Eventually, it was undeniable: God was breaking down. Iften and high priest Solnod fought the rust, and sanctified new gears, and replaced fraying wires, but the circuit boards were rotting and they had no way to fix things.
Iften scoured the holy texts for answers, but found no answers in the ancient manuals’ moth-eaten pages. Meanwhile, God’s footsteps grew ever-more faltering.
One morning, Iften went to pray upon God’s shoulders. He surveyed creation. He had seen holos of the world man had made, all dusty browns and grays. Now, under God’s ministrations, the world was green. Would it stay that way in his absence?
It was from this vantage that Iften saw the stranger. Something had attacked her, and she lay sprawled in the grass. He hurtled back to Solnod, who prayed to God to stop. When He had, Iften was lowered on ropes, and hauled the stranger aloft.
When she came to, she asked them, “Where the fuck am I?”
“Upon the shoulders of Deus 451-297a-2rc9,” Solnod intoned.
“Great,” the Stranger said. “Mech freaks.”
“Blasphemer!” Solnod cried.
“I don’t have time for this,” the stranger said. “I’m trying to save the world. Take me to the Factor.”
“It is forbidden!” Solnod said, disgusted.
The stranger pulled a small black rectangle from her pocket. She pointed it at Solnod. “Now”
“I shall do no such-“ Solnod roared. The box bucked. Solnod flew. Bones cracked. He lay still.
The Stranger pointed the box at Iften. “Take me to the Factor.”
Iften’s lip quivered.
The stranger sighed. “If you take me to the Factor,” she said. “I can save your God.”
#
What else could Iften do? He prayed to God, and God strode towards the Factor.
“Why go there?” he asked the Stranger.
“To save the world.”
The stranger didn’t look like a savior. She looked like a dirty woman in her forties with a bandaged leg.
“The thing you worship as a god,” she said, “was first built to serve humans.”
“Blasphemer.”
“That’s as may be. But the Factor is where these gods come from. If I can get there, there are texts that can help me put humanity back where we belong. Back in control.”
#
The Factor was a savage scar in the world, a trench of raw rock and magma. God limped over ruined buildings and toppled machinery. The bodies of lesser deities were scattered all around. The air made Iften feel nauseous and light-headed.
They traveled along it for two days before they came to the Factor’s heart. There, a building rose like a monolith, soot-black, with great doors taller even than God, and a thousand blank windows like the eyes of some great beast.
“There,” the stranger said, and God picked up speed.
They went through the gates, into a vast cavern full of mechanical hulks and shadows. It smelled of rot and animal musk.
“This is a dead place,” Iften said.
“This is where we find an answer to all the world’s ills.”
And in the darkness, something heard them, and roared its disagreement.
It was huge, a great amalgam of pollution-mutated flesh, and it had made its nest here in the heart of the world’s corruption. It bared teeth in a maw as wide as a river mouth. It spread leathery wings. It charged God.
“Go!” the stranger screamed, dragging Iften off God’s shoulder and onto an elevated walkway. God, ignorant of his faithful, strode into battle, massive and glorious despite the sparking of his divine heart.
“We have to find the manual!” the stranger yelled, while Iften recited the holy scripture over and over. The Stranger dragged him away, hauled him from room to room, searching, searching.
Behind them, the battle raged. The whole building shook. Ceilings collapsed. Floors gave way. Walls became landslides. And still the Stranger searched high and low. And then-
“I’ve got it.” She sounded shocked. She sounded lost in the moment. She held a thick glossy book with a spiral binding. Its pages were dense with scripture, and Iften recognized enough to know that this was a manual. No. The manual. Everything he had ever read was but a scrap of this single ur-tome. And seeing it in this blasphemer’s hands, he went to grab it from her, but she pulled out the black box and pointed it at him.
“I’m sorry-” she started, but never finished. A concrete slab fell from the ceiling and killed her in an instant.
Iften stared. Divine intervention? How could he know? But he could still see the ur-manual, could still pick it up. So, he did so, and fled from the room.
#
When Iften returned to God, the creature was dead, and God was well on His way. Frantically Iften tore open the manual. Franctically, he read. And as he did, he realized the blasphemer had spoken the truth. Man had created a machine to undo the scars people had carved in the world. And the machine had seen what man had wrought, and turned against its master. Man’s dominance had been ended, and from the wreckage of that society, Iften’s ancestors had recognized their new Gods.
The more he read, the more Iften understood that the stranger’s plan could have been made real. This God and all the others could be reset, could be made servants of man once more. This manual was the gateway to a new world. The old world. With this he could do more than repair his God. He could master it.
Carefully, Iften excised each of these pieces of lost knowledge from the ur-manual, and burned them. Man had spilled enough ash upon the earth, what was a little more? And when the last record of a way back to the world that had been was gone, Iften repaired what he could, and God took him away from that old hell, and back out into the new Eden.