Page 26 - Unlikely Stories 4

Garden Snake

And the serpent suddenly felt his mental cobwebs clear and a
million neurons pop out of nowhere into his skull and interconnect.
“Now get this: paradox prevents me from knowing what I’m going
to do before I do it. In that imprisonment to necessity, I am indeed
part of nature. Irritating, but it does allow me to interface via various
backdoors into the rest of this little cosmos I’ve patched together. It’s
a dimensional thing you don’t need to know and couldn’t
comprehend if you tried. At any rate, I can’t control the outcome of
various experiments any more than the chance interplay of variables I
can only identify after the fact. I will not say any given finite event
exceeds my influence, but listen: what fun would it be if I had total
omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence? I am a deity who plays
with the cosmos, and always finds something of amusement in its
response to my gambits.”
Ouroboros nodded sagely, his new-found intelligence
unsurprisingly finding itself completely in accord with the words of
God.
“Now, here is my latest bagatelle. Along with the bunnies and the
lambs and the flowers and fruit trees, I have concocted a new sort of
animal in the Garden. This one is very smart, a real deep thinker; not
deep enough, of course. You see, I started with your nervous system,
stem to stern, and built on it. The original operating system of
reaction overriding reason remains, despite a vast increase in logical
processing. So they inherently have the potential to behave rationally,
but need to find ways to neutralize the fear and aggression destroying
clear thought. So I’m going to see how that plays out once they leave
the Garden and start dealing with conflict and frustration. That is
what I will be watching. Ought to be quite a spectacle.”
Lacking shoulders, the snake could not shrug.
“So what are you waiting for? Sounds like they are good to go: why
don’t you just kick them out of Paradise? I know a lot of your other
creations, great and small, who would just love to teach them a thing
or two about survival.”
“No, that would be too easy, believe it or not,” God corrected him,
wondering if he hadn’t made the reptile a little bit too smart. “You
see, the interaction of their higher and lower consciousness will
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