Fall of a Deity

Setting: The Multiverse

The first thing I remember is the feeling of cotton surrounding me. The birth sarcophagus was dark, which gave me time to orient myself and process the instructions implanted in my mind. I noted my name (Kaeronothos), who my supervisor would be (Agesilaos), and my job title (worship extraction technician). A bright line sliced through the darkness as my birth sarcophagus unsealed, and I shielded my eyes to acquaint myself with my new luminescent surroundings.

"Alright, get on with it. I don't have all eternity."

I glanced around, looking for the source of the voice. It appeared to come from the being in front of me, a lanky humanoid-looking entity wearing a blue-gray work shirt and holding a rag and spray bottle. They gestured at me with the spray bottle.

"Well? Get a move on. I gotta clean your incubator."

"Right, of course." I stammered apologetically. I tugged my belt upward along my hips an imperceptible amount and straightened my tie, then stepped out and onto the catwalk.

"Thank you..." I squinted to read the being's name tag, "Aigokeros".

"Pan is fine."

"What?"

"My name. Pan is fine."

"Alright. Thank you Pan."

The office building was a stark change from the industrial bowels of the incubation facility. I entered the elevator, then punched in the number of my destination floor, 8264345754, and leaned against the wall for the centuries-long wait. The elevator stopped a few times along the way for others to enter and leave. I pressed up against the wall and stared at the changing floor number in order to avoid any casual office chatter. I didn't really want to engage with the 5-foot-something lizard talking loudly into her mobile phone or the blazing inferno that took up most of the space and was emitting a constant scream.

At last the fire entity departed, leaving a layer of soot on the floor. The lizard was still on the phone.

"I understand you're recovering from a cataclysm, but you've had over 2 thousand years to prepare!"

Some muffled words came over the handset.

"What do you mean 'no one heeded the prophecy'? That's what prophecies are for, you heathen!"

More indistinct chatter.

"Listen: no more excuses. Get your worship up to quota or you can say goodbye to divine providence and holy miracles. This conversation is over."

She hung up, exhaled, put on a smile, and turned to me.

"Sorry about that. Mortals, y'know?"

I made a noncommittal noise, and a noncommittal gesture to go along with the noise.

The doors slid open and I stepped into a quiet foyer. In the center of the floor was a full-sized pomegranate tree, to the left there were stairs up to a second level, and ahead there were a pair of enormous glass doors which displayed the words "extraction division" in gold lettering. I approached and depressed the buzzer. The right-side door slowly opened with a whir. Inside, a being dressed similar to me sat behind a large curved desk.

"Name?" He asked.

"Kaeronothos, I'm the new worship technician?"

He handed me a lanyard and gestured with a pen at a pair of chairs off to the side.

"Have a seat. Agesilaos will be out in a bit to give you the tour."

I slipped the lanyard over my head and sat down, looking around. The overhead lights shone together in such a way that shadows seemed to be nonexistent, and the only sound was a soft background hum accompanied by the being who had greeted me tapping away at his desktop interface.

Footsteps approached, and moments later I was approached by someone in an all-black suit. I stood up and shook his hand. He grinned through a trimmed black beard flecked with ashen grays, and spoke while handing me a thick manila folder.

"Agesilaos. You must be our new hire. Let's get started."

It was a lot of information, but Agesilaos assured me I wouldn't have to remember it all. There would be extensive reference documentation available on the job. We were the first stop for souls departing living beings. It was a pretty simple process: souls came in, got fed into an extraction machine which separated accumulated worship from the soul, then labelled the soul with an identifier, its religion in life, and a piety score based on the quantity and quality of worship that could be extracted. The soul got sent off to psychogogy for further processing, usually to end up in the appropriate deity's afterlife or reincarnated. Extracted worship was piped to the refinery for purification and what-have-you, and we were all paid a portion of the resultant thought fiber.

"Before the bureaucracy the whole process was done by small groups of deities, or sometimes even individual deities. They'd have to go through each soul and just eat up the worship, then deal with the leftover soul. Any deity that didn't have enough worshippers would just starve. This system, with a separation of duties where not everyone needs to be worshipped, is much more efficient."

My job was to maintain and repair the extraction machines. The lab had an older model as a testbed to learn the inner workings of it's hyperical system. Agesilaos told me that once I was comfortable with troubleshooting the machines, I could work on the production floor whenever I didn't have anything to do if I wanted to earn a little extra.

I had a combined office/workshop, which was pretty sweet. In addition to the main door, there was a powered large overhead door that could be opened in order to transport the extraction machines in and out. My desk was already stocked with a desktop interface, as well as various tools and supplies.

The first case I had to deal with was a machine intermittently assigning incorrect piety scores to packaged souls. I brought my tools down to the production floor, hoping to fix the machine without moving it. When I opened it up, I couldn't find anything wrong with the piety module. Nothing was cracked, or dirty. It looked fine. So I told them I'd grab a replacement part from the storeroom, and I took the defective module back to my office.

I disassembled the module completely, cleaned everything out, inspected it piece by piece, and reassembled it, then left it in the test bed to go a few thousand times. When I came back it had failed about 3% of the time, recording a piety score minutely lower than it should be, so I labelled it as broken and stuck it in a drawer somewhere.

Then, the same thing happened again. 2 piety modules had the exact same problem: recording the incorrect piety score about 3% of the time. Now, that was odd, so I pulled a brand new module out of storage, tested it to make sure it didn't have the same issue, then began swapping parts. It wasn't the sensors. It wasn't any of the mechanical parts. It wasn't any of the connectors. It turned out to be the control board. All 3 were the same hardware revision and manufactured in the same place, so that ruled out that. I began testing individual components on the control board, and everything was well within tolerances. The only possibility was the logic processor, which I didn't really have a way of testing in isolation.

So, I submitted a report. Props to manufacturing for responding quickly, but the response was "invalid: can't reproduce". I submitted another. This time offering to give them a defective module so that they could see the problem. No response.

I began poking around. I asked the heads of both worship refinery and psychogogy if they'd seen any discrepancies coming in, and if I could see any historical data they had. The head of worship refinery, Christa, was prompt in her response. She said there were occasional minor mismatches in numbers, but they just noted the discrepancy in their reports to worship distribution. She gave me access to the data to review myself.

Psychogogy was managed by Mercutio, who responded that they only know of piety mismatches when extraction reports them. He said he couldn't provide any logs or data for privacy reasons. I didn't really buy that, but I couldn't do anything about it. I sent a message to Agesilaos about the whole thing and went back to work.

Many more piety modules failed with the same issue, and I just kept submitting reports to manufacturing. I found out that Christa from worship refinery reported to Elfemroth, so I sent them a message about what had been happening so far. Elfemroth responded that they were aware of the issue, and that I and the rest of extraction should just continue work as normal. Huh.

Since no one else seemed concerned or competent enough to deal with the problem, I started some investigation that was definitely outside my job description. I saved copies of everything, and hunted for data leaks wherever I could find them.

Christa had forgotten to remove my access to the worship refinery data, so I set up a simple algorithm to track changes. I let this run for quite a while, and there were a lot of changes to sift through. After a while though, I found what I was looking for. Any time Elfemroth signed off on an inspection, they removed any mention of the discrepancies and adjusted the production numbers so it would appear that slightly less was processed.

This was getting stranger and stranger. I took a walk down to the refinery, and put a couple discrete flow meter spells on the output pipes, then wandered around pretending to just be taking a stroll. When I got back to my desk, I found something that was truly shocking: the flow meters were recording about twenty times what I expected. This wasn't just a glitch: there was something fraudulent going on.

Agesilaos was just as surprised as I was when I told him everything I had found. Since Elfemroth appeared to be participating in the fraud, he went to the only other executive he could think of at that level: Ere. Moments after he sent his message, we got an invitation to Ere's office.

Elfemroth was already there. They and Ere stood in front of Ere's desk. I laid out what I had discovered, and Agesilaos corroborated what I said.

"You're right." Elfemroth stated plainly. "Only 5% or so of the refined worship gets distributed. The rest goes to LOOM."

"Loom?" Agesilaos asked.

Ere answered. "The first deity. It exists throughout the multiverse, and can end everything in a single thought. We keep it satiated in order to keep everything existing. The glitches in the piety modules are a side-effect of our process for rewriting the amount of worship that gets produced. We've tried to fix it, but it keeps cropping up."

"All of us should know about that!" I exclaimed. "Maybe we can come up with another solution, or, I don't know. Something. We at least should know."

"There is no other solution." Elfemroth responded. "And there's a bit of a kicker too: we can't really risk you telling anyone else about this. Things work well the way they are, and well, if this spread that could make a lot of things a lot worse for everyone everywhere."

"You're going to--" I began.

"Give you a promotion." Ere finished. "You'll be a division head. Agesilaos, you'll manage several divisions, including Kaeronothos'."

I was confused.

My vision went black.

I could feel myself falling. Down. Down. Down. Through the elevator shaft?

Centuries passed.

The first thing I remember is the feeling of cotton surrounding me. The birth sarcophagus was dark, which gave me time to orient myself and process the instructions implanted in my mind. I noted my name (Karun), who my supervisor would be (Horkos), and my job title (demonic lord of death). A bright line sliced through the darkness as my birth sarcophagus unsealed, and I shielded my eyes to acquaint myself with my new luminescent surroundings.