Everything Is Like Ours

My grandson often asks me to tell him how we used to live in the old days, and I really love telling him these stories.

Long, long ago, our lives were very simple, uncomplicated, and wild. That was what made them interesting. If you wanted to swallow someone, you surrounded them and ate them. If you found someone abandoned, you took them in, and then you lived together happily.

Then there were more of us. We became much stronger than before, and we had more things to do, more responsibilities, and more enemies, both outside and inside our communities. We began to join together and form communities. We also got gods, and we worshipped them. There was the God of Fertility, the God of Pure Blood, the God of Cleansing Water, who was supposed to wash all the dirt away, and the greatest god of all: the God of Food. Without him, we would never have survived. Where else would we get our nutrition and energy?

That was how we lived in our communities. We had our pagan beliefs, and life was more or less stable. Of course, we were attacked from time to time, but with every attack we became stronger. More importantly, our collective mind became smarter.

The ages passed. Our communities grew larger, and there were more and more of us. We started doing more complicated work, our activities became more extensive, our enemies became more numerous, and our territory grew. But communicating with each other and sharing information became harder and slower.

Then we came up with an idea. We could send messages through our river, because every community was connected to the river by its branches and channels. Whenever we were attacked, we threw lots of little notes into the river so that other communities would know what had happened and send help along the same river to fight off our enemies. We also transported all our supplies and extra resources along the river, so that anyone who lacked something or needed something could take what they needed from it. Whenever new settlements appeared far away from the river, the river somehow magically found a way to send its branches toward them too.

More ages passed, and we became stronger, larger, and richer. It became difficult for anyone to attack us, and our society grew more complicated. Since outside enemies no longer threatened us as much as they used to, new problems began to appear inside our own communities.

In one community, we had a very interesting specimen. He announced that there was only one God, that he was God's son, and that he had managed to turn the water in our river into blood. Well, that was when our religious wars began. The community where the river began declared that it was the most important one and that there must be only one religion. Belief in many gods was wrong and harmful, they said. The problem was that this central religion often harmed all the other communities. Sometimes it blocked the supply of food and other resources along the river. Sometimes it refused to help us fight against foreign invaders. In the end, we decided to submit to it. We did not really care which god we believed in, as long as nobody interfered with our lives.

More eras passed, and our country became so huge and crowded that communication became a serious problem. Every message took a very long time to reach its destination, and by the time it arrived, it was often badly distorted. You could ask your neighbors for one building material and receive something completely different. When enemies attacked us, we had to wait for the other communities to find out what was happening and then send help along the river. By the time they arrived, many of our people had already been killed or forced to accept another religion.

So we built a huge network that connected every settlement into one unified internal network. This network saved us. Messages began to arrive much faster than they ever had by river, and we could finally coordinate our actions. Not every settlement had to produce the same things and create huge amounts of unnecessary goods. Instead, they produced what was actually needed, following instructions sent through the internal network. We became incredibly strong. Nobody could defeat us, and nobody could catch us by surprise.

Everything was going well until IT appeared.

IT was a huge settlement surrounded by strong, flexible rocks and an almost impossible barrier. Its inhabitants were very unusual. Unlike everyone else in our country, they did not produce anything. They spent all their time thinking, dreaming, inventing, imagining, giving orders, listening in on others, watching everyone, sensing everything, and remembering absolutely everything. It was something we had never seen before!

IT could sense an attack on even the most distant corner of our country while the attack was only just beginning. IT already knew what was happening and immediately sent orders through the internal network. But IT demanded a very high price for its services: more than 20 percent of the very best things produced by our entire country had to go to IT. When IT arrived, many settlements stopped believing in our old god. Why believe in a god when IT could do everything, knew everything, and controlled everything and everyone? IT asked us to call it INTELLECT.

Because some people in our settlements lost their faith, they became atheists. They began to value their own lives and stopped dying just because someone gave them an order. Instead, they started reproducing even more. It almost seemed as if they had begun to enjoy life more than before. But it turned out that all this happiness came at a price. There were so many atheists that our country began to get sick. New independent groups started to form, demanding freedom and refusing to obey orders from above.

Anyway, grandson, you are still too young to learn about things like life, death, and other worlds. The ones who live inside a glass dome next to INTELLECT say that our world is not the only one. They claim to have seen other worlds many times. Some looked very much like ours, while others had completely different shapes. They also say that our universe moves, that every universe has boundaries, and that when two universes meet, they can sometimes create another one. A universe can even travel to places where there are no vibrations at all. And apparently, many groups of universes have their own religions too...

But you cannot live on stories alone. Come on, grandson, let's go and give our mitochondria a little shake. We have just received an order saying that proteins are urgently needed. Apparently, our universe got into a fight with another universe today, and its boundaries were torn. We have to patch up those tears immediately. But why do we have to repair them so urgently? Perhaps they simply don't want us to see the other universes with our own eyes!