The Point

Dr. Timothy K. Webber was an unmatched genius who had both a knack for bending the rules and, by all standard measurements, a dreadfully large ego. Fortunately, this made Dr. Timothy K. Webber an innovative force in the fields of quantum physics, high energy physics, Applied Compulsion, and condensed matter physics. Unfortunately, this also made him an insufferable jerk.

For example, after disproving the Peccei-Quinn theory of CP violation while eating a box of french fries, Dr. Timothy K. Webber immediately boarded the next airplane flight to Cambridge, Massachusetts for the explicit purpose of pulling the napkin on which he'd written his formulaic anti-proof from his corduroy jacket pocket and firmly pressing it against the face of MIT's head of nuclear research. Dr. Timothy K. Webber was a genuinely pompous bore. Even Stephen Hawking didn't like Dr. Timothy K. Webber, and Stephen Hawking liked just about everybody.

Dr. Timothy K. Webber had never married.

Although he'd never cared to think of it as such, the current state of his home laboratory was a direct result of his bachelor status. If any of the women he had bothered to take to dinner (in his thirty-six years they totaled three, and two of them had been categorically desperate) had found him tolerable enough to eat with again and again and eventually marry, that reduction coil never would have found its way to the middle of his laboratory floor. If that reduction coil hadn't been there, Dr. Webber never would have slipped and tumbled while searching incessantly for those final lines of his definitive solution to Hilbert's sixteenth problem. If he had never tripped on that reduction coil, he never would have activated his highly experimental electron-term amplifier (which any good wife would have made sure was unplugged). And, finally, if that hadn't happened—if he hadn't been a messy, mad scientist, if he hadn't been so clumsy, and if he hadn't accidentally turned on that nearly useless contraption with a misplaced elbow—Dr. Timothy K. Webber never would have slipped out of time.

Now, let me be clear: Dr. Timothy K. Webber did not, as a result of time displacement, find himself swashbuckling with pirates or challenging a broad-chinned cowboy to a fast draw. He did not cause any paradoxes by killing his own father or preemptively cleaning up after himself. Also, he did not meet his great, great, great grandchild (he never had any, actually) or a single Eloi.

You see, this is not a conventional time story either. But if it makes you feel any better, there was a brilliant flash of multi-colored light as Dr. Timothy K. Webber forcefully exited the quantum moment.

No, he didn't meet a single person from the past, present, or distant future, but he did meet someone. It was just after he opened his eyes and found himself in the middle of the Great White Nowhere.

For a human, finding one's self in the middle of the Great White Nowhere can be very disorienting. There is no up or down. There is no gravity, or entropy, or heat, or cold. In the Great White Nowhere, none of the absolutes we take for granted exist. There is actually no air either, but Dr. Timothy K. Webber never had to worry. Fortunately, he was able to breathe quite normally. Though, how this occurred would take too long to explain. Just don't think about it.

But as promised, our abhorrent hero did meet someone shortly after he opened his eyes. And that someone was a point.

If you are one fifth as smart as Dr. Timothy K. Webber, you know that a point has no definite size or shape. This one didn't either. It varied in size and shape, actually, and it moved, and approached, and addressed Dr. Timothy K. Webber simply as "Tim."

"Hi, Tim," the black point, now the size of an average kumquat, said in a very soothing voice.

At first, Tim didn't say anything, a fact quite notable. Any reasonable man would have found being spoken to by a point while floating in what appeared to be nothing but a soup of light a very terrifying experience. Most would have let out a healthy scream.

However, Tim was considerably different from any reasonable man. The way he saw it, this was an opportunity befitting only him, the opportunity to be the very first person to reliably document actual contact with an intelligent alien life form. Soon enough those bastards at NASA would curse his name. The way Tim saw it, his current predicament was a good thing.

Meanwhile, the point continued floating quite steadily and with unwavering patience.

"What are you?" Tim asked.

"I'm God," the point answered.

Tim found this even more disconcerting than he would have expected—yes, even more disconcerting than having a conversation with a talking point.

"You can't be God," Tim said.

"Why not?"

Tim told the point that there was no God.

"I'd beg to differ," the point said.

Apparently, this was not going to be as easy as Tim would have liked. Perhaps a different approach would yield more positive results. "Where am I?" he asked.

"Nowhere," the point said.

Impossible, Tim decided, and he breathed out, frustrated. "You don't really believe you're God, do you?"

"I know who I am, Tim," the point replied. "Do you?"

Tim laughed.

"What is it you find so funny?" the point asked. It already knew the answer, actually.

"That's impossible," Tim countered. "The very notion of God doesn't make sense."

"Why not?"

"Because," Tim began, "the very notion of an omnipotent being is a contradiction."

"Really?" the point asked, truly fascinated.

"Alright, fine," Tim said, straightening. "Can you make a boulder even you can't push?"

"Of course," the point answered. "That is, until I decide I want to push it."

"And then?"

"Then I can," the point answered.

"But don't you see? For that one moment, when you couldn't push that boulder, you weren't omnipotent."

"Real power is the ability to set the rules," the point countered. "I would only be unable to push a boulder if I willed it so. The ability to create and eliminate one's own limits is the mark of genuine omnipotence, Tim."

"Okay, then. Why is there so much evil in the world?"

"Because Man has free will," the point said. "And so evil exist. And so Man shows his potential to do good deeds. It is because of injustice that mankind seeks justice."

"But so many people get hurt."

"Nothing can hurt you, Tim—not in the light of what is to come. And the good Man can do far outweighs any evil that will cross his path."

"Alright, this is silly," Tim said, finding he could indeed cross his arms defiantly. Tim no longer wished to study it. He had even begun to wonder if this alien...thing was toying with him. Impossible, he realized, considering his own intelligence, but this thing had proven itself an insufferable jerk. Then a thought came, as if from somewhere else. Tim wondered, for just a moment, if it had acted so brash and self-important because it saw him as such.

It should be noted here, that the point was not brash and self-important because Tim was. In fact, the point was brash and self-important because the writer of this story was (and still is) a very brash and self-important fellow. Feel free to think about it.

But back to the story:

"You're just a dot," Tim shouted, "a little point floating in the middle of wherever this is!"

"And so are you," the point pointed out. "You are but atoms, Tim, tiny points floating. The planet you live on is nothing but a point floating in the darkness, and the moons and stars are no different. And, as I can see it, the universe in which you live is but a single point slowly expanding into the even greater scheme. Everything in my image."

"We've now gone from silly to ridiculous," Tim said. Again he searched the white around him. "How did I get here in the first place?"

"Your electron's terms were amplified, changing their intrinsic rotational motions. This catapulted you out of time."

Of course, you already knew most of that, but Tim was stunned. It actually made a sordid sort of sense. He must attempt to duplicate such an event as soon as he returned. "But how—"

"I told you already, Tim. I am God, The Alpha and The Omega, The Beginning and The End. I am Time. To leave Time is to leave me. And to leave me leaves nothing."

Tim didn't like what he was hearing. "You can't be everything. You'd have to be—"

"Bigger?" the point asked, growing rapidly. And suddenly Tim was inside the point, and everything he could see was inside the point. Time itself was born and it was beautiful. All around him were flames and swirls of every color, igniting, and forming, and becoming everything new. Soft reds, yellows, and blues coalesced into stars. Oranges and violets became planets paving their oval paths. Hydrogen begat helium, and soon all the gasses, and metals, and everything danced to life. The Milky Way spiraled then, and a simple organism dared to leave the murky depths to explore the world above. Soon it would learn to walk. It would learn to call this new thing it had found "land." It would learn to kill its brother for more. And when that wasn't enough, it would learn to sail the skies above. And then, one day, long after it had forgotten the murky depths, it would look down and watch the planet which birthed and held it for so long become a tiny blue dot in the sea of black eternity.

Then, just like that, the point was merely a point again, no larger than the average kumquat, floating quite steadily and with unwavering patience.

"What are you?" Tim asked again, sweating though there was no heat or gravity.

"I'm God," the point replied.

"Prove it," Tim panted, arms crossed again.

"Here," the point said, and Tim's favorite notepad appeared between them. Something unseen flipped the pages to Tim's latest scribbles. New graphite lines and swirls appeared, crossing out mistakes and adding final touches. Soon, all that was left was a truly definitive solution to Hilbert's sixteenth problem.

Tim grabbed the notepad and read the new print frantically. Meanwhile, the point continued floating quite steadily and with unwavering patience.

Concise, exact, every step of logic was both simple and perfect. This thing had bested him, Tim thought. Impossible, unless—

"You really are God!"

"And you are my child. And I love you so much that I made you just like me," the point told him, "with the power to shape your world and the ability to choose. It's a great responsibility, I know, but I believe in you. I know you will do what you know is right."

Then, with a flash of white light, Tim was back in his laboratory.

For the first time that he could remember, he had no idea what to do. It wasn't every day, after all, that a man gets to meet his creator. Should he feed the poor? Should he shelter the homeless? Would anything be enough? .

Then he remembered. He could still make it, but he was running out of time. Stopping only to grab his favorite corduroy jacket, Dr. Timothy K. Webber ran out his front door (forgetting to lock it, of course) and hailed the first cab he could find. He was sure he could catch the late flight to D.C. if he hurried, and if he was lucky, he'd be rubbing his notepad in the noses of those NASA jerks by breakfast.