Consider the chicken farmer. He hatches the chicks, raises them into hens, breeds them with the right rooster, then expands his farm with each generation. Ten birds turn into a hundred, then a thousand, then so many chickens that the farmer loses count. Each day the farmer rises, feeds the chickens, and selects a few dozen for slaughter; he plucks them, cleans the meat, then takes them to market. His routine changes little, but it is a pleasant one; the farmer likes regularity, and the feeling of a job well done.
Then, one morning, the farmer exits his farmhouse to find that the chickens have discovered nuclear weapons. One of the hens flies a passenger jet over the wrong henhouse’s airspace and the rooster in charge shoots it down with a surface-to-air missile. An alliance of henhouses launches a retaliatory strike on a military base in Chickistan, and within a few hours the chickens are launching thermonuclear warheads at each other, annihilating almost the entire farm and massacring all but a handful of chickens. They have ruined years of the farmer’s careful efforts to grow his chicken farm, and now he has to start all over with a tiny clutch of surviving chickens in South America whom the fallout did not poison and who managed to survive the famine that killed almost every other chicken.
I don’t eat souls, so the analogy begins to break down here, but just as the farmer depends on his chickens for food, I depend on the human race for my own existence. I could explain more, but you wouldn’t get it—which is why I ordinarily make up some fable about what I actually do with the souls on the rare occasion I talk to humans. I think there’s a bit of a humorous irony in you people killing each other over what happens to you after you kill each other.
By the way, if you find that sadistic, it’s only because you think your suffering matters more than it really does. Your soul is immortal, and eventually you’ll think of it as a hilarious prank. Starting a holy war is like putting a chicken on an inner tube then pushing it into the middle of a pool. It’s funny. It doesn’t really hurt the chicken. I just want to see what it does.
But I don’t get to mess around with my chickens when I’m too busy keeping them alive. Humans will inbreed themselves out of existence if I let the population drop below a few hundred, and even that number is playing with fire. It helps that most have regressed to hunter-gatherers, since those societies have longer lifespans than agricultural ones, but the human race is only a couple of bad days away from extinction.
Did you know that after a nuclear exchange, there is a massive infestation of insects? They feed on the corpses of people and animals that die from radiation poisoning, and they spread unimaginable amounts of disease. I’ve killed trillions of these things trying to keep them away from my colonies. Flies, wasps, hornets, beetles, and especially ants. Trillions and trillions of ants. They cover the rubble in Europe like a carpet: each corpse can feed a colony for weeks. Not only have I had to keep them all away from my chickens, I even eradicated mosquitos, which had taken me millions of years to perfect. They’re just too good at killing people, and that’s the last thing I want right now.
I’m not omnipotent. I can’t control the weather. I can’t bring down bread from heaven or part the seas. My only leverage on the physical world is death. Ironically, people have started worshipping me as a life-giving deity for eliminating the creatures they don’t like, which will make for some very entertaining wars once they re-evolve into settled societies and start fighting crusades again. But for now, I have to kill the jaguars that try to ambush them in the jungle, smite the poisonous snakes before they can strike, and make sure no fighting breaks out.
That’s actually the easy part. Take Colony 11, in Argentina, who had a leader named Pablo who thought it was a good idea to make war on Colony 13. I set him on fire the second he finished his speech, and just like that, Colony 11 turned into inveterate pacifists. Their priestess, who used to be in PETA, went a little too far and started preaching it was a sin to kill animals, but those things are full of valuable calories, and the 11s needed all the calories they could get. So I set her on fire as well. Now the 11s are doing fantastic: they’re one of my best colonies, and all it took was a little bit of spontaneous combustion.
But most of the problems I’m facing right now are not so simple. I need some help, and since you people couldn’t keep your dirty little fingers off your nuclear buttons, you are going to be the ones to help me clean up the mess you created. None of you are going anywhere until I have a stable population of at least five hundred thousand for five straight millennia. You’re going to do whatever I tell you, whenever I tell you, because you really have no other choice. When the last human dies, I stop existing shortly afterwards, and any souls I fail to deliver—to wherever I deliver souls—are stuck here forever. That will include you. You will stay here until the heat-death of the universe, orbiting the burnt-out husk of the sun with your little murder buddies until you wish I had eaten your souls.
If you people feel bad about wiping out nearly the entire human race, and you want to undo your mistakes, this is your chance to atone for your sins. If you want to help me, I’ll send you to haunt one of my colonies and gather the information I need to keep your species alive. You’ll tell me what they need, how I can protect them, and who needs to be smitten to keep the civilization alive. I suspect you did not become presidents, premiers, and generals without a certain skill for logistics and an understanding of human needs, so I imagine you’ll be rather good at it. If you are, then after five thousand years, I let you go.
I’m not going to tell you what happens afterwards. Maybe there’s a God, and I can put in a good word for you. Maybe God just eats your souls, and I really am just a chicken farmer. I won’t tell you. You’re never going to know what happens, or if you’re going to heaven or hell. But the one thing you will know—and know with certainty—is that I can make a hell for you if you finish what you started and the human race goes extinct.
violenceandbeethoven t1_j85e8yo wrote
Reply to [WP] You are Death, but in a post-apocalyptic world. Only a few survivors remain, and you're doing everything you can to help them because if the last human dies, you die as well. The survivors can't see you, but they feel your presence and notice you efforts. They started to call you Life. by Frosty-Ad-1284
Consider the chicken farmer. He hatches the chicks, raises them into hens, breeds them with the right rooster, then expands his farm with each generation. Ten birds turn into a hundred, then a thousand, then so many chickens that the farmer loses count. Each day the farmer rises, feeds the chickens, and selects a few dozen for slaughter; he plucks them, cleans the meat, then takes them to market. His routine changes little, but it is a pleasant one; the farmer likes regularity, and the feeling of a job well done.
Then, one morning, the farmer exits his farmhouse to find that the chickens have discovered nuclear weapons. One of the hens flies a passenger jet over the wrong henhouse’s airspace and the rooster in charge shoots it down with a surface-to-air missile. An alliance of henhouses launches a retaliatory strike on a military base in Chickistan, and within a few hours the chickens are launching thermonuclear warheads at each other, annihilating almost the entire farm and massacring all but a handful of chickens. They have ruined years of the farmer’s careful efforts to grow his chicken farm, and now he has to start all over with a tiny clutch of surviving chickens in South America whom the fallout did not poison and who managed to survive the famine that killed almost every other chicken.
I don’t eat souls, so the analogy begins to break down here, but just as the farmer depends on his chickens for food, I depend on the human race for my own existence. I could explain more, but you wouldn’t get it—which is why I ordinarily make up some fable about what I actually do with the souls on the rare occasion I talk to humans. I think there’s a bit of a humorous irony in you people killing each other over what happens to you after you kill each other.
By the way, if you find that sadistic, it’s only because you think your suffering matters more than it really does. Your soul is immortal, and eventually you’ll think of it as a hilarious prank. Starting a holy war is like putting a chicken on an inner tube then pushing it into the middle of a pool. It’s funny. It doesn’t really hurt the chicken. I just want to see what it does.
But I don’t get to mess around with my chickens when I’m too busy keeping them alive. Humans will inbreed themselves out of existence if I let the population drop below a few hundred, and even that number is playing with fire. It helps that most have regressed to hunter-gatherers, since those societies have longer lifespans than agricultural ones, but the human race is only a couple of bad days away from extinction.
Did you know that after a nuclear exchange, there is a massive infestation of insects? They feed on the corpses of people and animals that die from radiation poisoning, and they spread unimaginable amounts of disease. I’ve killed trillions of these things trying to keep them away from my colonies. Flies, wasps, hornets, beetles, and especially ants. Trillions and trillions of ants. They cover the rubble in Europe like a carpet: each corpse can feed a colony for weeks. Not only have I had to keep them all away from my chickens, I even eradicated mosquitos, which had taken me millions of years to perfect. They’re just too good at killing people, and that’s the last thing I want right now.
I’m not omnipotent. I can’t control the weather. I can’t bring down bread from heaven or part the seas. My only leverage on the physical world is death. Ironically, people have started worshipping me as a life-giving deity for eliminating the creatures they don’t like, which will make for some very entertaining wars once they re-evolve into settled societies and start fighting crusades again. But for now, I have to kill the jaguars that try to ambush them in the jungle, smite the poisonous snakes before they can strike, and make sure no fighting breaks out.
That’s actually the easy part. Take Colony 11, in Argentina, who had a leader named Pablo who thought it was a good idea to make war on Colony 13. I set him on fire the second he finished his speech, and just like that, Colony 11 turned into inveterate pacifists. Their priestess, who used to be in PETA, went a little too far and started preaching it was a sin to kill animals, but those things are full of valuable calories, and the 11s needed all the calories they could get. So I set her on fire as well. Now the 11s are doing fantastic: they’re one of my best colonies, and all it took was a little bit of spontaneous combustion.
But most of the problems I’m facing right now are not so simple. I need some help, and since you people couldn’t keep your dirty little fingers off your nuclear buttons, you are going to be the ones to help me clean up the mess you created. None of you are going anywhere until I have a stable population of at least five hundred thousand for five straight millennia. You’re going to do whatever I tell you, whenever I tell you, because you really have no other choice. When the last human dies, I stop existing shortly afterwards, and any souls I fail to deliver—to wherever I deliver souls—are stuck here forever. That will include you. You will stay here until the heat-death of the universe, orbiting the burnt-out husk of the sun with your little murder buddies until you wish I had eaten your souls.
If you people feel bad about wiping out nearly the entire human race, and you want to undo your mistakes, this is your chance to atone for your sins. If you want to help me, I’ll send you to haunt one of my colonies and gather the information I need to keep your species alive. You’ll tell me what they need, how I can protect them, and who needs to be smitten to keep the civilization alive. I suspect you did not become presidents, premiers, and generals without a certain skill for logistics and an understanding of human needs, so I imagine you’ll be rather good at it. If you are, then after five thousand years, I let you go.
I’m not going to tell you what happens afterwards. Maybe there’s a God, and I can put in a good word for you. Maybe God just eats your souls, and I really am just a chicken farmer. I won’t tell you. You’re never going to know what happens, or if you’re going to heaven or hell. But the one thing you will know—and know with certainty—is that I can make a hell for you if you finish what you started and the human race goes extinct.
Are there any questions?