The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) by Chris Dietzel Page B

until she spoke or until they noticed she was the only one without a nutrient bag.
    Her mind is almost never as exhausted as her body, which is unfortunate. If it were, she could go to sleep at night, too tired to worry about the next day and the days after that. Instead, with a body that refuses to move, but a mind that races, she is trapped on her bed, forced to think of how things will play out. She envisions herself killing another Block every day until she is left with one or two people. She imagines herself as the final murderer the world would ever know.
    A swirl of life’s questions keep her trying to figure things out before it’s too late. Is there a God? If there is, what is he thinking as he looks down upon her? Are her actions understandable, given her situation? Or is there no excuse for the things she has done? Is there life after death? If there is, what form does it take? Not just for her, but for her Blocks as well. If there is a heaven, there must also be a hell. Is that where she will spend eternity for what she has done? If it was up to her Sunday school teacher, most certainly. If there isn’t heaven, what is there? Is there anything at all, or just nothingness?
    She has been told all of her life that murderers go to hell, that only God has the right to take a life. Kill someone: hell. Help someone die: hell. Suicide: hell. Only God can inflict suffering and death as he sees fit. But what she witnesses with her own eyes tells her something different.
    She sees life that cannot sustain itself. She sees how an entire group home would be living in misery and filth, each body covered in flies and maggots, if she tried to care for the entire population. It’s only when she has slightly more manageable numbers that everyone can live without infections and sores, can have clean clothes. The death of a few pays for the well-being of the many. Somehow, she doubts her Sunday school teacher would have approved of this scenario.
    Maybe it’s a test. Maybe God really is the only one with the right to take away the life he has created, and this is the apple she has been told not to eat. Well, if that’s the case, she is eating every bite and asking for more.
    Will she go through all of this just to spend eternity in hell? What would be the point of suffering in this life if she’s just going to suffer in the next as well? What was the point of creating Blocks? What was God’s reason for turning mankind into a motionless mirror of what it had been? Surely, if God is omniscient, he had to know there would be a point when the last regular people would be overburdened with the task of caring for the silent masses. Is this what he wanted, is it his will?
    It’s easier to believe there is no God at all. No one is looking down upon her. There is no heaven and there is no hell. She will not spend eternity in fire because she did what she thought was best for her people. Her Sunday school teacher, if he were around, would smack her wrist with a wooden ruler for these ideas. Thankfully, he is not around.
    Murderers do not go to hell, and saints do not go to heaven. She will end up in the same place as everyone else—people who have killed others, people who have killed themselves, and people who never killed anyone or anything. Suffering happens because the world is filled with death and pain and agony, not because of a plan from higher up.
    As a six-year old girl, she watched a nature show on TV in which the narrator said half of all wild animals in Africa die in their first year of life. Some starve to death. Others are eaten. Some have disease. Some are killed for no better reason than there were people who could kill them. Half of all life. She watched a little cheetah cub die of starvation. She saw a lion cub die by itself in the brush, calling out for its mom. One clip showed a baby rhino being carried away in the jaws of a tiger. Oh my God , she had thought. That one show, even for a six-year old, was enough for