Chương 32: 31: The Conversation

The chamber hummed around them, a low, constant thrum beneath the rows of dormant pods stretching into darkness. After demolishing an absurd amount of pastries, fruit, and cookies, Butter had conjured a sofa large enough for both of them. They sat sunk into the cushions, full to the point of regret. Katherine groaned and held her stomach.

"I ate too many cookies."

"You ate way too many cookies."

"It was a stressful day." Butter snorted, reached over, and tapped her lightly on the stomach. A warm pulse of Melody flowed through Katherine. The ache subdued instantly. Katherine blinked.

"…That is so unfair. You can just do that?"

"Mhm." Butter shrugged. Katherine sank deeper into the sofa with a relieved sigh. Their stomachs full and the immediate danger gone, the exhaustion settled in. For a while neither spoke. Butter reached into the Snack Dimension and pulled out a smartphone. Katherine stared.

"You have a phone?"

"Why wouldn't I have a phone?"

"I don't know. You keep your belongings in a pocket universe."

"Those things don't stop me from texting people."

"That feels incorrect somehow." Butter unlocked it and scrolled. Katherine leaned closer. The screen was full of blurry videos. A white-haired girl crossing a city block before a camera could focus. Pink eyes caught on security footage. A frame-by-frame breakdown of a streak of light punching through a warehouse wall. One title read: GHOST GIRL CAUGHT ON CAMERA??? Another: GOTH FELINE SPOTTED AGAIN?! Referring to W-9. Katherine looked from the screen to Butter.

"…That's you."

"Yeah."

"Sugarbear. You're famous.""'Famous' is generous."

"You mean that's real?"

"Most of them are." Katherine stared. Butter shrugged.

"I'm kind of an internet urban legend. Like Bigfoot."

"You are not like Bigfoot."

"A surprising number of people disagree." Butter flicked through another compilation. She flicked through more clips.

"Most people think it's fake." A blurry white-haired girl jumping across rooftops. A security camera recording something blurring past an intersection. A shaky recording of golden tails appearing behind a building before disappearing again. Millions of views. Arguments everywhere. Comments flew past. FAKE. Hoax. No way that's real. My cousin saw Ghost Girl once. Goth Feline solos. Butter groaned and kept scrolling. Other videos appeared too. Strange figures caught on security cameras.

Alleged sightings of people Katherine assumed were other experiments, anomalies, or things she didn't want explained. After a few clips, she leaned back.

"Noppity nope. I'm filling my head with more nightmare fuel."

"Reasonable."

"Show me something cute or stupid." Butter obediently switched apps. A cat fell off a refrigerator. Katherine laughed. Another cat got startled by a cucumber. Butter laughed. A raccoon attempted to steal a birthday cake and face-planted into a swimming pool. Both of them lost it. For a while, they sat together on the sofa, watching increasingly ridiculous videos while the chamber continued its endless hum around them.

Clock was still somewhere deeper in the facility, finishing whatever impossible task only Clock could accomplish. Until he returned, there wasn't much they could do. For now, there was nothing to do but wait. So they watched idiots on the internet hurt themselves in increasingly creative ways while the fate of countless people rested on someone else's shoulders....

"Hey," Katherine asked, "do you believe in God?" Butter glanced over from her phone.

"What would change if I did?"

"I'm asking if you do."

"I heard you. I'm asking why the answer matters. Believing in something doesn't make it exist. It just changes your relationship with it." Katherine hugged her knees.

"I don't. Especially after everything. If God's good, why all the suffering? Why kill so many people? The Flood. Sodom. A good God doesn't drown children." Butter snorted so hard she nearly dropped her phone.

"What?"

"You did the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where people grab onto the 'all-good' part and forget the rest." Butter shook her head.

"The Lion of Judah. Since when were lions cuddly? People hear 'love' and imagine a cosmic therapist. Then they read the rest and act shocked." Katherine opened her mouth. Closed it. Butter pointed a bandaged finger at her.

"Don't confuse God with the Hallmark version of Jesus. The same man who said, 'Blessed are the meek,' also made a whip and cleared a temple. Context matters. You're taking one trait from an entire being and getting upset when the rest doesn't match it." Katherine frowned.

"That doesn't answer the killing."

"Which people?"

"What do you mean which people?"

"The ones sacrificing children? The rapists? The murderers? The groups that spent generations being warned and refused to stop? Which specific group should've been allowed to continue?" Katherine hesitated.

"The children." Butter's expression softened.

"Yeah. That's the hard part." The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. She looked toward the endless rows of pods.

"No one actually knows what happens to babies. I don't. You don't. But if God is just, I hope people who never got the chance to choose aren't punished for it. That's not a perfect answer. It's just the only honest one I've got." Katherine rubbed her eyes.

"It still feels wrong."

"Maybe. But perspective is an interesting thing."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Butter sat forward.

"You know what I can do, right? I can hear visions. Emotions have colors. Music has texture. Some sounds have shape. You would never know what that's like. You can't. You're not me."

"That's not helping."

"It will." Butter held up a finger.

"Blue."

"Blue?"

"You think blue is blue because your eyes say it is. But blue isn't a thing. It's light interpreted by a human brain. Dogs see differently. Cats see differently. Snakes can see heat. A mantis shrimp sees colors we literally can't imagine." She shrugged.

"So is an object blue? Sure. To us. To something else, maybe not. Same object. Same reality. Different observers." Katherine stared at her. Butter smiled faintly.

"If creatures standing next to each other can experience the same object in completely different ways, why are people so confident they could fully understand a being that, if He exists, would sit infinitely higher than that?" The chamber fell quiet again. Butter returned to scrolling through videos while Katherine sat with the thought, uncertain whether it answered anything at all, but no longer certain the question was as simple as she'd believed.

Butter saw the subject still bothering Katherine and crouched to eye level.

"God, if He exists, is a spirit. Angels too. They don't have flesh or blood. They don't exist the way we do." She tapped Katherine's chest.

"When a human kills, a body stops working. But what does 'kill' even mean to a spirit?" Katherine frowned.

"To us, death is the end of the body. To a being that sees spirits as the real person, it might just be separation. Moving someone from one state of existence to another."

"That's insane."

"Maybe." Butter shrugged.

"But if humans spend a century in a body and eternity as a spirit, which matters more? A hundred years, or forever?" Katherine didn't answer. Butter continued, "The scale is different. Complaining that God took a human life could look very different from the perspective of something that sees eternity as the main event." Katherine scratched her chin.

"Fine. Then why not stop bad things before they happen?"

"Perspective again." Butter stood and stretched.

"If God exists outside time, He wouldn't see past, present, and future like we do. He'd see the whole thing at once." She paced slowly.

"A future murderer might never exist because of one small act of kindness. A good person might accidentally cause a disaster decades later. We can't trace every consequence. We barely understand our own lives."

"So what, everything is predetermined?"

"I'm saying we don't know enough to judge the whole equation." Butter turned back to her.

"Maybe bad things are prevented all the time and nobody notices. Maybe stopping one tragedy creates three worse ones. Maybe intervention happens in ways we don't recognize." She raised a finger.

"Imagine a genuinely good man. Everyone loves him. But God knows that twenty years from now he'll start a war that kills millions. So he dies peacefully tonight." Katherine's expression shifted.

"People would call it unfair. They'd mourn the good man. They'd never know about the war that never happened." Butter sat down again.

"I think you either believe in God or you don't. But trying to fully evaluate the decisions of a being infinitely beyond human understanding feels like asking a bacterium to critique astrophysics. We just don't have the equipment." Katherine frowned thoughtfully.

"…Can I ask something?"

"Mhm."

"You keep saying we don't have the equipment. What do you mean?" Butter tapped the side of her head.

"We only know sound exists because we have ears. Color because we have eyes. Smell because we have noses. Every sense reveals one tiny slice of reality." She glanced toward the endless rows of pods.

"So... what exists that humans simply don't possess the organs to perceive?" Katherine was quiet. Butter smiled faintly.

"Trying to explain God to a human might be like trying to describe every detail of a giraffe to someone born completely blind. You can use words, metaphors, comparisons... but they'll never actually see it."

"…Because they're missing the sense."

"Yep." She gave a small shrug.

"Maybe we aren't just missing information." Butter looked toward the ceiling.

"Maybe we're missing ways of knowing." Katherine was quiet for a while.

"I'm just tired," she whispered.

"Of all the suffering. All the pain. Everywhere."

"Me too." Butter rested a bandaged hand on her knee.

"Which is why we're supposed to help each other, not sit around waiting for God to fix everything." Katherine looked up.

"We all want justice," Butter continued.

"We want evil punished. But we also want free will. You can't really have both if God steps in every time someone's about to do something awful." She tilted her head.

"And if He punished every sinner, would you be safe?" Katherine blinked.

"Everyone who lied. Stole. Hated someone. Had a cruel thought. Would you still be sitting here?" Silence.

"People focus on God being good and forget justice comes with standards. Not 'better than a monster.' Perfection." Butter shrugged.

"By that measure, nobody's safe."

"That's scary."

"Maybe. But who decides what's good?" The question lingered.

"Humans define good by what benefits humans. A snake isn't evil for biting. A bird isn't evil for shoving its chicks from the nest. We judge things through our own nature and then assume everything else should follow the same rules." She leaned back.

"I think we got a little too confident. We can barely manage ourselves, yet we want to judge the morality of every being in existence." Katherine hugged her knees.

"Then what do we do?" Butter smiled, tired but genuine.

"Know your place. Do your best. Help the people in front of you." She squeezed Katherine's shoulder.

"That's enough." The chamber hummed softly around them while, somewhere among the endless pods, another sleeper dreamed. Katherine was quiet for a moment.

"But why make a world like this? If God's real, why build suffering into it at all?" Butter looked out over the endless rows of sleeping faces.

"I don't know." The answer came easily.

"No one knows. We can theorize all day, but we'd still be guessing." She glanced back at Katherine.

"But if God exists and created everything - every star, galaxy, and universe beyond our sight - why would a being that vast answer to us?" Katherine frowned.

"Think about the scale. A flea demanding explanations from a giant that built the entire ecosystem. The giant doesn't owe the flea an explanation for rain or winter." She raised a hand before Katherine could object.

"And the fact the giant doesn't immediately crush the flea for questioning it already suggests something. Not necessarily goodness, but not cruelty either."

"That's not comforting."

"I know." Butter gestured vaguely upward.

"We don't even understand our own oceans. Most of reality is completely beyond us. If God exists, we're a flicker asking questions we probably lack the capacity to understand." Katherine stared at the floor.

"So we just accept it?"

"No." Butter's answer was immediate.

"We do what we can. Fight what we can fight. Help the people in front of us." She pointed toward the pods.

"That's why we're here. Not to solve the universe. To fix what we can reach." Butter stood and offered her hand.

"Know your place. Do your best. Everything else is noise." Katherine looked at the hand, then took it.

"Know your place. Do your best." Butter smiled faintly and pulled her up.

"That's the whole thing."... Katherine didn't let go.

"Butter."

"Yeah?"

"Jesus." Butter blinked.

"What about him?" Katherine frowned thoughtfully.

"People always talk about the Old Testament God and the New Testament God like they're different. Wrath versus love. But what if it's just perspective?" Butter tilted her head.

"You said the giant can't understand the flea. Not because He doesn't care, but because He's never been one. So... what if Jesus was God becoming the flea? Living here. Hurting here. Feeling hunger, fear, temptation, betrayal. Experiencing what it's actually like to be human." Butter's eyes widened slightly.

"And afterward, maybe that's why the focus seems different. More patience. More mercy. The giant finally understood what being small felt like."

"The wheat and the weeds," Butter murmured. Katherine nodded.

"Exactly. Maybe He isn't ignoring evil. Maybe He's waiting because tearing out the weeds too soon would destroy the wheat too." Butter stared at her for a moment, then laughed softly.

"Oh my. Katherine, that's actually really good."

"It is?"

"Yeah." Butter shook her head.

"The incarnation as a perspective shift. I've never thought about it that way." She scratched at her chin thoughtfully.

"Honestly, it always bugged me a little." Katherine blinked.

"What did?"

"The idea that God needed Jesus to understand people." Butter shrugged.

"If He's omniscient, shouldn't He already know? Why bother becoming human at all?" Katherine frowned.

"But what does omniscient mean?" she asked. Butter opened her mouth, then paused.

"I mean… knowing everything?"

"According to humans," Katherine said.

"What does it mean to a spirit?" Butter's eyebrows rose. Katherine continued, warming to the thought.

"Like… I know math exists. I know numbers exist. But I don't know what it feels like to be a number." Butter snorted.

"That is the most Katherine sentence I've ever heard."

"Shut up, I'm serious."

"I know." Katherine pointed at her.

"So maybe I could know everything there is to know about math and still not know what it's like from the perspective of a number. If that even means anything. Maybe omniscience works differently than people assume." She hesitated.

"Also, that was a terrible example because I barely know math." Butter burst out laughing.

"Maybe you might now with your new blue brain." Katherine rolled her eyes.

"You know what I mean."

"I do." Butter leaned back, still smiling.

"Actually, I really do." The amusement slowly faded into thought.

"Humans imagine omniscience as an infinitely large human mind. Bigger memory. More processing. But if God exists, why would His way of knowing resemble ours at all?" Katherine nodded.

"Spot on." Butter stared into the distance for a moment.

"Oh my."

"What?"

"Nothing." A small smile tugged at her lips.

"I just like that idea. That maybe becoming human wasn't about gaining information. Maybe it was about gaining perspective." For a while neither spoke. The chamber hummed softly around them, rows of sleeping pods stretching into the darkness while the two sat in the quiet, turning over questions neither expected to answer. Then Katherine laughed.

"You know what's funny? The question of whether God exists is probably the point." Butter raised an eyebrow.

"If everyone knew God existed, people would obey out of certainty, fear, or self-interest. If everyone knew He didn't, plenty of people would stop caring altogether. But we don't know." Butter nodded slowly.

"We live in the middle," Katherine said.

"The maybe. The uncertainty. That's what gives choice meaning. You decide what you believe and act on it without ever getting proof." She gestured toward the endless rows of pods.

"Maybe that's why Earth is different. Heaven is all good. Hell is all bad. Here, both exist together. This is where people choose." Her voice softened.

"Every day. Every moment. Without anyone telling them whether it matters." Butter was quiet for a long moment.

"That," she said at last, "might be the smartest thing I've ever heard about any of this."

"Really?"

"Really." She laughed softly.

"I've thought about this for years and never landed there. Not-knowing as the point. God close enough to hope for, far enough to doubt. Choosing Him means something because certainty isn't guaranteed." She looked at Katherine, then stood and offered her hand.

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For helping me understand something I didn't know I was missing." Katherine took her hand and squeezed it.

"Know your place." Butter smiled.

"Do your best."