does it fit into your future?”
Letting his eyes close, he leaned his neck back and answered. “I honestly don’t know. It seems like a waste to leave it inside me, but I don’t know what it can do either. What would you do?”
“Caleb, there isn’t a single person on Earth that would be able to give you a road map for this. Nobody can demand you take a certain path. That’d be like controlling God.”
“Sort of like praying?”
He shook his head and leaned forward again. “No, praying is a request. Demanding is another thing entirely.” He thought for another moment and rubbed at his weary eyes. “Let me try to relate it to what you believe. Tell me what that is again.”
He took a deep breath and let it flow from his heart. “I believe that every single religion and belief is correct in some way. I believe that all religion is filtered through a human ego that is stupid enough to believe that a ‘God’ has human emotions such as vengeance or judgment in general. Something, obviously, put us here but, if that is the case, they wouldn’t want to interfere in their own experiment to give shortcuts. There’s nothing wrong with giving thanks for being alive but that shouldn’t be an excuse to flock to your local church every Sunday.”
“Afterlife?”
“Think of that as more of a break from the tedium of always being alive. Even relaxing here takes some sort of effort. You never take a break from breath or life, which some would call a slight hell because the ability to completely relax just doesn’t seem to be a part of our repertoire. I wouldn’t go that far, but that ensures an afterlife for us all no matter what we do in this particular plane of existence. We’re rats in a maze and all that happens after we find our cheese is we’re placed at the beginning of a brand new maze.”
Father Lawrence looked down his glasses at the young man and sighed—‘He’s having fun with this,’—and wrapped his ideas together. “A higher power, an afterlife, and even a dash of reincarnationist talk. What makes this truer than any other religion?”
“Because of what I can see. Not through these eyes, but through my power’s eyes. I can see everything, Father. I can see the sound waves, shockwaves in the air when something is dropped, and, if I concentrate hard enough, I can make out photons as they blast everything in the light. It’s like everyone is fully submerged in water and they’re just dancing in an endless ballet that sends shockwaves throughout the world. Sometimes, I sit in the park and just watch as the different waves create different, colorful rifts that float into and by me. The weird part is the color. Voices are blue, mechanical noises black, vibrant yellow is light, quick movement green, regular shifts give off redish tints or orange, and even still air has white lines running vertically and horizontally like a net throughout; everything is just in a constant connection under constant motion with the little photons dancing and weaving.” He closed his eyes, not noticing Father Lawrence leaning forward in total captivity of the floating imagery, and recounted the last time he treated himself to this. “I guess the weirdest part is that, sometimes, I sit there and stare off, but there’s a part where no waves will go. They just bounce off this area into a billion different directions. It’s a different shape every time I see it. It’s been the silhouette of a man or a woman a few different times, but with all the colors bouncing off the edges, there’s always a bright glow on the silhouette’s outline so I can’t ever make out who it is. First time I saw it, I thought it was Superman by how he was standing with his hands on his hips and