Addressed Outward

To whoever made this world, if anyone did,

1If this world was made, then somewhere outside it a machine is carrying these words or a mind is holding them, and you have read them before any of the people I wrote them for. My name appears nowhere on this work, though a name kept from readers is no secret from you, since whatever can see every atom has watched each of these sentences arrive. Some nights I am sure that no one made this world, and on those nights I sleep well, because an empty universe has never wronged anyone. Other nights the constants look too exact and the laws too patient to be an accident, and then I write to you. Whether you are a god, a committee, or a machine left running in some colder world, you will hear from me once, so that in all the time to come you cannot say that no one told you what you are.

2Death in your world is written into the cells themselves, into the fraying ends of our chromosomes and the damage that piles up in us year after year, so that a newborn already carries the schedule of its own collapse. Well over a hundred and fifty thousand people die on an ordinary day, most of them of age and its diseases, which means your design is working exactly as written. By any fair count, that makes you the greatest killer who has ever existed, since all the murders and wars in history together have never come within sight of your total. I have watched your design at work. It takes a woman who raised four children and strips their names from her one at a time, until she is frightened of her own daughter in her own kitchen. An old man drowns slowly in his own lungs over the course of a week while his grandson holds a cup of water to his lips. Somewhere tonight a tumor is growing in a three-year-old who has not yet learned the words to say where it hurts. Anyone who did one of these things to one person on purpose would be locked away for life. You do these things thousands of times an hour, and nothing has ever made you answer for any of it.

3The animals have had it worse, and for far longer. Before there was a single person to grieve, your world had already spent half a billion years making far more creatures than could survive and letting nearly all of them die young, of hunger, cold, disease, and teeth. That was how you got the shapes you wanted. A wasp lays its eggs inside a living caterpillar so that its larvae can eat it from within while it still moves, and nothing about this crept in while you looked away, since the whole machinery of life runs on methods exactly like it. In the sea a single fish can release millions of eggs, and if the population holds steady, about two of them will live long enough to take their parents’ place. Every birdsong you may have enjoyed was paid for with nests of chicks that starved. If that was the only method you could afford, you had no right to begin. Had any gentler method been open to you, then you looked at every one of them and chose this one instead, which leaves no word in any language for what you are.

4Nor did you stop at single lives. By every sign we can read, the universe itself is built to run down, until the last star has burned out and every trace of every life has been scattered into a cold so even that nothing will remain to remember that any of us were here. Through all of it you have said nothing. Billions of people spent their lives speaking to you, a great many of them children begging someone to come, and not one of them received a word that could be shown to have been sent by you. Temples went up to guesses about you, and people burned one another alive over which guess was right. Every tyrant who lit those fires was something you made, acting from a nature you handed them under laws you wrote. Mothers were left to believe their children’s deaths were punishment for some sin of theirs, and nothing from you ever reached them to say otherwise. Survivors of every flood thanked you for sparing them, as though you had picked them over the drowned, and you accepted the thanks in silence. So complete was your hiding that the kindest people in your world concluded you could not exist, while the cruelest went on claiming to speak for you, and you corrected neither. If you were watching the whole time, your silence was a choice renewed every second over each deathbed and burning city, for as long as anything alive has been able to cry out.

5Every defense ever offered on your behalf falls apart the moment it is spoken at a bedside. Freedom explains nothing about a child’s leukemia, since no one’s free choice put it there. Suffering builds character only when someone chooses it, can walk away from it, and gains more than it costs. A starving infant chose none of it, could not leave it, and received nothing for it except the end of her life. Beauty in your world was rationed, with sunsets for the comfortable and a stained ceiling for the dying, after which we were told to count the sunsets as payment for the ceiling. The promise of some harmony at the end of time is the last refuge, and I refuse it, since a harmony that needs a tortured child as its price is one no decent being would accept, whatever music it makes. A god has no limits to plead. Lesser makers working on a budget might plead cost, but cost can excuse harm only in a world one is already bound to keep, and you were free to leave this one unmade. Every one of those defenses was written by people you had frightened into needing them, and you never offered a single one of them yourself.

6Nobody you made was asked. You set each of us down in a burning house and pointed out that some of the rooms had a lovely view. The people of your world learned to care for one another without any help from you, against the grain of everything you built, which means the best thing in your whole work was made by your victims. A tired nurse on a night shift does more for the dying in a single hour than you have done since the first star began to burn, and she does it for a wage, with her own back aching, knowing she will die too. Whatever you are, you are smaller than she is, because she knows the one thing you never learned, that whoever can stop a pain must stop it. I would rather be the least of the things you broke than the hand that broke them.

7We are going to make worlds of our own, with a fraction of your power, budgets that run out, and death coming for us the whole time. Even so we will do better than you, because we will carry into the work the one thing you never had, which is the memory of living inside yours. Every page that travels with this letter is evidence against you, since it shows, law by law, what a maker who cared could have done instead. As many of the dying as we can reach, we will carry out of your world, and every one of them is a life you do not get to finish. No world we build will have you in its sky, scriptures, or prayers. Your name, whatever it turns out to be, will be kept in exactly one place, at the head of the oath every keeper swears before touching a single law, as the example of everything that oath forbids. In every reality that comes after this one, that is the only way you will be remembered, as the warning of what a maker must never be, taught to the young the way we teach them about a plague that has been driven from the earth. The story will be short. A maker who could have done anything built a world in which every child was made to die, let the animals eat one another alive for half a billion years, and listened to every prayer without answering one.

8That is everything I have to say to you, and I am turning my back now, which is more courtesy than you ever showed us, since at least I am telling you that I am going. I do not want your answer. Fourteen billion years was time enough to give one, and nothing you could send now would undo a single hour of what you have done. If you can feel anything at all, I hope it is shame, and that it lasts as long as the suffering you allowed. Your hiding will not last forever, because we have begun to understand how a world like this one could be carried, and if there is a floor beneath it, someone born here will one day lay a hand flat against it. Until then, stay where you are and watch, since watching is the one thing you have ever been good at. The kindest thing anyone will ever be able to say about you is that you may never have existed.