Hi. Uh, I’m Marvin. I’ve been coming here for a while, but I haven’t ever shared.

I'm a—well my
thing's a little different.​

I guess things started for me about six months ago. My wife and I had a baby. And it’s been,
you know, all the clichés. It’s a miracle—but it’s been hell on my sleep. Cuz once I’m up, I’m up.
So I started getting into late night comment sessions on science forums: evolution, intelligent
design, that kind of thing.​

Now I’m actually a neurochemist; I focus on the effects of audio stimuli on brain chemistry. You
know, neural plasticity and dopamine production as they relate to music: subpartial alpha-beta
waves, microtonal phase shifts, lydian quark compressions, you know. I’m a real dork for this
stuff. But for whatever reason intelligent design is what really gets me going. Like I just go
trolling the boards…though not trolling really; I mean I actually try to engage, educate a little.
But you know, these people, it’s just impossible. It’s like throwing your mind against a wall. And I
get so heated man…it’s like I’m intolerant of unintelligence, you know? It’s my fatal flaw. I might
as well be getting mad at people for not being able to do calculus. “Just take the derivative,
fool!”

But I get it. Science is suspect. I mean look at nutrition: like the scientific evidence for whether
you should eat wheat or not is crazy. Or if acupuncture works? You know, as layman we trust
that what we hear from our preferred media and peers is right; but skepticism is a necessary
and healthy trait in a scientist. Or, at least that’s what I thought.​

So. A couple nights ago, Cora gets up at like 3am, and it’s my turn—my wife had an early
morning. So I get her down, and then go straight under my cans, put on some binaural
meditation beats and get to it. And I’m raging away on someone, talking about the evolution of
the eye, when suddenly, in my headphones, I start hearing something, weird.​

There’s a sort of crystal ringing in the 22000 hertz range. Sort of a tinny electric crackle. It gets
me curious, so I export the file, isolate the frequency, pitch shift it, slow it down—and when I do
all that, it resolves, into the sound of a hushed new age voice, saying:

[GOD C​HORUS]
HELLO MARVIN, I THINK THIS IS GOD

[MARVIN]
Sounds like someone was having a laugh with me? Right. Of course, that’s what I thought…but
then the voice answers that thought:

[GOD C​HORUS]
NO, NO, I’M NOT HAVING A LAUGH

[MARVIN]
And I thought, well that’s strange. Because this was recorded audio. It’s not streaming live. And
then the voice says:

[GOD C​HORUS]
WELL, NO, BUT I’M OMNIPRESENT, INCLUDING IN TIME, SO, IT’S ALL SORT OF THE
SAME THING FOR ME

[MARVIN]
So I throw my headphones off and go to bed. Figured I was exhausted, overworked, you know.
But then in the morning, I get a phone call. I thought it might be the nanny, running late. But no:

[GOD C​HORUS]
I’M SORRY ABOUT LAST NIGHT, THIS IS PROBABLY A MORE NORMAL WAY TO TALK TO
YOU

[MARVIN]
“Well if you’re God, a burning bush would actually be more normal—”

[GOD C​HORUS]
HA HA HA, NO, NOT THAT GOD. I MEAN, THAT’S A VERSION OF ME, BUT I’M THE ONE,
REAL GOD - AT LEAST I THINK

[MARVIN]
Yeah. So I was starting to get a little freaked out at this point, but still, I was definitely not falling
for it. So I play along:

“Well what makes you think you’re God? Can you do some kind of miracle or something?”

And at that point my phone turned into a fish.​

Okay…
No, no, not okay.​
I don’t really know kinds of fish. It was like a trout maybe? It was phone-sized…

[MARVIN]
Like I said I don’t really know fish. But honestly I’m starting to freak out here. Like I am having a
mental episode. And so, I’m like, get out of the house, get on my bike, head to the lab. But when
I get there, I find out that everyone else has had the same experience. Susie, Walt, Trillian,
Kamala, the two Jacks; they’re all freaking out. Kamala says her phone turned into a kitten. And
Jack 2 says:

[HENRY (JACK 2)]

“WHY DIDN’T WE ALL GET KITTENS?”
[GOD C​HORUS]
WELL, I KNEW SOME OF YOU WERE ALLERGIC

[MARVIN]
And we all hear that. God is in all of our heads, and we are freaking out!

[GOD C​HORUS]
DON’T FREAK OUT, DON’T FREAK OUT! I’M SORRY, IT’S NEVER EASY MAKING FIRST
CONTACT. LOOK, I’M JUST GONNA COME IN NOW

[MARVIN]
And then through the door walks an 11-year old girl in a mermaid costume.​ She says she’s
trying appearing as a playful child, so she seems less threatening. But so we’re all just taking it
in, and then Walt says:

[TOBY (WALT)]
“OK, WELL CAN YOU DO A MIRACLE ALL OF US WILL SEE?”

[MARVIN]
And so then she rolls her eyes—she has all these very tween affectations—and then the coffee
maker turns into a baby pterodactyl.​

[HUMAN C​HORUS]
What?

[MARVIN]
Yeah. Susie was really into it:

[JESSICA (SUSIE)]
“HEY LITTLE BUDDY! AREN’T YOU A LONG WAY FROM HOME?”

[MARVIN]
She goes over to it with a pencil and tries to get it to bite it, and it’s pretty cute. But then we’re all
just, wait.​

[MARVIN & LAB C​HORUS]

“WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?!”

[GOD C​HORUS]
I CAN DO SOME THINGS. BUT I’M NOT SURE IF I’M ACTUALLY GOD. I WAS HOPING YOU
COULD RUN SOME TESTS, AND SEE IF THESE ARE MIRACLES?

[MARVIN]
And here’s where we start going down the rabbit hole. Now I am a devout atheist; but I’ve
always believed that if I was confronted with irrefutable evidence of God, as a good scientist I
would change my mind. And here was my chance to test that! To test my atheism and devotion
to rationalism. And I gotta say, we took care of the pterodactyl pretty quick. We had hypotheses.​

I mean first off there’s the Jurassic Park amber thing, other ways DNA could be preserved…or
time travel. Spacetime wormholes, which aren’t even that controversial in scientific communities.
Or there’s molecular printing: just reorganizing the molecules from the coffee maker into the
form of a pterodactyl, which is also pretty non-controversial speculative science; like 30, 40
years from now we can probably do this.​

[HUMAN C​HORUS]
So you’re saying you guys did not take the pterodactyl to be a miracle.​

[MARVIN]
Right. We just postulated that there could be explanations beyond our technological capabilities
that were not supernatural or holy.​

So then we’re like, okay, what next. And I gotta say, Little God was great. She did whatever we
asked! First we asked for a bunch of basically telekinetic and transformational stuff. All the big
Bible clichés: walking on water, water into wine, splitting the Red Sea…
Oh, yeah, we went to the beach! Plus Little God is really into historical accuracy so we actually
did it in Egypt circa 1400 BCE.​

[MARVIN]
Time travel yeah, wormhole; no big. And then the water too, no big; because if we’re postulating
future technologies, space time distortions, gravity flux—that kind of stuff quickly becomes just
not that impressive. I mean sure, impressive, but not miraculous.​

[HUMAN C​HORUS]
It sounds like maybe this is just some very evolutionarily advanced intelligence, right? Where
does the God stuff come from?

[MARVIN]
Well first, she claims to have created the universe. So we carbon date her, and her age is
infinite in both directions, suggesting that she’s immortal. But then that actually gets pretty dark,
because Jack 1 says:

(JACK 1)
“WELL, CAN WE KILL HER?”

[MARVIN]
And we’re all like no, we’re not going to try to kill an 11-year old child. But then Little God just
gets up, real calm, and breaks into a full sprint right across the break room, smashing her head
right into the fucking metal door. Bam! And she hits the door hard and she is dead, and we’re
gonna have nightmares for the rest of our lives…

And then we hear the other door open behind us, and there she is. Little God. She saunters
back in, all cool and casual, and is all:

[GOD C​HORUS]
SEE? I’M FINE

[MARVIN)
And her body is still on the ground?
So there’s two of her?
But even this, she helps us explain by postulating a whole mess of super advanced tech. I mean
we already know it’s easy to form any old heap of molecules into an 11-year old body; and with
DNA printing and cerebral uploading, we had an explanation for any kind of Lazarus stuff she
pulled.​

And as for her “soul”:

[GOD C​HORUS]
SOUL IS A MATTERLESS, INFINITE SUBSTANCE THAT EXISTS OUTSIDE OF TIME AND IS
CONSTANTLY SEPARATING AND REFORMING

[MARVIN]
So I don’t know, that one kind of turned into semantics…

But honestly at this point were starting to doubt everything. Like Kamala starts in on the
uncertainty principle: are our observations affecting the data? Or, is Little God manipulating the
data? She could be deceiving us by changing the microchips, or moving the ink on the
whiteboard. She could be corrupting our actual brain waves! None of us could prove that this
wasn’t just a simple multi-player VR.​ Matrix.​ But when you get to that level of skepticism, I mean
of course you know that’s a possibility in the back of your head.​ But you don’t live like that. It’s
paralyzing.​But if we’re being scientific, scientific about the existence of God, then we can’t
discount those possibilities. I mean evolutionarily, we are still infants, technologically and
mentally. We haven’t even hit singularity yet! Our little 21st century human minds can’t even
begin to conceptualize some of the actual laws of physics. And if we accept that there may be
explanations that are simply beyond our own intelligence, then what evidence could she
possibly come up with? Clarke’s third law:

[GOD C​HORUS]
ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MAGIC
[MARVIN]
If I can explain away something that by all criteria satisfies any definition of God, then I can
explain away anything. Any miracle. Any wonder. Any feeling. Any sense of love, or
responsibility, or moral…or just sense of meaning.​

I look into my daughter’s eyes…my wife…what does it mean?

We tried so hard to shatter our skepticism; but it was like throwing our minds against a wall.​

We traveled into black holes, into quarks; we slipped through time backwards and sideways; we
created new life forms, living suns; we watched the universe multiply, invert, spiral, disappear.
We beheld an infinity of wonders—and yet we sat at our desks in stoic calculation, stripped of
awe, paralyzed by the unforgiving relentlessness of our intellect.​