The mandate had been given by God that morning, and Nathanael and Amon had arrived in the nascent realm to shape His will.
The task was simple: creation, in all its perfection. As divine as this instruction was, it did demand a great deal of creativity on the part of his favourite agents. Helpfully, He had gotten them started with all of the matter and energy that they would need. Indeed the task was arguably trivial in that they had only a single universe to tend to, the others being helpfully tended to by myriad other angels.
They quickly got to work, shaping all the countless galaxies and stars, which took no time at all, and then focused on the most important task of all. Creating paradise on earth.
The earth started as a great brown ball, covered in water. To give it shape and colour they added sweeping meadows, forests and trees. To support the future humans who would follow their divine shape, they would need food, in the form of fruit and vegetables, and animals to provide light entertainment.
Nathanael gestured and sweet, charming animals emerged, delicate grazers and rabbits that would nibble on the grass.
He smiled at their natures and harmless attitudes. Amon frowned. "Nathanael, these animals you have created are wonderful, but don't you think there is an inevitable problem here?"
Nathanael glanced over the bank of cloud at him. "What problem could there be, Amon? Do you think they might be too cute?"
"There is certainly some risk of that, but that is not the problem, dear Nathanael. The problem is what happens when these animals begin to fill the world with their offspring." Amon gestured. "Here, let us see what that looks like on this small island."
As his hand arced through the air, centuries passed on the island and the population of rabbits and deer exploded. Eventually they consumed every spare scrap of green, and they began to starve. Within a year their population had collapsed to less than half of what it had been.
Nathanael looked on with horror. He wept at the sight of the emaciated creatures. "Amon, stop. How can you do this?"
"I do nothing, Nathanael. This is merely the natural consequence of time. This same thing will happen everywhere unless we act." He stood firm on the cloud with his arms crossed.
"And how can we act to stop this?"
"Well, you may not like the answer, but I have a suggestion." He seized a nearby piece of cloud and split it into two chunks. He squeezed and shaped them, and then cast them down onto the land below. They took shape as a fox and a wolf, and immediately set about tearing into the nearest rabbits and deer, who had no defence against this new addition whatsoever.
Nathanael was horrified. "Surely this is too much. Do they need to suffer in this way?"
Amon watched the new predators lying down to rest after their feasting. "It is sad, I admit. But without them, collapse and starvation are inevitable. Would you have us simply place an arbitrary number on their population? With this in place they have a pressure to evolve and change, to become more complex and better adapted to the environment. It's a beautiful system."
Nathanael watched as one of the wolves kept killing despite having more than enough food available, following its instinct to glut itself while the opportunity was available.
"What if we just made the island bigger?" said Nathanael.
Amon snorted. "Don't be naive Nathanael. When would it end?"
Nathanael hung there for a few more moments and then disappeared.
Some time passed while Nathanael created all of the animals and flowers of the rainforest, thousands of bird varieties and species. He'd thought more about what Amon had said and decided to visit him again.
Nathanael appeared beside him and found the world changed.
In the time he had been away, Amon had been busy. The meadows hummed with invisible life, tiny organisms that Nathanael could barely perceive. He watched a young deer drinking from a stream and noticed something off in its movement. It stumbled, recovered, stumbled again.
"What have you done?" Nathanael asked.
Amon was sitting on the edge of a cloud, watching the world turn below. "There was a waste problem," he said. "Dead matter was accumulating. Fallen leaves, carcasses, excrement. The land was becoming choked with it. I designed organisms to break it all down."
"And what's happening to that deer?"
"Some of the organisms interact with living tissue. They have changed, evolved to spread and take advantage of its resources. It was not intended, but for it to be effective it needed to adapt and change, and some of those changes were difficult to predict."
Nathanael descended to the surface. The deer was shivering, its breath wheezing. "So this is inevitable?" He said, gesturing at the animal.
"What dies must be reclaimed. The bacteria do this efficiently. If I were to design a system that could do exactly what we wanted without ever changing then I would have to be forever getting involved, tweaking things to avoid any harms whatsoever. It would be endless. And it would be an extremely inelegant solution."
Nathanael looked up at him. "Inelegant."
"Yes. Inelegant. There is a finite amount of matter on this world, and a finite time for us. We may have the power to fix these things, but the humans certainly won't. We simply can't afford it."
"So it's not worth your time to save this deer?"
They watched it die. Nathanael eased its passing raising a hand to its forehead. He felt the bacteria population climbing within before the body was cold. Efficient indeed.
"Come," Amon said. "I have more to show you."
He led Nathanael to a hillside where a wolf lay, head on its paws, grey-muzzled and thin. One of the first wolves. Its cells were old, losing coherence. No longer repairing themselves as they once had. It was not sick. It was simply falling apart.
"Senescence," Amon said. "The cells divide to maintain the organism, but each division loses some information. Eventually the organism can no longer maintain itself."
"And why did you not fix this?"
"Because it is necessary. Old organisms die and make room for new ones. Their matter is reclaimed. Without this, the population would grow until it exceeded the carrying capacity of the land, and then we would have the same collapse we saw on the island."
Nathanael was quiet for a long moment. "Amon," he said carefully, "You keep saying the same thing."
"What?"
"Your time is limited. There's a fixed carrying capacity. You keep speaking as if this world has hard limits that we have to accept. But we set those limits. We made this world. If there is not enough matter, we can add more. If the carrying capacity is too low, we can raise it. You are solving for scarcity, but scarcity is not a law of the universe. It's something we get to decide."
Amon frowned. "You cannot simply keep adding resources forever. At some point..."
"At what point? We created this world today. We could simply create another one."
"It is not about whether we can. It is about whether we should. A system should be self-sustaining. It should not require constant intervention."
"Why not?"
Amon paused. "Because... that is what it means to solve the problem. A true craftsman builds a clock that runs on its own. He does not stand beside it, forever pushing the hands."
"We are not clockmakers," Nathanael said. "We are gardeners. A garden requires tending. We have that responsibility because we have the power to do so."
Amon stood and looked out across the world. Nathanael could see that he was not simply defending a design choice. Amon felt that there was an inherent beauty to it, a correctness. The way predation and decomposition and senescence all interlocked into a single self-regulating system. It was elegant. No oversight required, and no further thought needed.
The fact that the loop was built on suffering seemed, to Amon, like an acceptable cost.
"There is a neatness to it," Nathanael said, reading his expression. "I can see that. Everything feeds everything else. Nothing is wasted. It has the beauty of a proof."
"Yes, exactly. It's clean." Amon said, seeming relieved to be understood.
"But Amon, the proof is filled with suffering."
The wind moved through the long grass on the hillside. The old wolf breathed its last and was still.
"What would you have me do?" Amon asked.
"I would have you start again. Not to answer the question 'how do I build a system that runs itself,' but with the question 'how do I build a world that is just for all its inhabitants.'
"Your world would require constant maintenance. Constant intervention. We would have to tend it forever."
"Yes."
"That is inefficient."
"That is what is required of us, Amon," Nathanael said.
Amon looked at him for a long time. Then he shook his head. "Tomorrow, the humans will arrive. I do not have time for a second attempt. The humans must ultimately be left to themselves."
"As long as you can see the choice that you're making, old friend."
Amon turned away and began preparations for the next day. Below them, the world turned on, beautiful and brutal, its suffering woven so deeply into its structure that it looked like nature.
Nathanael sat on the cloud alone and watched a rabbit eating clover in the late afternoon light. A fox crouched in the treeline. The rabbit did not know it was being watched. It did not know that its death was a design choice.
But Nathanael knew. And he thought: "They deserve better."
The mandate had been given by God that morning, and Nathanael and Amon had arrived in the nascent realm to shape His will.
The task was simple: creation, in all its perfection. As divine as this instruction was, it did demand a great deal of creativity on the part of his favourite agents. Helpfully, He had gotten them started with all of the matter and energy that they would need. Indeed the task was arguably trivial in that they had only a single universe to tend to, the others being helpfully tended to by myriad other angels.
They quickly got to work, shaping all the countless galaxies and stars, which took no time at all, and then focused on the most important task of all. Creating paradise on earth.
The earth started as a great brown ball, covered in water. To give it shape and colour they added sweeping meadows, forests and trees. To support the future humans who would follow their divine shape, they would need food, in the form of fruit and vegetables, and animals to provide light entertainment.
Nathanael gestured and sweet, charming animals emerged, delicate grazers and rabbits that would nibble on the grass.
He smiled at their natures and harmless attitudes. Amon frowned. "Nathanael, these animals you have created are wonderful, but don't you think there is an inevitable problem here?"
Nathanael glanced over the bank of cloud at him. "What problem could there be, Amon? Do you think they might be too cute?"
"There is certainly some risk of that, but that is not the problem, dear Nathanael. The problem is what happens when these animals begin to fill the world with their offspring." Amon gestured. "Here, let us see what that looks like on this small island."
As his hand arced through the air, centuries passed on the island and the population of rabbits and deer exploded. Eventually they consumed every spare scrap of green, and they began to starve. Within a year their population had collapsed to less than half of what it had been.
Nathanael looked on with horror. He wept at the sight of the emaciated creatures. "Amon, stop. How can you do this?"
"I do nothing, Nathanael. This is merely the natural consequence of time. This same thing will happen everywhere unless we act." He stood firm on the cloud with his arms crossed.
"And how can we act to stop this?"
"Well, you may not like the answer, but I have a suggestion." He seized a nearby piece of cloud and split it into two chunks. He squeezed and shaped them, and then cast them down onto the land below. They took shape as a fox and a wolf, and immediately set about tearing into the nearest rabbits and deer, who had no defence against this new addition whatsoever.
Nathanael was horrified. "Surely this is too much. Do they need to suffer in this way?"
Amon watched the new predators lying down to rest after their feasting. "It is sad, I admit. But without them, collapse and starvation are inevitable. Would you have us simply place an arbitrary number on their population? With this in place they have a pressure to evolve and change, to become more complex and better adapted to the environment. It's a beautiful system."
Nathanael watched as one of the wolves kept killing despite having more than enough food available, following its instinct to glut itself while the opportunity was available.
"What if we just made the island bigger?" said Nathanael.
Amon snorted. "Don't be naive Nathanael. When would it end?"
Nathanael hung there for a few more moments and then disappeared.
Some time passed while Nathanael created all of the animals and flowers of the rainforest, thousands of bird varieties and species. He'd thought more about what Amon had said and decided to visit him again.
Nathanael appeared beside him and found the world changed.
In the time he had been away, Amon had been busy. The meadows hummed with invisible life, tiny organisms that Nathanael could barely perceive. He watched a young deer drinking from a stream and noticed something off in its movement. It stumbled, recovered, stumbled again.
"What have you done?" Nathanael asked.
Amon was sitting on the edge of a cloud, watching the world turn below. "There was a waste problem," he said. "Dead matter was accumulating. Fallen leaves, carcasses, excrement. The land was becoming choked with it. I designed organisms to break it all down."
"And what's happening to that deer?"
"Some of the organisms interact with living tissue. They have changed, evolved to spread and take advantage of its resources. It was not intended, but for it to be effective it needed to adapt and change, and some of those changes were difficult to predict."
Nathanael descended to the surface. The deer was shivering, its breath wheezing. "So this is inevitable?" He said, gesturing at the animal.
"What dies must be reclaimed. The bacteria do this efficiently. If I were to design a system that could do exactly what we wanted without ever changing then I would have to be forever getting involved, tweaking things to avoid any harms whatsoever. It would be endless. And it would be an extremely inelegant solution."
Nathanael looked up at him. "Inelegant."
"Yes. Inelegant. There is a finite amount of matter on this world, and a finite time for us. We may have the power to fix these things, but the humans certainly won't. We simply can't afford it."
"So it's not worth your time to save this deer?"
They watched it die. Nathanael eased its passing raising a hand to its forehead. He felt the bacteria population climbing within before the body was cold. Efficient indeed.
"Come," Amon said. "I have more to show you."
He led Nathanael to a hillside where a wolf lay, head on its paws, grey-muzzled and thin. One of the first wolves. Its cells were old, losing coherence. No longer repairing themselves as they once had. It was not sick. It was simply falling apart.
"Senescence," Amon said. "The cells divide to maintain the organism, but each division loses some information. Eventually the organism can no longer maintain itself."
"And why did you not fix this?"
"Because it is necessary. Old organisms die and make room for new ones. Their matter is reclaimed. Without this, the population would grow until it exceeded the carrying capacity of the land, and then we would have the same collapse we saw on the island."
Nathanael was quiet for a long moment. "Amon," he said carefully, "You keep saying the same thing."
"What?"
"Your time is limited. There's a fixed carrying capacity. You keep speaking as if this world has hard limits that we have to accept. But we set those limits. We made this world. If there is not enough matter, we can add more. If the carrying capacity is too low, we can raise it. You are solving for scarcity, but scarcity is not a law of the universe. It's something we get to decide."
Amon frowned. "You cannot simply keep adding resources forever. At some point..."
"At what point? We created this world today. We could simply create another one."
"It is not about whether we can. It is about whether we should. A system should be self-sustaining. It should not require constant intervention."
"Why not?"
Amon paused. "Because... that is what it means to solve the problem. A true craftsman builds a clock that runs on its own. He does not stand beside it, forever pushing the hands."
"We are not clockmakers," Nathanael said. "We are gardeners. A garden requires tending. We have that responsibility because we have the power to do so."
Amon stood and looked out across the world. Nathanael could see that he was not simply defending a design choice. Amon felt that there was an inherent beauty to it, a correctness. The way predation and decomposition and senescence all interlocked into a single self-regulating system. It was elegant. No oversight required, and no further thought needed.
The fact that the loop was built on suffering seemed, to Amon, like an acceptable cost.
"There is a neatness to it," Nathanael said, reading his expression. "I can see that. Everything feeds everything else. Nothing is wasted. It has the beauty of a proof."
"Yes, exactly. It's clean." Amon said, seeming relieved to be understood.
"But Amon, the proof is filled with suffering."
The wind moved through the long grass on the hillside. The old wolf breathed its last and was still.
"What would you have me do?" Amon asked.
"I would have you start again. Not to answer the question 'how do I build a system that runs itself,' but with the question 'how do I build a world that is just for all its inhabitants.'
"Your world would require constant maintenance. Constant intervention. We would have to tend it forever."
"Yes."
"That is inefficient."
"That is what is required of us, Amon," Nathanael said.
Amon looked at him for a long time. Then he shook his head. "Tomorrow, the humans will arrive. I do not have time for a second attempt. The humans must ultimately be left to themselves."
"As long as you can see the choice that you're making, old friend."
Amon turned away and began preparations for the next day. Below them, the world turned on, beautiful and brutal, its suffering woven so deeply into its structure that it looked like nature.
Nathanael sat on the cloud alone and watched a rabbit eating clover in the late afternoon light. A fox crouched in the treeline. The rabbit did not know it was being watched. It did not know that its death was a design choice.
But Nathanael knew. And he thought: "They deserve better."