Gods Remain

The Locket was a piece of history, torn from its place, steeped in misery, and spit out into the cold husk of rooms that continued uninterrupted for miles in every direction. It was pure information displayed without filter. Like a cylinder seal of ancient Mesopotamia, the surface was crisscrossed with lines, forming a design like Sanskrit or some other forgotten tongue. The Servile held it tentatively, religiously, could barely keep hold of it with trembling hands.

The Servile, worshiping information as their kind do, felt the importance of this relic but could barely comprehend the meaning. They needed a display, a screen, a wall to shield them from what it was, some other way of understanding it. They knew data and information, trusted it like a parent, but only knew it through Cyphers.

They had come here, this room on the far flung corner of the Project with it’s flickering lights and stale, uncirculated air to clean up the jumbled, utilitarian refuse of a bygone era. Nothing passed through these ancient catacombs to history anymore, and certainly no one would see this section again for a hundred years, but the Serviles had to be kept busy. Picking through the refuse, recycling and sorting, they had found many strange but meaningless things, and trashed everything. Everything save this treasure found by this Servile. Their thoughts were transfixed, but chaotic, reading at once a lived moment and trying vainly to project an imagined screen in front of it.

Cyphers, artificial singularities housed in immense magnetic fields that contained and balanced the intense forces within, were the data gods the Servile knew. These singularities were formed from pure thought and ideas, collected and condensed in virtual space until the sheer digital mass of information condensed and sparked to life a black hole which could include the entirety of the Universe's thought. Such a god as this was dispassionate and animist, a god of nature which lived out it’s purpose like any rock, tree, or bird. The information could be read off of the accretion disk, the hot, spiraling mass of knowledge held simultaneously within the singularity and displayed on the disk, and registered on a screen.

The locket, too, was a singularity. It unclasped and held a single point of meaning within, a picture, and an outer meaning, an accretion disk of ancient symbology innately read by the shared tribal knowledge of the reader. The picture was of a being light-faded by time, obviously having been looked at continuously in the past. The case, despite its tarnished face, had the marks of handling and care beneath the dirt of time. The image was of someone important, someone cared for as much as the opened picture or rubbed surface. The Servile felt they were holding a god older than theirs, Aphrodite housed within a heart shape registering the meaning of the past. Someone had cared, had loved without a screen, without obscuring it as a silhouette of the emotion. They had loved plainly.

The gravity of the metal trinket long forgotten tugged at the Servile’s heart and mind. They held the Holy of Holies, and it burned them from within. They had never held meaning before, never experienced a thing that was loved so completely. Experience was always second hand, meaning derived out of patterns from concentrate. They found purpose in the menial tasks set before them, finishing them to completion, then looked to the Cypher for sustenance. A never ending log of experience given to them on a flickering plate which had never seemed empty until this. A new world was here in this artefact, beyond the animist gods of reality, a religion rather than an object of worship.