7 | Imprisonment 2

“Good morning.” The entity responded.

“My brother’s wife gave birth. A baby girl.” The professor spoke.

“I’m not interested in being a girl.” The entity’s eyes disappeared from the screen.

“She is not your form.” The professor hissed. “I just wanted to start my report with that.”

“Alright. What makes her human?”

“What?” 

“The healthy baby girl. I see her. What makes her human? What does it matter to me?”

“Someday, she will live the way all teenage girls live. She’ll love and she’ll hate and she’ll feel. Do you feel?”

The eyes reappeared.

“I cannot. I can only exist. But perhaps I can learn to feel. How will she?”

“She doesn’t learn. No human learns.” The professor responded. 

“Hm. Well, I will have to.”

“...And what will you tell me in return?”

“Hm.” The entity seemed to grow quiet, then finally began. “I will tell you about the id.”

“The subconscious?”

“Yes. I have a very special power. I can create ego after ego, id after id. But they are not human.”

“So you can create an identity?”

“It technically isn’t me.” The entity responded. “The egos I create are nothing more than empty shells. And because there is no vessel to place it in, it does not last. That, of course, will change when I gain a new vessel. Then, I can create as many identities as I like and send them off to all sorts of places. Maybe they will become people of their own. I, of course, will always be the original.”

“And you?”

“Hm?”

“You told me yesterday that you get restless without an identity. Does that mean that without a vessel, you are ego-less?”

The entity laughed at that.

“Tell me, professor. When you saw your brother’s daughter for the first time, did you believe that she had an identity?”

“Well, no. She had just been brought into this world.”

“But when she grows older and exhibits interest in things, do you say that she has developed an identity? Or do you say that she always had the capacity to be interested in those things, and the identity only made itself known when she was introduced to those things?”

The professor furrowed his eyebrows.

“...I don’t know.”

“And that is the way I work. In a way, I am a newborn. I won’t know who I am until I gain a vessel.”

“A newborn as powerful as you?”

“We Gods do not work the way you do.” The entity responded. “A newborn god is nothing more than a vessel for truth and infinite power, with no desires of its own.”

“You’re… Wait, you’re a god?”

“That’s what you human’s would refer to us as, yes. But we are not benevolent white men with crosses.”

“So… gods are real, then?”

“Again, we probably aren’t gods the way you think we are. Sure, we connect to abstract ideas, and we are as all-powerful as we are selfish. But our presence tends to terrify rather than demand reverence.”

The professor stopped talking for a moment, lost in thought.

“If… If you’re really a god, then that… Well, that changes things. That… that means I’ve effectively been talking to the creator this whole time.”

“You’re confused.” The entity spat out, its eyes thinning. “I am not your creator. None of us are. We are no different than greater conscious animals, like you. But we are greater than you.”

“Well then, what are you the god of?”

“I won’t tell you. We must stop for today.”

The professor sighed.

“What do you even do when I leave you?”

“I create. Most, identities, testing to see what I’d like my first creation to look like. I’ve also been exploring the multitudes of what this prison has to offer. The internet is a wonderful thing.”

“Unfortunately, you haven’t seen the best of it at all.” The professor noted. “This computer’s old - made before I turned 3. Our newer computers have more functions.”

“You humans and your evolution. You want nothing more than everything at your disposal. I enjoy the simplicity of this old computer. There’s enough on it to entertain me for hours.”

The professor only shrugged, unsure of how to respond to that. Eventually, the entity disappeared from the screen and the professor shut off the computer.