“I know.” It had damn near broken him. When he came here, I wasn’t sure what if anything could be done for him. Then he argued with me. We fought until he was better. “My gate is always open to you, and my home is yours—but I understand being called to a greater purpose, even if I don’t keep faith with that particular purpose.”
He closed the distance between us and cupped my face. “Mi alma, believe me when I say I will argue with you until the world ends or I die, whichever comes first. This is where I want to be. I have given all I had, and now I will give the rest to you and to this place you are building.”
“We.” I promised him, covering one of his hands with mine. “This is a project we’re all doing. If we can make it work.” I still wasn’t sure it would. The serum wasn’t ready, and the world…the world kept burning.
“Whatever I have, it’s yours. I swear it.”
He meant it, every word. Still… “What if I die first?”
“Then the world will have ended.” The choked note of emotion galvanized me into motion. I wrapped my arms around him and held on. “Don’t leave,” he whispered against my hair. “Wherever you go, let me at least follow you.”
Blink.
“I still have my faith, though I question it as often as not.” Andreas stood in the center of his sitting area, mug of coffee in hand. “But to answer your question, I believe souls travel. Maybe they travel together, and fight to stay together, even when they come to Earth.”
“That almost makes us sound like aliens on holiday.” I didn’t mean to laugh at him, but maybe I needed something a little silly. My emotions were all over the place.
“Perhaps we are, perhaps God is the captain of the ship, and our time here is merely the stop we take on this journey before we go on to the next.” The wistfulness in his voice pulled at me.
“Perhaps?”
“To pretend to understand the mind and will of God is to demonstrate the worst hubris. God is. That is all I have to know. Everything else is guesswork, intuition, and hope.” His shoulders dipped with the last, then he shook his head. “You have never expressed a deep regard for God.”
“It is not God I doubt…” The conversation felt oddly familiar, but I pressed past the disconcerting sensation. “I wasn’t brought up to hold God as the singular being upon whom I should heap all my problems or praises. My parents taught me self-reliance, kindness, and compassion. They taught me a work ethic, and that life itself was to be celebrated. The dead…the dead move on to the next part of their existence, and to those souls, we commend them good journey. Worrying about what happens after means always looking away from the now.”
“And discussion of past lives? Where does that fall?” The armor around him was impenetrable. I couldn’t read his reactions, but we didn’t know each other well, so perhaps that was merely a lack on my part.
Wait…
Blink.
“You’ve said this a hundred times, but if there was no God, there would be no hope.” Andreas motioned with a bottle of beer in his hand. “Our faith in him isn’t about true or false, it’s about survival. It’s who we are as a people.”
“You’re arguing that faith is genetically coded?” How many beers had he drunk?
“Yes,” he said, circling the room as he paced. The man always did enjoy a good debate, and he never could sit still. When he was still, something was wrong. Was he even aware of the physical cues he gave off? “Nature versus nurture is more than a psychological theory. Think about our entire history as a species, we are all products of our environment. The coding in our genetics is the toolbox we received as a gift at conception—in the moment of the big bang, as it were. Each of us became these microcosms of creation. We exploded to life as the genetics come together—but what we choose to do with those tools, well, that’s something else all together.”
I laughed. What else was I supposed to do? “That’s beautiful poetry, truly. But how are we genetically coded to believe in God?”
He spread his arms wide. “Because we exist. We must believe in something more. Creation requires infinite energy, so we must always ask—what came before? What comes after? The question is as old as we are…whether we call them gods, goddesses, or God or Goddess…they are divine. The creator—he or she must exist, because we believe. Maybe we are the products of this infinite creation, create and we believe, so we have power in that.”
Insane. Certifiable. Genius. Beloved. So many words I could apply to him. “So your argument is God—or gods—must exist, because we do. Thus, they exist because we give them life, but we exist because they bestowed it upon us?”
“True, it’s a bit chicken and egg,” he conceded. “Yet, faith defines us.”
Blink.
“Faith,” I whispered. “It defines us.”
“Perhaps,” he said, his frown deepening. The mug in his hand seemed to tremble before he set it down. “I don’t know that I can believe in past lives, specifically. Though, I could argue that if they did exist, then each life is a journey to a specific purpose, or perhaps to handle an unfinished moment.”
Unfinished moment.
Yes, unfinished.
I hadn’t finished. “Then why can’t we remember them clearly? Wouldn’t it make more sense to be aware of what we need to do?”
He hesitated, then began to pace, and something in me eased. Moving helped him think. “We are given one life. One life to make something happen, with ourselves, the world—whatever the course or task of our life is. Let us say something is unfinished, and you earn another opportunity. Are you helped or hampered by knowing what you did before?”
“In an experiment, you would want all the information to avoid repeating the same mistakes.” My coffee had cooled, but it was still delicious and warm as I drank. The caffeine was doing its job. Or maybe it was the discussion.
Whirling, he pointed at me. “What about blind studies?”
“Double blinds are to test the efficacy of a substance. We know that a person’s mindset can alter what they report. If they don’t know whether they are receiving the placebo or not, they will report everything they experience, positive or negative.” Though some with the placebo would often report an improvement in their condition, their belief turning transformative.
“Precisely.” A smug grin turned up the corners of his lips, and my heart accelerated. It had been a long time since I’d seen him smile. “Why would another life be any different?”
“You’re saying awareness of it at all would change reactions, much less knowing it all?”
“It makes sense…you know what you’ve done in your life. Doesn’t that inform the decisions you make now?”
Did it? Did it really? What if I didn’t know what I’d done? The connection, the feeling I knew them, and then at the same time, it didn’t make sense? Did it? Hell, I didn’t even remember agreeing to this biosphere. And look at me, arriving at his quarters a mess of quivering emotions and unable to focus.
None of this seemed real.
Blink.
“What the hell is wrong with her?” Andreas’ voice rose somewhere to my left, but it was Oz who knelt in front of me. He shone a light in my eyes, and I winced away from them. “She was just staring off into space, and she kept doing it. One moment here, the next just a blank.”