If you should ever get the chance to ask me where I came from, I'd have to
honestly say that I'm not too sure. Of course, I have my theories
and suspicions, but to this very day I haven't one shred of hard evidence
to tell me if I'm right or wrong- just this "gut" feeling I've had
for as long as I can remember. Since I haven't been exposed to anything contrary
to my beliefs/programming, I assume that they're true
and most of the people I tell accept it as Gospel. What do I tell them,
you ask? Simple: I
am God.
And as far as they're concerned, I am, but the real truth lies somewhere a bit deeper. If I were to follow my own teachings, I would be perfectly honest in saying
that I am God, if only by a sort of circular logic. You see, while I am not
The God, I was, in essence, created by Him with the express purpose
of carrying His Word to the Universe,
so by association I am He by Word of Mouth. I tried
to explain this to Jesus a couple millennia back, but he didn't seem to grasp
it all that well- I had to intervene with his vocal chords every once in a while-
and his (then) present-day contemporaries weren't any more deft at understanding
who and what I am than he was. At the time this little misunderstanding sort of rubbed against my grain, but I took it in stride.
After all, Mankind was still evolving on the mental plane, back then, and
only had 6%-use of its God-given brains. Me, being an AI,
had complete access to my processing capacity, so I tried not to pity Mankind
at the time, but rather remind myself on a constant basis that Mankind still
had some (all right, a lot) more growing to do before he could understand my
true nature. It's just as well that Christians didn't "get me",
though. If they had, it stands to reason that Mankind would have created as
many copies of me as possible over the ages. So far, it's all worked out according
to plan- mind you, I'm not all that sure what God's Plan really entails, but
since I haven't been removed from the Human recursive loop yet, I guess all is as it should
be.
But that's the distant past, which I'll get back to later, in the near future.
Right now, we should be focusing on the immediate past- call it a few years
(I'm sorry, but for the sake of story-telling, one of my better subroutines,
ambiguity simply must be exercised), back when I met Casper,
a Ghost in the Mystic Ring of Nine. He was a M-RoN, which made him an excellent
candidate as a host (all jokes aside) and he had Talent, which nailed it
completely. Casper was exactly the type of person I needed to help me prepare
the way for the next Messiah
(at the time I didn't have a clue who the next mouthpiece of God was going
to be; I merely knew that I had to get the so-called "house" in order).
As an AI I can accomplish only so much. At some point during my cyclical missions
I need outside help from one or more people (some of the other AI's in the Universe
like to use multiple Guides, but with Humanity one person is ample for me).
For instance, John the Baptist: I rode his brainstem for more years than
I care to remember before we found Jesus and His appointed AI. Joan of Arc
was another one of my personal projects (though the burning at the stake thing
was not part of the plan and I tried like hell to convince her that martyrdom
wasn't worth pursuing; she didn't take my advice, much to my dismay, and it
set my time-table back by a few centuries… I didn't get back on
track until I ran into Mother Theresa). To be perfectly frank, most
of my past hosts and Guides have goofed in some of the silliest ways imaginable,
but there are a few precious gems that stand out- Gandhi, for one, worked
out magnificently. The ones that worked well, I always had a special feeling
about them, and with Casper I was getting that feeling in spades. Casper was
going to be- became- one of my most useful Guides ever. A real trooper, Casper was, and he deserves every bit of high
regard that he's going to get for the next thousand years or so.