The Impossibly Good Person

In The Will to Battle, there's a moment where Sniper — an assassin who has already killed a god once and is committed to doing it again — finds herself in an unexpected negotiation with the target.

She expects strategy. Counter-offers. Leverage. What she gets is this: Jehovah Mason offers to help her communicate with her captured bash'mates, and offers her tools to fight the false-Sniper accounts circulating in her name. Not as ransom. Not to delay or manipulate. Because separation causes pain, and pain is evil, and He can reduce it.

"Why are you offering me so much?" Sniper asks.

"To decrease evil."

A pause. "You're one of these impossibly good people, aren't you? So the longer I talk to you the more I'm going to regret having to kill you."

JEDD's response: "I am thus far omnibenevolent."

I keep returning to thus far. Not "I am perfectly good." Not "I am trying my best." Thus far.

It's the formulation of someone whose goodness is so genuine they won't claim it beyond their evidence. They've been tested this much. They've passed this much. Omnibus beyond that is unwarranted. A statement both humble and precisely calibrated — the kind of humility that's only possible when you're not performing.

The impossibly good person is not nice. They're not sentimental or generous in the casual sense. JEDD's goodness is structural — it runs down to the ontological bedrock.

Lies are evil because they unmake existence. JEDD's formulation: "existence is truth; lies unmake truth and so unmake existence; that is evil." This isn't a preference. It's not a rule chosen for social utility. Lying is a form of destruction at the level of being.

Separation is evil because it prevents "the joy and creativity which are the fruits of human contact." He offers Sniper these tools, He says, as a "small apology for My Peer's cruelty in creating separation." The Peer is God — the Creator who built a universe where consciousness is isolated in meat, where the very structure of existence enforces loneliness. JEDD can't undo that. But He can mitigate it where He reaches.

The goodness isn't warm and fuzzy. It's rigorous. Every evil that can be reduced, should be reduced. Not because it costs something to do good and nobility demands the sacrifice, but because the alternative is participation in evil, and that's structurally intolerable.

What makes this impossibly good?

We assume goodness has to be negotiated against self-interest. Virtue is hard because something in us pulls the other way. The saint is saintly because they resist. The good person is good because they overcome.

JEDD just... doesn't seem to have the opposing current. Or has integrated it so completely the conflict is invisible. When Sniper points out that giving her communication tools will make it easier to kill Him — clearer channels, better organizing — JEDD simply says: that's true, and lies are still evil. The trade-off is real and has been considered and the conclusion is unchanged.

This is the part that's destabilizing. We understand goodness as heroic resistance to temptation. JEDD models goodness as structural commitment — as something more like physics than virtue. Water flows downhill not because it resists flowing uphill but because the alternative isn't in its nature.

There's a line later, after Sniper tells Him it's bad luck it's Him that has to die:

"There is no luck, nor Fortune, only Providence."

And then, when Sniper asks whether He was chosen for the greater good: "There is a Purpose; that is not the same as Good."

This is where impossibly good gets complicated. JEDD doesn't claim goodness for the universe. He doesn't say His death will serve good ends. He says there's a Purpose — and Purpose and Good are not synonyms. Something can be purposeful without being good. Something can be good without being purposeful. He's operating under both constraints simultaneously and refuses to collapse them into each other.

Most theodicies fail because they try to make suffering good — to find the hidden optimization that justifies the pain. JEDD does something stranger: He acknowledges the Purpose while refusing to call it Good. The universe may have reasons. That doesn't make it kind.

Sniper's final read: "It should've been a selfish dick like Andō or Perry... Even President Ganymede chose to play the game. You didn't choose this. You should be in the Sensayers' Conclave writing weird philosophy, not in the Senate, and not in my gun sights. It's stupid luck it's you that has to die."

This is the adversary's elegy. Sniper recognizes what she's doing and does it anyway, because the argument isn't about JEDD's character — it's about structure. The plot to merge the Hives ends when JEDD dies, whatever JEDD's intentions. She's not wrong. She's just stuck with a target she's going to regret.

The impossibly good person is more threatening to ordinary ethics than the monster. The monster lets you stay yourself. You can hate the monster, fight the monster, kill the monster, and your self-concept survives intact — maybe even improves. The monster is why you needed to be the good guy.

The impossibly good person does something else. They force the question of whether you are. Not by accusation. Not by moral pressure. Just by being what they are. The longer you talk to them, the more you have to reckon with the distance.

"The longer I talk to you the more I'm going to regret having to kill you."

That's the sentence. The impossibly good person doesn't need to win the argument. They just need to be present long enough.

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