For good or for ill, The Great Engineer in the Sky is waiting for me. I try daily to do His will, but as it turns out he communicates only very rarely and in vagaries. That’s not very engineer-like, but whatever. The other night He came to me a in a dream, speaking in parables, and blessed me with the following messages.
Parable 1 – All Boats Should Have a Hole
Two brothers were born to a pious mother and father, and both grew up to be engineers. The older brother was wise; he could forsee difficulties before they arose and prevent them from happening. He rose to a lower-level management position and had a prosperous 30’s and 40’s and enjoyed his job. The younger brother was not as wise, and often created designs with fundamental flaws, because of his short-sightedness. Over time, he learned to wait until it was impossible for anyone to figure out the origin of his errors, and then swoop in late in the project and find and then solve the problem. He was promoted into the business arm of the organization and his shenanigans continue to this day. To his credit, he let his older brother live in his vacation house for a while when he got laid off from his engineering job in his late 40’s.
Parable 2 – Opportunities Lost
The older brother, a Virtuous Engineer, was devising a new tool for picking apples off of trees – a 60% reduction in the labor required. In his literature review he discovered that a man named Steve had already had a very similar idea 20 years earlier. Steve invested all his life savings and nearly a decade into developing the product, but ultimately couldn’t make a business of it and went bankrupt. The older brother took this as a message that his idea simply wouldn’t work and gave up the pursuit.
The younger brother, a Virtuous Businessman, one day by accident found the plans that the older brother had discarded. He misunderstood the plans but had a shop in town make the parts anyway, and customers could choose the color of their tool – either yellow, blue, or matte black – and what size of pinwheel they want on it, or no pinwheel at all for a 25% fee on top of the base price. Most tools don’t work particularly well for picking apples but are sitting and collecting dust in more than 1 out of 3 garages in the country.
Parable 3 – The Fight of Good and Evil
The paths of the two brothers leads them to far-off lands and to personal highs and lows, but eventually led them back to each other. After they have both sloughed off their mortal coils, the brothers spend their tortured eternity locked in a battle whose effects are felt on Earth. The Virtuous Engineer brother is wise, gracious, and judicious. The Virtuous Businessman brother is shrewd, Machiavellian, and singularly-focused on the bottom line. As they battle one or the other may have an upper hand at any moment, and the result transmutes into greater or lesser engineering integrity or business cleverness of those on Earth. I asked Him, “but which brother eventually will win?” and His response was, “the one who can deliver the highest ROI.”
The End Times
Finally, in these dreams many spirits showed me a vision of the end of this iteration of reality, how the functions of Heaven and Earth will eventually slow down and then stop. There is broad agreement on how, with just a few details differing between them. Some believe there will be cost reductions which lead to longer periods between re-tooling; others believe the engineer responsible for re-work will be replaced by a contractor who allows the new tooling to drift too far from the original spec; still others believe that the re-tooling work will be outsourced and a inches-to-meters conversion error will happen on some critical drawings. In any of these cases, the end result will be the new sub-atomic particles going out-of-spec high and, upon deployment, will lead to a cascade failure of the entire universe – an event known as The Great Energetic Disassembly. The mass, momentum, and energy of the system will be conserved, but the parts will no longer fit together. In another 10 million years the cycle will repeat but with different part names.