Conversation, when one party demanded to know where “it” was going, only to be
met with the other’s negative response. Like her, Robert regarded himself as an
orphan; he also shared her non-belief, and this, too, brought them closer. He
was the son of a preacher and had lost his mother to breast cancer the week he
received his ‘A’ Level results. He was with her when she died, but could not
share his father’s comfort as the grief-stricken man lay his hand on the fading
glow of his wife’s forehead, assuring her that she was going to a better place.
When she went, Robert knew she was gone for good. In her final breath, he could
hear no relief of a soul acknowledging its final resting-place; just the echo
of a door slamming shut forever. He attended the funeral, where his father
stood in his own pulpit and read from the Bible – “I go to prepare a place for
you.” He survived his wife by just three months and joined her in the
adjoining, pre-booked plot in the crematorium. Robert did not attend the
funeral. Instead, he went to the pub, where he got excessively drunk and railed
against the Life Thief called God, who had stolen his parents.
When Mary was contacted by the
OGI, she was made to sign the Official Secrets Act even before attending the
interview, and on the day itself she told Robert that she had decided to become
a teacher and was attending an interview for a Post-Graduate Certificate in
Education. She would never see him again. Six weeks before her first interview,
he threw himself off the tower they called Suicide Watch on the university
campus. He left her a note: “From nothing I came, and to nothingness I return.
Be happy.” She Googled the phrase to check the quotation and glean what might
have been his thoughts when he wrote it, but it seemed it had been his original
work. His mother’s sister arranged the funeral, even though Mary tried to
convince her that it was not what Robert would have wanted. She called Mary a
bitch and ordered her to stay away from the church. Instead, Mary went to Lake
Windermere for the day and tried to remember Robert’s voice, but it was already
gone.
For the first time in three
years, she prayed or, as she preferred to call it, issued a summons: a summons
to whatever power the universe held, to deliver the sound of his voice one more
time. Occasionally, she caught a sense of him and wished she believed, so that
she could picture him tucked into God’s pocket, the way she had remembered each
of her grandparents when they died. One night, she fell to her knees and begged
God to come back into her life, remembering: “Ask, and it shall be given unto
you.” She asked. She felt her heart beating in the silence. She just didn’t
have the God gene.
She stayed in Lancaster and vowed
to concentrate on her work and prepare for her forthcoming interview with the
OGI. She bought a new red outfit and matching shoes, as if marking, with a big
red tick, her new life.
The office was an unprepossessing
building on the outskirts of the Yorkshire Moors and its existence was unknown
to all but the select group of young scientists hand-picked to work there. Dr
Matthew Gosling, who personally collected her from Leeds station, engaged in
little small talk en route to the office, but he did say that they had been
following her progress for some years and had, through a source he could not
name, been made aware of her thesis. Mary was flattered. She assumed that
nobody, apart from a few lecturers, would ever see what she regarded, in her
best moments, as a small triumph in her circle’s escalating war on God; the
knowledge that her work had made it beyond the university walls suddenly made
her feel very grown-up.
It was to be the first of 23
interviews. Mary talked about her upbringing, her parents, her schooling, her
love life, and, it seemed, everything she had ever thought about anything. She
talked about Robert. About how, following his death, little by little, but in a
mere matter of weeks, memories defeated pain once more, just as they had when
she lost her parents. She told them about the book she was writing:
Everlasting, which challenged the church’s traditional concept about eternal
life. And at no time was she allowed to, and nor did she, breathe a word about
what took place during these clandestine meetings. It was clear that the
absence of any living relative or emotional tie in her life had been a factor
in her selection, for nothing less than total dedication to the cause was, said
Dr Gosling, of utmost importance.
She assured them of her
independence and her devotion to scientific truth and the pursuit of happiness,
based on the God elimination principles that had been central to her studies.
On her 21st birthday, she received a call to say that her
application to the OGI had been successful and they looked forward to welcoming
her to the organisation. She packed a small case filled mostly with books and
left for Leeds station where, as he had on every other occasion, Dr Gosling met
her. She did not know, on December 12th 2008, that it would be three
years before she saw the outside world again.
*
Andrew
Tappen had been at the Wiltshire Daily News just one week when he landed the
big one in January 1998. Two pigs, siblings named Butch and Sundance, had gone
on the run from an abbatoir in Malmesbury, his home town. During their week on
the run, they had managed to squeeze through a fence, swim the River Avon and
take up residence in some neighbouring gardens. When they were finally found,
it was Andrew’s job to try to buy the pigs to save them from slaughter, but his
small paper did not have the funds of the national Daily Mail, which secured
the animals from owner Dijulio, in return for exclusive rights to their story.
Lost dogs, cats stuck up trees,
sick cows - no minor animal story escaped his paper. “This story’s got legs,”
his editor would call across the news-room. “One for you, Andrew.”
When it wasn’t animals that were
being spotted across the county, it was Jesus. Every day, readers sent in
photographs of their latest sighting of a bearded man appearing in the most
mundane of places. A slice of toast, a bathroom tile, a frying-pan – it seemed
there was no place too humble for the Lord to make his presence felt in
people’s lives.
On June 26th 2008,
Andrew would be marking ten years on the paper. He had celebrated his 30th
birthday just before Christmas and did not need this second reminder of how
life was passing him by. But his editor insisted on throwing a party for his
loyal employee, and he was forced to grin and bear it as his colleagues
catalogued his dubious record of trivial story-gathering.
It was on Facebook that he began
to follow the trail that would change his life.
*
Mary Donald
was loving her work. She had not yet been assigned to any laboratory tasks, but
under Dr Gosling’s tutelage was able to concentrate fully on her work and,
inside the dark confines of the OGI, able to dispel thoughts of the life she
had once had with Robert on the other side. It was, she thought, like her own
version of heaven and hell: the outside world, with its wars and pain and
suffering and, inside the OGI, a world of dedicated men and women, committed
only to the pursuit of happiness.
She knew little of how far the
OGI had come with its development of iDeus66; her job was to collate names and
addresses, separating them according to age, profession and religion. Marked
for special attention were young women without children, and these went into a
computer file marked Priority; only Dr Gosling and his colleague, Dr Annabel
Winters, could access the file with a secret code, and Mary learned that you
did not ask questions of your superiors, no matter how curious you might be
about any aspect of the operation.
It was the screams that woke her
in the night. Loud, sobbing, female screams that made the walls tremble in her
small bedroom in the OGI’s living quarters. She could not locate exactly where
they were coming from, and when she first heard them she thought that she must
be dreaming. She put them down to an over-active imagination and her grief at
the loss of Robert, but one night she put on her dressing gown to try to track
them down.
They appeared to be coming from a
room below the main building, but as all areas were locked at night, it was
impossible to pinpoint the exact source. On the mornings that followed the
screams, Mary watched her colleagues closely, for the tiniest sign of something
that might give away the previous night’s activity; if they knew anything, they
were not showing it.
“Dr Gosling,” she said, one
morning, when she felt brave. “I’m having a problem sleeping; there appear to
be some very strange noises that I can’t quite identify.” She had been at the
OGI for nearly two years and was hoping she had proved her loyalty.
Dr Gosling said just four words:
“Everything in good time.”
That night, she heard the screams
again and, shortly after they began, there was a knock on the door. She
answered it to find Dr Gosling and Dr Winters standing there, and after
ordering her to get dressed, indicated that she follow them.
As they opened and re-locked each door, the screaming grew louder until,
at the final door, it suddenly stopped. Mary found herself in a laboratory,
although not one of the kind with which she was familiar, as there were more
computer screens than she had ever seen in one room. In the far corner, she
made out what looked like a body, handcuffed to the railing of an old-fashioned
hospital bed. A man she had not seen before was standing close by, so still,
that Mary wondered if he might be a waxwork. This, explained Dr Gosling, is the
EGL, and it is where the creation that is the elimination of God begins.
*
“Jenna Crewe
has invited you to be her friend on Facebook.”
Andrew Tappen remembered Jenna
Crewe. They had started on the Wiltshire Daily News together, but Jenna had
quickly moved up the Fleet Street ladder. Not for her the two-bit stories about
mobile sausage escapees.
Jenna was returning home for a
family visit and wondered if they might meet up. It was quickly arranged and
they met at a pub called the Potting Shed in Crudwell.
A decade on, and over a bottle of
Shiraz, they talked easily. Jenna was now freelancing, but there was something
on her mind.
“Do you remember Matthew
Gosling?” she asked. Matthew, Andrew recalled, had been thrown out of medical
school for unethical conduct.
“Yes, of course. Strange
business. We tried to do a story on him but got nowhere.”
Jenna placed a journal on the
table, open at page six. “Take a look at this.”
It was an article by Matthew
Gosling, titled Goodbye, God . . . It Wasn’t Nice Knowing You. It talked about
the joy of losing his faith and his mission to save the rest of the world from
what he called “the God lie”. Science, he said, was the only truth, and had,
within its grasp, the means to purify mankind by the removal of the errant God
gene.
“Wow,” said Andrew. “He’s really
lost it. Where’s he working now?”
“That’s just it. Nobody really
knows. There was a Facebook group supporting his theories, but it’s now a cold
trail. If you try to contact any of the members, you get nowhere, and not just
on Facebook. They’ve vanished. All of them. Students, mainly. I just thought it
might be one for you.”
“Did any of them own a horse?”
Jenna looked confused.
“Sorry, it’s just my name is
never first in the frame when the political intrigue stories come up in
conference.”
“I thought maybe we could work on
it together, do a bit of digging.”
“Woodward and Bernstein.”
“Little and Large, more like.” It
was an unwelcome reminder that, at six feet tall, Jenna, who would never look
at any man under six three, would never be interested in Andrew’s seventy
inches. Sometimes, God could be very cruel.
*
The God gene elimination process is, in
essence, no different from that of the homologous recombination technique and,
once the errant gene has been targeted and isolated, iDeus66 can destroy it
without harming the foetus in any way. To treat more well-established genes,
particularly those in adults over the age of 30, the procedure is more
complicated, as the gene can prove resistant and, even, multiply itself, but
there is every evidence to suggest that by the end of the century, the process
of permanent god gene targeting will be standard procedure in our hospitals.
Dr Gosling told Mary that she was
ready to begin working in the laboratory, and as she finished reading her
mentor’s paper she realised that she had inadvertently stumbled upon what might
turn out to be the most important scientific study of her generation. Maybe she
would win the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Her mind started to race as she read
and re-read the work. No more wars; no more imposition of religious strictures
designed to bring about nothing but guilt and fear; no more lying awake at
night, worrying about what happens when you die. No. More. God.
She could not sleep that night,
and even when she heard the screams, she knew that the young mothers would one
day be glad of the gene cleansing they had been privileged to experience at the
OGI; in the long run, it would make their lives easier, even if they didn’t
know it yet; it would certainly make the lives of their children easier.
When she finally closed her eyes
and fell asleep, she dreamed of her dead parents for the first time. They were
not sitting at dining tables on fluffy clouds, surrounded by famous people;
they were lying still, at the bottom of the sea, but large fish had started to
eat at their bodies, starting with their eyes. At the end of the dream, there
was nothing left of either of them. Earth to earth. Ashes to ashes. Water to
water. When she woke, she cried, because she missed them. She missed Robert.
*
The leads on
Matthew Gosling went cold in Yorkshire in 2004, but Andrew Tappen and and Jenna
Crewe were persistent in their research. The doctor had been spotted a number
of times in Leeds during the early part of 2008, but only at bus stops, railway
stations and the odd café. They contacted old friends who might know his
whereabouts; they visited his parents, his sister, his old employers, but he
really seemed to have disappeared. They visited Lancaster University, where
Mary Donald was known to have met him during her time at university there. They
knew this because her boyfriend, Robert Mentorn, had written about it in his
diaries. She told him she had an interview for a teacher-training course, but
he found her diary and, suspecting she had not been telling the truth, read it.
She had left all his belongings when she suddenly left, they said, but they had
held on to them in case she ever decided to return, and it seemed heartless to
throw away what were his only real remains.
It was a cold December morning
when Andrew and Jenna set off for the OGI. It was easy to find. Mary had
detailed every step of her journey in her own diary, and Robert, for reasons of
his own, had meticulously reported every detail in his. There was no obvious
means of entry or exit, and they walked for half an hour before finding
something that looked as if might lead to a main reception area. They lay on
the ground behind a low concrete wall when they saw a car approach and a man
emerge with a young woman. She seemed to be struggling to walk, and although
Andrew’s instinct was to run to offer help, he resisted the temptation. They
walked around the building once more, and when a light came on downstairs, in
what appeared to be an annexe, they crept over to try to look inside.
What they saw was Mary Donald,
sitting upright, but rocking back and fore on her bed. They could not hear a
sound through the obviously heavy glass, but they could see, from the shape of
her contorted body, that she was sobbing convulsively. Jenna tried to get a
clearer view, but the window was too high even for her, and so Andrew knelt on
all fours to enable her to stand on his back. When they finally caught Mary’s
attention, they said it was like looking at someone who had been eating nothing
but darkness all her life.
This manifestation of the other
side, arriving so suddenly at her inner sanctum, induced in Mary a horror of
the kind she remembered when they told her that her parents were never coming
home. She beckoned to the face to go away, mouthing the words in silence, for
fear of being caught in collusion with the outside world from which she was
denied access. Finally, the face disappeared, but she knew it would be back.
“We have to do something,” said
Jenna. “What is this place?”
“Warehouse of the Body Snatchers,
if you ask me,” said Andrew. “Come on, let’s go.”
The couple were surrounded before
they even reached their car. Six men, all armed, pointed guns at them and, in
their midst, stood Matthew Gosling. Andrew tried to make light of the situation
and held out his hand. “Had a bit of trouble tracking you down on Facebook,” he
smiled, but there was no response.
“Take them inside,” said Dr
Gosling.
Locked door after locked door,
and the pair finally arrived at the laboratory where Mary had first witnessed
the iDeus66 experiments.
Handcuffed to security rails on
opposite sides of the room, they stared at Gosling, awaiting his next move.
“Where do you stand on God?” he
asked.
“Sorry?” Andrew and Jenna spoke
in unison.
“Believers, or non-believers?”
“Right now, I think I must be on
the side of the believers, because I’m praying really hard,” said Andrew. Jenna
wished he would stop trying to be a comedian and acknowledge the seriousness of
the situation.
Had events not taken the turn
they did, the doctor would have told them what he had learned: that there was
no God. He would have asked them to imagine the freedom, if they had known,
once and for all, that it wasn’t true, any of it. Would it not have been a
welcome release? And an end to war, with nations embracing nations? He could
have taught them how to live in every single moment, sure of its passing
forever. To live without God was to live without fear, to be happy: knowing,
completely, that this was it. That was his discovery. What sane person would
not grasp the opportunity to eliminate the faulty gene that had corrupted their
very existence since the beginning of time? He had seen the power of the
godless master race, and it was good.
*
Mary lay on
her bed and listened for the familiar sound of new incumbents. She knew that
the face at the window would not have managed to get away; nobody ever did. She
dressed and made her way to the lab. Now that she had her own set of keys, it
was an easy journey to make.
She had never seen Andrew and
Jenna before but knew, as she had with every arrival, that they were not there
by choice. The guards had returned to their posts outside, and she had to think
fast. She sensed that the couple suspected she might be their friend; they
certainly knew she was their only hope, and they begged her with their eyes.
The supply of iDeus66 Mary threw
in Dr Gosling’s face stunned him momentarily and gave her time to snatch the
syringe they used to stun newcomers resistant to the research experiment. She
had to be quick to retrieve the keys for the handcuffs, but when the couple
were free, they followed Mary back through the corridor of doors she knew so
well. But each way they turned, they could hear the running footfall of another
guard – Gosling had clearly managed to hit the emergency button before falling
to the ground. Without their mobile phones, which had been taken from them when
they were captured, they had no means of alerting anyone to come to their
assistance, and so the threesome just kept running and running, and praying.
Andrew thought that if this were ET, they would be lifted high into the sky to
escape their captors, but he decided to keep his thoughts to himself.
An explosion from the vicinity of
the laboratory where they had left Gosling unconscious blew the hole in the
wall that provided them with their escape route. A second explosion sent flames
and smoke high into the evening sky, overpowering navy blue ribbons of dusk,
splitting the building in two like the Red Sea get-out provided for Moses to
lead God’s people to the Promised Land. Matthew Gosling’s body was
unrecognisable when they took it from the inferno in which he had perished,
along with iDeus66. He had seen 9/11 and the Iraq War, he had seen the war in
Afghanistan, and he had known that the elimination of God could have prevented
them all. It would have to be enough for him, for now; but there was a time for
everything.
*
On her 100th
birthday, Mary Donald gave thanks to God for her life. But it wasn’t God, just
the thing she needed to give thanks to because it was bigger than her. Call it
God, a god, power, energy, the universe. If people chose to give it a name, she
no longer cared; it was of no real consequence; if they needed to believe that
there was more to come, it was not her job to burst their bubbles. And who was
she to say that any of them were right – or wrong?
Her life had been filled with
love. Two devoted husbands, three children, six grand-children, and friends of
over, in some cases, sixty years’ standing. She counted Andrew and Jenna, until
their deaths, among her closest. Sometimes, she heard their voices, but knew it
was only the wind. Still, sometimes she liked to pretend otherwise.
She had published books, too,
including – and her personal favourite – No God, No Art? The argument
questioned whether the greatest music, art and literature was born of the need
to believe in a superior being, irrespective of whether that being was real or
not. Sometimes you needed certainty, and sometimes you needed belief. She had
seen both sides of the wall and no longer feared either.
It was a truth, of sorts, and she
had been happy. Within a month she knew she would be dead, but it no longer
worried her what that meant. The last thing she would remember hearing, if ever
she woke, would be the slow movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major.
*
Dr Tam Gosling, of The Royal
Institute of Genetic Engineering, paid tribute, in the annual address to the
Worldwide United Genetics conference, to the scientists behind the discovery of
iDeus66, but Mary’s name was not among them. It was, he said, as had been
predicted by Dr Matthew Gosling, the greatest scientific discovery of their
age; his great grandfather would have been proud.
Dr Tam Gosling was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2084.
