Old Alinani Akira lived alone in his mansion in the mountains on a little glowing planet in the cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2065 and thought about the meaning of existence. There were only a few hours on a day that he did not spend alone pondering eternal questions of life and death.
Every day at noon, his friend old Italus came up from the town in the valley and brought the gossip of the townsfolk.
They would sit and talk in the living room where a strange picture was displayed on the wall. It showed a weak little star peaking from behind some bizarre things that seemed to be stuck to the ground of whichever planet it was a picture of. And the picture had a flowing fluid that reflected the starlight.
Old Italus had asked his friend about the picture multiple times, but he had only received a cryptic smile and an even more mysterious sentence: “It involves a terrible story, Italus, and it makes me sad.”
Now, one day, as the two friends talked about the strange ways of the young people in the town, Alinani Akira sighed and said, “They aren’t that bad, old Italus, they aren’t that bad.”
And then he told his friend the story of how he created a blue little world filled with sentient beings that could multiply and speak a thousand languages and how they ended up killing each other.
“It makes me stay up at night and worry,” he said, “It all started because of my questions about existence. It was a constant source of pain to me, because I didn’t know who I was and why I was here. So I started learning to build worlds in the Hyperdynamical Simulator, but I never did any serious building, mind you, and I always took care not to cause pain to any beings that I created.
“And then, when I was twenty-two, I heard of a wise being called Merlin Divit who was passing through this cluster of galaxies and was staying for a few days on a planet in that dirty, unlucky galaxy called the PCG 54883. And people from all the planets around here were rushing to see him because everybody said that he knew all the secrets of Life and the Universe.”
“And you went there?”, asked old Italus. “If I had had the equipment and the time and the energy to do that when I was twenty-two, I would have found much better planets to pay a visit. Excuse me.” And he chuckled.
“I was interested in better things,” Alinani wasn’t amused. “So I packed my things, and I flew to the sordid little planet, and for five days I waited outside the inn where Merlin Divit was staying and finally, on the sixth day, I got a chance to see him.
“I thought he looked like my grandfather, and he laughed when he saw me, and asked me what I wanted. I told him I wanted answers. I wanted to know what the meaning of everything was. And then he reached inside his pocket and brought out a white oval thing, and he gave me that picture that you see on the wall, and he said, “Call it an egg.”
I asked him what that was supposed to mean, and he smiled and said that he wanted me to build a world in that thing. “Build a perfect world, so that you will not be able to doubt its reality. And then create a being that will ask itself the questions that you ask yourself, and that being will find the answers for you.”
“So for seventeen years, I sat in front of the Hyperdynamical Simulator, and I integrated that little egg into the system so that I could create the world in there. I built the pale star you see on the picture, and I programmed that fluid and made beings that needed the fluid for survival. I started out with simple beings that did not think, and I made everyone dependent on the star for life, and to make it self-sustaining, I made the beings consume the material of each other, but I always took care not to cause pain. And then finally, I made that wonderful being that could ask itself what life was all about.
“But that being did not ask questions. It just lived and consumed other living beings and reproduced and died. So for the second time, I went to Merlin Divit, this time in a much better planet luckily, and I told him I had failed to create the questioning being.
And then, that evil Merlin smiled and said, “It has to hurt, Akira.”
“That night, frustrated with my questions, angry with old Merlin Divit, and mostly out of stupidity, I came home and introduced Pain into my Oval. And immediately, the little world was unrecognizable. They couldn’t bear the pain of existence that I had inflicted. They questioned life, and they made stories about an all-powerful creator who controlled everything and inflicted pain on them, and they found everything hurtful, and went out to destroy each other, and they created weapons that could destroy the whole Oval in an instant.
“I have created a little world full of brutal creatures, and old Merlin expected me to learn the meaning of existence from these little monsters.”
“So what can you do about it?” said Italus, a little surprised at how his friend was taking these artificial beings he created so seriously.
“I could destroy the Oval,” said Alinani Akira, “Or I could shut down the Hyperdynamical Simulator. And I know it would be a favor to all these sad beings.”
“Then let’s do it,” said old Italus.
“But they are supposed to find the meaning of Life and the Universe for me,” Alinani Akira said sadly, “They are my last hope. I will have to wait until they destroy their own world.”