The Church of the Undergod

THE MAGENTA SUN bakes the already wrinkled cheek of Yaum Yatu'dea through the diaphanous and unblemished window of his office. The ebony door behind him is of similar size and proportion to the window, but it invites him to look out more than the window invites him to leave. The cushion of Yaum's gas chair finds an equilibrium an inch and a quarter lower than it was at the factory, and the cylinder relinquishes its lifeforce in breaths below a whisper. Lines upon lines of turquoise code carve into his eyes like Halloween pumpkins, the incisions scarcely perceptible until the whole retina gives at once later than he'll live.

The code writes and rewrites itself. Yaum's fingers, rigid as rods and agile as octopi, are merely a vehicle. They're the gears on the bicycle that the code rides to completion, clicking and snapping all the way, the fingers and the keys alike. Sixty years ago, computers exceeded the power of the human brain. Yaum's computer is at least ten times more powerful than his brain, and the difference grows every day.

Yaum takes no credit for the motion of his hands. He is proud of that – for tomorrow, men, women, and children will eat from the hands of machines possessed by the same code that possesses him now.

And their mouths, no matter how many teeth adorn them, shall feed the Holy Victim the Undergod. Gueleum 24:8.

Yaum's fingers stop. He thinks, at first, that the code is complete, and so he looks at the screen, now with both his eyes and the focus that had fallen out of them. He could no longer tell, just by observing the code, whether or not it was going to work. Only the code knew that, programmed with more introspective ability than he himself was allowed to exercise.

He runs the code, and there promptly manifests a simulation of what it thought the robot would do once assembled. A soulless gray sludge runs along a conveyor belt into the back of the machine, and a thousand hands and tubes come down from the top of a glass chamber to splice and churn it until it finds the Sufferer and is made holy. In a matter of minutes, bakery-grade bread is supposed to emerge from a chute in the front. Instead, it's the same execrable paste as before, except that it's the color of skin instead of stone.

The code is still imperfect. Yet Yaum knows, because his hands had frozen, that the code was content not to be written any further. He sees before him, then, two lines of thought to entertain. Either the code, calling to him in the voice of the Undergod, is indeed complete, or his connection to that voice is weak, and needs revitalizing.

Now he looks out the window.

It is, indeed, shaped like a doorway. Were it broken, Yaum could easily walk out, and the last of Man's remaining shackles – gravity – would yank him back into humility. No. He and everyone else in this city is too important to allow themselves to do that. They're at once too great and too small to let the Victim writhe under the earth unaided.

Tomorrow, he would descend – peacefully, humbly, and gracefully. He would admire the height of the towers; and needing to justify their height, while so many crawl like ants, unable to see their own shadow, he would be reminded of his service to them and the One whose hunger they sate.

The next day...

IN THE MORNING, the sun is cyan. The skyscrapers, cruelty-free, have the color and hardness of ivory and the shine and smoothness of seashells. They run into the sky like roads running into the sea, the waters within a thousand feet of vanishing over the world's curve. Invisible cars pass through each other on the street; traffic is as old, dead, and retrospectively horrible as the Plague. The air tastes like cotton candy, melting cheerfully in the warmth of the hydrated mouth. It's said to be sweeter if you smile, and so everyone does. The streets are free of frowns.

"Good morning," a man in a brown suit says as Yaum passes.

"Good morning," Yaum says.

Thirty seconds pass.