Gods and Robots: part 8

The end of history?

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: A rogue AI megaship known as ‘Probably Better’ has transited through the portal to Palinor and is naughtily using magic, which shouldn’t be possible. Drawing power from directly from the sun, the megaship has angered the gods themselves…

Bruglia. Palinor.
3208. Brightsun.

Once deities feel compelled to weigh in on a conflict, there’s a slim chance of it resolving in a way that will leave anybody in the vicinity alive. When all other options are exhausted, the gods enter the fray - and their considerations are of grander schemes than the mere survival of mortals. They deal in matters of belief and faith, of worship and decrees, not in the pitter-patter of tiny feet. From the vantage point of the all-powerful, individuality recedes. One life is unimportant; it is the many who tilt the scales. There is only the people.

The obsidian creature hovering above the city threatened the people. It had killed thousands already, many of whom would have been church-goers, even in those heathen times. It was a troublemaker, and had demonstrated an alarming disregard for wielding etiquette. Maximal energy draining from the local sun was an idiot move. It tempted chaos.

Paf could not sense a mind, not in the traditional sense. Despite her diminutive size, she was often the first and last tactic used by the gods. There had been a time when they had roamed the world at their leisure, often together. The pantheon had been strong, and had crafted a civilisation fit for their love. Ihlomet had his elemental weapons, unsubtle but definitive. Glaicius could conjure illusions so convincing that some had lived their entire lives trapped within, without ever realising. Unihex was the arbiter of natural laws, able to tap into the core energies of the planet and twist physics to his whims.

Nothing so dramatic for Paf. She was small, had made herself small, such that she could stand on the palm of a human’s hand. Sometimes she went smaller. If Unihex saw the universe at the macro level, her point of view was the micro. Her expertise was molecular and atomic: when she looked at someone she saw not a person, but a cluster of cells, a galaxy of particles cohering to a pattern. From a pebble to a mountain, she saw into the structure of things, and she could pluck at those molecules, and the binding forces holding them together. The shape of a brain was familiar to her, and she could sense the electrical signals passing from neuron to neuron, even intercept and redirect them.

While Unihex attracted its attention with his big sword, Paf flew closer to the floating ship, shrinking herself as she approached, until she was small enough to slip between the solid substance. As she flitted down paths, around circuitry and along substrates, she recognised some of the materials. The ship was carved from the rocks of the Appilan Abyss, yet was infused with something else. There was an interlaced layer that was foreign; she was certain it was not of Palinor, for she would have recognised it. It was Max-Earth technology, somehow fused with Palinese materials. Nothing like it had ever existed before.

She sought its core, but there did not seem to be one. The ship’s entire form was its mind, distributed throughout. There was a swelling of energies at its centre, and she moved towards that area, passing through bulkheads and pipes carrying unknown fluids. There it was: a blue ball of light, what had perhaps once been a Max-Earth reactor of some sort, now entirely powered by magic. Without magic, the ship would cease to function.

Feeling for the intricacies of the ship’s internal structure, Paf identified a strand that would begin to unravel its ability to harness magic. Breaking the bonds between molecules would disrupt their capacity for transferring the necessary energies, leaving the ship with only its Max-Earth technology - which was defunct on Palinor. She reached out to pull on the strand, but instead felt tingling pinpricks across her hand, and her eyes widened as the tips of her fingers began to disperse, coming apart as a fine mist.

It took all her concentration to maintain her form, countering the ship’s attack as best she could, while swiftly reversing and slipping out through the hull. Paf, the Tiny God, held herself together in time to get clear, with a new-found fear and respect for the Max-Earth megaship.

The late-afternoon sun was flickering, dipping in brightness before returning to its full strength. The micrological attack on her ceased as the daylight returned to normal.

“The ship has wielding capabilities equal to my own,” she told the others. “Do not underestimate it.”

“It’s a brute,” Glaicius said, with an expression of distaste. “No finesse, no fine control. It wields magic like a bludgeon.”

A beam of fire burst from the front of the ship, splashing harmlessly over Unihex’s chest. The beam shifted from red to blue, ice encasing his upper torso, but Unihex batted it away like a bothersome fly. The ship began to move for the first time, retreating, putting distance between it and them.

“It is an infant,” spoke Unihex, his thoughts entering their minds without a sound, “and knows nothing of the power with which it is playing. In this realm, I have no equal. We should make swift work of this.”

Feet straddling two of the mesas, he stretched forth his fingers and formed a fist. Paf could sense the crushing gravity warp enveloping the ship, holding it in place, squeezing its hull. It was unable to move, and resisting being crushed was clearly consuming all of its concentration.

One hand still outstretched, Unihex raised the sword with the other. “Ihlomet, if you please.”

The size of a tall human, Ihlomet ascended to perch upon Unihex’s wrist. Touching the blade, he whispered something and it ignited, flame a mile long licking into the air, turning to black smoke as it left the blade. The surrounding light rippled and flexed in the heated air. Lava dripped from its lower edge, falling to the city below where it spread over buildings and along streets.

“Find me an intrusion,” Unihex ordered her, and Paf closed her eyes, reaching out again to the megaship, looking for a weak point to receive the swing of the blade. She found one, and Unihex knew her thoughts immediately.

Taking a step forward, he swung the blade one-handed, its movement through the sky producing a shockwave that rushed ahead of it across the city. Glaicius replicated the sword with an illusion, obfuscating its real position. Seconds before it was to slice into the megaship, half a dozen small projectiles escaped from its hull and impacted along the advancing blade, the explosions knocking it aside by a relatively tiny distance - but enough for it to miss. The ship had easily seen through Glaicius’ trickery.

The sword kept going by the force of its own momentum, scything through the air, glancing past the megaship by inches, and then the blade crunched into the city below, cutting a new canyon across the centre of the mesa. Buildings collapsed and toppled into the crack, sewers were ruptured, and tremors rippled out. Fires spread perpendicular to the weapon’s impact site.

Unihex strained to withdraw the blade, which had become embedded deep in the ground. Seizing the brief moment of distraction, the megaship released another missile, larger this time, which rocketed towards the gods’ position. A blinding flash, silent, and then an eruption and a growing fireball of immense power. It wasn’t magic, but Max-Earth technology, and Paf could feel the splitting of the atom as it happened - tearing, ripping at the fabric of nature, a chain reaction spreading exponentially at a rate that would engulf them and the city.

She fixed upon the core of the detonation, the fission reaction, and attempted to constrain it, to halt it before it blossomed into something that could not be controlled. The weapon was a betrayal, an insult, and it disgusted her.

“I cannot contain it,” she said, feeling the heat of the coming firestorm, the sound of the shockwave deafening..

“I am with you,” said Ihlomet, joining her side and redirecting the heat towards the sky, away from the city, the flames arcing in a sweeping parabola away from the city at his command. It was not enough: the bomb was no simple detonation, and was made of many parts, each of them devastating in their own way.

Unihex released his hold on the sword and channelled his attention to the growing mushroom-shaped devastation. He brought his hands together, forcing the energies of the bomb back upon itself, compressing it, shrinking it, insisting that it return to its prior state. He commanded the laws of the universe to obey him, and the new sun that had bloomed above Bruglia slowly diminished. Paf breathed a sigh of relief, as she sensed the volatile materials calming themselves, the threat of atomic instability and contamination averted.

The megaship had seized its moment of distraction. No longer held by Unihex’s gravity field, it was moving, and she could sense it had adjusted its mental defences: it was learning from each of their attacks.

A cry of surprise came from Unihex, a sound none of them were accustomed to hearing. He was shifting his weight, moving his legs as if troubled by something underfoot. That’s when Paf saw them crawling up and along his body: thousands of creatures, slightly taller than a human, formed of the same materials as the megaship. They swarmed out of the city, clambering up Unihex, covering his legs in a black, writhing mass, like ants swarming over a new food source. Each was tiny relative to Unihex, but they were present in overwhelming numbers. Unihex tried brushing at them with his hands, shaking his legs, but they would not be dislodged. Still they kept coming, the swarm spreading up his torso and along his arms. Each of the gods tried dislodging the crawling creatures from Unihex’s body, burning them, freezing them, dismantling them, but still more came, scurrying out of the grimy, rubble-strewn streets of the city.

The sun dimmed again and Paf sensed a force gripping Unihex’s body, channelled from the ship and through the thousands of skittering creatures now covering his body like a second skin. It was a physologist’s grip, a warping of gravity, the very same techniques Unihex would use. And then Unihex himself began to rise, ascending, the ship keeping pace, both of them lifting away from the city and towards the heavens. Rubble from the city poured from around Unihex’s feet, some of the metallic creatures fell, but still he kept moving skywards, drawn up by the whims of the Max-Earth abomination.

“What do we do?” she asked, turning to the others, but Glaicius was already gone. Ihlomet was staring up at the ship and Unihex as they receded into the distance high above, open-mouthed and too stunned to respond. She landed on his shoulder and slapped his face. “What do we do?”

Photo by Matt Johnson on Unsplash

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Meanwhile.

Leanne Shawler

wrote an interesting piece about how stories shift and change beneath our feet, whether we want them to or not, riffing on something I wrote back in 2023 (!):

Why The Ending to “Obsidian and Flame” Changed

Also, Leanne has a really nice dinkus.

I need to come back to this and write more about it once it’s percolated through my brain a bit, but in the meantime I leave it here so that you can also start thinking about Ben’s analysis of a satisfying life:

Aliveness and where to find it

Jason Chatfield

wrote about a recent Substack event, which was all about Notes:

Notes on Notes (and Why I’m Cautiously Optimistic about Substack)

I was fortunate to go to a couple of London-based Substack events over the summer, and left feeling similarly uplifted and optimistic — while having to temper everything with the reality that every single tech company over the last 20 years has completely shit the bed.

Having somehow talked to a whole bunch of the folks at Substack, from co-founders to engineers to customer support…I’m really hopeful that they’re going a different route. But, you know, we’re still operating within capitalism, soooo

Right, time for some author notes, in which I mainly complain about feeling a bit poorly. Poor me.

Author notes

Getting this chapter out the door nearly broke me. It might be the closest I’ve come in a decade of writing serials to giving up. It was a momentary, fleeting sense of hopelessness, one which passed as swiftly as it arrived (hence today’s chapter existing!), but it was unnerving regardless.

The trigger was coming down with a weird migraine/viral something-or-other on Tuesday afternoon. I was on the train back from London after work, which normally provides me with two solid hours of uninterrupted writing. Instead, my brain dribbled out of my ear. It wiped me out for the evening and the following day. When I have a migraine they normally come on fast and dissipate similarly quickly. In this case, it’s lingered all week, never quite blooming into a full-on session — which makes me think it’s something else.

Anyway, Wednesday was a day of brain fog. I managed a few words in the evening, but each sentence was like wading through treacle. It felt difficult in a way I haven’t had for ages. Writing is never ‘easy’, but I’m fortunate to usually feel the flow, to get into the zone quite quickly.

This was compounded, I suspect, by not being able to rely on my usual tricks: when I’m struggling with a blank page, I like to simply dive into a regular character’s brain and poke around. I might not know what to write, might be unsure of the order of events, but that character will no doubt have an opinion or a reaction I can lean into.

In today’s chapter, I have a spaceship and a bunch of omnipotent gods that we haven’t really met before. Uhhh…?

Except, of course, we have met them before. Paf and Glaicius showed up in ‘Zealots’ back in August 2022. My initial instinct was to take an omniscient, detached narrator for this chapter (a bit like last week’s), to lend the events a sense of grandeur and scale. Alternatively, I’d considered going with Unihex’s POV, but that felt like it would rob the god of too much mystery. (true story: I did consider doing a flashback episode showing Unihex’s past/origin — probably not going to do that now. Feels indulgent and unnecessary/a distraction)

Going with Paf for the POV character made sense. She’s the smallest, which contrasts nicely with everything else going on. Still massively powerful, of course, but hers is a different perspective. I’d established her as being quite spiky and grumpy in her earlier appearance, so that then gave me a way in.

Still, the chapter remained a struggle, not least because the migraine turned out to be more of a long-term viral weird thing that has lingered all week. I’m usually a night writer, happily staying up until midnight once everyone else is asleep, but every day this week I’ve been in bed by 10pm. That cuts out a huge chunk of my writing time, so everything has become extremely compressed (hence no audio today - sorry!).

One thing that did help is that I’d worked out a lot of the fine details of this conflict ahead of time. I have a long, scribbly page of notes about PB’s encounter with Unihex, and how it was going to go down. I needed to work that out early, simply to make sure that it was possible. I knew the beats I wanted in the story, but the fight had to make sense within the rule that have been established. I think it just about holds together. Let me know what you think.

Obviously, it’s not quite done yet. There’s still some more to go with ‘Gods and Robots’ before we can go find out what’s been happening on Mid-Earth.

Phew. I’m tired.