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A Thousand Names for God and Infinite Mustard

by Matt Wallace

Kimo found God hiding out inside a dark nebula in the MACS0416_Y1 galaxy. He trapped God in an empty mason jar and duct taped the lid shut.

God was not happy about any of it. “I wasn’t ‘hiding out.’”

“What?” Kimo asked.

“In the nebula,” God said. “I wasn’t hiding.”

“I didn’t say you were hiding.”

“The asshole writing this story did, and I don’t appreciate the miscategorization.”

“What in the hell are you babbling about now?”

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter,” God grumbled, then added as a bitter-sounding afterthought, “Omniscience sucks.”

God didn’t really “sound” like anything. God didn’t have a voice, just thoughts communicated differently into Kimo’s mind, but the human mind is always abstracting and interpreting (a polite way to say it’s scrambling desperately to make sense of the overwhelming reality it perceives), so God must sound like something.

To Kimo, God sounded like a former addict at an AA meeting.

“Did you even clean this jar?” God asked his captor.

It was a jar of Forever Mustard, the official condiment of the discerning deep-space astronaut. The brand name was a blatant misnomer, of course, as all mustard is basically infinite. The company that makes Forever Mustard didn’t come up with a special extra-long-lasting formula for space travel or anything. They just came up with the name and started selling it to spacefarers who didn’t want their freeze-dried food to taste like rehydrated anus.

“Can you even taste?” Kimo asked the Almighty.

“I invented tastebuds.”

“But do you have any?”

“No.”

“Then what difference does it make whether or not I cleaned the jar?” Kimo fired back, annoyed.

“It’s the principle of thing,” God insisted.

Kimo let loose a salvo of fake, mocking laughter. “Oh, do you really want to get into a discussion of decorum here?”

“I’m not taking that bait,” God rebuked.

Kimo stared out through the transparent plates in front of his control console at the nothing enveloping the vessel carrying them at frankly impossible speed through galaxy after galaxy. There was no light show to watch. There was no sound. There wasn’t a single star. There wasn’t even blackness. It was void. It looked kind of white, but that may have just been his mind trying to rationalize what his eyes were witnessing.

It was kind of a perfect metaphor for his current and reluctant traveling companion, and a good place for a narrative break.

Kimo’s own story is incredibly boring. The fucked-up part is it shouldn’t be. It should be a wildly compelling saga. It should be a shocking tragedy that rends the heart. It should be a uniquely horrific tale, one that imparts the lesson never to let such events be repeated.

There was a war. He lost things in it. It changed him, and not for the better.

See? Fucking boring. You’ve heard it a million times before. Maybe you’ve even experienced it yourself. It’s happening right now to people all over the world.

It might be just how tired his story was that motivated Kimo to do what he did. The undeniable blandness of experiencing horrific loss and suffering as a human being, the abject banality of it as both theme and consequence. It became almost impossible for him to blame people for what had happened to him and his family. They weren’t really individuals in this context. They were like archetypes, or models of a machine that was poorly designed and constructed and never recalled.
He wanted to take it up with the machine maker. That made sense to him.

He decided to track down “God” or the closest facsimile of our ideas about God. He decided he’d go and find the root of the problem and deal with the cause, instead of focusing on symptoms. Because that’s all he saw around him on Earth, everywhere he looked. It was all just symptoms.

“How’d you know the jar would work?” God asked him.

Kimo ignored him for a while. Maybe he was doing it on purpose. He’d spent a long time and a lot of effort to facilitate this conversation, after all.

“Stop being an asshole,” God insisted. “Dramatic pauses are a mortal construct. They don’t work on me.”

“Why don’t you make me open the jar?” Kimo asked God right back.

“I can’t make you do anything.”

“Why?” Kimo pressed.

“Is this rhetorical? It feels like you’re being rhetorical.”

“No,” Kimo insisted. “I actually want you to answer me. Why can’t you make me open the jar?”

“Free will,” God reluctantly answered.

“That’s how I knew the jar would work.”

“So you were being rhetorical!”

“You got your answer, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, fine, you’re the cleverest of my little meat sacks. Congrata-fucking-lations.”

Kimo ignored the taunt. “If you want out of the jar, why don’t you just explode it with God magic?”

“So, you’ve graduated from rhetorical to just plain mocking me.”

“It’s a legitimate question,” Kimo insisted.

“I don’t have anything resembling what you would call ‘God magic.’ I am just a being with an annoyingly narrow skill set. I don’t send lightning bolts. Never have, never did. You people with your imaginations, which I also invented, by the way, and now deeply regret.”

“So, you can create the universe, but you can’t unmake a glass mustard jar?”

“I could re-make it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I could go back, remake the entire universe, total redo of your planet and all life that sprang from it, etcetera, etcetera. Only I’d tweak the substances that would eventually become this jar. Or maybe make mustard seed not happen. I don’t know. Something. That way when we arrived at this point in the lifespan of your universe’s existence, there’d be no fucking jar for you to trap me inside. I could totally do that. But that’s the only way to get around the whole free will thing, and that’s just how the universe and my involvement with it works.”

“Okay, so then remake the entire universe minus mustard jars. I dare you.”

“Don’t wanna.”

“Why not?” Kimo demanded, his voice rising suddenly.

“Because it’s a lot of work, okay? And even thinking about it is exhausting.”

“Bullshit answer.”

“Maybe,” God admitted.

“Did you invent lying, too?” Kimo asked, genuinely curious this time.

“Lies are ethereal.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means falsehood is inherent in creation. I didn’t need to invent it.”

There are literary principles which also make this a smooth segue into a narrative break, but those principles aren’t important or necessary to explain right now. Being the author isn’t about following a structured index of rules.

It’s about playing god.

Kimo’s very boring backstory picks up a bit in its second act, interest-wise, because he had to get to a galaxy thirteen-point-two billion light-years from Earth, a thing that should be utterly and fantastically impossible to achieve by any human being or terrestrial society under the laws and principles of science and technology as we understand them.

But he did it. He became the first and only person to ever traverse such a bogglingly unthinkable distance. You’d think he’d be proud of such an achievement, but when your goal is to put the screws to the creator of the entire cosmos, how you get to the creator’s doorstep is just a clerical matter. Some people might call this a symptom of obsession. Kimo never really thought about it, probably because he was too obsessed.

He was never a scientist. He was never an astrophysicist. It doesn’t matter what he’d actually been, other than it makes where he ended up even more impressive.

After he was done fighting that war, the one where he lost everything but it’s far too route to get into, he was given the job of guarding things, secret things. Some of those things were technological. Some of them weren’t supposed to exist, or even be on the planet Earth to begin with.

Kimo knew what he wanted to do, and he started getting it in his head that what he was guarding might be the means to do it. So, he started asking questions, casual ones, in the break room over a cup of coffee with people who knew a lot more than he did.

That’s how it started, over a cup of wildly mediocre instant coffee.

That first question led to others, and those questions led to what became an abnormally long lifetime of knowledge and experience it is highly doubtful any other human being will ever accumulate.

Oh, and eventually he stole the keys to a spaceship. That bit was pretty exciting, admittedly, it’s just not terribly relevant anymore.

The only truly important or ultimately relevant part of this is the Kimo who finally came to trap God in a mustard jar isn’t the Kimo who first decided to do it. Centuries have passed on Earth since then. Maybe even eons, it’s impossible to know, including and especially for Kimo. That’s what stepping into the nothingness does. He can’t remember if he knew that when he did it initially, but he’s certainly come to accept it. He’s lived what would be lifetimes untold to the Earthbound Kimo, and the one tangible benefit of it is he knows just a ridiculously huge amount of stuff now.
It gives him nosebleeds most days.

Brains are kind of like carafes that way.

The machine he built to drain and refill his brain is also pretty interesting, but again, it’s not entirely relevant.

Eventually, inevitably, God asked, “So, how did you find me?”

Kimo was ready for the question, and almost automatically fired off the answer he’d preprepared in his head before he even began his titanic journey.

“You leave a trail like a deadbeat dad living on a single high-interest bank credit card.”

“I’m not dignifying the judgment implied in that overly articulated simile.”

“You fucked up Earth,” Kimo continued, “or maybe we fucked it up and let you down. Probably the second thing. And, you know what? Fair. It doesn’t really matter at this point. Anyway, it was clear you’d abandoned us.”

“Again, I feel like that’s a miscategorization. I was never an interventionist creator. I never intended to be. There have been actual songs written about it.”

“Fine, you lost interest in us. Either way, you were splitsville. Fucking gone. But I figured you still must need to find something to do with eternity. I figured you’d try again. And you did, didn’t you?”

God was silent. But that’s okay. Kimo, like all human beings, was used to God’s silence.

“Oh, aren’t we the clever pen monkey?” God fired bitterly.

“What did you call me?” Kimo asked, confused.

“Not you. Never mind, never mind,” God groused impatiently. “Just finish your fucking explanation of how you’re so damn smart.”

“You tried again,” Kimo reiterated, more firmly this time. “And again, and again. I think I came across all of them, your failed replication experiments. Every world lasted a bit less than the one before, until there was just a single puddle of goo amidst the rocks that’s never going to spark. Like you started fingerpainting and only left a single thumb print.”

“You should’ve been a poet, Kimo.”

God was being sarcastic.

“Eventually the trail stopped, and when the trail stopped, I knew I’d find you. After so many tries, and so many failures, that final one, the one that breaks you, there’s no moving on after that. You just kind of sit down wherever you are and decide, ‘Well, here I am, and here I’ll stay.’ And if you’re really, really lucky a truck runs you over and you don’t have to worry about the impulse to get up again finding you.”

“You sound like a hairless ape speaking from experience.”

“Of course I am.”

“Your truck never came, clearly.”

“Neither did yours, clearly.”

“Aren’t you my truck, Kimo?”

God’s captor didn’t answer right away. It was one question for which Kimo had not prepared.

“No,” he finally said, more thoughtfully than he’d said anything thus far in his conversation with God. “No, I’m not. That’s not what this is.”

That, of course, prompted God to ask, “Okay, then what is this?

One more thing about Kimo before God has his question answered.

He’s an optimist.

It’s the absolute worst thing a human being can be, yet it’s solely responsible for humanity making it as far as humanity has, which is a mind-blowingly epic distance when one really stops to think about it.

Being an optimist in a human world is painful, unendingly so. It’s often far less painful to be a cynical pessimistic jackass, or at least it’s far more comforting that way. Optimism demands taking in all the hurt and disappointment other people hurl at you and striding forward, instead of stepping back.

Honestly, it just plain sucks most of the time.

Kimo knows that God didn’t create optimism. He knows from God’s answer about lies. Kimo can absolutely believe that optimism is an ethereal quality. It’s something that lives in the fabric of creation. There’s no sifting it from the process. Especially not when free will enters that process. God did choose that one. And in doing so he didn’t assure much, but he did assure there would be a not insignificant amount of people who chose optimism, or rather could not deny the optimism that lived at the core of what they are.

Kimo is one of those people. He wishes he wasn’t, often. He’s seen horror. He’s seen other people choose the worst in themselves, or rather, to be fair to the previous supposition, he’s witnessed them unable or unwilling to deny the worst that lives at humanity’s core. He’s watched and felt them inflict that on his body and on everything and everyone he loved.

So, being that optimist, when Kimo decided to seek his creator and hold that creator accountable, it wasn’t a plan of action born from malice or vengeance or anger, and neither was his desired result.

Maybe that’s the most interesting part of Kimo’s story. Maybe it’s the most interesting part of anyone’s story. It could also be utter drivel.

However, that’s what has brought Kimo and the God he’s placed in a mustard jar to this point in this story.

That fact is undeniable.

Kimo answered God’s question by pressing a key and causing the eerie nothingness surrounding their shared vessel to become star-speckled space. There was no feeling of motion or of motion ceasing. The scene just changed, like a quick cut in a movie.

There was a planet visible through the transparent plates, a brownish orb looming large and stationary.

It was, undeniably and objectively, ugly as fuck.

“You’re going to try again,” Kimo told God.

“I’m going to what now?”

“Okay, once again, you’re omnipotent. You can’t possibly be surprised I said that.”

“I mean, I guess I just assumed you were on some predictably gothic human revenge-type trip here. I didn’t think I needed to know otherwise.”

“I guess we’ve proven all-seeing and all-knowing are not mutually exclusive.”

“You don’t wear smugness well, Kimo. Leave it to the professionals.”

“You don’t get to give up,” Kimo stated flatly.

“I don’t, huh?”

“Nope.”

“Why not? You gave up.”

“I didn’t give up,” Kimo corrected God. “I did this. Doing this was the exact opposite of giving up. Staying on Earth, living out my grief until I didn’t have to live with it anymore, that would have been giving up.”

“You must be very proud,” God taunted him.

“I am. I am proud.”

“I’m sorry, but real quick here: Why don’t I get to give up?”

“For one, you started this whole thing. No one made you do it. You chose it. Free will, etcetera, etcetera. Like you said, you have an annoyingly specific skill set. You chose to use it. You don’t get to bail out of that choice just because you were disappointed in the result.”

“But if I have free will like you and I chose to do a thing, why can’t I then choose not to do a thing?”

“Because I’m the guy who put you in that jar and I’m fucking telling you that you can’t if you ever want out of it.”

“Okay. I can’t deny there’s some merit to that position.”

“But mostly,” Kimo continued, as if God hadn’t interrupted him in the first place, “you’re not going to quit because you have what none of us ever will. You have eternity. You have all the time. Which means you have all the time to figure this out. Wherever free will and determinism and all that horse flop meets a mass of conscious beings who don’t choose to be horrible to each other, you’re going to eventually find that intersection point. You have the time to do it, however long it takes. You’re also the only one who can do it, apparently. So to not do it would just make you a giant dick.”

“Well now, I wouldn’t want anyone thinking ill of me, would I?”

“You can crack jokes all you want. Whether you’ve been judged unfairly by people is beside the point. What I’m telling you is true. And I’m not going to let you be a dick.”

“Maybe you should’ve been God.”

It didn’t sound like sarcasm this time.

“I doubt I would’ve arrived at any of this if I was anything other than just some fucking guy,” Kimo asserted.

“I can probably learn a lot from that,” God had to admit.

“All right,” God said, sounding resigned to Kimo, “so I’m giving it another go. Are we going down to that rock slab, then?”

“I’m not, no. I’m going to put your jar in a homeostatic capsule and shoot you down there. It’ll self-destruct when it makes landfall and vaporize the jar with it. I’m choosing to do that. So, you should be free again.”

“Why aren’t you coming with me?”

“You know why.”

“Yeah, I do. I guess I just want to hear you say that you know why. I guess I need to hear you know what you’re actually choosing.”

“I can’t leave this ship. Ever. If I tried to take one step off, I’d probably crumble to dust? Or maybe I’d just cease to exist? I honestly don’t know. But I know I’ve effectively taken myself out of linear and space and time and if I try to re-enter I won’t survive that transition. That’s the cost of a thirteen-billion-light-year roundtrip.”

God didn’t know what to say to that.

“For once, the pen monkey is right,” God admitted.

“I really wish you’d tell me what the hell you’re talking about,” Kimo said.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s one of those omnipotent things your meat brain isn’t meant to hold or process.”

“So, we’re good, then?” Kimo asked.

“What’re you going to do?” God pressed. “After you send me down there? Are you going to keep going?”

“I’m not going to wait for the truck, if that’s what you’re asking me.”

“Then what will you do?”

It sounded like God really needed to know.

“I don’t know,” Kimo admitted. “I guess I’ll see what I can find another thirteen-billion-lightyears past where we met. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even kick over a more competent supreme being.”

“If you find one, send them my way. I could use the help.”

“You never met another one? Like you?”

Kimo asked that question differently than he’d asked any of the others. He sounded almost like a child who hadn’t yet met the darkest angels of human nature.

“No,” God told him simply. “I haven’t. And I’ll be totally honest with you. I don’t really even know what I am. Maybe that’s why I needed you. All of you. To help me figure that out.”

Kimo didn’t seem all that surprised, considering the magnitude of such a statement.

“Well then,” he said, “one more reason to keep trying until you figure it all out.”

God’s next words almost sounded choked up, which is wild considering they were a noncorporeal being with no throat or tear ducts.

“You know… I let myself forget there were people like you down there. That’s my bad.”

“You’re apologizing to me?” Kimo asked, surprised.

“I’m thanking you,” God clarified.

Kimo nodded, still looking at the dead orb that would be God’s next canvas.

God would probably fuck it up, of course.

God is ignoring that the author wrote that.

Perhaps God has realized that being omniscient and being in control of this story are two very different things.

That fact and God’s silent acknowledgment of it would satisfy the author immensely.

Besides, whether God fucks it all up again isn’t really the point.

“Either way,” Kimo said, “I accept.”

“I enjoyed our talk, Kimo,” God told him.

“Yeah. It was a good chat. I don’t imagine we’ll do it again?”

“I mean, if you’re really insistent that I keep trying… we’ll do everything again.”

Kimo actually laughed. It was the first time he’d laughed in almost thirty thousand light years.

“Then I hope we have some good shit to talk about,” he said.

“Me too,” God agreed.

That’s the end of this story.

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Host Commentary

Once again, that was “A Thousand Names for God and Infinite Mustard” by Matt Wallace.

Like the god of Matt’s story, the authors published in Escape Pod have now created a thousand different worlds for listeners and readers to explore. Like the human of Matt’s story, most of these worlds are, at their core, optimistic. Even the grimmest ones contain people who refuse to yield to that grimness, who reject unrelenting cynicism and try to continue moving forward despite the disappointment and despair surrounding them. A story like this functions as an allegory for the act of creating art, with all its little miseries and mishaps, all the worlds that didn’t work as intended, the fingerpaint smudges and the muddy messes. Artists often want to hide at the edge of the universe instead of trying again and failing. But humans are all ultimately creators; whether we tell a story or paint a picture, bake a cake or build a house, we all contain the potential to make something from the raw materials of the universe. We all suffer setbacks, shame, guilt, and fear of making mistakes we can’t fix. And we are also all the weary souls who seek answers to life’s questions, who gravitate to acts of creation by others to spark something within ourselves that will help us persevere and survive when hope feels millions of light-years away. Each of us is a god and a human, a single world and a whole universe, demanding accountability while also encouraging ourselves and those around us not to give up. So create. Keep trying. Another thousand stories are out there waiting for us to find them.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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