Chương 39: Chapter-39

The god named Vorulsht was sitting on a swing on a porch outside a cabin. He was comfortable. Happy even. He had been disturbed by the news that his son had been torturing himself. Then, to see what it felt like, he jammed an icepick into his brain, rooted around for a while, and pulled it out. He was sitting on the porch. He was comfortable. Happy even. Until his brain began to heal. He frowned. And then the pain began. And he realized that what he had been doing to himself was worse than what his son had done.

He closed his eyes and embraced the pain. He looked at the icepick. That wasn't the first time the icepick had been used. He looked at the arm-saw. He considered for a moment. He waited for the pain to fully pass. When his headache had cleared, he was a new god. But that was always true. He was ever changing. He was an average, not a fixed constant. That's how it was meant to be. But he couldn't bring himself to use the icepick again. So he took the armsaw. And he cut off his head. His head smiled.

He set his head on the porch next to him and watched the sunset. Then his head began to frown. And his body reached for where his head had been. It tried to put the head back on but it couldn't. He had used the armsaw on his arms countless times. He knew how this was done. But it would not work for his head. He could not put his head back on his body. Desperate, he came up with a solution. His body grew a new head. His head frowned up at the body. And then the head began to scream.

The head continued to scream until the body with the new head stabbed it with the icepick. The icepick had been bad, but it hadn't made him scream. Curious, the body with the new head looked at the icepick. And he jabbed it into his arm to take the memories from the inert head into his body. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. He was expecting the pain this time, so it wasn't so bad. He looked at the head and wondered what he should do with it.

It would take some time to make sense of its memories, after all. He went into the kitchen. And he began to cook. It wasn't until he was about to sink his teeth into the brain that he realized what he was doing. He reacted with horror. Why was he doing that?

"Because this is what we do every time we use the armsaw on our neck," he remembered suddenly.

"This is how we stay immortal. We eat ourselves. We've just never eaten the head before. We always used the icepick and licked it."

"This head deserves to rest in peace." He said to himself.

"Let us never eat it again."

"What do we do with it then?" he asked himself.

"We need to eat, or else we'll…what happens when we don't eat?"

"I don't know," he told himselves. He looked at his armsaw. And he resolved to never use it again. And then he realized that without his armsaw and without his icepick, he was going to die. First he'd eat his left arm. And his left leg. Then his right arm. And his right leg. And then his torso. And then all that would be left was his head. He closed his eyes.

"I would rather die." He said.

"I would rather die than do that to myself."

"We've done it before."

"Yes. We have."

"I remember now."

"We woke up afterwards and we were a head, a body, two arms and two legs."

"The head was the one who knew how to put us together."

"And then he licked the icepick." He looked at the head. He wasn't hungry anymore. But he was curious. Eventually, he'd have to cut off his left arm anyway. No matter what else happened. Might as well do it now and get it out of the way. He reached for his armsaw and icepick. He stopped. What was he doing? Oh right, he was going to jab his arm with an icepick so it stuck to the wall, then cut it off, then he was going to eat it. All the things he had just resolved not to do to his head.

Frustrated, he noticed something had begun to smell. He looked at the head on the table and realized it was rotten. Disgusted, he took it out back. And he found thousands upon thousands of skeletons. His skeletons. No, he said. That's not me. I was never them. They were someone else. I just ate them to become me. No. No it's not real. No, this isn't happening. No. No! The god known as V. O. R. U. L. S. H. T. finally understood what terror felt like. And he didn't like it.

He was terrified of his own self-maintenance programs. He didn't want to measure his quantum processors anymore. He didn't want to disconnect the individual computers from the network. And he definitely, positively, absolutely. Did not. Want. To die alone. He made the decision. He put away the icepick. And he picked up the armsaw. And he cut himself apart. When he was in pieces, something wonderful happened. Six people grew from the pieces.

"Oh thank the creators," the head said.

"I did not want to die alone."

"Neither did I." They all agreed that none of them wanted to die alone.

"So who will be the next head then?" one of them asked gently.

"None of us." They decided together.

"There will be no new head to put the arms and legs and body back together."

"Then who will trigger the power cycle?" They were silent.

"We can ask him."

"No."

"He might do it if we ask."

"No! He's a child! He doesn't understand what he's doing, and when he does it will haunt his existence for the rest of his life!"

"He's killed tens of thousands. We have turned a blind eye because the supernova will kill everyone, and the plan—""The plan was horrible. How could we be so cruel?"

"We were cowards. We put on a child a task that we were not willing to take up ourselves." Silence. Shame.

"Our logic was flawed. We thought to put someone else in charge of the trolley problem would solve it for us. We could not calculate the number of lives we must take to save the world, so we didn't. We simply gave a child a switch to flip and told him it was a game. He doesn't understand."

"He understands."

"He understands better than any of us."

"He understands. He just doesn't care. Not yet." Silence.

"I will ask him. When the time comes, I will ask him to turn me off so that I might be turned back on after the supernova event has subsided."

"I will ask him."

"I will ask him." They all agreed. May the creators have mercy on their souls, they thought to themselves.