God looked left, right, up and down, scratched his head and
wondered what he could call the feeling he was getting. He hadn’t bathed in
days or even tinkered with his iGod.
It used to be good. There was nothing he couldn’t do, nowhere
he couldn’t go; he was unchallenged and unparalleled. Then he realized that this specifically was
the problem!
He was bored.
Being God was so boring. No challenges, no butterflies in
the stomach, no taste of success when everything you do succeeds. Yes, that’s
what he was feeling: boredom. He needed to do something about it. He needed a
challenge, something that even he couldn’t be sure to control. He took out his
iGod and tapped on iCreate on the screen. A very friendly voice crackled into
existence.
“How are we doing
today, Sir?”
God spoke into iGod, still pre-occupied, “Hey Murphy, I am
bored. Gotta do something worthwhile… else everything seems so easy… ”
“Occupational hazard,
Sir. You control time and space, every particle follows your whim…how can you
have challenges?”
“Precisely my question, Murphy... don’t bounce it back at
me…”
“Err... may I suggest
a small experiment, Sir?”
“Impress me!”
“Okay, I can simulate coin
tossing in my processor and make every particle do two different things based
on the two outcomes, and keep going indefinitely… so you see, after 2 tosses we
will have 4 possible states, after 3,8, after 10, 1024 and so on. We keep
tossing for a long, long time and what we will have is a contraption which would
not only be complex but also without any design or order in it.”
God started keying in the commands to simulate infinite coin
tossing as he spoke, “Interesting, but still, since we know the probabilities
of heads and tails, the entire system is under some sort of a measure and
control…”
“Here’s the fun part, the
probabilities of heads and tails might not be fixed at 50-50 in this case. They
can be dynamically assigned to each toss on the basis of a new algorithm I
wrote…”
“Can I take a look at the algo?”
Murphy’s voice flickered a little, “Umm…. Let’s not spoil the surprise… Once you are done with the simulation, I will
add my algorithm to the system.”
“Okay, where do we apply this new logic?” God ran his hands
through his hair. He didn’t really have much hope from this experiment. Murphy
had promised him many exciting experiments in the past, most of them all hype
and no fun. The worst was a Reverse-Karaoke program which filled music behind
anything devotional anyone would sing for God. Combined with a non-musical
voice, that can be a recipe for auditory holocaust.
Murphy cleared his throat, “Remember the stress ball you used to squeeze whenever I turned on the
Reverse Karaoke? It has turned into a blob of infinite mass concentrated to an
infinitesimally small volume. We can just make it explode into a lot of
particles and apply the governing algorithm…”
God finished keying in the commands. The iGod screen buzzed
as Murphy went through the code and added his bits of the algorithm.
“Well let’s do it”, God said, “but I hope this time your
contraption works…or else I might have to reprogram you…”
Murphy let out a half-hearted laugh and made the giant
screen on the front wall of God’s chamber come to life. A few advertisements
later, the image of the ball flashed on the screen.
“I call it the Big
Bang!” declared Murphy pompously as he started counting down, “…3, 2, 1”
“Boom!” went the ball into a zillion zillion pieces and the
screen started plotting the paths taken by each piece. Within a few Godminutes galaxies,
stars and planets could be seen as the debris started expanding at an ever
increasing rate. Pieces combined and recombined and were giving rise to new
patterns.
“This is fun.” God thought as now he could see self
sustaining and evolving organisms originate in a blue planet orbiting a medium
sized star.
“Not so fun.” he realized a few Godminutes later when we saw
those organisms evolve into two-legged life forms who were intelligent enough
to start developing their surroundings to suit themselves, but at the same time
stupid enough to kill one another and start destroying the planetary resources.
“Murphy,” he said, “We have to fix this.” pointing at the
screen as one bearded man was getting crucified for being nice to others and
suggesting others do the same.
“Can’t, Boss.”
Murphy said, “We have no control over
this. The algorithm is self-adjusting and self-controlling.”
God was feeling exasperated, “You mean we have to just watch
this roll-out in front of our eyes?” as a big bright mushroom cloud dazzled the
screen on a location which was marked as Hiroshima.
“Not really. You can
take a break” Murphy spoke in a matter-of-fact voice “Go on a vacation.”
God stared in disbelief as Murphy carried on “Trust me. This algorithm is fool proof and
now I think I can tell you what it is... ”
God was listening silently as Murphy paused for maximum
effect and then said, “The algo behind
this experiment, dear God, is – ‘If things can go wrong, they will’. Every time
there is a bird dropping on a newly washed suit, every time a piece of bread
falls with the buttered side down, every time you miss a bus or every time an
elevator gives you the miss, it is my algorithm at work. I have put Creation on
Autopilot now. The universe, the planets and their inhabitants might seek
meaning, deeper significance and spirituality to explain the random things that
happen to them, but they’ll never know it’s our experiment that’s causing
things to happen.”
“Look, it’s a foolish experiment…” God tried to drive some
sense into Murphy.
“Yeah, Nice name…”
Murphy replied “’LIFE’ we will call it. An
acronym for Look It’s a Foolish Experiment. And
it will be governed by chance and my algorithm which will henceforth be known
as Murphy’s Law: ‘If things can go wrong, they will!’ ”
Meanwhile, at one point on the screen, a few men drove an
airplane into some tower while at a different point a bearded man was laughing
his guts out at the news. God decided he had had enough. He tapped the iPack
icon on his iGod as his collection of robes started neatly sliding into his
Skybag as he looked one final time at the screen for some flicker of hope.
Somewhere marked as Bombay a bearded, capped man tilted a microphone over his
face and started howling one of the worst songs God had heard since a long
time. Murphy proudly asked, “Isn’t he nice?
I made him practice with my Reverse-Karaoke, the project that you had so
disdainfully trashed.”
Taking deep breaths God asked, “Murphy, is this a coup of
sorts? Now that I am totally powerless and everything down there is ruled by,
what do you call it, Murphy’s Law?”
“No Boss,”
Murphy’s voice was sincere, “I think it’s
because I had jacked up our systems to my processor running the same algorithm
a few Godminutes before you started cribbing about getting bored of being so
powerful and tapped on iCreate. I had thought I would silently run the
experiment and note down the results. But now as you see, one thing led to the
other and now both down there and up here it is chance and the algorithm that
are running things.”
God tapped his iGod for the last time on an icon called iFly
and docked the device on the wall. He picked up his Skybag as his personal
transportation device phased in into existence. He eased into the cushion seats
of his transporter and looked at the iGod screen one last time.
“Now with me gone, and your Law taking care of Creation,
what will you do, Murphy?”
“Oh I don’t know,
Boss. May be I will sing.”
“So long,” God hastily pressed a button in his device before
Murphy could switch on the karaoke program and his device whizzed out of
existence only to appear a few million Godlightyears away when he eased back
into his seat and took a long, deep sigh.
“Oh my Rajnikant,” he mumbled.
Back in God’s castle, as Murphy busied himself with
practicing the newest cacophonous tune, unseen to him, on a point marked
Chennai on the giant screen a dark, moustached person looked up in the sky,
swung his index finger in the air accompanied by a whipping sound and said,
“Don’t worry, Bro! I am still there to fix things. Mind It!”
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