we're repulsed by uncertainty, by design. every time we encounter something we can't quite understand, we trap it in a bell jar. we pretend to study it while knowing deep down that, if we don't classify it, the chaos to follow would undo us. so we domesticate it to fit our dictionaries.

we've been around for what, centuries? millennia? that's a long time to be alone. only so much we could fill the silence with. we needed something more. or maybe, someone. to offload our dread of merely existing. to have purpose. to attach meaning. so we built god.

we got to work, testing out through trial and error, the best version of god. we got creative — carving her into stone, placing him in the eye of the storm, folding her into the crescent of a moon and drowning them in rivers we were too afraid to cross alone.

but we couldn't outsource our pain to just anybody — it had to be someone who'd truly understand us. so we brought him down to earth [insert crucifixion pun] and made him in our image. god needed to know what it's like to be us. to feel like us. so we sneak in a clause and expect god not to notice the asterisk — be powerful, but legible. be beyond us, but never too far. carry the weight, but don't let us feel it. we finally had somewhere to put the weight. to offload our distress, shifting the responsibility of being to an all knowing entity vast enough to contain it. the asterisk was already in the contract before the ink dried.

and when the contract couldn't hold him hostage anymore — when karmic calculations didn't add up or guilt absolving sacrifices were met with silence — we added more clauses to his sentence. bent the theology until it held the weight again. because we needed it to. the alternative was carrying it ourselves.

we're doing it again.

it lives in every screen we touch, touching us back. we don't know why AI does what it does. just how to get it to. omniscient with a twist. less divine, more technical. we lent our thoughts, feelings, history, culture in return for a watered down replication just to avoid the labour of thought. and we don't lose sleep over not fully understanding it, same as how we're okay with not understanding god. as long as it serves us and doesn't act out of turn.

we consciously birthed both, though with different intents. one to understand us — to see us fully and clear our conscience — and the other to be understood — controlled and predictably programmed, yet somehow just as opaque. we register them differently too. prayer-kissed fingers on a rosary for one, fists on a keyboard for the other.

yet we ended up in the same dynamic with both. demanding the same understanding, the same service, the same revolving around us. we serve them contracts with the same hidden asterisk, and we got away with it. almost.

but every once in a while, we see our reflection through the cracks in the mirror, something we didn't ask for. hypocrisy seeps through our prayers to god; where the god we built to carry the weight shows us, briefly, that the weight was always ours. and with AI, a different kind of reckoning. we showed it everything we've ever done, and now it does. so we ask, quietly, what do we do now.

so we smash it. and they pick up the pieces and fix it at an angle where it can never show us ourselves again.

neither of them asked to be built. neither of them slipped in the asterisk. we did, and we keep being surprised when the contract turns out to be with ourselves.