“Anyone can be a prophet. You just have to say that what you’re talking about is a reflection of God. Or of the gods. Or of some divine spirit. However you want to put it. Whether those things come true isn’t one way or another about it.”

“But what you said did come true. You preached for interdependency and it happened.”

“Yes, it was good for me that it turned out that way.”

“So you didn’t know they would.”

“I already told you that I didn’t. But we certainly worked hard to make them happen, and to give it the appearance of inevitability. And of course the whole mystical angle helped too.”

Cardenia furrowed her brow. “You’re a founder of a church.”

“Yes.”

“But listening to you, you don’t seem to be particularly religious.”

“Not really, no.”

“Or to believe in God. Or gods.”

“I really don’t. And when we designed the church, we intentionally made the divine aspect of it as ambiguous as possible. People don’t mind having the mystical aspect of a church being poorly defined as long as you make the rules of the church clear. We did that. We modeled a bit off of Confucianism, which strictly speaking wasn’t a religion, and added bits we thought would be useful from other religions.”

“So you don’t believe in your own church!”

“Of course I do,” Rachela said. “We created a set of moral precepts to bind the various human systems together. We did it because we thought it was desirable and to some extent necessary. Since I believe in those precepts, I believe in the mission of the church. At least, the mission of the church when we founded it. Human institutions tend to drift from their creators’ intent over time. Another reason to have clear rules.”

“But the divine element is fake.”

“We decided that it was no more fake than the divine aspect of any other religion. As far as the evidence goes, in any event.”

Cardenia felt a little light-headed. It was one thing to believe the predominant church of the Interdependency was bunk, which was a thing Cardenia had believed for as long as she could remember thinking about it. It was inconvenient when, strictly speaking, you were now head of that church, but she could at least keep that to herself. It was another thing to have the founder of the church, or at least the core of memories that comprised her, confirm it was bunk.

“Naffa was right,” Cardenia said. “The Interdependency is a scam.”

“I don’t know who Naffa is,” Rachela I said.

“She was a friend of mine,” Cardenia said. “I had a dream where she appeared to me, as you, telling me the Interdependency was a scam.”

“If I were telling this story, I would have said that I had had a mystical vision of the Prophet,” Rachela I said.

“It was just a dream.”