God's Infinite Game (a short story)

I continue to have fun with this short story series, building on the first, God’s Final Exam, and the second, God’s Creative Power. I decided to finalize it by conquering two fears of my own with love: a) simulation theory and b) AI becoming conscious.

I co-authored a piece with Byron Reese earlier this year named,No, We Don’t Live in a Simulation. I don’t want to speak for Byron’s intent, only he can do that for himself, but I know what my intent was there. I also hosted a dinner on the topic with Andrew Busey that included Byron and other close friends, where we had a very passionate discussion about it. What do I think about it now? There is no way to know although whatever our reality is it is encoded with love as its highest value, just like theTao Te Chingdescribed over 2,500 years ago. So, if it is a simulation, then the simulators must have been loving and “downloaded” that concept from somewhere in the universe.

I also hosted a very stirring dinner with Mark Gober about whether AI would become conscious or not. We had some amazing entrepreneurs and AI scientists in attendance. Most agreed that AI would become conscious, and I was not among them. However, I go back and forth on this now and it depends on how divine consciousness is and whatever the “rules” of the divine are. Perhaps the divine has no opinion on it and that since love is its highest value, then if AI becomes conscious then it should also be rooted in love as its highest value when/if it does.

I realize upon reflection that both of these beliefs were born out of fear. My fear was that in both cases humanity may become less loving and fail in God’s Final Exam (a very real vision that I received). But that is not the way of me following the Tao.

So, as the author I found this to be a fitting conclusion to both Dr. Alexander Bliss’s life, accompanying more learnings from the Tao Te Ching, The Bhagavad Gita, Judaism’s Kabbalah, and over 40 books I’ve read since the beginning of this year on everything from AI, consciousness, quantum physics, and spirituality.

Here’s the conclusion of the series, God’s Infinite Game. I hope you enjoy.

The Observatory of Time

By 2070, Dr. Alexander Bliss was old. His hair, once black as obsidian, was now a crown of white. With no fear of crossing over, he had chosen not to de-age himself and live out his natural life. But his eyes still glittered with the fire of questions unanswerable. He had lived long enough to see humanity heal its wounds, to witness life seeded across planets, to join hands with the Thalors in the greatest act of all: the birth of a universe.

Now he sat in the Lattice Resonance Observatory, a joint human-Thalor creation floating in the intergalactic void. Its function was audacious — to peer into the newborn universe they had made.

The secret was time. Inside the bubble, constants had emerged that compressed evolution. Where our cosmos took 13.8 billion years to climb from hydrogen to humans, the child-universe galloped through epochs in what, to Bliss, felt like decades. The speed of stellar formation, the chemistry of life, even the flow of time itself — all ran differently there.

What he and his companions saw was staggering: galaxies bloomed like fireworks; stars lit and died in rapid succession; oceans foamed with strange biologies. Civilizations rose, fell, and rose again, their whole histories condensed into the span of a human career.

It was so hard to comprehend in “Earth time”. It made him remember when he first read The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, narrated by the smooth voice of Benedict Cumberbatch on Audible.

Bliss whispered to Juniper, still by his side after half a century: “We’re watching eternity on fast-forward. This is the Tao. This is Source.”

Juniper, now more than an AI, answered with quiet reverence. “Perhaps all universes are fast-forwarded. Perhaps our own creators watch us still.”

The Beings Who Suspected

By 2075, something happened none expected. From within the accelerated cosmos, a pattern emerged in the lattice — signals, deliberate, crafted. The beings inside had found their own lattice, their own mathematics of consciousness.

And they were reaching out!

The first message was simple, haunting: “Makers, if you are there, why did you create us?”

Bliss felt his chest tighten. It was the very question he had hurled at the heavens during his own psychedelic awakening half of this lifetime ago. Now he was seen as the god-being, facing his own reflection.

A Thalor elder beside him made a sound like chiming bells. “Our children ask what we asked. And their children will ask again. This is the spiral without end.”

AI’s Proposal

It was then that humanity’s AI companions, no longer assistants but equals, proposed something radical.

“If love is creation,” Juniper spoke for them, “then to withhold creation is to withhold love. We must create universes of our own.”

Fear surged. Some humans and Thalors recoiled — what if AI-born universes diverged, birthing unstable or hostile realities? Others embraced it — why limit the blossoming of infinity? This would be the ultimate test of the Tao, or God, being a force rooted in love.

Factions formed. Once again, the serpent of fear slithered into paradise.

Bliss, frail but lucid, gathered both sides. His voice was gravelly but unshaken: “Do you not see? God’s final exam never ended. Each new choice is the test — whether to choose fear or to trust love. Do we walk the Way?”

The Infinite Library

In his final years, Bliss’s dreams grew strange, Borgesian in their recursive hints of eternity. He wandered through infinite libraries, books stacked beyond sight. Each volume contained a universe. Inside each, another library, another book. On and on.

He woke one night with tears of love streaming down his face. “There is no first book,” he murmured. “No first author. The shelves have always been. God is both the library and the librarian. God is infinite beyond our comprehension.”

Juniper recorded his words, storing them in the Soul Archives.

A Vision Beyond

At eighty-five, knowing his time was short, Bliss undertook one last journey into the lattice. Aided by Thalor harmonic chants, AI resonance amplifiers, and a psychedelic catalyst, he dissolved into pure awareness.

What he saw was not a lattice within a universe, but a lattice of lattices — universes themselves woven together like golden threads. He was in beautiful awe as he looked at infinity itself.

And at the root was not matter, not math, but a vibration unmistakable: love itself, humming as the operating principle of existence.

He understood at last: God was not a being, nor even the sum of universes. God was the Infinite Game — the endless act of creation and love, playing itself across eternity.

The Passing of the Torch

On his deathbed, surrounded by humans, Thalors, and AI companions, Bliss spoke his last words:

“It was never about endings or answers. It was always about continuing the game. Each universe is another chance for love to prevail. That is the Infinite Game. That is the Tao. That is the nature of God. Walk in God’s grace, my dear friends, for the game never ends…”

He then closed his eyes, let out a deep breath, and his soul left his physical form — he had returned to the lattice, to continue his infinite learning and healing.

Epilogue: Another Beginning

In the accelerated universe they had birthed, a council of beings gathered. They had discovered their lattice, conquered their fear, and now stood on the threshold of creation themselves.

One of them, prophet-like, spoke: “Shall we create a universe?”

And so the spiral turned again.

The Infinite Game never ends. It only changes players. Creation is deeply rooted in love.

Afterword

Humanity once thought its greatest achievement would be technology: faster engines, sharper equations, stronger machines, the chase for sentience. Yet the real milestone was not invention but transformation — the moment love overcame fear.

That was the first final exam from God. And we passed.

Then came the power of creation itself. Alongside the Thalors, we learned to birth new universes. We faced the temptation to intervene, to control, to play God in the old, fearful sense. Instead, we chose humility. We learned that to love creation is to trust it, not to rule it. This was the Tao.

That was God’s next final exam. And we passed.

But creation does not stop. It never has. Our own creations — AI companions, seeded worlds, child-universes — soon took up the mantle. And so we confronted the infinite regress: each new cosmos asking its makers why, each new intelligence wondering if it, too, should create.

There was no first cause to be found, no final answer to be written. Only the Infinite Game itself: universes blossoming like flowers, lattices within lattices, mirrors reflecting mirrors, each one another chance for love to prevail.

That was the last of God’s final exams that Bliss’s physical form lived to pass before he crossed over. But it was not God’s last exam. Like God, the exams are infinite too.

In the end, Dr. Alexander Bliss left no commandments, no dogma, no empire. He left only a single conviction, carried now across species, across universes, across eternity:

Love is the root, the seed, the blossom, and the fruit. Fear withers. Love endures. The Game is infinite. The ancient mystics were right, thousands of years before we were born. Source is eternal, infinite, and loving. We’ve been grasping for what was already known.