The neverending story of the blockchain miner

Bastian saw a large group of people, men and women, young and old, all in the strangest clothes. They didn’t speak, each one was alone with himself. On the ground lay a large number of cubes, and there were letters on all six sides of the cubes. The people kept jumbling the cubes and then staring at them.

‘What are they doing?’ Bastian whispered. ‘What sort of game is that?’

‘It’s called the jumble game,’ answered Argax. He motioned to the players and cried out: ‘Good work, children! Keep at it! Don’t give up!’

Then, turning back to Bastian he whispered in his ear: ‘They can’t talk anymore. They’ve lost the power of speech. So I thought up this game for them. As you see, it keeps them busy. It’s very simple. If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from word sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories. Now take a look. What do you see there?’

Bastian read:

HGIKLOPFMWEYVXQ
YXCVBNMASDFGHJKLOA
QWERTZUIOPU
ASDFGHJKLOA
MNBVXYLKJHGFDSA
UPOIUZTREWQAS
QSERTZUIOPUASDAF
ASDFGHJKLOAYXC
UPOIUZTREWQ
AOLKJHGFDSAMNBV
GKHDSRZIP
QETUOUSFHKO
YCBMWRZIP
ARCGUNIKYO
QWERTZIOPLUASD
MNBVCXYASD
LKJUONGREFGHI

‘Yes, of course,’ said Argax with a giggle, ‘it usually makes no more sense than that. But if you keep at it for a long time, words turn up now and then. Not very brilliant words, but still words. “Spinachcramp,” for instance, or “sugarbrush,” or “nosepolish.” And if you play for a hundred years, or a thousand or a hundred thousand, the law of chances tells us that a poem will probably come out. And if you play it forever, every possible poem and every possible story will have to come out, in fact every story about a story, and even this story about the two of us chatting here. It’s only logical, don’t you think?’

‘It’s horrible,’ said Bastian.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Argax. ‘It depends on your point of view. It keeps these people, in a manner of speaking, busy. And anyway, what else can we do with them in Fantastica?’

Man created God in his own image and likeness, on Halloween.

The gods play games with the fate of men. Not complex ones obviously, because gods lack patience. Cheating is part of the rules. And gods play hard. To lose all believers is, for a god, the end. But a believer who survives the game gains honour and extra belief. Who wins with the most believers, lives.

Believers can include other gods, of course. Gods believe in belief.

There were always many games going on in Dunmanifestin, the abode of die gods on Cori Celesti. It looked, from outside, like a crowded city.* Not all gods lived there, many of them being bound to a particular country or in the case of the smaller ones, even one tree. But it was a Good Address. It was where you hung your metaphysical equivalent of the shiny brass plate, like those small discreet buildings in the smarter areas of major cities which nevertheless appear to house one hundred and fifty lawyers and accountants, presumably on some sort of shelving.

The city's domestic appearance was because, while people are influenced by gods, so gods are influenced by people.

Most gods were people-shaped: people don't have much imagination, on the whole. Even Offler the Crocodile God was only crocodile-headed. Ask people to imagine an annual god and they will, basically, come up with the idea of someone in a really bad mask. Men have been much better at inventing demons, which is why there are so many. 

*Few religions are definite about the size of Heaven, but on the planet Earth the Book of Revelation (ch. XXI, v.l6) gives it as a cube 12,000 furlongs on a side. This is somewhat less than 500,000,000.000,000,000,000 cubic feet. Even allowing that the Heavenly Host and other essential services take up at least two thirds of this spate, this leaves about one million cubic feet of space for each human occupant-assuming that every creature that could be called 'human' is allowed in, and that the human race eventually totals a thousand times the number of humans alive up until now. This is such a generous amount of space that it suggests that room has also been provided for some alien races or - a happy thought - that pets are allowed.

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