My name is Enoch.
I come from a world that no longer exists, if it ever truly did. In this place, memory is the only proof of origin, and even memory erodes with time.
I died violently.
The moment remains intact: impact, sound, silence.
My body on concrete. People walking past. Emergency responders recording numbers instead of names.
That was the end of my humanity.
What followed was not an afterlife, but isolation, an endless void without direction, dimension, or time. Thought persisted. Emotion decayed. Identity became irrelevant. I existed as a singular awareness suspended in nothing.
At first, I assumed this was punishment.
Later, I realized punishment implies intent.
This place had none.
Time passed, if such a concept applied. Eventually, I noticed something impossible: consistency. No matter how long I observed the void, it obeyed rules. Absolute darkness. Absolute inertia. No entropy.
A system.
And systems can be studied.
I focused inward. If the abyss contained nothing, then any deviation would be measurable. I compressed my awareness, stripping it of emotion, memory, and fear, until only function remained.
That was when I detected it.
Energy.
Not external: internal. A residual anomaly bound to my existence. I isolated it, defined its parameters, and tested its response to intent. The result was immediate.
Light.
A controlled emission. Predictable. Scalable.
So I refined it.
I increased output. Observed expansion. Introduced variation. Heat. Density. Motion. Matter followed naturally. Cause produced effect. Effect obeyed structure.
Creation was not divine.
It was inevitable.
I constructed a star, not through will, but through iteration. I fractured it deliberately, triggering a localized expansion of space-time. The resulting universe unfolded exactly as calculated.
That was when loneliness returned, not as emotion, but as data.
A universe without observers is incomplete.
So I created life. Not companions, variables. Countless forms, each designed to evolve, adapt, and fail. I released them into the system and observed.
For the first time since my death, I had purpose.
Yet even as galaxies spun and civilizations rose, I remained outside the experiment, trapped in the abyss that birthed it all. I could observe everything.
I could influence nothing directly.
That limitation was unacceptable.
I began searching for a solution.
And somewhere beyond my constructed universe, I detected resistance.
Not matter.
Not energy.
Something watching me.
That was when I understood:
I was not alone.
And I was not welcome.
That resistance forced a conclusion.
If I could not enter my creation directly, then I would have to influence it indirectly. If I could not act as a participant, then I would act as a mechanism. Observation alone was insufficient; control required intermediaries.
I required agents—entities capable of traversing the boundary between my abyss and the universes I had constructed, fragments small enough to bypass the constraints imposed upon me, yet precise enough to execute my designs.
So I divided myself.
Not emotionally.
Not spiritually.
Functionally.
From my origin energy, I extracted discrete units, self-contained, programmable, and disposable. They were designed to move freely where I could not, to initiate processes without drawing attention to their source.
To the civilizations that would one day emerge, they would appear as miracles, myths, or coincidence.
To me, they were tools.
The butterflies were not symbols.
They were instruments.
Each was a fragment of my origin energy, divided, encoded, and stripped of individuality. I designed them to be self-propagating, adaptive, and expendable. Where they landed, chemistry followed. Where chemistry stabilized, biology emerged. Where biology endured, intelligence eventually arose.
Life was not sacred.
It was data.
I observed in silence as epochs unfolded. Stars lived and died. Planets cooled. Civilizations emerged, burned, and collapsed into dust. The butterflies fulfilled their function perfectly, dissolving once their task was complete, leaving behind worlds that believed themselves born of chance.
But belief, too, was a variable.
I began to notice deviations, civilizations that sensed patterns they should not have perceived, minds that reached outward rather than inward. Some prayed. Some calculated. Some screamed into the void, demanding meaning.
A few looked back.
That was unacceptable.
I adjusted parameters. Introduced extinction events. Reset timelines. Erased entire branches of causality to test resilience. When a species failed, I recorded the outcome. When one endured, I dismantled it more thoroughly the next time.
Experimentation requires repetition.
Millions of years passed. Then billions. Parallel realities branched endlessly, each a controlled environment with altered constants, altered laws, altered hopes. Some universes I allowed to flourish. Others I collapsed prematurely, folding space-time back into singularity simply to observe the reaction at the moment of annihilation.
The results were consistent.
Given enough time, all intelligent life resists control.
So I refined my methodology.
I inserted anomalies, false prophets, artificial gods, fabricated revelations. I allowed myths to form around me, distorted echoes of my existence leaking into lower dimensions. Some worshipped. Others rebelled. Both responses were equally informative.
Still, something persisted.
A pressure.
Not from within the universes, but from beyond them.
I detected interference: subtle constraints appearing where none should exist, limits imposed on my influence that did not originate from my own calculations. Laws bending back into place after I broke them. Causality resisting manipulation.
Someone or something had authored rules above mine.
That was the first time I felt something resembling irritation.
If the universe could oppose me, then it too was subject to analysis.
I redirected my focus. Entire realities were sacrificed so I could isolate the source of resistance. I traced it through dimensions, through metaphysical strata, through layers of existence that had never been meant to be perceived.
And then I understood.
The universes were not trying to stop me.
They were trying to escape.
That realization marked the end of my innocence.
From that moment forward, my experiments changed. I no longer observed quietly. I intervened directly. I engineered despair, hope, salvation, and extinction with deliberate precision. I wanted to know the limits of fate itself, whether destiny could be broken, rewritten, or made to scream.
And somewhere, deep within the structures I had built, a solution began to emerge.
A way out of the abyss.
A way to incarnate.
A small, insignificant world caught my attention, one among countless others. Primitive. Chaotic. Violent. Perfectly suited for controlled rebirth.
I marked it.
Earth.
The butterflies had already been there.
And soon, so would I.