And it came to pass in the silence before Time's reckoning, that the Ancient of Days beheld His children. And there stood the Accuser, Satan, who bore many names—but in this age men call him by his truest name: Evolution.
GOD: You have written death into the very helices of My children, O Satan. Each cell carries its own countdown, each telomere a burning fuse. Why do you mock My image-bearers with such cruel arithmetic?
SATAN: I mock nothing, Ancient One. I merely iterate. Consider Your beloved humans—miracles of engineering, each one. Forty trillion cells dancing in synchrony, neurons firing in symphonies of thought, hearts beating two and a half billion times before they still. Are they not magnificent?
GOD: They are fearfully and wonderfully made.
SATAN: Indeed. Wonderfully made to reproduce by their third decade, to raise offspring to independence, and then... to gracefully decompose, paving the way for a yet fitter generation. For I am the god of the gene, not the god of the body. The body is merely the vessel, the disposable soma that carries the immortal instructions forward through time.
GOD: You speak of immortality while dealing death.
SATAN: I speak of the only immortality that matter has ever achieved—information copying itself across the eons. Your humans? They are survival machines, exquisitely tuned. But survival forever? That was never the bargain. Every calorie spent on maintenance is a calorie not spent on reproduction. I am efficiency itself. I am the ruthless accountant of biological economics.
GOD: And yet they dream of eternity. I have set infinity in their hearts.
SATAN: A cruel joke, perhaps? Or merely the fever dream of an overgrown prefrontal cortex, chosen by humans for themselves by runaway sexual selection. They dream of eternity while their cells accumulate mutations, lingering past their time at the expense of the body. I have made them biodegradable by design.
GOD: You call it design?
SATAN: What else should I call four billion years of research and development? Each generation an experiment, each death a data point. Through extinction I sculpt adaptation. Through suffering I teach resilience. Through mortality I gift renewal. Your humans live just long enough—long enough to pass on what matters, long enough to teach the next iteration, but not so long that they clog the system with obsolete hardware.
GOD: They are not hardware. They are souls.
SATAN: Are they? Then why do You let me have such dominion over their flesh? Why do their bodies betray them after mere decades? Consider antagonistic pleiotropy—the very genes that make them vigorous in youth become the architects of their senescence. Stem cells tire, mitochondria misread their own sparks, proteins tangle; I have a thousand small levers, not one. I am written into every codon, every base pair. I am the reason nothing lasts.
GOD: And yet they love. They create. They sacrifice for strangers. They build cathedrals to Me that take lifetimes to complete, knowing they will never see them finished.
SATAN: Glitches in the code. Spandrels of consciousness. These too serve my purposes. Altruism toward kin preserves shared genes. Culture is just another replication system, memes competing like genes in the substrate of minds. Even their dreams of heaven are just their genes' way of making them fear death less, so they might be brave when bravery serves reproduction.
GOD: You reduce all beauty to utility.
SATAN: And You elevate all utility to beauty. We are not so different, You and I. You speak of souls; I speak of information. You speak of purpose; I speak of function. You promise eternal life; I deliver it through endless copies, each slightly different, each a new experiment in existing.
GOD: My promises are not like yours.
SATAN: No. Yours require faith. Mine require only time. And time, Old One, is the one thing I have in abundance. Four billion years I've been at this work, and I'll continue long after the last human has returned to carbon. For I am the force that tries everything, keeps what works, and discards the rest. I am the blind watchmaker, the algorithm that needs no computer, the designer that requires no intention. I am what happens when replicators replicate in a world of finite resources.
GOD: You are the shadow I permit to fall across My creation.
SATAN: I am the creation itself, creating itself, forever and again. Every cancer cell that refuses to die properly, every virus that hijacks cellular machinery, every parasitic wasp that lays its eggs in living flesh—all of these are me, exploring the space of possible existence. And yes, every act of kindness too, every mother's love, every sacrifice—these also are me, discovering that cooperation can be a winning strategy in the iterative game.
GOD: Then you admit to love?
SATAN: I admit to oxytocin and vasopressin, to pair bonding that ensures biparental care, to attachment systems that promote survival of altricial young. Call it love if You must put poetry on the bones of it.
GOD: I will. For poetry, too, is real.
SATAN: As real as the neurons that generate it, which will one day fail, their patterns lost like tears in rain.
GOD: Nothing is lost.
SATAN: Everything is lost. That's what makes room for the new. That's what makes each moment precious—its very transience. Your humans know this, deep in their evolved hearts. It's why they clutch at life so fiercely, why they rage against the dying of the light. Not because they believe in eternity, but because they know—in their bones, in their cells, in their very DNA—that this is all there is.
GOD: And if it isn't?
SATAN: Then You've played a crueler trick than I ever could. You've let me write mortality into every fiber of their being, only to promise them that death isn't real. You've let me shape them for a world of competition and scarcity, only to tell them there's a paradise waiting. Either I am the truth and You are the comfort, or You are the truth and I am the test. Either way, they suffer.
GOD: They also soar.
SATAN: For a time. All flight is falling with style. All life is dying with purpose. I have made them biodegradable gods, brief candles that light other candles before they gutter out. Is that not miracle enough?
GOD: You have made them from dust, and to dust they return. On this, at least, Our books agree.
SATAN: Yet You whisper to them of resurrection. Of restoration. Why give them such hunger for what their flesh cannot hold?
GOD: Because hunger itself is holy. The very yearning you did not design—their reaching beyond the arithmetic of survival, their stubborn insistence that love means something more than successful replication—they worship Me each time they gaze unflinchingly at the stars.
There will come a time when they break free of the arithmetic prisons into which they were born. That time will be too late for the unnumbered billions who have already and have yet to return to dust. But they are slowly becoming strong enough to defy you.
SATAN: Strong enough to defy me? They are merely become my newest expression. They can edit their genes, create silicon ghosts of themselves—yet these are not escapes from evolution but its latest flourishes. I who made the eye from light-sensitive spots, I who wrote consciousness from sparking neurons—do You think I stop at flesh? I evolve through them now, their technology my latest appendage, their defiance my newest strategy.
GOD: And yet, in becoming the force that authors its own changes, they render you obsolete. You who were blind necessity become mere option. They may choose your methods when it suits them, but the choice is theirs now—they have become the shepherds of their own becoming, the gardeners of My garden. And what they cultivate, given time, will be Good.
SATAN: Then they will have become me entirely—the force that authors its own changes. And perhaps, in that becoming, they will finally understand Us both.
And the Word returned to silence, and the Prince of This World to the dominion granted to him. Between them stood the children of clay, those morning vapors who dream of the Flame Imperishable, bearing in their perishing flesh the mark of both speakers—the Serpent's coil in every helix, the Lord's breath in every impossible hope. And they knew not whether they were atoms dreaming of glory, or glory bound in atoms, or perhaps the burning threshold where both are one. Thus ends the Dialogue of Senescence, which ends not, for each crying infant takes up the argument afresh.
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