Legends Of The Multiverse #10 - A Digital Temple

dber (66)in #fiction • 7 years ago (edited)

Every God is all-powerful, until they're not.

Man is starving. He finds a tree which bears fruits. The tree becomes God.

The tree is struck by lightning. A flaming branch falls to the ground. The tree is God no longer. God is the lightning.

Yet the tree takes on new significance. The tree is the manifestation of God's power. It is sacred. A temple.

So it goes - one God conquered by another, conquered by another, the old bent to the will of the new.

There has always been a war between the Gods. Sometimes fought with violence, sometimes with cunning, always with an eye toward maximum influence.

And like all prolonged wars, the weapons evolve with time, until they are more insidious and effective than the belligerents could ever have imagined.

"Let me know when you're gonna cut power on your end!"

Michael called out across the server farm, over the collective whir of one hundred thousand cooling fans.

Nick was watching "Gyro's" latest upload PiP on his right contact. Gyro's crass voice spoke into his left auditory nerve at 30% volume.

Michael picked up the blow horn. "Nick!"

Attention diversion paused Gyro's feed and Nick looked up. "Whas up?"

"Tell me when you're gonna cut the power!" It was frustrating enough the reboot had to happen manually, but Michael wondered ruefully which supervising asshole had paired him with Nick.

Nick cursed, just a little. He'd already cut the power on his end. A few more minutes and the whole place might have burned out. Even Nick knew power had to be cut simultaneously or one generator would overcompensate and fry.

"Gotcha." Fuck if he was gonna tell Mike though. Then he added "shuttin' down now, " and mimed pulling the switch.

Mike turned to his console and did the same. Almost instantly the entire warehouse, several square miles, went dark. The collective buzz of machinery circled down the drain of a slow motion death rattle until there was only silence and the emergency lights.

Around the world billions of users would be experiencing an information blackout for the first time in years. Contacts, implants, even rudimentary tablets and smart phones - all of it would be unhooked for 45 seconds. The World Bank estimated the outtage would cost over 100 billion dollars in Universal Quantum Currency.

But it would all be worth it. This final update to the global network would be entirely self maintaining. All the simulations showed future software updates could be developed faster and more effectively by the patch itself than by external human and A.I. troubleshooters working in tandem.

It would be the end of downtime. One final, collective holding of breath before the eternal flow of information began in earnest.

Nick's contact lens had been recording Gyro's feed up until the moment of shut down. He waited out the forty five seconds watching it.

"...second now folks, this thing is going to go live. Now all of you know I'm not a religious man - hell you've seen the inside of my skull! I'm hardly a man, period! But right now, I can feel that old time religion. My sensors are tingling, baby! We are right there, on the edge of the greatest precipice man has ever encountered. The final brick, my electric sheep, is about to be placed in the Temple of God! Not the God of your ratty new testament, your toilet paper King James, but a new God unlike anything mankind has ever encountered. Rest assured friends, when we come out the other side of this tunnel, we will be reborn as a species in the eyes of..."

The feed went dead and Gyro, with his gleaming multi-frequency eyes froze mid sentence. A frissee ran down Nick's spine.

Michael stared at his watch. 35 seconds. He spoke into the blowhorn. "On my mark."

Nick hesitated, but raised his hand to the lever.

"Five, four, three..."

In the final two seconds an insane idea flickered in Nick's mind. He imagined sabotaging everything. Smashing the server module and racing over to Michael, killing him, with his bare hands if neccessary, and then setting fire to entire building. The thought came unbidden and fierce, and for a split second Nick saw himself as history might see him, as one of the two most culpable people in the entire human race.

"...two, one, mark!"

Michael pulled his lever.

Nick stared at the slate gray lever switch for another long second, consumed with worry. But then he remembered the series finale of "Nostrom's Retreat" was airing tonight and he wondered, along with much of the world, whether Nostrom had actually killed McHaley in the last episode or just maimed him, as so many streamers predicted. Nick thought otherwise and had been working on a zippy one liner to post if he turned out to be right.

Running several candidates around his head, savoring the potential likes and upvotes and hearts he would receive, Nick was put at ease.

He pulled the lever.

Deep in the heart of a structure larger than any previously conceived by the human race, and invisible to them all, It awoke.

Photo by Silver Spoon (Own work) [CC0 - Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons