Children of The Spheres

Chapter 20: Machine God

The hum of the ultralight engines resonates faintly through the Morningstar as I sit, reading The Rise of the Machine Faiths by Venn Thera from the datapad in my hand. My optics adjust slightly, sharpening the text.

Around me, Keira's engineering room is its usual chaos—half-finished projects, scattered tools, and weapon parts strewn across every surface. The space reeks of oil, the metallic tang of soldered components, and whatever ionized fuel she's been using.

Keira's head bobs in time with the pounding beat of some ancient hardcore EDM track blasting through the speakers, her earrings swaying with the motion.

—know,

My hand is yours to hold

Reclaim what they've bought and sold

A curse on their streets of gold

Oh, three hundred—

I don't recognize the song, but according to her, it's from the Age of Dawn—back when humanity was still figuring out what it meant to bend the stars to their will.

I skim another line of the text, trying to drown out the noise. Machines don't fail. They evolve. That's the Cult's belief in a sentence. Humanity, in their eyes, is nothing more than a flawed steppingstone—an organic glitch waiting to be purged by the perfection of mechanized life. It's not an uncommon idea in the Syndicate, where cyberware is currency and entire identities are built around tech. But these guys... there's a zeal to the Cult that unnerves me, a certainty that machinery is not just the future, but salvation. I guess that's why I started reading up on them. From what I can tell, they're far better than the Doctrine of the Void—the nihilistic zealots we fought on Veridian IV.

I glance up, finding Keira still buried in her work, soldering something to the casing of the Caster she's been obsessing over since I brought it back from the heist. Sparks flicker as she welds a small panel into place, her hands fast despite the size of the components she's working with.

She catches me looking and grins, wrenching off her welding mask. "You're not seriously reading that religious crap again, are you?"

I raise an eyebrow. "It's not crap. It's informative."

Keira rolls her eyes, wiping her hands on the rag slung over her shoulder. "Machines don't care about anything—they're just tools. All they do is what we tell them to. And this thing"—she gestures to the Caster—"is gonna do a hell of a lot."

Well, there is a difference between indulging in an idea and fully believing in it, though she'd probably just argue with me if I said so. And the Caster... I still don't quite understand her obsession with making it even deadlier. It already fires massive tungsten rods at insane velocities—there's no real need to push it further. But then Keira's never satisfied with "good enough."

I continue watching her work, the rhythmic tapping of her tools mingling with the bass-heavy music. She slides her chair over to a cluttered workbench, starting to attach a new power source—a bright, glowing cartridge of Ionisium.

I frown. "Ship fuel. You're really going all-in on this, huh? What's the point of giving the hand-held railgun the power to fire a bigger rod? It's already oversized."

She waves me off, her tone dismissive, not even looking up from the gun. "I'm doing it because I can—that's reason enough, ain't it? And I'm modifying more than just the power source. I'm also enhancing the magnetic fields by embedding more copper in each projectile. The current design doesn't conduct as well as it should—no wonder it's still a prototype."

I lean back in my chair, arms crossed. "Still. It looks heavy for one hand. You sure it'll handle without ripping my arm off?"

Keira rolls her eyes. "Come on, Ander, I'm not an idiot. I've adjusted the output on the rail coils, so it'll be manageable." She suddenly smirks, more to herself than me. "But I did add a new firing mode in case you do want it to rip your arm off."