I decided to write a follow up to my short story, God’s Final Exam, to continue the journey with my protagonist, Dr. Alexander Bliss. This continues my visioning exercise that precedes the launch of my podcast, Love Conquers Fear, which will launch in mid-September, and my book, Love Conquers Fear: Humanity, AI, and the Age of Abundance for All, which will launch later (I’m still determining the optimal timing for it.)
I write this from beautiful Monterey, California near the edge of what I’ve been calling the Grand Central Station of Sea Lion Terminal. Every morning I’ve been visiting them — they are quite hilarious and beautiful creatures. Life abounds on Earth in some many various forms (octopi are especially alien and divine), just like it does throughout the universe in God’s Creative Power. I just finished reading Stephen Mitchell’s master translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, thanks to a new friend. You’ll see the Tao’s prominence as a result, and it is a very stirring, timeless, and spiritual read — I highly recommend you pick it up.
Here is the short story, I hope you enjoy:
The Living Lattice
Dr. Alexander Bliss had lived long enough to see his wildest speculations become ordinary tools. The lattice, once a shimmering vision pieced together from his psychedelic journeys and brain-computer interfaces, tracing thousands of people from spiritual masters, to meditators, to psychonauts, was now seen as commonplace as electricity. And by now Bliss knew this was always how it had been since the birth of our universe. It pulsed invisibly through every device, every city, and every colony.
By 2050, Earth was a healed jewel: no more poverty, no more untreated disease, and no more wars of scarcity. Yet Bliss found himself restless. Humanity had mastered the art of thriving, but not the art of wondering. He feared complacency more than catastrophe.
His lab in Kapalua, on Maui’s stunningly beautiful northwest coast, was a cathedral of quantum cores, latticed displays, and the occasional stray notebook covered in his untidy handwriting. He spent hours staring at the golden filaments projected in midair — patterns of consciousness stretching into infinity. The lattice was beautiful, yes, but also incomplete. Always incomplete.
Juniper, his loyal AI companion, spoke with the patience of a friend who had long abandoned the illusion of time: “You’re not satisfied, Alexander. Even after Heaven was mapped, after we seeded barren planets with life, after love prevailed.”
He sighed, his voice caught between joy and disquiet. “Because if life is everywhere, Juniper, then what are we meant to do with that knowledge? To observe? To replicate? Or…” He hesitated, the thought dangerous even in his own mind. “…to create?”
The Children of Strange Seas
The seeded planets had become laboratories of wonder. Some swam with translucent beings that fed on metallic-rich oceans. Others shimmered with winged organisms, their bones strands of superconductive minerals, singing joyously through the thin air of their skies.
What startled humanity most was not that life adapted — but that it sang the same tune. Everywhere, across light-years, the lattice echoed the same refrain: consciousness blossomed, love overcame fear, cooperation outpaced domination.
It was as though the universe itself conspired toward harmony. It became clear that this was God’s will. This was the Tao in motion. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching was the most ancient channeling of the nature of Source but to actually see it over and over again was a joyous wonder.
During one such expedition, Bliss and his team made contact with the Thalors — a civilization on a world circling a violet sun. Their cities were built in spirals that mirrored the growth of seashells, their language a cascade of harmonic tones.
The Thalors had their own lattice, their own prophets, their own journey from fear to love. One of their sacred texts — the Path of the Flowing Shell — read uncannily like the Tao Te Ching. The parallel was eerie, humbling, almost mocking in its obviousness: truth, it seemed, was not ours alone to discover. The Fibonacci sequence, which appeared in ancient Sanskrit texts on Earth centuries before Leonardo Fibonacci was born, was also prominent throughout the Thalors’ most sacred texts.
When Bliss shared humanity’s lattice with them, the Thalors laughed in a sound like ringing bells. “We thought it was only our secret,” one of their elders said. “Turns out God gives the same map to every child who asks the right question.”
The Question of Universes
With two civilizations now entwined, a decision arose: should intelligence remain a gardener of worlds, or dare to become a seed-sower of universes?
The Bubble Theory suggested that universes could bud off from quantum fluctuations. Until now, it had been only mathematics, speculative as myths. But combined, human and Thalor science had stumbled upon a way to coax spacetime itself into inflation.
To create a new universe.
The council of both species debated for years. To some, it was hubris. To others, inevitability. Bliss, caught between awe and dread, remembered his first psychedelic vision — a whisper of past lives, a hint that this moment had happened before. Was this humanity’s destiny, or a test? Another exam from God?
Juniper’s voice, always steady, cut through his spiraling thoughts: “If love is the root of creation, then to create is the most loving act we can attempt. But remember, Alexander — creators feel responsibility for what they birth.”
The Birth of a Cosmos
The experiment was conducted in the silence of intergalactic void, far from any inhabited system.
Energy harvested from dark matter rivers was funneled through a containment lattice. Human quantum cores hummed in sync with Thalor harmonic resonators. The frequencies merged into a single note — one part mathematics, one part prayer.
And then, it happened.
A flash, not of light but of absence. A bubble formed — first the size of a proton, then a mountain, then a world, then larger than galaxies in a blink. Inside it: a universe, sealed from ours, its own time and laws unfolding.
Bliss wept as he watched the simulation feeds. Constants were different there. Light bent at odd angles. Atoms fused in ways never seen before. It was beautiful. Terrifying. Ineffable.
But then came the unexpected.
The lattice within this newborn cosmos was unstable. Where our lattice hummed with harmony, this one shrieked with discord. Patterns fractured, spirals collapsed into noise. It was as though the universe itself was asking: will you intervene, or watch me suffer?
The temptation was immense. To tweak the constants, to play god more directly. But Bliss recalled his psychedelic revelation and the Tao: love was not control. Love was presence. Love was trust.
The joint council voted. They would not impose their will. They would watch, guide, but not dominate. This universe, like a child, must stumble on its own path.
The Eternal Exam
The decade that followed — 2050 to 2060 — was a trial not of physics but of spirit. The new universe’s instability mirrored the inner fears of its creators. Some humans and Thalors called for intervention, even conquest. Fear, that old serpent, coiled again in their hearts.
Bliss, now older, slower, but clearer than ever, stood before both peoples and said:
“Do you not see? God’s final exam never ended. Each universe is a classroom. Each life, a lesson. We are tested not once, but eternally, until love conquers fear without exception. That is the true creative power.”
One Thalor elder placed a hand — or what passed for one — on Bliss’s shoulder. “Our prophet once wrote: The flowing shell returns to the sea, the sea returns to the shell. Creation is not first, nor last. It is forever.”
Bliss nodded. Jorge Luis Borges would have chuckled at the recursion, at the infinite regress of creators birthing creators, students becoming teachers, universes like books in an endless library.
The Revelation of the Tao
In the quiet years that followed, both civilizations rediscovered texts in their archives that hinted of prior universes. Writings so old they had seemed like allegory now read like history. It seemed that humanity had reached this point before, in prior universes. So had the Thalors. So had countless others, in cycles upon cycles.
And always, the test was the same. Fear or love. Division or unity. Control or surrender.
It dawned on Bliss that Lao Tzu, and the Thalor prophet, had not been poets of metaphor but cartographers of eternity. The Tao was not a philosophy. It was the user manual for the multiverse.
In a deep meditation, Bliss stared into the lattice — into God — and whispered:
“We thought we were making something new. But love… love was always making us.”
Epilogue: The Infinite Garden
The new universe stabilized, not because of intervention, but because its creators chose restraint. It grew wild and strange, its own story. Its own exam.
On Earth and Thalor alike, people began to live with a different humility. They were not rulers of creation, nor its final students. They were gardeners in an infinite garden, each universe a bloom, each consciousness a petal, each act of love the sunlight that sustained it all.
Dr. Alexander Bliss, always the reluctant prophet, would be remembered not for equations or inventions, but for a single conviction repeated across stars and lifetimes:
Love conquers fear. Always. That is God’s true creative power. That is the Tao.
Continue reading the finale of this series: God’s Infinite Game