Entry 41: in which levels of difficulty appear

Mrs G has taken pity on me and explained that Do Soak You comes in different levels of difficulty. It seems that my problems were caused by tackling a level beyond my powers of "inference".

She says I should have started with a level called Gentle, rather than the level I did attempt which is called Intermediate. No wonder.

She herself claims to have reached the next level called Difficult. Lucy has apparently reached a level called Fiendish and hopes to graduate soon to Diabolical.

But why has no one, including Gabriel himself, come up with the obvious level, to whit, Simple? As existence itself should be, but seldom is.

Despite the explanation, for which I am of course grateful, I am in no great hurry to embrace Do Soak You again, Gentle or not.

Entry 40: in which one asks what's the point?

What with the stress of recent events, and in the confident expectation of much more to come, I have been seeking diversion.

Since everyone else in the Realm seems addicted to Do Soak You, I thought I would have a go to see if there is any point to this so-called intellectual challenge. Opened the first puzzle and divined the answers immediately. So no point whatsoever.

Was explaining this to Mrs G who was I fear completely unhelpful in her response.

"Der ..." she began, which I think is code for you are being unbelievably stupid, "You aren't supposed to divine the answers. What would be the point of that? You're supposed to infer them".

So returned dutifully to said puzzle that I might infer the answers, only to discover that it actually can't be done.

In other words, pointless, much as I suspected all along.

Entry 39: in which despair seems a measured response

Somewhere in the universe the expression "Just when things could not get worse they do" will spring unbidden to the lips of a sentient creature. In the event I should like to seek out that sentient creature and commend it for its wisdom, its economy of expression and its prescience.

Whether that event has passed or is yet to be, I plan to apprehend the expression and make it my own. Indeed, I utter it now: "Just when things could not get worse they do".

Readers will be aware of several things:
- the boy is off to do a spot of space tourism
- his mother is displeased
- the quality of my life is compromised
- said tourism was to be a low-key event
- thanks to the maladroit Ghost it is not low key
- and now the whole wretched business might as well be adorned with tinsel

So what has gone wrong? Why not ask what has gone right? The answers are much and little respectively.

First Metatron takes the opportunity to put in an appearance, not here in the Realm, oh no. Here he has been been conspicuous only by his absence. Instead he chooses to materialise on Earth, where, for reasons I cannot fathom, he wanted to be "in" on the birth of the lad as a biological entity.

Anyway, thanks to a teeny weeny error in his space-time coordinates he lands bang centre in a group of nomadic herdsmen looking after a bunch of sheep. Needless to say they are scared crapless, not only by Metatron's rather frightful appearance, but by the shower of ionised particles that accompanied him, causing the environs to light up a trifle, given it was night and all.

Instead of dematerialising pronto and leaving them to wonder if they imagined the whole thing, he starts bleating on about glad tidings etc, to whit, promulgating the very events that I am so desperately keen should be low key.

"Just when things could not get worse they do". Again! Things are now at an astonishingly low ebb. But wait! That ebb can get lower yet! Cue the Ghost.

You will recall that it is the Ghost who has done the the necessary gene splicing to cause that rather sorry virgin to become pregnant, and has been trailing the lass and her paramour as they head towards Bethlehem. What has he managed to do? Caused a massive plasma flare, that's all. OK. It does happen if you dimension-shift in a hurry. Even I have been known to set the odd bush alight in this very manner. But for goodness sakes!

This flare is relatively stable, can be seen for miles around, and looks to last days if not weeks. Even the dull hominids that inhabit Earth were unlikely to miss such as event and sure enough, it has stirred up both fear and excitement in equal measure.

I am reliably informed that some top honchos have been dispatched in the direction of the flare laden with gifts with which they are to buy-off or otherwise placate whatever supernatural happening is to be found there.

I look forward to my next meeting with the Ghost. But it is unlikely that he shares my enthusiasm.

Entry 38: in which Mrs God attempts a witticism

Still perplexed by Lucy's soul/sorl idea.

Described it to Mrs G; how he would hang on to the bad ones and do his corrective education thing and I would get to keep the good ones who would sing my praises.

"He's as mad as a brush" she declares.

"Exactly".

"I mean why would they want to sing your praises?"

I think that at times like this a dignified silence is best.

Entry 37: in which Lucy waxes strange

Lucy has been surprisingly useful lately, and clearly knows it. Thus he has felt free to bend my ear about his latest hare-brained scheme, to wit, going into the soul business.

Allow me to explain. Many biological entities have a degree of consciousness and self-awareness. This consciousness is an emergent property of neural complexity and floats, as a kind of metastructure, above the neural net that gives rise to it.

If this is confusing, consider this parallel. Biological entities are "alive", yet are composed of elements and molecules that are not themselves alive. In the same way conscious entities achieve their consciousness through the aggregate activity of neurons which are themselves not conscious.

Now all consciousness resonates with deions. This is in itself pretty trivial and "just one of those things". However, anyone in the Realm can, if they can be bothered that is, "read" that resonance and learn something of the nature of the biological entity that gave rise to it. Such resonance has a half-life of perhaps 20 billion years, so some traces usually last all the way through to the next collapse.

Now you may feel, with the number of conscious entities around in the universe, that the deion field would get pretty saturated; but with a inverse 4D Fourier Transform it is simple enough to pick out the pattern characteristic of any particular entity. But who could be arsed?

Well, it appears that Lucy could; he calls the patterns "souls".

"Why souls?" I ask.

"Well" he says "it stands for Self-aware Organic Unredeemed Lifeforms".

"You've lost me there Lucy" I say "In what sense Unredeemed?"

"Ah" he says, all smug as per, "once we run the Transform and capture a pattern, we have redeemed it. Much as you might redeem a coupon. I think we should set up a working party, we could call them Redeemers, whose job it would be systematically to find and redeem souls".

Reluctant to confess that I don't know what a coupon is, so press on.

"Wouldn't that make them sorls?" I ask. Lucy looks utterly baffled. "Well" I say, in the manner of one producing a trump card, "they'd be Self-aware Organic Redeemed Lifeforms, n'est-ce pas?"

Alas he fails to rise to this so I ask the blindingly obvious question "But Lucy, why bother?".

Now it's his turn to produce the trump, or so he thinks, for he declares some souls / sorls have been 'good' in the course of their biological lives and others have been 'bad'.

"Well, almost certainly ... your point being?"

"We could divide them. You could keep the good ones who would sing your praises and stuff and I'd take the bad ones. I could set up a kind of correctional facility, put them straight, that sort of thing. I'm thinking of calling it 'Holistic Education for Life after Life', or hell for short. I think it would be a jolly wheeze".

By now I had a blinding headache, made my excuses and left. Lucy worries me. He has this quite unhealthy obsession with right and wrong, and especially wrong. Never happier than when there is a spot of fornication going on.

Me? I'm more of a live and let live type. But if I know Lucy, he's not about to let this one drop.

How utterly dull.

[Editor's note: Can this be a reference to Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830)? According to Wiki he did develop some interesting mathematics to do frequency analysis. Or just another cosmic coincidence?]

Entry 36: Lucy pulls one out of the hat

Glad tidings. Lucy has done the MC magic. One Joseph has, surprise surprise, decided that Mary is the one for him, up the spout or no.

Better still, Lucy seems to have eased them out of town on the pretext of some census or other, and away from her zealous family so there is some prospect that phase two can proceed with less drama than phase one. I think the Ghost has got the message at last, ref "low key". Entourage last seen heading in the direction of Bethlehem with the Ghost in hover mode. Can't let go of his biological experiments, it seems, until they have come to fruition. Propably wants to see if the boy does actually have two heads.

Mrs G still whingeing on about getting the lad back home. The trouble, alas, is that "embedded" as he is in a biological entity, he is there for the duration, which is to say, for the course of its natural life. This she seems reluctant to accept. "Organise a miscarriage" she says.

Honestly! Ethics and all that. Please.

Entry 35: in which my feeble editor makes his excuses

An unwelcome fact has come to my attention; my earthly editor has not been keeping these posts going at the kind of clip I am entitled to expect. There can be no excuse given that all he has to do is upload some text, I have already created, to blogoland.

Unless the sniveling wretch gets his act together I will visit various plagues of positively biblical proportions upon him. Even though I am quite nice.

However, I am, as ever, magnanimous. I will concede that the combination of renovation and visiting family has rather eroded his free time. If he promises to extract his digit from whatever sphincter it is embedded in, pronto, I will forgive. Perhaps.

Editor's note 1: He's got me dead to rights. What can I say?

Editor's note 2: So who's writing this text anyway? How come there is an entry, in the Diaries, complaining about my tardiness? Was this foreseen? Spooky!

Entry 34: in which it all starts to unravel

I am very tempted to say "Dear God". Instead I shall confine myself to dearie me and bleeding bollocking heck. Which part of "low key" does that effing Ghost not understand?

He finds a woman all right, with which to do the cloning /gene-splicing magic on behalf of the lad, but which woman? Well, sight unseen, you're going to say some old biddy with 17 kids who lost count years ago and who is not going to turn too much of a hair, nor her husband either, when some new sprog puts in an appearance.

Err, no. Whatever passes for intelligence in the Ghost does not stretch that far it appears.

Instead he puts a virgin, I repeat a VIRGIN up the spout. The wretched child is not even married. And he chooses the Middle East, the one place on the entire planet where the locals like nothing better than stoning to death those who have strayed from the straight and narrow.

Thus the life expectancy of Mary, for such is the wretch's name, is about 15 rather unpleasant minutes once her condition becomes known to her loving family.

Should Mrs God get wind of all this, she will spend most of eternity making me wish that I could simply curl up in a corner and die. I do envy biological life forms sometimes.

Ghost nowhere to be seen, quell surprise. However for once Lucifer has turned up trumps and in that rather suave urbane manner suggested "Leave it to me Squire".

"What's the plan?" I ask.

"Nip over and exercise a wee bit of MC where it will do most good."

"Come on Lucy, do tell, enough of the mystery already".

"Well", he says, "I've got this yokel in my sights. He is going to find Mary strangely alluring. So much so that minor details like her unfortunate condition will seem trifling. Once they're hitched, well, they can take it from there".

"Good stuff Lucy, well get cracking before the poor lass comes a cropper. And um ..." somewhat gruffly "do appreciate it".

No sooner said that done, and he was off to work his magic on some poor sod. Way of the world, eh? Well that world, anyway.

Alas, it's a racing certainty that this sorry affair is not over yet.

[Editor's note: It appears that MC stands for Mind Control. Discussed briefly here.]