Dilemma by D.A.Sanford - HTML preview

Setting the gods straight

We are now at the god’s home. All six people are here and time’s imps. I now know the imps. I remember working with them and getting pranked by them. I, like Jerry did, have thought about what exactly I need to say.

“April, I hope this does not ruin the relationship that we have but your tactic was very cruel. Telling me that my family did not exist. I am now fully aware that I spent a month in that room. I ask you if you have ever experienced a time differential between one world and your special worlds? You don’t need to answer, thirty minutes on one world will be thirty years on your burned up worlds. Is that thirty years real to the person you place there? I will now say it is. I spent a lifetime on another world. It was as real as the experiences the person has on one of your worlds. That ruler broke his teeth eating rocks. The toxic liquid he drank destroyed his digestive system. I ask, were those just figments of his imagination?”

Now I turn to the others. “After I asked to be sent to oblivion when you all assured me that the family was not real, you told me that if I resumed my role, you would have them waiting for me. How can you take illusion and have that illusion waiting and them not still being an illusion? Can you tell me, for a fact, that in that month, my soul did not get reborn in that child I was?

I felt that old goblin’s family push my hand aside and take his hand. I heard them thank me but the woman told me that my wife would be here to take my hand when it is my time. As I told the gathering, life is like a book. Many chapters, many stories, my life was real. Now for what you need to consider, are all of you, this realm and this universe, just a hallucination caused by an interaction of doctor prescribed drugs?”

None of them say anything. I know that they understand the reasoning I just put forward.

“A dream which, at the moment, can seem so real, the people are real but in a moment of waking are lost. We all may be the dream people. What will happen to us when the dreamer awakens. What will happen to all of us if the author stops typing and erases what he has written. What is real and what is a dream is a matter of prospective. I choose that the life I had was as real as we are. I will conduct myself, going forward, with that in mind. Jerry was right. I can affect those lost millions by honoring them in my actions. I will change future history.”

I’m spent. My throat is dry. I feel something cold on my calf. I look down and there is a cold beer. The imps tell me to drink up. “We did not flavor it.”

I sit and they sit next to me. I like these guys.

The imps and I just sit and wait. I feel like I need to add one more thing to shake them up. Might as well. “Could you say for some certainty that what your positions now could be just a wishful dream of your childhood self.”

That one hit home. April is tearing up. “When I was an orphan, I would dream that I had the power to change everyone or punish the ones that would not change. Those dreams were just like what I do now.”

The others are getting the same thoughts. April comes over to me and apologized to me. “I’m sorry, you are absolutely correct. Time does flow differently in other worlds. It is a distinct possibility that you did live that life. If there is the slightest possibility, I was wrong to just dismiss it. That agony I saw in you when I pulled that dream scene was real. Those night terrors were real. How could I have been so insensitive.”

She is breaking so I get up and hold her. “You did not realize what was possible. I forgive you. We all have that tendency to dismiss what is beyond what we understand our reality to be. I ask you to ponder the person that is walking down a street talking to himself like he is holding a conversation with someone. That society believes that man to be mentally sick.”

Sending a thought message to all. “Is that man really sick?”

I have totally blown them out of the water with that one.

The female god of all asks for forgiveness. “What you have brought to light has shattered our reality. Something that we know and live with was so easily dismissed by us when you argue that you lived that life. You have opened our eyes. Life is what you experience and is not our right to dismiss.”

Looking at the others, she tells them that they need to assess their own views and opinions to weed out personal bias. How many have we condemned as mentally sick that were actually well. How many have we sent to new lives, erasing memories, that actually did not need that. They may have only needed a soft shoulder that would listen.”

I now finish this conversation. “Knowing what my reality is, I will finish the job that you have given me. I am now in my mid twenties in this life. I will resume my aging from this age. When this body again reaches age sixty, I will retire and go to that final life. I have people waiting.”

April is thinking and tells the group. “All the previous Watchers, with the exception of the failed one, has gone on for millennium before they retire. I now say that I will also again start aging and will leave with Darrel. It is up to you as to when you retire but we need to rethink our terms. We bring those bias’s with us. Maybe we need to let a fresh prospective in more often. We need to think about putting in term limits.”

This hits home to all of them especially since April tells them that she really cannot remember how long she has been the Watcher. “I don’t even remember what my orphan name was.” That has hit her hard because she realizes that is just what she accused me of. “I could not really prove that my orphan life was real if I was tasked to.”

With that, this meeting broke. We all have a lot to think about. Reality has just been up ended and been rendered in doubt like margarine being called butter. They are just not the same. Are our views just stagnated at the point of our ascension?

Darrel is the only one that seems to have a grasp of the situation. He has a plan and it now includes April. He now knows that, when he crosses over to the final life, it will not just be April as a mate forever but my wife from that life. Who knows, could that life actually have been his life before he became the investigator for the gods?

He really does not care anymore. Coming to peace with this new view and knowing that this will come to an end when he wants it to.

Every being in the universe has its own reality. Truth for one will be false to another. We call someone that is always complaining that they are sick as a hypochondriac but our sickness is real. Isn’t this what wars have started over. Isn’t this why that world is now just an asteroid belt. I’m right and you are wrong.

Now I understand, now I control myself and how my time will be spent until my wife and sons come to take my hand.