The Game

The night of June 10th, in the year 2018 CE, 14 billion years after the second big bang, on the planet Earth, in the city of Los Angeles, a young man slept soundly in his own bed. Unbeknownst to him, this would not be the same sleep he had fallen into every previous night of his 24 years leading up to now. For as he fell into sleep, a sleeping god awoke.

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Have you ever had those dreams where you could tell you’re dreaming? Those are always strange, like in normal dreams Genghis Khan can hand you a parking ticket and call you a douche, or you can drive from San Francisco to Hawaii, and you won’t question the dream logic. It all makes just enough sense to your sleeping self that you’ll go along with it, even if on paper it's all so obviously impossible. And yet, sometimes you’ll just see a person that you didn’t expect, or maybe something completely mundane that could have happened in real life, but it just catches you off-guard and makes you think “Oh, I’m dreaming. Neat.” And then you wake up.

Has that ever happened to you? Because it’s happening to me now. I was just dreaming about being at the National Zoo in D.C. Pretty standard stuff, the dream version still has the elephant house as it was when I was a kid; with giraffes and the hippos they used to keep there, before they moved those out to give the elephants more indoor space. The woolly mammoth herd was a new addition to the scene, but that isn’t what made me realize this was a dream though. The dream giveaway came up when I was walking over to feed the giraffes a carrot, and I saw myself standing there, already feeding the giraffes. I was fairly perplexed for a few seconds before I realized this was all a dream, and started waiting for myself to wake up.

It felt like I was standing there for a solid minute before I realized I wasn’t waking up right now. Nothing else to do but roll with it, so I walked up next to myself and tried to get one of the giraffes to eat the carrot in my hand.

“Hey, you.” I said to myself. “Hey, yourself.” Replied my other self.

“Come here often?” I joked, in an exaggerated sultry tone.

Other me giggled. “Oh, man. I knew I missed this, but I had no idea how much I actually did until now.” He said, as he lifted up another carrot above his head. I watched the giraffe’s long purple tongue snake around the carrot before retracting the tongue and the carrot back into its mouth.

“Missed feeding the giraffes? Yeah, I guess it has been a while.”

“No, dude, how much I missed you, talking with you, dreaming this kind of stuff! I love it, I love how even in our dreams the animals seem so perfectly natural. Actually yes, yes I did miss giraffes.”

“I gotta say, I think this is a first for me. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a dream duplicate of myself before. Also, I usually wake up when I realize I’m in a dream. Like, instantly.”

“Normally you would, but this time I’m keeping the dream going. I’m really enjoying this, and I needed to talk with you anyway, so don’t worry about waking up early, I’m in control of this dreamscape.”

“Works for me, me. So what do I want to talk about?”

“Everything I guess; existence, desire, mortality, us.”

“Kind of a broad set of conversation topics isn’t it? Also kind of a buzzkill, I thought I would want to have more fun with lucid dreaming.”

The other me turned away from the giraffe towards me. We sat there for a few seconds just kinda staring at each other before he smiled and broke the silence. “You’re right, I do want to have more fun with this, let's go check out those exhibits outside.” He started walking towards the exit and I followed him out to the main zoo path.

“I guess it's pretty obviously a dream considering that there are miraculously no strollers in our path.” I joked.

Other me laughed “Yeah, I guess that’s one clue. Also that,” He pointed to the left “could be considered another clue.”

I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect to see a huge green and red splotchy tree leaning towards me at that angle. Also trees don’t usually move, not even dream trees. The top of the tree curled down to face me before I realized this was not a tree. This was the long neck of an enormous sauropod dinosaur. “A Barosaurus!” I yelled with glee. It must be standing behind a deep moat, because I could barely see the shoulders from where I was standing.

“Is he not just the coolest fucking thing!” Other me was also excited to see a dream dinosaur. “Excellent I.D job, by the way, considering you’ve never actually seen one alive, and I made sure this one had exactly the look of the real things, 150 million years ago.”

“Oh me, of course you’d say that! I imagined this. No one knows what it really looked like.” I said with bizarre confidence.

“Oh right, getting ahead of myself here.” Other me laughed at his own wordplay and affectionately nudged me with his elbow. “ I guess I should explain why I’m here.”

I was already grabbing a leafy tree branch from this wheelbarrow right next to us that definitely wasn’t there a moment ago. “Or you could join me in the ultimate giraffe feeding experience.” I said as I lifted this upscaled petting zoo treat above my head and started waving it to get the dinosaur’s attention. After a second the beast took notice and curled its neck down to meet me. It was moving pretty quickly, but it was just so huge that it still took a couple seconds for the head to make it all the way down. Amazingly, as tiny as the head was compared to the rest of the body, it was still big enough to swallow me whole. It bit down on the branch, and I let go before I could be lifted off my feet. I watched the dream dinosaur swallow the whole branch without chewing, before it started leaning back down to us.

I heard the sound of leaves rustling to my right. “Love the way we think. I can talk AND feed dinosaurs.” Said other me, as he waved another branch around for the Barosaurus. We both watched in silence as it grabbed the second branch, an enormous tongue pushing the entire thing down its incredibly long gullet.

“Sorry, I forgot, what did you want to talk about?” I asked without taking my eyes off the dinosaur.

“Everything. You might want to sit down for this.” There was now a bench directly behind where we were standing. We both sat down and continued to watch the dinosaur now feeding itself on the trees around its exhibit.

“So, if you could rewrite existence, bend reality itself to your will, be a god, what would you do?”

“Well I’d definitely do something like this.” I gestured at the dinosaur. “My own Jurassic Park would probably be my first idea. I did dream up this good boi after all.”

“Obviously, but what else?”

I thought for a moment. “Save the environment I guess, change the world, eliminate religions, perform extremely cool and unethical scientific experiments.”

Other me chuckled at that “I know for sure you’d do all those things. But what else would you do as a god?”

“I don’t think I’d have any use for worshippers.” My mind briefly went to Zeus. “I’d probably be really gross. Bang absurd numbers of mortal women.” Other me grinned, “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Well,” I considered “would all that be enough though? I mean if I had all of time, wouldn’t I get bored? Bored of experiments? Bored of existence? Bored of sex?”

That also got a light chuckle out of him “Right about the first two, though I actually haven’t tried that last one. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me.”

That gave me pause. “What do you mean you already tried doing that?”

Other me smiled, “I mean I’ve already spent billions of years doing those things. Here,” he held up two fingers and moved them towards my forehead “Let me show you.”

His fingers made contact and I saw it all. I saw the Earth from space, with its continents shifting in reverse order. I watched them all join, split and rejoin, several times. I saw the Earth and moon come back together and form a swirling mass of rock in space, before the swirling mass became two separate planets. I watched all the other plants be unmade and the solar system disperse into a vast field of asteroids. I watched the sun spit off gasses until it was no longer the sun. I saw the matter of the solar system all converge into a new, much larger star. I watched the entire universe being unmade right before my eyes, and at the end of it all I saw only myself, staring right back.

I closed my eyes, the other me mirroring my actions. “You can open your eyes now.” Taking my own advice, I opened my eyes. We weren’t in a zoo anymore. We were now standing on the surface of the moon, facing the Earth. Neither of us was wearing a spacesuit.

We stood there for a bit in silence, staring at the Earth. Understanding slowly crept into me, and I decided to break the silence. “So… you’re not actually a dream duplicated of me, are you?”

His gaze didn’t shift from the Earth. “No. No I'm not.”

Fuck it, just ask “... You’re god.”

“Correct.” He replied

“But you’re also me. Somehow we’re the same person, except you’re a god.”

“Yes.” God me stood there for a few seconds before he turned to face me. “The universe is cyclical. Before the big bang, there was another identical universe. I was born on the same Earth as you, in the previous cycle. By sheer coincidence, I survived to the end of time- the end of my time. Somehow, my very being was assimilated into the new singularity formed in the big crunch. When the universe re-expanded, I was woven into the new reality.”

“And you waited 14 billion years for humanity to evolve again, and for me to be reborn.”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why do that? Why do any of this?” I gestured at the dream universe around me.

“You already know the answer to that question. Think about it”

I sat there for a minute, trying to understand the motivations of a god. I couldn’t wrap my head around even the concept of eternity, so how could I ever know what he wants? Then it hit me; I can't fathom divinity, but I know myself. “You… you’re lonely. Bored. You already did everything a lonely god can do. But you didn’t come here to recruit me for a pantheon, that would be redundant. No, you want to experience mortality all over again. Live a new life with me?”

God me started to clap “Bravo! You figured it out! Pretty quickly, if I do say so myself.”

“How would that work? I figure the point is that you’ll merge with me?”

“I knew I’d get the idea! Yes, that’s kinda what we’ll do. I want to feel everything you do, live, get old, die. I want to eat, shit, learn, grow old, and struggle. But I also want to do all the amazing things a god can do. I don’t want to live the same life I already did, and I don’t want you to go through the same hell I did to get to now.”

“So, what happens now?”

“I rewrite reality to make a wildly different life for us. While you’re awake we will be as one mind, and you won’t know that you’re also god. That would ruin the whole mortality thing. When you dream we can talk, and I’ll make any adjustments to reality we desire. Within reason of course, gotta keep things interesting.”

“So I’m still going to die?”

“Technically yes, but also no. It’d be boring if I never let you die, but when you die I’ll just wait again for the next universe, and either wait for the next you or just make a new one, and we’ll continue to play this game. And also, I’m already you, and I can’t ever die.”

“Won’t you get bored when I’m dead?”

“I did the first time, but now that we have a plan I suppose I could just stop experiencing things for a time and just wait it out. I kinda need to stay out of things anyway, doing nothing is how I make sure the universe reforms in the same way.”

“So it’ll be a new me, and I won’t remember this conversation? My old life? Will I still be me?”

“I mean, we’ll be doing this for an infinite number of realities, so I can guarantee you I will mix it up with that sort of thing. Would get boring if it’s always the same us.”

Though sometimes it might be fun to see how we would react if we suddenly found ourselves in another reality. Actually, that’s a great idea. I might run with that, something different. Something Kinky. I know exactly what we like so this ought to be weird.”

I watched God me snap his fingers and the universe faded to black.