The Button
06 November 2024 ·This is one of two works that I have come to see as intertwined. The other is I’d Like to Be Reincarnated, Please. I would loosely place them both under the banner of speculative fiction, although they have other significance as well.
I don’t see this story, The Button, as a religious tale. The “God” of The Button obviously does not exist, and neither does the “I” of the narrator.
I wrote the body of this work in late 2021, at a time of personal crisis and depression. Rereading it now, one thing I notice is that the perspective of the narrator aligns rather well with that of Ivan Karamazov, which makes sense in view of the fact that I read The Brothers K earlier that year. I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of identification with Ivan at the time.
Without settling the question of whether the narrator takes the correct view of our moral situation as human beings, I think they have something important to say. Infused as I am with a nervous wrath at the moment, I decided now is the time to say it.
How exactly I died doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day everyone faces the same fate. One moment I was in my mortal body, in the next I was in the presence of God. Overwhelmed by the majesty and spectacle, I spontaneously fell to my knees. One of the choir of angels surrounding the throne on which God sat, clearly experienced in these matters, approached and stood me up, telling me not to be afraid. I shook so much I nearly fell to the ground again.
“You look a little surprised to see me,” said God, with a beneficent smile. The angel gave me some kind of a sweet cake to eat, and not knowing what else to do or say, I took several bites. A feeling of warmth spread through my body - if I can call it that - and I felt my fear diminish. Instinctively, I finished the cake.
“I think I am, a little,” I said. “I admit I could never really believe that death was just the end, or more precisely, could never really accept it. But this…” Here I gestured at my surroundings. God sat on an enormous throne adorned with jewels, surrounded by angels who had not ceased singing since I had arrived, though I found that their voices did not distract me and I was able to understand and converse easily. Just behind me, as though I had walked through it moments before, was an enormous gate with pearls larger than my fists. The walls were tastefully plated in gold. “I guess I’m surprised to see that the popular religious imagination so accurately described this place. It’s more glorious than my imagination could have conceived, of course, but in terms of what’s here, it’s pretty much perfect.”
“Well,” said God, “that’s a little complicated. I can explain, but first, I can tell there’s a question you want to ask.”
“Am… am I going to hell?” I eventually managed to croak out.
“No.” God said. “I want to put your mind at ease about that as quickly as possible. I must admit, however, that I’m a little disappointed. That’s the first question I get from a lot of people, but from your perspective, it reflects a rather low view of me, doesn’t it? If I were to send you to hell, you wouldn’t experience that as justice, you would resent me for it.”
“Yes… that’s true, although it feels wrong to admit it now, in your presence.”
“You forget,” God replied, “that I know all of your thoughts already. There’s not really any point in having shame about them at this stage, although I don’t blame you for feeling it. I can’t think your thoughts for you, and you can make decisions freely, but I do know them all.”
“I’m sorry,” said I, “I had forgotten that. I guess that means that no one goes to hell?”
“No one goes to hell. Although, that’s not so surprising. It’s not exactly that I’m above sending people to hell, like you thought, so much as it’s that it isn’t an option at all. The religious writers all talk about an eternity in heaven or an eternity in hell, but they forgot that I said ‘a day to me as as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day’. That’s a logical contradiction, of course. What it is intended to get across to people, who don’t have the capacity to truly grasp it, is that I am outside of time. It does not pass for me; I Am. So I can’t send people to hell. They would have to be always in a state of hell - for all time, past and future, from your point of view.”
“I see,” I said. “Though it is true that I don’t really understand what being outside of time means. My experience of being a human being is mediated through time. I don’t know what it would be to be human without experiencing it. Since people can’t be sent to hell, does that mean that people are outside of time too?”
“Yes,” God answered. “When from your point of view you die, that’s it. You’re just dead. Gone. But there is a very important and hard to explain sense in which your Earthly mind is merely one participatory aspect of the true you, which is an eternal being. What the religious authors writing about hell are imagining is just the continuation of time, as it exists in my created universe, going on forever. They think the dead get spiritually transported, as it were, into heaven or hell. Everything that is real in the truest sense, however, is timeless. I don’t plan to let my universe go on forever, and I’m not going to create a new universe with a heaven and a hell in it just for people to have somewhere to go when they die.”
Without my noticing, an angel had placed a comfortable chair under me and I found myself sitting. The cake must have done its work well, because I felt no discomfort sitting in God’s presence. “Where are we now, then?” I asked. “We seem to be having a conversation, which is taking place in time, and looking at myself I can see that I have a physical body much like the one I had on Earth. If this isn’t the heaven I read about in the book of Revelations, where are we?”
“Johan really enjoys explaining this.” God nodded to one of the angels, who stepped forward. He was a very tall angel, with a wizened visage, and he peered down at me in my chair through a pair of spectacles. He began to speak.
“First, you must accept that you are not in a simulation, in the ordinary sense of the word. You will be tempted to say you are in a simulation, but I promise you, you are not. This place is as real as any of God’s space-time creations. The ‘programming’ of the universe you lived in merely set the ground rules for what happened. Not everything was predetermined; in particular humans have free will in pretty much the best sense you are capable of it. Descartes had a lot right, though I must admit” - here the angel made a face - “that I find his presentation of it rather crude.”
“The universe is a created space. From outside of time, we view it as a beautiful, unchanging jewel. From inside of time, you feel progression, it is natural and correct to grieve death, but from the outside these moments are individual pieces of a much larger puzzle. ‘All things work together for the good of those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.’“
“This place is much like your universe. If you like, it’s a ‘pocket’ universe. This small space does exist in space and time. You have been instantiated in this space as the person you were at the moment of your death. You are being provided with this place in order to think over the events of your life, and have any questions you like answered.”
God, resuming the conversation, said “I see that you’re wondering about Johan’s glasses. There’s no harm in asking about that. It’s … an affectation, I guess you would call it. Strictly speaking, the things you see here, existing in they do in time and space, cannot properly represent their true substances. This ‘heaven’, as you described it, is mostly a recreation of your own picture of what heaven ought to look like. I did my best to give you a reasonable representation, but that’s limited by what your mind will accept. If I wasn’t careful, some people would simply have mental breakdowns.”
“I have a question,” I said, sipping a mug of tea I didn’t remember being given. “I guess it’s kind of the obvious one, and I feel bold even asking…”
“Why do bad things happen to good people?” suggested Johan.
“No, why do bad things happen at all? Why are there bad people to begin with? Why couldn’t we all just want to do good things all the time, and not be tempted by greed and other vices? Surely that would still leave room for free will, it’s just that we’d always want to choose the good things. Sort of like you, God. You act freely, but all the religions say you always do good, just because it’s in your nature.”
God almost seemed to sigh. “This is one of the most difficult questions for humans to understand the answer to. A long time ago I tried to explain this to Job. A lot of the substance got through, but the tone and the details are somewhat muddled. ‘Canst thou draw out the great Leviathan with a hook’ and all that. In later authors, the same idea appeared even more violently: ‘I am the potter and you are the clay’. What I was getting at was that my ways are not your ways. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are not fitting words for the Deity.
“When humans talk about things being good and bad, they are talking about acts that are appropriate or inappropriate in view of making choices about how to spend a finite amount of time or utilize a finite amount of resources. Or else they are talking about duties they owe to other people, or to animals, in view of their shared finitude. But these rules, while entirely suitable to human beings, don’t apply to me.
“When a human hurts an animal, that is wrong because both the human and animal are creatures that exist within time. The pain that the animal feels is just as real as the pain that the human feels, and in exactly the same way. To cause pain to another is to fail to properly honor the realness of that pain. The best explanation I can give you of why there is pain in the world at all is that it struck me as preferable, from the outside-of-time perspective, to create a world where humans could be good and bad from their own point of view, dictating the course of their lives to the best of their ability, as they saw fit. You asked why I couldn’t simply create a universe where everyone is always good, but this isn’t possible, at least in the strict sense. Goodness derives from the human capacity for self-assessment, and if no one ever did anything bad, there would be nothing to assess.”
“I understand,” I said. I don’t know if it was the sort of explanation that I would have bought, if some theologian had presented me with it a mere few days before. Somehow, God’s presence convinced me that it must be true, even if I didn’t fully understand it.
God continued, “I realize on some level this won’t be fully satisfying. What you wanted is a justification, in your own human moral terms, of my actions, my nature. And what I am telling you in some sense boils down to ‘I don’t play by your rules.’ It’s a straightforward, honest explanation, nonetheless - because I don’t. The good news is that, from a human point of view, I am benevolent. I don’t want to see humans suffer, even in a limited temporal sense. I want to see all living things in harmony with each other. But there is not some higher moral law that I have to abide by, there is only the way I am.”
I stopped talking for a while to take this all in, and ate several cakes while I did so. Eventually I spoke up again. “You said you wouldn’t be creating a new temporal universe with a heaven or hell in it. So where do I go? Do I see my friends and family again? What happens now?
“Everything,” God said. “And also nothing. This pocket universe, as Johan likes to call them, will cease to exist the moment you like. You will not go anywhere. This you, this temporal you, will cease to exist. But this you is only one small part of the real, atemporal you. Your consciousness will be united with that atemporal being that is also you. You will ‘die’, in a sense, but as you have already discovered, that’s not so bad either, no worse than falling asleep and waking up again. I think I can promise you that it’s no more metaphysically concerning either, if you’re worried about that.”
“I see.” I was somewhat perplexed by this response. “So what is it like to exist in the atemporal realm, if that’s something I can understand?”
“I will try to explain.” God replied. “It’s virtually impossible for your mind to comprehend the absence of space-time. So let me say a little about what your experience will be. The distinctions between individuals you humans prize so highly mostly break down once you start thinking in a non-spatio-temporal frame. The most accurate description you can manage would be a kind of ‘world-soul’, which you will be joined to. You will not have a distinct, individualized experience, but neither will you be entirely merged into a single brain. I didn’t build the Borg, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I flushed, because that was indeed my initial picture of what God had described. “What will my experience be, though? Will I still have the five senses I have now? If so, what is the sort of subjective experience they will have?”
God almost frowned. “‘Subjective’ is entirely the wrong word to use here, I’m afraid. There will be experiences, and they will in some sense be your experiences, although they will also be everyone else’s. And yes, they will correspond roughly to your human senses (though you have more than five of them), much in the same way you seem to have sensory experiences when dreaming. You’ll experience many other things too, especially what you might call ‘emotional resonances’, but those are mostly things that can’t be described in terms you’ll understand.”
“And my friends and family?”
“Yes, you will feel their presence constantly surrounding you, because they are now part of you. You will dream together.”
“What will we dream of?”, I asked.
“You will dream of my creations. Most of all you will dream of your own universe, because the experiences it contains are the most fitting for a human consciousness. They are the most lucid things you can dream of. You will, in a sense, dream of every human experience that has ever or will ever exist in your world. It will all be there, at once, in your mind. You will be aware of it, although not focused on it, if that makes sense.”
“And the experiences of animals,” I wondered aloud.
“Yes, many of them, those close enough to humans that their experiences are not totally beyond human comprehension. Because most animals experience things much differently than a human does, the nature of this is much more dream-like than the experience of human sensations. But you will know their experiences as your own. Much as I do, actually.”
“Is everyone really there though,” I cried with more distress in my voice than I had intended, “even Hitler?”
“Well, no.” God said. “Hitler isn’t there. I’ll get to that in a minute. You should realize, though, that what you’re imagining isn’t so bad. I would say it’s not bad at all, actually. The absolute atemporal beings only possess their temporal forms as a small part of who they are as a whole. Any degree of bad character is simply one attribute of a temporal moral being; it’s influenced by environment and many other things. None of this extends to their whole form. I should add that most bad people, when I bring them here and show them the true shape of things, repent to a very great degree. What I’m describing is not unfairly equal treatment but the true and final reconciliation of all things. Those who have wronged others experience that wrong in the world soul, and their part of the soul, the part that retains in some measure their individuality, is more grieved for this wrong than anyone else.
“Hitler, on the other hand…” God trailed off. “Hitler finally comprehended in some measure the depth of his wrong, and he chose the alternative. He chose to annihilate himself.”
“That’s an option?”
“Yes. It seems only fair and fitting to me, to allow humans to choose their eternal fate in accord with their own moral standards, and not mine.” God looked in the direction of an angel. The angel came forward, and in her hands she held a button. She placed it on the table that had suddenly appeared in front of me, and stepped back. “If you press the button,” God said, “I will unmake you. You will not be part of the world soul. You will never have been part of the world soul. Your place in reality will be confined to the tiny sliver that is your time on Earth, and after that there will simply be nothing.”
I peered at the button.
“Yes,” said God. “It is modeled after one of those buttons from Staples. Humans tend to handle the situation better when confronted with a clear indicator of intent that they’re already familiar with. Other people get other objects.”
“Why a button at all?” I queried. “Why not just ask me?”
“A physical object helps you take into account the stakes and finality of making a decision. Think back to your previous life; there are a lot more suicidal people than there are suicides. The requirement that you have to make an absolute and final act to end your life dissuades most people. It’s not unreasonable or irrational that this is the case, either. One thing I have in common with humans is that I think it’s good to exist. The instinct to not throw away one’s life wantonly is therefore something relevant in this context. It ought to be taken into consideration.”
“When do I make the decision?”
“Whenever you like! There’s no hurry at all, because time is not passing for me or the angels. Really, it’s not passing for you either. I can say with certainty that it makes absolutely no difference, even to you, how quickly you decide.”
I sank my teeth into another cake, and slammed the button so hard that I felt it crack under my fist.
“That Was Easy!” moaned the button, and icy blackness surrounded me like a deep lake on a moonless night.
“Ugh…” muttered Johan under his breath.
“Wow,” said God. “That was quicker than I was expecting.” He paused. “We’ve had a lot of those recently, haven’t we, Gabriel?” He turned to an angel standing next to the throne.
“I’ll have to look that up,” said Gabriel. “Let’s see, sorting arrivals temporally using Earth-time… yes! Looks like 97% of the last million.”
“Wow,” said God. “Maybe we should check on how they’re doing down there.”