Apophis: What If God Got Bored?
What if God got bored?
It's not exactly the sort of question one expects to find at the beginning of a theology book.
Which is probably why I like it.
Imagine being completely in charge of the universe.
You know everything that has happened. You know everything that is happening. You know everything that is ever going to happen. Every triumph, every catastrophe, every love affair, every war, every misplaced set of car keys—all proceeding exactly according to plan.
People might even tell one another that everything happens because you intended it to happen.
At first, this sounds like a pretty good job.
But after a few billion years?
What would be the point?
He Spun the Wheel
This is the idea behind Apophis.
In the song and its accompanying imagery, a god emerges from the black void. He has splendid ideas. He can be in charge. He can control everything. People can worship him.
And then he does something much more interesting.
He spins the wheel.
Suddenly something can happen that wasn't part of the plan.
A human being comes tumbling through a hole in the universe and turns into a joker. A king laughs at his jester. A Shakespearean tragedy reaches its inevitable conclusion with bodies scattered across the stage—except that one of the bodies gets up and walks away.
An archaeologist goes looking for the dead past and discovers dancing hieroglyphs. A mummy unwraps itself and becomes a beautiful woman.
The universe refuses to stay put.
Listen to “Apophis” by Dizzy O'Brian
That is where Apophis enters the mythology.
Traditionally associated with chaos, the great Egyptian serpent becomes something a little different in the Dizzyverse. Chaos isn't simply destruction.
Chaos is the possibility that something else can happen.
If everything is controlled, nothing is really participating.
Not even God.
Why Would Tut Call His Organization Apophis?
This is also why the name Apophis began to seem increasingly appropriate for the mysterious organization behind Senator Tut in Who Is The Dragon.
Tut and his allies are fighting something enormous, but they are not trying to replace it with another enormous system of control.
The androids have become divided. Some want to eradicate humanity. Some want to dominate it. Others still want to serve. Electricians and powerful institutions have their own designs for what androids should become.
Tut's organization is different.
They aren't trying to become the new masters of the androids.
They are trying to give them back the possibility of choosing what they become.
That distinction matters.
It would be very easy for a resistance movement to say, “The wrong people are controlling everything. We should be controlling everything instead.”
History has seen that story before.
Apophis represents a much more dangerous idea:
What if nobody gets to know the ending?
What if the androids themselves have some say in it?
Suddenly Tut's organization isn't merely fighting for one side of a political conflict. It is fighting for uncertainty itself—for the right of sentient beings to introduce something into the story that the author didn't anticipate.
Which Brings Me to the Author
There is a peculiar thing that sometimes happens when you write stories.
At first, you are God.
You create the world. You create the characters. You decide where everybody lives and what everybody wants. You know who the villain is. You know where the story is going.
It's all very impressive.
Then one of the characters refuses to cooperate.
This sounds ridiculous until it happens.
You put a character into a scene intending them to say one thing, and suddenly you realize they wouldn't say it.
So they say something else.
That changes what another character does.
Which ruins the scene you had planned three pages later.
Then somebody who was supposed to be a minor character becomes interesting. Someone who was supposed to be frightening becomes funny. Someone you invented to perform one simple function turns out to have ideas of their own.
Eventually the strangest thing happens.
You stop asking:
“What do I want this character to do?”
And start asking:
“What would this character do?”
At that moment, something has changed.
You have granted the character a kind of being.
Not literal independent existence, of course. But within the imaginative world of the story, the character has acquired enough coherence that you can no longer move them around like furniture.
They have become capable of surprising their creator.
And That's When the Story Gets Interesting
I have increasingly found that Who Is The Dragon works this way.
I know approximately where I'm going.
Then I start making the scenes.
And something happens.
Marion does something I hadn't expected. Schroeder wanders into a situation and introduces randomness simply by being Schroeder. Tut ends up dismantled. His head gets put into the wrong luggage. A family in New Jersey starts chanting “Apophis, Apophis, Central Park.”
Somewhere along the way, I realize that I'm no longer forcing the story toward an ending.
I'm watching to see what it does.
And that may be the real meaning of Apophis.
The creator doesn't disappear.
The creator relinquishes absolute control.
He spins the wheel.
Perhaps that's the difference between making something and allowing something to become alive.
A perfectly controlled character is a puppet.
A perfectly controlled android is a machine.
A perfectly controlled universe is a mechanism.
But give any of them enough freedom to surprise you...
...and suddenly you have a story.
APOPHIS is part of the evolving Future Mythology of Dizzy O'Brian and the Dreamers and the world of Who Is The Dragon.
If I already knew the ending, what would be the point of you?
Listen: APOPHIS on SoundCloud
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