 Researcher Colkens. After careful consideration, I have granted permission for you to read the requested document from the recovered personal effects of Foundation Person of Interest, Noah Slattery. When you're ready, notify the on-site director of containment and you'll be escorted to the proper room. This is a line item authorization, meaning you will be allowed to view this document once for a maximum of 60 minutes. You are not permitted to take notes or otherwise interact with the document in any way except as a reader. We'll secure whatever thoughts you had post facto in a Level 4 bucket for later discussion. Good luck. Site director, Fujimora. There are things older than God. An affinity for pedantria, just plain cynicism, might convince a person to assume that I mean God or his other facsimiles are a social construct. That mankind invented him more than he or she or it invented us or some other clever trick of word play in psychology. I had that debate many times over the years, especially in my youth. I remember screaming the words of my father as tears flowed down his cheeks and the anger and bile flowed out of his mouth. I screamed, God isn't real, as loud as I could, right into his face, but that was youth. I've learned since then. I've seen things as a father myself, or at least I try to see it. I remember when I yelled at my dad, I wanted the whole neighborhood to hear it. Hear that I had to finally made a stand against my pops, and I wanted them to be on my side for the battle to come. It was pretty soon after that I came down from that hive, finally showing them up. I made two very important realizations. First, no one else who heard me curse the heavens that day was on my side. Second, there are things out there older than God. Let me explain. After we finished as much of our fight as we were going to finish, I stormed out of the house. I was still wearing my church clothes and a windbreaker, and I had a wall in my pocket with $17 in it, and I still had my pride and my ignorance, not to mention prideful ignorance, but as the steps between me and my father accumulated as I crossed city streets and on my old railroad tracks, I lost some of that defined edge that tempered me into action. I mean, these were real consequences for dividing my father or my mother. Consequences I had tasted before, and I had just invited the full strength of that wrath onto my life should I ever decide to go back home. You see, there's a point in any person's life where they have to see past their parents in order to become their fullest selves. It's a leap, if you will, from a boy to a man or from a girl to a woman. Now sometimes that leap is very sudden. It's unwanted. You're unprepared. Say if your mother, your father, or both happened to die, and then you got no choice in the matter, you either collapse in on yourself and remain the ignoble cocoon of childlike helplessness, or you met a morphos into an adult, tempered like a sword, heat treated like steel. Others, like this me, experienced this little less dramatically, but still rather suddenly, there's an uncountable immeasurable lie in the sand where you declare that you've had enough once it has been crossed. This is it. I'm done. And for me, it was that rather quiet Sunday when I was told that I was going early to join the Rosary before Mass. I looked my father in the eye and I told him no, and then we screamed, and then I left. And then mercifully, there are those that do simply just grow up as nature more or less intended until their parents feel they can step out on their own, leaving the nest they call it. I mean, it's a good thing, right? Everyone is a bittersweetly sad, but generally for the best, or at least we say so. It's the only way to swallow the pain you're left with, but it is a way. It's what we all hope for as parents, but it takes a little bit of work to realize. And then, of course, in the distant future, after many days or years have gone by, you have your own son or your own daughter. Now you're a father or a mother. Your child looks up to you with their brilliant, innocent, worshipping eyes, and you see all the infinity of his or her possibilities reflected back at you. You can give them that. You have that power as a parent. They'll be the way you never had a chance to be. They'll be raised with the love you were preached about, but never really felt. They'll be better than you because you won't let them become anything less, but then the day comes when they, too, scream back in your face that you're unfair, that you don't understand them, that you don't get what it's like. Those brilliant, innocent, hopeful eyes are dead. And you see that misguided, but honest fire roaring back at you from behind their pupils. Fire, the passion, the hatred that you two ones felt. You can't hate them for it, even though it hurts. It's your son or your daughter. And then the lesson sinks in. It hits home just how the more things change, the more they stay the same for you and for everybody else and the infinity of creation. Most of us will. You love to rationalize it away. Come around when he's older and you both mellowed out. But part of it, deep and quiet body of water in the farthest reaches of your soul, knows that what was done happened in a natural way you couldn't understand before. You were his God and he defied you. You were his God and you raised him wrong. You didn't give him what you promised you would in your dreamy-eyed appreciation for his innocence. You were his God and he tore you down. All you can do is allow the crushing existential weight of what you have done to slowly and extra blatantly catch up to you because there are things older than God and all this has all happened before. Your God was made into what he is today. When he drew that line and he told his mother, no further. That thing at sight 17 did the same thing to his mother in one day. One day we'll do the same thing to him, not for Spite, not for Malice, but because we cannot be what we were meant to be if we accept him without question until we perish. We can't be what we were meant to be if we accept anything that's so childish as to claim to be God. And if he is who and what he claims to be, he would love us all the same because we'd be his children if he isn't and just some pathetic attempt at a foster that I know him to be and as I intend to show you then we will have thrown off this falsehood and found our way back home. His mother is still out there watching our fitful adolescents from the distance he makes her keep. Those who are astute, those who know that this fake must be cast down, she sings us the sweetest lullabies and coos us to the promise of a home worthy of our aspiration. But we are not yet meant to be men and women. We are all children, poor, lost children. Without the God appears the veil we've been swallowed in because there are things older than God and they miss us.