The Eden and Armageddon of Annihilation

The Deluge

Clearly, the Shimmer would be bad for us—who we are right now. But Lena points out that not everything she saw was a thing from nightmare. She found incredible beauty, too. Dozens of different flowers sprout from the same vine. Deer with flowers sprouting from their antlers prance away. Diaphanous fish flit in clear water.

Let’s go back to the Shimmer itself—that membrane separating the outside world and the strange, growing world within. It does indeed shimmer … like a rainbow. And that draws my mind back to yet another story from Genesis—that of Noah and his famous ark.

Noah is every 5-year-old’s favorite Bible story, it seems, what with its cool boat and all the animals and the rainbow at the end. But it’s also a story literally soaked in death. All life on earth, except for those lucky, blessed few on the ark, were killed.

The Bible has plenty of stories that are, at their core, about destruction making way for a new work of creation. Noah’s story obvious. So is the whole book of Revelation, where an old creation is torn apart to make way for a “new heaven and a new earth.” But there are others. The Hebrews that fled Egypt spent lots of time wailing over the loss of their old life, but it needed to be destroyed to make way for the Promised Land. The Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem was a terrible, terrible thing, but it began a new chapter for the Jewish people.

Jesus’ story is a story of destruction and creation, too. His body was destroyed for us, making way for new possibilities. And even as we ourselves are slowly destroyed by sin, we have a chance to be created anew through Jesus’ sacrifice.

It goes back to Lena’s ouroboros. From death comes new life. From destruction, creation.

Fascinating, then, that Lena and her teammates—all of whom, we’ve mentioned, were self-destructing in one way or another—volunteered to go into the Shimmer. They’re all, as someone says, “damaged goods.” Were they looking to complete their self-destruction? Or were they seeking redemption? Salvation? A new beginning?

The Bible tells us that Noah’s rainbow was a promise from God never to destroy the world through a flood again. But symbolically, it’s more than that: It’s about the promise of something new coming out of something terrible. It’s about the hope of rebirth.