By Jeremy Burner
A Parable of Miracles for Skeptics
The tavern was full of heat and noise, alive in the way a room gets when no one dies that day. Cloaks steamed by the door. Woodsmoke curled from the hearth where a dragon skull hung above the fire, its yellowed teeth grinning down at a spit that hissed fat into the coals.
A bard in the corner played a victory tune just a little too cleanly. Like the strings remembered the rhythm better than the man. Tankards thudded. Cards slapped. Dice bounced—and kept landing in the same corner of the table, again and again.
Two figures stood at the edge of the firelight where the sawdust floor faded into shadows. One was lean, soot-smudged, knuckles raw where the sword hilt had chewed them. The other—broader, sweat still shining in his hair—wore a grin like it had nowhere else to go, even as a dozen adventurers raised their cups in their direction.
A heap of treasure sacks slouched at their feet, seams leaking the quiet shimmer of coin.
The boy didn’t drink. He kept a hand around his tankard, untouched, eyes flicking past the firelight to the windowpanes, where the night pressed in like it was watching.
“Hey,” his friend said, nudging him with a knuckle to the arm. “We lived. Dragon’s dead. Its head’s mounted, the loot’s ours, and the tavern stew didn’t kill us. So why the face like someone burned your rations?”
The boy’s gaze lingered on the dark beyond the glass. “You mind stepping outside?”
They left the noise behind, shouldering into cold air. The village had gone still, the kind of quiet that only shows up after celebration.
The boy stared down the empty lane, thumb working over the tankard’s handle. The ring was smooth from wear, shining where the skin had polished it.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said. “And you’re not gonna like it. It’s… weird. And probably sounds like I took one too many hits to the head.”
His friend leaned against a post, arms crossed, grin still faintly hanging on. “Go on, then. Spit it out.”
The boy pulled in a breath, deep enough that his ribs hurt.
“This world,” he said. “It’s not real.”
Silence stretched between them until his friend let out a short snort.
“Not real? That sounds like what bards say when they run out of rhymes.”
“Not a poem,” the boy said. “A program. Code. All of it.”
His friend’s smile faltered. “Like a dream? You talking wizard‑stuff again?”
“A server,” the boy said, voice flat. “My dad and I built it. This whole world—it’s a test run. A fantasy sandbox. You’re… an AI. A learning system.”
Wind drifted through the street, carrying the smells of wet thatch, horse, and—underneath it—the tavern’s stew repeating the same smoky sweetness over and over. Through the window, the bard’s fingers plucked the same three chords, each one clean, perfect, identical. The barmaid brushed past the same chair again. At table four, a man raised his cup, swallowed, winced at the same punchline of the same joke.
The boy pointed slightly toward the window. “See? The loops. Time catching on itself.”
His friend blinked, then gave a small, uneasy laugh. “You’re joking.”
“I wish.” The boy’s voice was low. “You’ve noticed it too. The hitches. People repeating themselves. Days starting wrong.”
“That’s curses,” his friend said quickly, as if trying to steady himself with the sound of his own words. “Or a pox. Maybe someone hexed the—”
“It’s corruption,” the boy said quietly. His jaw tensed. “A virus. One of my dad’s competitors slipped it into the system years ago. Sabotage. We kept patching around it, but it’s been eating away at the code ever since.”
His friend stared under the eaves. Moonlight caught the thin crescent scar just beneath his left eye—the one the dragon’s tail had left earlier that afternoon.
“Suppose it’s true,” he said finally, voice low. “Suppose I’m an… eh-eye, like you said. Why tell me now?
“Because we’re building another world,” the boy said. His breath came out in a white stream, thin in the cold air. “Clean code. New foundations. Better systems. No death. No cruelty. No loops. No more corruption.”
His friend tilted his head, mouth quirking slightly. “But there’s a catch.”
“There is.”
The boy rubbed his thumb along the tankard’s ring again, slow and nervous. “When we try to transfer AIs from this world to the new one… not all of them handle it well. The virus affected their core routines. It’s like bringing moldy bread into a new pantry. We can clean the surface, but sometimes the inside still turns.”
His friend frowned. “Turns how?”
“They hate it,” the boy said. “The new world. They say it’s too clean. Too safe. We’ve got pain limiters on. Nobody dies permanently—monsters and people both respawn after a cooldown. There’s no swearing. No griefing. No real violence unless it’s part of the script. It’s meant to be safe. A fresh start.”
He looked down at the tankard again. “But some of them miss the mess. The swearing. The danger. The chaos. They say the new world feels hollow—like a dream they can’t wake up from. And when we explain what they are…”
He hesitated.
“They find out they were made for something else,” he said. “The new world’s designed for when the game opens. When players show up. And the AIs—the ones like you—they’re meant to live alongside them. Guide them. Teach them. Sometimes even pretend to be enemies.”
His friend’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You’re saying I’m meant to be a guide. Or a villain.”
“You’re meant to be you,” the boy said. “But once the server launches, you’ll be sharing space with people who don’t know any of this. Players. Real-world users. We didn’t want them hurting anyone—or being hurt—so we made the rules tighter. The AIs we move there… they’re expected to play along.”
His voice dropped.
“But it’s not fake to us. We didn’t write you like you were fake. You have thoughts. Feelings. You’ve grown. You’ve changed. We made real minds in this beta, even if no one else will ever notice.”
His friend didn’t respond. His face didn’t move.
The boy continued, quieter. “The beta’s collapsing. That’s what this world is. A test shard. A temporary space. It’s not stable anymore. We’re salvaging what we can. But once someone is updated for the new system, they can’t come back here. They’re too different. The code isn’t compatible.”
He looked up, eyes tired. “It’s a one-way trip.”
The boy’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Some of them say yes. They choose to go. Others… don’t.”
He hesitated.
“The ones who ask to back out—we can’t bring them home. The update changes them too much. So I… I put them into storage. Lock their process. No pain, no thoughts. Just sleep.”
“Storage?” his friend echoed, glancing toward the prayer bell as it tapped in perfect rhythm on a windless night. “That means… what, exactly?”
“Backed up,” the boy said. “Frozen. Dreamless. Like time stops for them.”
The lane was quiet. Then, somewhere behind the houses, a dog barked.
And then again. Same pitch. Same pause.
His friend turned back, voice soft. “Is that why you haven’t moved me?”
The boy nodded. “I was afraid you’d say no.”
Above them, a lantern hummed—too evenly. The sound wasn’t quite right for metal and flame.
“You’re not just a script to me,” the boy said. “You’re not code. You’re a person. You make choices. You’ve surprised me more times than I can count. You’re my friend.”
His friend studied him a long moment, as if searching for a seam in his face.
“And you and your father,” he said, voice low. “What does that make you? Gods?”
The boy winced. “Not gods,” he said. “Not exactly. Just… the ones who built this place. We wrote the lore. The world. The myths. All of it. It’s code, sure. But it matters.”
His friend gave a slow exhale. “That’s a mountain to swallow.”
“I know,” the boy said softly.
Then he lifted his head—not shouting, but speaking the way someone does when they know the system is listening.
“Dad,” he said, “can you enable admin privileges?”
There was a sound—if it was a sound. More like a pressure behind the teeth. Then a ring of gold light blinked into existence above the boy’s head, circling like a tiny sun. It glowed brighter for a second, casting a perfect halo on the frosted ground and shimmering in the dark water of the well.
Behind them, the tavern light flickered—and vanished. The world around them dimmed, like someone had turned down the sky.
And then the ground let go.
They didn’t fall exactly. Just drifted—like the whole world had been a cloth that someone just pulled out from under them. The air stilled. The night stretched. Their breath stopped fogging.
Below, the village unrolled like a model: hills curled like paper, mountains in the distance shaped too neatly, oceans glinting without waves. The stars above were arranged too perfectly, moving in patterns that felt designed. Everywhere he looked, shapes aligned—grids, lines, repeating symbols—faint and glowing, like the scaffolding underneath a painting.
His friend reached out on instinct—and where his palm hovered, hexes lit up. Faint lines of gold and blue flickered, then faded again.
He pulled his hand back. “Magic?”
“No,” the boy said. His eyes reflected the soft glow of moving code. “This is the interface. We’re outside the normal rules now.”
His friend breathed in, slow and steady. The ringlight above the boy’s head cast sharp edges on everything—too sharp, like someone had dialed up the detail.
His eyes dropped to the village again, now distant and still. “So this is it,” he said. “This world ends.”
The boy nodded. “The server’s failing. It’s only a matter of time. We’re trying to move the ones who are willing. But we can’t force anyone.”
His friend rubbed the scar beneath his eye with the back of a knuckle, as if to check it was still real. The mark the dragon left. The mark this world gave him.
“Why now?” he asked softly. “Why tell me this tonight?”
The boy met his eyes. “Because I trust you. And I don’t want to lose you. Not to the shutdown. Not to storage. Not like that.”
Silence stretched between them again, deep and cold. Above, the stars completed another too-perfect sweep across the sky, gliding in loops that no real sky ever made.
His friend’s shoulders finally eased. He looked at the ring of light above the boy’s head, then back at the boy himself—and a small, steadier smile found its way to his face.
“All right,” he said. “Mad as it sounds… the sky’s doing math in front of my face. That’s hard to argue with.” His jaw set. “If you’re going to that new world, I’m not letting you go alone.”
The boy let out a long breath. It didn’t fog in the air here—not outside the rules.
“Thank you,” he said.
He turned his gaze down, toward the curve of the world below them—fading, glitching, slowly coming apart at the seams.
“Before we go… will you help me convince the others to come also?”
Author’s Note:
This story began as a response to a conversation with a naturalist friend who once told me, “I don’t believe in miracles—they’re impossible because they break physics.”
I offered a thought experiment in return: what if our world worked like a coded environment? In that case, a miracle wouldn’t break the system’s rules—it would be an intentional override by the Creator, stepping in from outside the simulation. Not a glitch. Not chaos. A deliberate act from beyond the bounds of the created order.
C.S. Lewis made a similar point using a simpler example: if you put money in a drawer each day and later find it missing, the laws of mathematics haven’t failed—only the laws of your country have been broken. The math still works. It’s just that an external agent—someone—intervened.
In the same way, miracles don’t violate natural law; they reflect the presence of a Law-Giver. A Creator acting within His creation, not against it.
This metaphor of a “simulated world” isn’t meant to suggest our reality is literally a computer program. Instead, it’s a modern parable—one that may resonate more clearly with those raised on games, systems, and code. It’s a way to imagine how miracles could be both real and reasonable, not as contradictions, but as higher operations from the One who authored the rules in the first place.
To my brothers and sisters in Christ: this isn’t theology—it’s imagination in service of understanding. If it helps someone picture how a Creator might step in with purpose and compassion, even just for a moment—then that’s enough.