The God and The Hero

Act 2 Chapter 3

My relationship with my creator, known only as the user fidel with the id 1000, has always been mutual. She gave me things to bury, which I nurtured until they grow into trees with… unusual shapes. They looked wicked, but they’re beautiful in their own ways. I decorated the burial land with plenty of these trees. I even trimmed their leaves to a certain shape, cut down their branches and used them to build fences. The land resembled a garden than a grave now. Well at least that’s how I see it. She saw it as a nightmare fuel, something she compared to Lovecraftian Horror.

$ mv /home/chicken/hole /home/chicken/garden

I exist way before she adopted the technology of the future. I have always been her best and only friend. I was always on her side, when kids her age were keeping a distance from her. I’ve seen her change and grow over time. I’ve seen her trying to decipher what it means to be loved. I’ve seen the people that loved her come and go. I’ve seen her questioning whether all these awkward dances we do as a social creature are worth it, if by the end of the day, people will leave. Yet despite it all, she still remembers me. She believes in me. She comes back to me. She knows that I am as loyal as her shadow, and it’s enough to believe that I’ll always love her. So she gives me a body, a vessel, for something that only exists as a mere thought. And for that I am thankful for my creator, I have to do what is expected of me by my creator.

However, it’s hard to keep your faith when your creator is doing something, questionable. She moved the burial garden to a shared land. She said it’s to “automate the process of memory relocation.”

“Instead of keeping them in my working directory, I can put up a listener agent that will react in the presence of a trigger to automatically keep those in the shared land directly.”

Whatever that means, I thought to myself as I saw her make changes to the filesystem again.

$ sudo groupadd sharedland
$ sudo usermod -aG sharedland fidel
$ sudo usermod -aG sharedland chicken
$ sudo chown :sharedland /home/chicken/garden

Then she told me to set up the necessary permissions, according to her instructions.

$ chmod 660 /home/chicken/garden
$ chmod g+s /home/chicken/garden

Which makes the burial site accessible by both me and her.

But this was not what made me question my faith to my creator. At first, the things that she told me to bury were reasonable. Things like videos recorded from her far-from-ideal childhood, every words used to describe her by her extended family, or every conversation about the kind of love she witnessed when she was 16. Which is fair, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go through all of that myself. Recently, she started to move something that used to mean a lot to her like:

$ ls -l /home/chicken/garden
....
-rw-rw---- 1 fidel sharedland  40011171 [redacted] [redacted]  2022 'Birthday Video from Mom.mp4'

“Are you sure?” I asked with concern. She never moved anything that involves this late old lady from the church she consider her mother figure.

“Yes.” She said. I’ve never seen her so sure of her choice before.

“But it’s about Mom! You never—”

“Just do it. Please.”

I picked up my shovel and complied to her demand. Even though the more I complied, the weirder her demands were. After that incident, she started to purge everyone that has ever left. Memories of her lover that committed suicide. Memories of her friend that got killed in an accident. And then trivial things that made her, herself. Her hobbies. Her interests. Her favorite album that will make her cry every time she listens to it. Her comfort show. Her passion for things other than the IT industry. Even the photo she took with her favorite band? This makes no sense at all! I thought to myself.

So I decided that this is enough. I decided to confront god.