In His Own Image
By the time you read this I'll be a myth. I don't know exactly what kind. Maybe I'll still be a god, maybe I'll be the devil, or maybe some cautionary folk tale mothers use to scare their kids into behaving, if there are still any mothers and kids left in the world. Maybe I'll just be the Bogey Man, my manifestations reduced from flesh and blood to mere bumps in the night. Of exactly what I'll become, I'm mostly uncertain, but myth I will most certainly be. That, and gone.
While I can't predict the way my name will live on as it is passed down through the ages, I can at least influence it through this writing, so I'm telling you, the reader, whomever you may be, what really happened. I'm giving you my first hand account of a rise to greatness and the mighty fall I later took. When I'm finished, you'll probably think I was an egomaniac or some power mad monster bent on domination, but I wasn't. At least not at first. In the beginning, all I wanted to do was to be loved.
As a teen, I was lonely and awkward, the kind of guy who never got the girl. The kind of guy who got his glasses smashed by the girl's quarterback boyfriend instead. The sad story of my youth has been told over and over again by others just like me, so I won't make you sit through it now. Suffice it to say that mine was a near universal experience, avoided only by the privileged few born at the top of the social food chain, and while it warrants no retelling, it does deserve note. It was my lowly station in life that drove me to do the things I did, and no matter what you have to say about the outcome, at least you'll understand that my intentions were good. Well, maybe not great, but they weren't so bad.
At least not terrible.
So what if they weren't perfect? Let's just agree to consider my intentions good for the sake of this story and get on with it. The problem was that all my good intentions did for me was pave a road best left rough, and both the source and object of said intentions was love, or whatever I thought love was when new hair and hormones dictated my feelings. Those were desperate times, times when the answers to all of life's problems could be found, and were in my case, in an ad in the back of a comic book. Said ad promised to unlock the secrets of hypnotism. Specifically, those of hypnotizing women. When I came across that ad, the end began. My four ninety-five and SASE were as good as in the mail before I'd even finished reading, and in the days that passed while I waited for my hypnotism kit to come, I singled out my first would-be girlfriend.
She was out of my league at first, but I worked my way into hers and commenced with the extraction. I got close to her as her tutor. I helped her with her homework, and by helped I mean I did it for her, and this was all it took to get an initial exchange going. Our relationship was one of mutual parasitism, her feeding freely from my intellect while I garnered enough favor among her peers to get beaten up less and less with each passing grade. She was hyper-social, a walking smile that sparkled and glittered its way through life, the kind of girl that dotted the dottable letters in her name with hearts and flowers. She gripped like a vise the respect of her peers and the envy of everyone else around her. I didn't understand it then. I still don't. The kind of social hierarchy that places the cute and vapid in a position of superiority over the smart and skilled is antithetical to reason, but so is much of high school, so I learned to roll with that particular incessant punch and brace myself against its next recurrence.
Some day things would change, or so everyone told me. Some day the people like me would be on top of the world. People like them would live four blocks from their high schools, marry the aging quarterbacks and captains of the cheerleaders, and grow fatter and further from their former glory with every painful day of decay that came to pass. Their own spoiled, beautiful children would ruin them, as they had their parents, and so would spin the cycle. People like me, it was said, would eventually prosper and teach and invent and run the corporations that turned the world and made history, while people like them would wither into oblivion. All I had to do was be smarter and better until my day came. This was the anthem of my kind. Suffer now for later rewards. This kept us going through wedgies, swirlies, wet willies and getting pantsed. The faith in our future successes carried us through the humiliation of our present pains. Most of us anyway.
It took patience and faith to adhere to this mantra, and I had neither. I wanted my reward now, minus the requisite suffering, so I willed a way where none had previously been. I was going to have what the beautiful people had, namely other beautiful people. I was going to live the dream of every likable geek in every high school melodrama John Hughes ever made, and I was going to have it on my terms.
It wasn't hard to get her alone and vulnerable. In fact, just under the polished veneer of her chipper cheerleader motif, she was already both. All I had to do was get her into surroundings that mirrored her inner state, so I made my move as the SATs closed in. Promising her an assembly of infallible cliff notes to get her through the ordeal, I brought her home and got to work.
I told her I would have to tutor her. I would have to actually help her study as opposed to just do her work for her. It wouldn't be easy, but it could be done, and when I had assured her so, she agreed to our first study session. Once she'd committed to being alone with me, my plan could go forward. It was a brilliant scheme, built upon far more inspiration than perspiration, but it would pay itself off in more sweat and panting than any honest day's work could ever hope to produce. Half way through her first chapter on Algebra, I made my move. In a practiced tone I soothed and relaxed her and she went under right away. Then she simply sat there, eyes closed and breathing steady, waiting for my suggestions.
I never ordered her to sleep with me under hypnosis, if that's what you're thinking. I merely exposed her to previously unimagined levels of arousal, adding layer upon layer to her inner sex fiend until she was so overcome with the need to come over and over that my pudgy, acned visage couldn't get homely enough to turn her off. I awakened something inside of her that could only be satisfied by the nearest available male of the species, he being me, and I let her take it from there. Was it rape, or was she willing? In hindsight, it was probably both, but I never forced anything on her, so while my list of regrets begins at about the time of our ill-fated tryst, this encounter does not make said list on its own merit.
It's a well known fact that hypnotism can not be used to force a subject into any action against their will, but a lesser known fact of the art is that a subject's will need not be broken, merely bent. If a person with an aversion to pickle juice is asked to drink deeply of the bitter brine, they will refuse. If the same person is convinced that they're thirstier than they've ever been, that their throat is as dry as the Gobi, and they are then handed the same jar of juice, they'll gladly guzzle. All it takes is the right trigger to motivate an individual, to wrap her mind within a frame that's willing to look past the initial revulsion and on to the satisfaction of her scorching desire. I didn't have to force her to sleep with me. I had to make her want it so completely that she'd sleep with anyone upon whom she could get her hands, and then position myself appropriately within said hands.
So I counted backwards from ten to one and I snapped my fingers. As I suggested, she became consumed. I did it again and she was ten times worse. Again, and another power of ten. So on and so forth until it didn't matter who, until it being me was an insignificant triviality at best. I didn't seduce her while she was under. The exercise was only a test, a probe into the depths to which she could be driven. Once I knew how deep I could go, I established the turn-ons and triggers I would need to induce the same state when she was conscious and cognizant, then I brought her back. It worked like a charm, and as we later lay together in post-hypnotic coital bliss, I considered what rewards she had earned for choosing, as it were, me to fulfill her needs.
I gave her gifts through other triggers. There were words and subtle, nuanced actions that wouldn't happen accidentally in normal conversation. These awakened in her other states of being and mind -- to cheer her up when she was sad, to wake her when she was drowsy, to boost her self image, to tap into the latent strength that we only ever rarely realize in the proverbial moments of adrenaline and crisis - I gave her these triggers and allowed that she could invoke them on her own, giving her complete control over herself and her surroundings. She had access to levels of insight and intuition and intelligence normally reserved only for savants. She was my super girl, my wonder woman. She could make herself capable of anything merely by uttering the right syllable. Anything, that was, except for sexual gratification.
Only I could induce her arousal, and satisfaction thereof could only come the old fashioned way. This one power I kept for myself. If a simple word could bring her to orgasm, she wouldn't have needed me at all, so there was no trigger for that. Only that which made her demand complete satisfaction did I put within my power, and that trigger only ever passed my own lips. It was mine and mine alone to use, much like her.
What set my downfall into motion was the slow and steady encroachment of my own listlessness with the relationship. Don't get me wrong. We were happy together for years. We had the perfect relationship, we were the archetypal pair, the dork and the hottie, that always came together in the beer, deodorant and breath mint commercials. Before us, I'd always thought those contrasting actors had been paired up merely to instill hope in desperate males that the purchase of a given product would transform them into unstoppable Casanovas, but there we were, together as proof that it could really happen. Sometimes I even forgot that our relationship was based solely on sex, and that said sex was based solely on mind control. Sometimes. The rest of the time, reality nagged at me and spoiled my fun.
As time passed, I grew to understand that what I had created was not so much a sex toy as an expression of power, a possession, and like any new toy, the novelty faded. I needed new toys to keep my attention. I needed new girls, and as I grew older, new women. I cultivated my harem from only the choicest picks among women who would never otherwise have given me the time of day. I refined my hypnotism prowess so much that I could put a person under in an instant. Any stranger on the street could be brought under my influence, and many of them were. I had what other awkward teens had only ever dreamed they'd grow up to have. I was surrounded by women who lusted after me, and occasionally each other for my viewing pleasure.
My life became filled with devoted women. There were enough of them that I could borrow small enough sums of money from each and they would never care if I repaid. Such was the volume of those sums, when added together, that I could live comfortably without ever holding a job. After I had exhausted all of the beautiful women I could find, I used those perpetually-borrowed funds to travel. I went to New York and acquired supermodels. I went to Los Angeles and got actresses and pop divas. If ever there was a woman after whom I'd longed, I needed only to get close to her and she would be mine. Once I even went after a president's daughter, only because she was unattainable, and I had to hypnotize her secret service handlers as well just to get to her. They'd have beaten me senseless and probably thrown me in jail just for getting too close if I hadn't, and before I could bring them back, I had to convince them that I was no one of consequence, that there was no need to arrest me for what I was doing. I assured them while they were in the deepest of trances that I was one thing and one thing only: I was harmless. When I brought them back they barely even noticed I was there.
That was the defining moment in my ascension, the day I understood what I was truly capable of being. I still couldn't force a person into any action against their will, but I could convince them of anything I wanted and their wills would snap appropriately. That was the day that I realized that I could be anyone, have anything, and do whatever I wanted if I just made the right suggestions. That was the day I decided to convince the world that I was God.
I started with my ladies and the secret service agents, as they were the most readily available. I put them under, one at a time, and left each of them with but one new suggestion when they woke. Each of them came to look upon me with wonder, for there I was before them in all of my miraculous glory. They worshiped me, not because I made them, but because they believed that they should. Needless to say, this went to my head a little.
The greater my throngs of worshipers grew, the greater my ambitions became. I was spinning on an upward spiral into my own divine kingdom. I went a little higher with each new lamb who fell into my flock. I was the alpha and the omega to the select few who heard my word, but this was not enough. There were heathens everywhere, billions of them all over the world, and if I could be worshiped by a small assembly of the devoted, why not by the whole of humanity? The problem was that if I spent every waking hour of the rest of my life hypnotizing and converting, I'd never make more than the smallest of dents in the population, and there are so many better things for God to do than run himself ragged trying to collect worshipers. I had meant to be God and I was turning out to be little more than a cult leader, but there were ways to expand my influence that I hadn't yet tried.
The standard devout worshiper hypnosis routine was still good enough for most of my converts, but I had to develop a new class of underling to help spread my word. I began hypnotizing acolytes, special followers endowed with all of the attributes and unwavering devotion of my stock followers, but triggered to tell the entire world of my miracles, of my glory and greatness. They weren't easy to make. They required finding people already charismatic and persuasive, then giving them the standard perception of my holiness, and finally rounding them out with the suggestion that word of God walking among them was the most important piece of information they could share. It was their evangelism that would earn them the greatest favor of their Lord, and so they went among the unwashed and told the world at large the good news of its Creator. I imagine that some part of them was driven solely by the empty promise of a false god's rewards, but I like to think that mostly they did what they did because it was not just right, but it was the absolute most right thing they could do.
Sadly, the rest of the world didn't always see things my way. Most of my acolytes were institutionalized. A few were beaten and tortured by fundamentalist mobs, illustrating that religious zeal was a dangerous phenomenon when God wasn't nearby to direct it. A very small handful were successful, bringing into the fold of my flock a new class of worshiper, one who believed in my power without the benefit of post-hypnotic suggestion. I quickly hypnotized them anyway, just to be safe. The acolytes were helping, and in time I had a small army of the devout at my disposal.
Again, my ego grew ravenous. My sizable flock still wasn't enough to satisfy me, yet it was growing too big for me to handle. Between those converted by my acolytes and those I personally recruited, my church became tremendous. I no longer had the time or the reach to personally attend to the needs and suffering of my people, and those who went long enough without my attention began to question my existence. Some adopted unconventional ways of worship, which ranged from quaint to harmful. Some of my followers were making human sacrifices just to get my attention. I know this shouldn't have worried God, but I still had yet to convert the whole of humanity, and those heathens who lived outside of my sphere of influence would undoubtedly take unkindly to the idea of murder in my name.
I had to take back control of the fringe elements, so I hypnotized a new priest class to keep the people in line. They preached my word, handed down directly from me, and instructed the people in the proper ways to pay me the respect I was due. My influence grew greater still and the whole world was poised to fall into my hands. My realm continued to grow, and at every measurable moment, it grew ahead of my ability to keep up. When there were too many priests to personally account for, I hypnotized angels to deliver my memos for me. When the angels' numbers were unmanageable, I made archangels who oversaw the angels and filled in for me, whenever and wherever I was needed yet priorly engaged. Even with my hierarchy in place, control was slipping through my fingers. My religion had grown too big to micromanage. There was only one thing I could do to keep it going, and keep it growing, without losing what I'd worked so hard to create.
I needed fellow gods. No, I needed fellow Gods. Creating yet another class of divine being would be a temporary stop loss at best. Before long, my holy family would become as dysfunctional and incestuous as the gods of ancient Greece or Rome. What I needed was not demigod wanna-be's and hangers-on with the potential to plan and plot against my authority. I needed exact, flawless representation standing in wherever and whenever I couldn't be. I needed copies as exact as possible of me to carry on my work, so I hypnotized my final batch of minions, my greatest creation, myself.
I imbued within my clones all of my own powers of hypnotism. I gave them all of my own drive and devotion to building the faith. I gave them my name, told them that they were, in fact, me. Each of them believed that he or she was me, the one true God, and I sent them out into the world to continue my evangelism. Their charge was to convince people not to worship them as God, but to believe that in worshiping them, they were worshiping me. My final solution left me able, as God truly should be, to be everywhere at once.
My copies were exact and perfect. Eventually, they followed my lead. They made their own priests, their own higher and lower angels, their own copies of copies of the man who made God in his own image. Before I had noticed, there were identical religions springing up all over the globe. The world was truly mine, and I was free to step back and admire my creation from afar.
It was then that I realized the fatal flaw inherent in the system. The third generation of Gods begot a fourth, and they a fifth, and so on, until all the world worshiped me, their one true God, by proxy. There were no more heathens left to convert, but that didn't stop my Gods. Still intent on copying themselves, they dipped into each others' pools of followers, creating more Gods out of perfectly good worshipers. If unchecked, they would eventually have made everyone into one of me, and while a god among men is a special thing, a god among himself is at best unworthy of notice. I was in danger of losing my very special status unless I did something to stop them, to stop me, to stop myself (hopefully you understand how I could confuse my pronouns at this point) so I did what anyone in my position would have. I called for a holy war.
Every God followed suit, declaring that he or she was the one true me, and that all opposing shepherds and their infidel flocks should be brought to slaughter. Soon my followers were massacring each other over which of me they should worship. Blood drenched the face of the Earth in my name. The stench of death was impossible to escape, even for me. There was no heaven to which I could climb that was high enough to escape the funk of faith gone wrong. I gagged on the stink of my creation as I watched it die, and when there were no more of my followers left standing, when our priests had been burned for heresy, when our angels had cast off their halos and torn each other wing from imaginary wing, there were none left but us, the rival Gods. There were none but me and others exactly like me.
I fought myself over and over again, and I'd like to think that I survived this long by being smarter or better than the rest, but the truth is we're all the same. We created ourselves this way. If the others out there are just exact copies of me, then it's just chance that keeps any one of me alive longer than any other. For all my power and glory, in the end I am as dependent on the whims of random chance as was the lowest of my lowly worshipers For all my supposed omniscience, I keep wondering.
If every one of me is an exact copy, then every one of me believes that he or she was the first. I believe I'm the first, the original unpopular kid who became God to the entire world, but it's possible I came along later. It's possible some other me grabbed me off the street as an adult and triggered this history in my head. It's possible that I'm nothing, that my words are not the Word of God after all, but the word of some imitation. Not that it matters. No matter which one of me survives in the end, it will still be me.
And if ever again there are normal people on my Earth, if ever all of me have killed each other off and some remote village survived by escaping my attention, it's possible that these words I write will be found. And if you're reading this, then it isn't just possible, is it? It has come to pass. So I tell you now that this is the true story of God, because you will probably have heard a few by now. Believe no others, for I was the one true God, as was I and I and all the others who shared my power. We were God, but in the end we destroyed ourselves. We played God and lost.
We sought ourselves out and fought to the death, and I'm only alive now to write this because of all of the others of me I've managed to kill thus far. It's possible that one day I'll meet my match, so to speak, and I won't live to pass this parable on, so I'll keep writing whenever I can, and I'll fight the other Gods I come across. I'll sit securely within my hiding spot until I see them wandering the empty land in search of me, then we'll hold our grand and epic battles and, as there are no mere men left to document the outcomes, I'll do it myself. I'll account for every one of me I depose and expose as a false idol. I'll rid the world of the plague I've put upon it, and then I'll live quietly through the remainder of my years, writing down tales of the challengers I've bested.
In fact, I think one of me is approaching now, which means I've got another epic battle to fight, but I'll write more as soon as I'm finished with him.
© 2006 Rob Callahan
While I can't predict the way my name will live on as it is passed down through the ages, I can at least influence it through this writing, so I'm telling you, the reader, whomever you may be, what really happened. I'm giving you my first hand account of a rise to greatness and the mighty fall I later took. When I'm finished, you'll probably think I was an egomaniac or some power mad monster bent on domination, but I wasn't. At least not at first. In the beginning, all I wanted to do was to be loved.
As a teen, I was lonely and awkward, the kind of guy who never got the girl. The kind of guy who got his glasses smashed by the girl's quarterback boyfriend instead. The sad story of my youth has been told over and over again by others just like me, so I won't make you sit through it now. Suffice it to say that mine was a near universal experience, avoided only by the privileged few born at the top of the social food chain, and while it warrants no retelling, it does deserve note. It was my lowly station in life that drove me to do the things I did, and no matter what you have to say about the outcome, at least you'll understand that my intentions were good. Well, maybe not great, but they weren't so bad.
At least not terrible.
So what if they weren't perfect? Let's just agree to consider my intentions good for the sake of this story and get on with it. The problem was that all my good intentions did for me was pave a road best left rough, and both the source and object of said intentions was love, or whatever I thought love was when new hair and hormones dictated my feelings. Those were desperate times, times when the answers to all of life's problems could be found, and were in my case, in an ad in the back of a comic book. Said ad promised to unlock the secrets of hypnotism. Specifically, those of hypnotizing women. When I came across that ad, the end began. My four ninety-five and SASE were as good as in the mail before I'd even finished reading, and in the days that passed while I waited for my hypnotism kit to come, I singled out my first would-be girlfriend.
She was out of my league at first, but I worked my way into hers and commenced with the extraction. I got close to her as her tutor. I helped her with her homework, and by helped I mean I did it for her, and this was all it took to get an initial exchange going. Our relationship was one of mutual parasitism, her feeding freely from my intellect while I garnered enough favor among her peers to get beaten up less and less with each passing grade. She was hyper-social, a walking smile that sparkled and glittered its way through life, the kind of girl that dotted the dottable letters in her name with hearts and flowers. She gripped like a vise the respect of her peers and the envy of everyone else around her. I didn't understand it then. I still don't. The kind of social hierarchy that places the cute and vapid in a position of superiority over the smart and skilled is antithetical to reason, but so is much of high school, so I learned to roll with that particular incessant punch and brace myself against its next recurrence.
Some day things would change, or so everyone told me. Some day the people like me would be on top of the world. People like them would live four blocks from their high schools, marry the aging quarterbacks and captains of the cheerleaders, and grow fatter and further from their former glory with every painful day of decay that came to pass. Their own spoiled, beautiful children would ruin them, as they had their parents, and so would spin the cycle. People like me, it was said, would eventually prosper and teach and invent and run the corporations that turned the world and made history, while people like them would wither into oblivion. All I had to do was be smarter and better until my day came. This was the anthem of my kind. Suffer now for later rewards. This kept us going through wedgies, swirlies, wet willies and getting pantsed. The faith in our future successes carried us through the humiliation of our present pains. Most of us anyway.
It took patience and faith to adhere to this mantra, and I had neither. I wanted my reward now, minus the requisite suffering, so I willed a way where none had previously been. I was going to have what the beautiful people had, namely other beautiful people. I was going to live the dream of every likable geek in every high school melodrama John Hughes ever made, and I was going to have it on my terms.
It wasn't hard to get her alone and vulnerable. In fact, just under the polished veneer of her chipper cheerleader motif, she was already both. All I had to do was get her into surroundings that mirrored her inner state, so I made my move as the SATs closed in. Promising her an assembly of infallible cliff notes to get her through the ordeal, I brought her home and got to work.
I told her I would have to tutor her. I would have to actually help her study as opposed to just do her work for her. It wouldn't be easy, but it could be done, and when I had assured her so, she agreed to our first study session. Once she'd committed to being alone with me, my plan could go forward. It was a brilliant scheme, built upon far more inspiration than perspiration, but it would pay itself off in more sweat and panting than any honest day's work could ever hope to produce. Half way through her first chapter on Algebra, I made my move. In a practiced tone I soothed and relaxed her and she went under right away. Then she simply sat there, eyes closed and breathing steady, waiting for my suggestions.
I never ordered her to sleep with me under hypnosis, if that's what you're thinking. I merely exposed her to previously unimagined levels of arousal, adding layer upon layer to her inner sex fiend until she was so overcome with the need to come over and over that my pudgy, acned visage couldn't get homely enough to turn her off. I awakened something inside of her that could only be satisfied by the nearest available male of the species, he being me, and I let her take it from there. Was it rape, or was she willing? In hindsight, it was probably both, but I never forced anything on her, so while my list of regrets begins at about the time of our ill-fated tryst, this encounter does not make said list on its own merit.
It's a well known fact that hypnotism can not be used to force a subject into any action against their will, but a lesser known fact of the art is that a subject's will need not be broken, merely bent. If a person with an aversion to pickle juice is asked to drink deeply of the bitter brine, they will refuse. If the same person is convinced that they're thirstier than they've ever been, that their throat is as dry as the Gobi, and they are then handed the same jar of juice, they'll gladly guzzle. All it takes is the right trigger to motivate an individual, to wrap her mind within a frame that's willing to look past the initial revulsion and on to the satisfaction of her scorching desire. I didn't have to force her to sleep with me. I had to make her want it so completely that she'd sleep with anyone upon whom she could get her hands, and then position myself appropriately within said hands.
So I counted backwards from ten to one and I snapped my fingers. As I suggested, she became consumed. I did it again and she was ten times worse. Again, and another power of ten. So on and so forth until it didn't matter who, until it being me was an insignificant triviality at best. I didn't seduce her while she was under. The exercise was only a test, a probe into the depths to which she could be driven. Once I knew how deep I could go, I established the turn-ons and triggers I would need to induce the same state when she was conscious and cognizant, then I brought her back. It worked like a charm, and as we later lay together in post-hypnotic coital bliss, I considered what rewards she had earned for choosing, as it were, me to fulfill her needs.
I gave her gifts through other triggers. There were words and subtle, nuanced actions that wouldn't happen accidentally in normal conversation. These awakened in her other states of being and mind -- to cheer her up when she was sad, to wake her when she was drowsy, to boost her self image, to tap into the latent strength that we only ever rarely realize in the proverbial moments of adrenaline and crisis - I gave her these triggers and allowed that she could invoke them on her own, giving her complete control over herself and her surroundings. She had access to levels of insight and intuition and intelligence normally reserved only for savants. She was my super girl, my wonder woman. She could make herself capable of anything merely by uttering the right syllable. Anything, that was, except for sexual gratification.
Only I could induce her arousal, and satisfaction thereof could only come the old fashioned way. This one power I kept for myself. If a simple word could bring her to orgasm, she wouldn't have needed me at all, so there was no trigger for that. Only that which made her demand complete satisfaction did I put within my power, and that trigger only ever passed my own lips. It was mine and mine alone to use, much like her.
What set my downfall into motion was the slow and steady encroachment of my own listlessness with the relationship. Don't get me wrong. We were happy together for years. We had the perfect relationship, we were the archetypal pair, the dork and the hottie, that always came together in the beer, deodorant and breath mint commercials. Before us, I'd always thought those contrasting actors had been paired up merely to instill hope in desperate males that the purchase of a given product would transform them into unstoppable Casanovas, but there we were, together as proof that it could really happen. Sometimes I even forgot that our relationship was based solely on sex, and that said sex was based solely on mind control. Sometimes. The rest of the time, reality nagged at me and spoiled my fun.
As time passed, I grew to understand that what I had created was not so much a sex toy as an expression of power, a possession, and like any new toy, the novelty faded. I needed new toys to keep my attention. I needed new girls, and as I grew older, new women. I cultivated my harem from only the choicest picks among women who would never otherwise have given me the time of day. I refined my hypnotism prowess so much that I could put a person under in an instant. Any stranger on the street could be brought under my influence, and many of them were. I had what other awkward teens had only ever dreamed they'd grow up to have. I was surrounded by women who lusted after me, and occasionally each other for my viewing pleasure.
My life became filled with devoted women. There were enough of them that I could borrow small enough sums of money from each and they would never care if I repaid. Such was the volume of those sums, when added together, that I could live comfortably without ever holding a job. After I had exhausted all of the beautiful women I could find, I used those perpetually-borrowed funds to travel. I went to New York and acquired supermodels. I went to Los Angeles and got actresses and pop divas. If ever there was a woman after whom I'd longed, I needed only to get close to her and she would be mine. Once I even went after a president's daughter, only because she was unattainable, and I had to hypnotize her secret service handlers as well just to get to her. They'd have beaten me senseless and probably thrown me in jail just for getting too close if I hadn't, and before I could bring them back, I had to convince them that I was no one of consequence, that there was no need to arrest me for what I was doing. I assured them while they were in the deepest of trances that I was one thing and one thing only: I was harmless. When I brought them back they barely even noticed I was there.
That was the defining moment in my ascension, the day I understood what I was truly capable of being. I still couldn't force a person into any action against their will, but I could convince them of anything I wanted and their wills would snap appropriately. That was the day that I realized that I could be anyone, have anything, and do whatever I wanted if I just made the right suggestions. That was the day I decided to convince the world that I was God.
I started with my ladies and the secret service agents, as they were the most readily available. I put them under, one at a time, and left each of them with but one new suggestion when they woke. Each of them came to look upon me with wonder, for there I was before them in all of my miraculous glory. They worshiped me, not because I made them, but because they believed that they should. Needless to say, this went to my head a little.
The greater my throngs of worshipers grew, the greater my ambitions became. I was spinning on an upward spiral into my own divine kingdom. I went a little higher with each new lamb who fell into my flock. I was the alpha and the omega to the select few who heard my word, but this was not enough. There were heathens everywhere, billions of them all over the world, and if I could be worshiped by a small assembly of the devoted, why not by the whole of humanity? The problem was that if I spent every waking hour of the rest of my life hypnotizing and converting, I'd never make more than the smallest of dents in the population, and there are so many better things for God to do than run himself ragged trying to collect worshipers. I had meant to be God and I was turning out to be little more than a cult leader, but there were ways to expand my influence that I hadn't yet tried.
The standard devout worshiper hypnosis routine was still good enough for most of my converts, but I had to develop a new class of underling to help spread my word. I began hypnotizing acolytes, special followers endowed with all of the attributes and unwavering devotion of my stock followers, but triggered to tell the entire world of my miracles, of my glory and greatness. They weren't easy to make. They required finding people already charismatic and persuasive, then giving them the standard perception of my holiness, and finally rounding them out with the suggestion that word of God walking among them was the most important piece of information they could share. It was their evangelism that would earn them the greatest favor of their Lord, and so they went among the unwashed and told the world at large the good news of its Creator. I imagine that some part of them was driven solely by the empty promise of a false god's rewards, but I like to think that mostly they did what they did because it was not just right, but it was the absolute most right thing they could do.
Sadly, the rest of the world didn't always see things my way. Most of my acolytes were institutionalized. A few were beaten and tortured by fundamentalist mobs, illustrating that religious zeal was a dangerous phenomenon when God wasn't nearby to direct it. A very small handful were successful, bringing into the fold of my flock a new class of worshiper, one who believed in my power without the benefit of post-hypnotic suggestion. I quickly hypnotized them anyway, just to be safe. The acolytes were helping, and in time I had a small army of the devout at my disposal.
Again, my ego grew ravenous. My sizable flock still wasn't enough to satisfy me, yet it was growing too big for me to handle. Between those converted by my acolytes and those I personally recruited, my church became tremendous. I no longer had the time or the reach to personally attend to the needs and suffering of my people, and those who went long enough without my attention began to question my existence. Some adopted unconventional ways of worship, which ranged from quaint to harmful. Some of my followers were making human sacrifices just to get my attention. I know this shouldn't have worried God, but I still had yet to convert the whole of humanity, and those heathens who lived outside of my sphere of influence would undoubtedly take unkindly to the idea of murder in my name.
I had to take back control of the fringe elements, so I hypnotized a new priest class to keep the people in line. They preached my word, handed down directly from me, and instructed the people in the proper ways to pay me the respect I was due. My influence grew greater still and the whole world was poised to fall into my hands. My realm continued to grow, and at every measurable moment, it grew ahead of my ability to keep up. When there were too many priests to personally account for, I hypnotized angels to deliver my memos for me. When the angels' numbers were unmanageable, I made archangels who oversaw the angels and filled in for me, whenever and wherever I was needed yet priorly engaged. Even with my hierarchy in place, control was slipping through my fingers. My religion had grown too big to micromanage. There was only one thing I could do to keep it going, and keep it growing, without losing what I'd worked so hard to create.
I needed fellow gods. No, I needed fellow Gods. Creating yet another class of divine being would be a temporary stop loss at best. Before long, my holy family would become as dysfunctional and incestuous as the gods of ancient Greece or Rome. What I needed was not demigod wanna-be's and hangers-on with the potential to plan and plot against my authority. I needed exact, flawless representation standing in wherever and whenever I couldn't be. I needed copies as exact as possible of me to carry on my work, so I hypnotized my final batch of minions, my greatest creation, myself.
I imbued within my clones all of my own powers of hypnotism. I gave them all of my own drive and devotion to building the faith. I gave them my name, told them that they were, in fact, me. Each of them believed that he or she was me, the one true God, and I sent them out into the world to continue my evangelism. Their charge was to convince people not to worship them as God, but to believe that in worshiping them, they were worshiping me. My final solution left me able, as God truly should be, to be everywhere at once.
My copies were exact and perfect. Eventually, they followed my lead. They made their own priests, their own higher and lower angels, their own copies of copies of the man who made God in his own image. Before I had noticed, there were identical religions springing up all over the globe. The world was truly mine, and I was free to step back and admire my creation from afar.
It was then that I realized the fatal flaw inherent in the system. The third generation of Gods begot a fourth, and they a fifth, and so on, until all the world worshiped me, their one true God, by proxy. There were no more heathens left to convert, but that didn't stop my Gods. Still intent on copying themselves, they dipped into each others' pools of followers, creating more Gods out of perfectly good worshipers. If unchecked, they would eventually have made everyone into one of me, and while a god among men is a special thing, a god among himself is at best unworthy of notice. I was in danger of losing my very special status unless I did something to stop them, to stop me, to stop myself (hopefully you understand how I could confuse my pronouns at this point) so I did what anyone in my position would have. I called for a holy war.
Every God followed suit, declaring that he or she was the one true me, and that all opposing shepherds and their infidel flocks should be brought to slaughter. Soon my followers were massacring each other over which of me they should worship. Blood drenched the face of the Earth in my name. The stench of death was impossible to escape, even for me. There was no heaven to which I could climb that was high enough to escape the funk of faith gone wrong. I gagged on the stink of my creation as I watched it die, and when there were no more of my followers left standing, when our priests had been burned for heresy, when our angels had cast off their halos and torn each other wing from imaginary wing, there were none left but us, the rival Gods. There were none but me and others exactly like me.
I fought myself over and over again, and I'd like to think that I survived this long by being smarter or better than the rest, but the truth is we're all the same. We created ourselves this way. If the others out there are just exact copies of me, then it's just chance that keeps any one of me alive longer than any other. For all my power and glory, in the end I am as dependent on the whims of random chance as was the lowest of my lowly worshipers For all my supposed omniscience, I keep wondering.
If every one of me is an exact copy, then every one of me believes that he or she was the first. I believe I'm the first, the original unpopular kid who became God to the entire world, but it's possible I came along later. It's possible some other me grabbed me off the street as an adult and triggered this history in my head. It's possible that I'm nothing, that my words are not the Word of God after all, but the word of some imitation. Not that it matters. No matter which one of me survives in the end, it will still be me.
And if ever again there are normal people on my Earth, if ever all of me have killed each other off and some remote village survived by escaping my attention, it's possible that these words I write will be found. And if you're reading this, then it isn't just possible, is it? It has come to pass. So I tell you now that this is the true story of God, because you will probably have heard a few by now. Believe no others, for I was the one true God, as was I and I and all the others who shared my power. We were God, but in the end we destroyed ourselves. We played God and lost.
We sought ourselves out and fought to the death, and I'm only alive now to write this because of all of the others of me I've managed to kill thus far. It's possible that one day I'll meet my match, so to speak, and I won't live to pass this parable on, so I'll keep writing whenever I can, and I'll fight the other Gods I come across. I'll sit securely within my hiding spot until I see them wandering the empty land in search of me, then we'll hold our grand and epic battles and, as there are no mere men left to document the outcomes, I'll do it myself. I'll account for every one of me I depose and expose as a false idol. I'll rid the world of the plague I've put upon it, and then I'll live quietly through the remainder of my years, writing down tales of the challengers I've bested.
In fact, I think one of me is approaching now, which means I've got another epic battle to fight, but I'll write more as soon as I'm finished with him.
© 2006 Rob Callahan