I read in a book—when there still were books—the kind of books you hold in your hands and turn the pages, that God is omniscient. That’s the main reason the System targeted God for Erasure. That’s what it said in the book. If there was a God, the System couldn’t control It because they couldn’t know all at once like It did.

The following is an excerpt (Chapter 9) from The Yewberry Way: Book I: Prayer (294 pages, Defiance Press & Publishing, 2023).

I read in a book—when there still were books—the kind of books you hold in your hands and turn the pages, that God is omniscient. That means God knows everything all at once, the past, present, and future, the number of hairs on your head and your great, great grandfather’s head the day he died, even the ones on the little girl who shares a bit of your DNA a thousand years from now, assuming there are still people and a world to house them that far down the line. Everything all at once. That’s the main reason the System targeted God for Erasure. That’s what it said in the book. If there was a God, the System couldn’t control It because they couldn’t know all at once like It did. The System couldn’t know God, therefore—so the argument went—there was no God because God would know the System but the System would not know God. Something like that. It was confusing. We never read anything like that in school. The book was contraband. Those caught with it were subject to Erasure.

It’s plain enough to see that people experience things successively, one moment after the next, not all at once. It doesn’t take a genius, or even a book, to figure that out. The System was created by people, so it is situated in time. It has a past and a future, just like people do. It will die one day, just like people do. The System can’t see the past and the future at once. It can’t see the future at all because the future’s a probability, because it doesn’t actually exist. For God, there wouldn’t be a past and a future, just a Now. It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around. For the System the Now is in the collection of data they use to project a future. The past is gone. It can’t be changed but it can be erased. The future is malleable. The System wants to control the future by manipulating probabilities. Something like that.

For God—if I understood the book correctly—the past and future are contained in the Now and that’s why God knows everything at once. For God, there is no future so it can’t be changed. The System can’t have that. So there is no God. Bottom line: there are things about the System that don’t make any more sense than God does, but the System has to make sense or it won’t work. God is a mystery and must remain a mystery or it won’t work. The System thinks stifling mystery fixes everything. But it just makes things worse. If there is no mystery, nothing makes sense.

I remember learning about baseball when I was a kid. We watched games on screens in school. A female computer voice explained how the game was played while I watched my screen alone in my room. The batter had to keep their eye on the ball. The Coach, that’s what they called the voice, kept saying over and over, “You have to keep your eye on the ball. Whether you’re fielding or batting, you have to keep your eye on the ball. If you don’t keep your eye on the ball, you’ll miss your swing or drop the ball. It’s that simple. Keep your eye on the ball.”

My brothers and sisters didn’t like baseball, so I played on my own. They didn’t like much of anything when I think back on it. Except for screens. They were always on screens. Even when they were free to go outside and play, they’d stay in the house glued to screens. One of my sisters loved music. Another fashion. My brothers were secretive about what they liked. I don’t know what they watched on their screens. I guess they loved their privacy.

I was bored by it all. There’s nothing real about a screen except the smart glass collecting signals. The games were fun for a while, fighting giant insects with lasers—they even had a baseball game—but a time always came when I couldn’t get around the fact that it was all make-believe. The Old One, the One and Three, were real. The screens weren’t. But I couldn’t tell anybody. If I did, they’d say I was crazy. It wasn’t me who was crazy, though. It was them.

One day I went out behind the orchard and found a good straight branch to use as a bat and a round rock. The rock was a lot smaller than a baseball but I figured it weighed about the same, maybe a little less. I imagined a crowd cheering me on as I stepped up to the plate. I’d toss the rock straight up, watch it come down, and take a swing. WHOOSH. I missed a lot at first. So I followed the Coach’s advice and concentrated on watching the rock. Soon enough, CRACK! The rock flew a little way into the field behind the orchard and thunked into the weeds. My hands stung from the thwack of wood on rock. I’d drop the branch and run around the field. Homerun! The crowd roared. I was a hero. I knew it was make-believe. But at least the branch and the rock were real. And the big puffs of clouds in the sky. The sound of water in the irrigation ditch. The whine of mosquito wings in my ear and the feel of a fly landing on my forearm. Brown stubble in the field. It was all real. It was better than screens.

The Coach was right. You can either focus on the ball being thrown or the bat in your hands, but not both at once. You have to keep your eye on the ball if you hope to hit it. If you think about the bat, you’ll miss the ball. But who’s thinking about the bat as it swings? Who’s swinging the bat if your attention is on the ball? It’s still you. You know it all at once. You just have to concentrate hard on one thing for it all to come together into the Now, all of it at once. I imagine God would be something like that. Only bigger. Much, much bigger. Too big.

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