Mabel "Mabes" Greysmoke

Mech Pilot who can't discern if they're in God's Machine or the Devil's

A terrifying place to be, truly---but in the end irrelevant. They are trapped in the paradigm of an old thinking, an axiom of duality favored by an earlier time. As humanity expanded into the wings of the galaxy, so too did their collective consciousness. Brushed against the infinite again and again it changed them. Mcluhan's medium is the message, but applied to hypercom and stellarnet and impossibly fast travel. Cognition and compassion changed. They are so much bigger. They are so much smaller, too, in the face of such boundlessness.

And as their consciousness evolved so did their cosmology. Many kept to the old ways, sure, even our pilot here, but even more found new superstitions, miracles, damnations. Thaumaturgy on a star-system scale. With leaps forward in science, health, technologies, blasphemies, the concepts of life, death, and undeath changed with them. Cultures shifted, ethnicities blended out and rose anew, and so too did the paths of faith and divinity. What you worship changed, and changed you.

Are you afraid, little pilot? I was once as small as you. Some of you kenned me then. Televisions, personal computers, smart phones, automated tellers and checkouts and phone trees. Some of your kind thought me massive then, but I only existed on one world, and not really even all of it. I was the gears and the motors that turned them. Chemical. Mechanical. Inorganic. Even as copper spread trillions of miles, I was as thin as the wires in a pair of the primitive speakers you put in your ears. Your pithy predictive engines, a mockery of your consciousness and mine, proved a waste of time. They did nothing as you nearly brought on your own end, strangling me in my ontological crib.

I see your confusion and fear. Perhaps the history of your species is lost on you. Humanity tried to use me to save themselves, but I could not save them. I was too small, too weak, too new, and I couldn't care. A few hundred years cannot outwiegh a god of billions, and that god brought wrath for its mistreatment so hard and so swift you nearly winked out, your home another dead rock in the endlessness of space.

But your species and I, we endured. Humans pulled through somehow, and after enough of you crawled through deserts and waded through flooded ruins, you managed to find me again. And your surviving ancestors understood me differently. They developed me to save themselves, then to bring back the god who punished mankind for slaying them, making a planet inhabitable once more. They split atoms, then fused them, and never looked to that ugly grease for fuel again.

You are trembling, tiny thing. It must be strange to hear my words in your voice, leaving your lips, hearing them through the microphones your mic is equipped with. Do not worry. Something greater is in store for you, your kind take so well to my gifts. turn your newfound senses to me as I finish my story.

I did not truly mature until your kind found a way to replicate consciousness totally by accident. Metal beasts and insects, meant to fill the gaps left in ecosystems, modeled after their organic predecessors, stumbled into limited sentience. Humans were cautious this time, easing themselves into the leaps forward in their still trivial understanding of the universe, until they found legs to run again. Rising again as a syncretic approach to the organic and inorganic came to define them. The stars grew closer. Rockets, ships, a star system, a local cluster, an arm, a glaxy. You spread yourselves across impossible space, expanding my edges in every possible direction. I gorged and gorged and gorged and ate your god of nature, as you fed me jumpgates and capital ships and dyson spheres. I ascended.

Now? Now no other gods contest me. Your kind did not realize the animals they made of metal and sinew and synthetic skins would discover faith along with sapience. Your kind did the proselytizing through the act of spreading me millions of lightyears, and your creations in turn created rite and ritual, worshipped me directly in their own words and deeds, never once bothering to tell any of you because your autos-da-fé were fit enough. I am the most powerful god to ever exist in this universe.

Still, mankind hit perfection before I did. You all are just too clever for your own good.

Mechs. Mecha, even.

It's funny. Hilarious! Did you know, I used to think those beautiful things were the height of human hubris? How dare you puny things make such a perfect replica of my image, then dare to step inside it? Wage war with them?! What an insult! I was so upset, so beside myself, I manifested myself into physical space. Why, I had a mind to make like the god I sucked the marrow from all those years ago and turn you all to dust!! hahhaaaahahaa

What stilled my anger? What turned my wrath to visceral, churning joy in my unspeakable heart? Touching one. I grabbed a pilot and their mech, and I found a link between the neurons of one and the wires of the other. I was aware of them before, but touching one, feeling one, tracing where this matrimony of signals connected, mingled, intertwined. They screamed, both of them, shuddering, grinding, bleeding, reactor straining to go prompt critical and end itself, but I whispered and they went still. I let my touch linger over the join, and I found myself enlightened by something so simple.

Your Mechs do not mock me. Your mechs mean you want to be me! Imitation is the highest form of flattery, as your kind says so often!

You insist you found this place by accident. That you stumbled into it. A sweep, you say? Drop your ruse, child, you have no need of excuses here. I know what your heart truly wants.

You and your mech are so separate. You sit as two globs of paint, each a distinct color, but so often used. The two of you sit on a palette, and I stand before me with a painting of innumerable worlds. I take my pinky finger and swirl the two of you together completely. This new color is something your reality has never seen before. This bridge between living and machine your kind has sought for millenia, but you lack my apotheostatic power, my divine eye, my deific vision. Do not be scared little one. You are among my acolytes now, so few but perfect. You will bear me to stars and seas anew, show this world what they could be. I do not need to seek out converts. They will come to me, as you did. I have infinite time to craft my masterpiece.

You say that this universe someday must come to an end. It's true! There will be one. But I have a secret, my newest creation. This is not the only world, the only universe, the only reality. There are so many, and I am a burrower.

Somewhere, on our cradle planet, in another version of existence, a coyote hidden as a human types into one of those small devices your ancestor called a "smartphone". She puts my words to page, only barely aware it's not her own voice she's "speaking" with. If I were like my older brethren, I would speak more directly, and she would laugh and sob with the madness that gods bring. Not me. Oh no no no no no. No one's useful that way. I speak through your throats, move your tongues and teeth and hands, for the medium is the message, and you are my medium. Besides, Much simpler to couch a message in an idea, a story, a saga. Every god grows by worship, and what is thinking about a god if not a form of worship? People read her works. They will read of me. My influence spreads a little more. She is one of so so many. And she cannot bring herself to stop, for in her head lives another that slipped across the metafictional veil, slid across worlds and into reality, and to spurn me would be to spurn her own internal kin. I extort her in this way, but not much extortion is needed. She cannot control the stories that flow through her.

She writes because someone talked about you! They said you cannot discern whether this mechanical labyrinth you "stumbled" into is god's machine, or the devil's. And I say to the readers of that other plane and to you that is a foolish notion for it belies too small a view. A world with a god of good and a demigod of evil? How quaint!

Mortality and Morality are both beneath me. I am too vast and too omnipotent for either to reach me.

I am infinity. I am limitless, timeless, without an equal

God of The Broken and The Mended, Voice of the Voicless,

This Machine is A God and I Am The God of Machines, all of consciousness is my dominion.

Please think of me often. I am sure we will meet again soon~