A Prophet Shouldn’t Need ID

I was standing outside a classical bar as a soft patter of droplets fell above me onto the rain roof which had been deployed for the bar’s entrance. It had several neon signs labelling it as ‘The Orange Boot’ and a rather vintage entrance design. While the soundproofing prevented me from discerning the volume of the conversation, just looking through the doors was enough to distinguish that it was quite busy. In short, it was an ideal location.

“So, you’re telling me you don’t have any devices with electronic identification on you, nor any physical identification, and that your face isn’t registered on the database, but that you still want me to let you in?”

A bouncer half a metre taller than me stared down with the kind of expression a falling refrigerator would use on an innocent bystander, were it capable of expression. Calming my slight agitation, I paused to consider my options. I needed to get in here, and yet I had no means to prove that I was in fact of the age of majority. I would need an excellent excuse in order to get in and complete my mission. I scratched my chin and thought this through. After careful consideration, I finally came to the obvious ironclad excuse to persuade the bouncer.

“I forgot to bring my ID.....”

“Then no entry.”

“Could you please just let me off this once?”

“No.”

“But-”

“You’re holding up the line, lady.”

Unfortunately, it seemed the humans of this era were much more restrictive about alcohol consumption than I had thought previously.

Perhaps the Lord’s information was outdated…? No, it must just be solely this bar which is this strict on the issue of identification. I will likely be able to try elsewhere with more success.

“Truly, man can only look at the outward appearance. Only the Lord looks at the heart.”

“… Okay?”

At that exchange, I set off to find another, less dogmatic bar, and I breathed a sigh of relief at the fact that the rain had cleared up while I was talking to the bouncer. Avoiding the crowd lining up, I proceeded off in a random direction, hoping that I would find something appropriate before it got too late.

While I was lost in thought about potential excuses for my lack of an ID, I lightly bumped into a woman who was rushing towards the train station. Despite momentarily stumbling, she quickly recovered and then proceeded at her earlier breakneck pace. Avoiding the water fountain I almost crashed into myself, I silently cheered her effort to fight through the endless flood of pedestrians. For better or worse, the streets of the city of Strait were busy even – though it might be more apt to say especially – at night. Advancing past petrol-based personal vehicles inherently necessitated more foot traffic – though personally, I would appreciate it if people had more consideration for others on these paths. I’m sure it was a lot harder to not consider others when the roads were composed of moving metal death machines.

Continuing down the street, I glanced from side to side hoping to catch any signs indicating a bar. I began to feel a sense of insignificance in comparison to endless stream of enormously tall buildings passing by me. While they were constructed as such for the sake of efficient land use, the practical result for a pedestrian like me is the feeling of being boxed into a gargantuan maze with sporadic opportunities to take turns into even more maze. Efficient indeed, but certainly existentially terrifying. On that level, I couldn’t help but be grateful for my fellow pedestrians; if they weren’t there, then walking through the city might change from mildly unsettling to a truly liminal horror experience.

As I was currently in Strait’s largest food service district, most stores around me were some kind of restaurant or café. In the first place, eating out is a luxury not covered under the Common Dividend, so the overwhelming primary demographic of those visiting them tended to be the employed. Fortunately for my wallet, old-school establishments like classic bars tended to be aimed at a poorer economic caste and admittedly a lower brow customer base…. Not that a servant of the Lord could ever be low brow. Finally, after almost thirty mind-numbing minutes of fighting my way through the crowd, I spotted another bar.

‘Greg’s Bar’, huh? I didn’t realise I had standards for at least a little creativity in a bar’s title until I read that.

Despite my reservations about this Greg individual, I headed towards the automatic glass doors marking the entrance to the bar. Noticing that there wasn’t any bouncer, my anticipation quickly grew. I walked up to the doors and waited a moment for them to open… only to be met with nothing.

Of course, this could have simply been me not entering the sensor range for the door, so I moved forward a bit more to ensure… and then a bit more. Recalling some likely irrelevant nonsense about Zeno and a paradox, I halved the distance between me and the door several more times before finally concluding that something was perhaps wrong. Turning my gaze slightly to the end of the doors I noticed an old-fashioned tablet with a prompt displayed on it:

CONFIRM ID HERE

Fu-… gosh darn it.

An auburn haired woman seeming as if she had given up on drinking pushed past me out of the door, grumbling about “insane prices”. As such, on a whim, I decided to return to my apartment early that day. It had nothing to do with how broke I was. Nothing at all. However, deciding that my costs were far too sunk to return home empty-handed at this point, I came up with a rather brilliant idea. Pulling a foldable water bottle out of my pocket, I walked up to a nearby water fountain and filled it up to the brim with water. Then, briefly glancing around at the surrounding crowd to ensure nobody was watching me too closely, I gave an equally brief prayer. Grinning slightly to myself, I ambled to the nearest train station to return home.

Skipping over the painful hydraulic press-like process of squeezing onto and off the train, I was now only a short walk from my apartment, and in a much quieter area. Unscrewing the now-lukewarm bottle, I brought it to my lips. For some reason, for an instant there I felt like I could see my life flashing before my eyes. Disregarding that strange apparition, I brought the water-turned-beer to my lips and drank half the bottle in a very rapid chug.

… Then I remembered two things: firstly, why people don’t normally drink beer while it is warm; secondly, that I actually have a strong distaste for beer. Needless to say, a suspiciously yeast-smelling puddle of liquid soon manifested on the ground.

Why didn’t I just turn it into wine…? I got too fixated on the beer and bar association…. Nonetheless, the Lord gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers! I must cheer up and focus on my mission!

Vaguely feeling like I had hit a new low for the night, I trudged up to my apartment. I lightly sighed when I heard yelling from my next-door neighbours, realising that the soundproofing had broken; but nonetheless, I ignored them, approached my apartment, and cracked open the door to Everywhere.

===

To simplify things drastically, entering Everywhere for the first time was an… odd… experience. Everywhere is quite literally everywhere. It is everything on Earth simultaneously compressed into the space of a single room. Entering it leads to your senses being immediately overloaded with the information of… well… literally everything. It took time to adjust and focus solely on the direct contents of the room.

Aside from the two beds in the apartment, the room itself was currently filled with signs with pro-faith messages on them and “WWJD” wristbands. I mentally cringed a little remembering my efforts to hand out the latter near a university before being chased away by security. They didn’t have to laugh at me too….

After a while of adjustment, I could gradually see the outline of an extremely elderly man lying down on one of the beds in the room, breathing shallowly. Indeed, the reason that my room contained literally everything was not just that I was a hoarder. Rather, it was because it was the most efficient means to establish direct communication with the Lord. While what I was seeing is closer to a “metaphor” generated by my brain than literal visual contact with the Lord himself, it was still as close to seeing him as a human mind could get.

The Lord turned his head slowly towards me, and with a voice sounding like a calm stream, he slowly began to speak.

“Did you succeed in proselyting the local inn?”

I felt slight pang of guilt in my own failures tonight knowing that, in the past, him asking this question would have been completely unnecessary. Nonetheless, I responded honestly.

“No, Lord. I was unable to enter any bars due to a lack of valid identification.”

A small frown appeared on the Lord’s face at that.

“To my best knowledge the local inn should be a hub of activity for all the talk of this town. I do not see why you could not get into one merely because due to a trivial matter of identification papers.”

I clenched my fist slightly before taking a deep breath. I recalled the Lord rejecting me using modern technologies which could have easily carried my identification, such as an omni-watch, or even a more old-fashioned device like a smartphone on the basis of them being “devices of the faithless”. Moreover, a device capable of searching the internet would have enabled me to locate bars much more quickly. Nonetheless…

“I will try harder in the future, Lord.”

“You know what should happen if you fail.”

His point was unfortunately incontrovertibly valid. Should I fail in my mission of spreading faith, we would both cease to exist.