Mephis shaking his head side to side.

Mephis:

Well then, carry on…How did you approach the creation of its moral values?

Sava:                 

I'm glad that you asked…the covenant – it's a set of moral laws that we put in place for them to follow.  (showing the book to Mephis).

Mephis:

I see. Not only did you enforce rules of conduct, but you gave them an entire book of good behavior. And how did you manage to give it to them?

Sava:                 

Well, the content is usually uploaded during their sleep in the form of a sequence of virtual images, flashing through their conscious. Of course, we pick the most mentally unstable subjects, their psyches are more volatile and this results in a less resistant execution. However, in this case, I just gave it to them. Not in a physical sense of course. Obviously, I cannot appear inside the simulation. Instead, we created our own character inside the simulation. This was quite expensive in terms of resources, but, at times, its usage is justifiable.

Mephis:            

Why, how did you manage? What did you use to deliver the book?

Sava:                 

On this occasion, we picked a bush and set it on fire; I called it, the burning bush. In contrast with our humans, it's an interface device of relatively low difficulty. All we needed was an inorganic heat source and a voice modulator.

Mephis:            

And other times?

Sava:                 

On other occasions, it depended on the difficulty of the task. Sometimes, we had to introduce the full-fledged character subject. Of course, …

Sava hesitates...

Sava:                 

We couldn't just create him the regular way, because of the male-female sexual interaction, the way our general evolutionary model works. Because this character had to have a direct moral and intellectual manipulation control. Physiologically, of course, it was a human being, but his psyche was different.

Mephis:            

Oh, I see what you've done - an artificial insemination with a female donor. What a banal concept, nevertheless, it seems practical. Continue, how did it work out?

Sava:                 

It worked out good as far as the introduction of the custom character is concerned. The paradigm, as a whole, so to speak, did display some flaws, but the character served its purpose.

Mephis:            

My concern has to do with your manual intervention in the design of this evolutionary process. Ultimately, a good system should be debugged and work without manual intervention, however with your book, it's nothing short of intervention. Here, for instance, you speak of changing the sheep's color, water into wine and walking on water. What is this? Blasphemous hacking!

Sava:                 

Well, Mr. Topheles, we struggled with quite a predicament here. You see, unless what they're viewing is supernatural, the humans, they don't give special significance to the events we've presented. Not to mention their primitive, initial state of development. We were forced to introduce trickery and special effects if we were to captivate their attention and prove our power.

Mephis:

Other times, however, the manual interventions were much more significant. Here I've noticed that you created ten different unnatural disasters…and here … did I understand this correctly, you parted the Red Sea!

Sava:

There was no other way around it; we had to save the chosen people from Pharaoh's wrath.

Mephis:   (Reads the book further and notes absently)         

Chosen people?   What's this all about? (Then finds something else in the book and exclaims.)

Mephis:            

Ahh! Yet another design glitch. You've zeroed out the entire planet's population?!

Sava:                 

We ran into some problems. Our subjects' genotypes were contaminated due to the influence of some of my peers. They started just playing in the system; began creating their own characters and placed them into the simulation. They did so without my consent, as well as circumventing the necessary tests.

Mephis (Grinning):  

What were your results?

Sava:                 

The special beings intermixed with the locals, leading to tremendous moral degradation and a disruption of the algorithm. They got a bit out of hand, excessively fornicating, performing acts of incest and homosexuality.

Mephis (Grinning):

Sava, are you homophobic?

Sava:                 

No Mr. Topheles, on the contrary, I voted to implement homosexuality as a mechanism for curbing population growth as an alternative to epidemic disease and war. Yet, this wasn't supposed to take effect until the population started growing uncontrollably.

Mephis:            

Does this point have a conclusion, Sava?

Sava:                 

Because of the low standards that the special beings imposed on the morally stable population, we decided to fix this problem with re-initialization. It would be much easier to preserve several carriers of the previous genotype with high moral standards; the cream of the crop, so to speak, and eliminate everyone else. Then, simply re-multiply the entire population.

Mephis:            

I am not sure that I can approve such a system; having to reinitialize itself in such a drastic manner. I am kind of curious in the mechanics of it. How did you manage to do this?

Sava:                 

I should tell you, Professor Topheles that, during the execution of the flood, we realized that this was quite a difficult and cumbersome task in itself.

Mephis:            

The book only mentions that the havens were opened, without explaining how it was done. Considering that the water was raised to 15 cubits as written here, how “on Earth” did you propose to drain all of it?

Sava:                 

It was quite simple, Sir. Rather than flooding the entire planet, we administered a local flood.

Mephis:  (looking a little puzzled)          

And what kind of locality did you choose?

Sava:                 

The one where the moral was contaminated the most – The Mediterranean region, Mesopotamia and the Middle East.

Mephis:

How did you manage to encircle this region?

Sava:                 

The water was naturally contained by the Pyrenees, Alps, Caucasus, the high coastline of North Africa and other existing mountains. For the remaining territories, we triggered a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions around the perimeter of the region and reshaped its topography to allow for an encircled basin.

Mephis:            

Is it not true that in your system a random algorithm governs volcanic eruptions and earthquakes? How could we be sure that the water would be contained in the resulting boundaries?

Sava:                 

We created a feedback loop, tested the integrity of the encasement and executed the eruption algorithm until the encasement was complete.

Mephis:            

The Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Southern Europe all the way to the Alps and Caucasus, then Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula? How were you able to generate so much water?