I have seen the face of God. A round shape of mystical proportions with no eyes and no mouth. It’s a faceless man and woman, a being of two names and many different colors. A being of ungodly power that lies slumbering inside my head and wakes up every night when my weary eyes cannot resist any longer. I have seen him, her, or it, many times and in many dreams–sometimes nightmares.
Inside the closure of my steel walls, beneath the rust sky of impenetrable dimensions, I go to sleep every night whenever my shift finishes. Sometimes, at noon, sometimes, in the morning, sometimes, not at all. There is no real schedule to work, only the will of the machine, and whatever it wills must be done. I obey it, I follow its every step and command. I must do so, for it feeds me, it fills me with the necessary nutrients for my weak body and humble mind to grow, to coexist alongside the toxic spores of this never-ending steel behemoth. Works is life here at the end of the world, where no man is born without the consent of the great machine.
I am SPW-62321. It means Standard Permanent Worker, which means I do whatever menial task is needed of me at any time, in any situation. I live for the machine for I cannot live without it. It is hard, desperate work at times, but it is one that gives me a sense of satisfaction whenever I hear the hum of success whispering as the yellow lights start to turn off and the red ones rise.
There is no sun here and no moon. There is not even a sky as a matter of fact. Only the workers in the rising levels of the major production chambers are capable of seeing any piece of sky at all through the small potholes where the toxic fumes leave the eternal machine. For me, red is the night and yellow is the day. This color duo is the only thing that makes a desperate attempt to separate the dry rusty colors of brown and grey from the many millions of cogs and screws that always surround me.
It is cramped. It is humid. Steam vents every minute and there’s always something moving every second. We never stop, for the machine never sleeps. It needs us as much as we need it. I sometimes wonder for what exact reason. My father and his father, they all lived and died, their entire lives working in the depths of the great machine. They never rose into the upper levels, but they also were never demoted to the lower levels where the worst parts of the steel gut are found. Here–where I am–I am free. So free, I can sometimes stretch both of my arms and feel the tip of the walls at the very end of my fingers. And yet I wonder, why am I here? Why was my father and his father here before me? What do we do exactly?
The machine works, but no one knows why. It just does, and does things, things that sometimes are loud and dangerous, things that sometimes are powerful and magnanimous. The machine breathes like a giant, a resting monster that takes deep breaths that last for whole days, and when it exhales, it becomes a dragon.
The heat is so strong that sometimes I must rest on my back, so my feet don’t burn through the boot soles. I have had these boots for so long, that I think they were assigned to me the moment I was born. They already knew my size; they already knew how tall and heavy I was going to be. From the moment I was created, inside the artificial womb of some carebot, all my definitions and settings were established based around the current necessity and the future mileage that could be taken out of me. I was born, or more accurately, I was designed to withstand the crude alleys of the machine, but even I was incapable of resisting its mighty fury whenever it decided to release its anger on the rest of the world.
I am among the lucky ones. In the lower levels, the flames are born, and down there, when the machine screams, and wails, and cries, and roars.
Everybody dies.
Piles of bone, mutilated bodies, and scorched corpses are the only things that return from the depths of the machine. Down in its gut, only monsters can live. By the next cycle, new replacements are sent.
I feel lucky where I am. A generation of SPW that have, so far, succeed in maintaining a simple yet effective routine of constant efficiency. My father was a robust worker that never failed his tasks. And so was his father, I think.
I don’t know how long I have been working here. I know it’s been years, for I can see that my fingers and skin are getting wrinkles and spots, but I can’t know for sure. It’s just been years, I think, and so far, I haven’t done anything bad. The machine sustains me, and I do my best to keep it moving.
Yet whenever the shift ends, whenever the groaning of the steel pipes and hammering machinations stop, and the red lights turn on as the machine draws the next cycle, I fear. I fear my chambers, where the rust evaporates in the middle of a permanent gust of malfunctioning ventilation, where my concrete bed awaits me with the embrace of its rocky surface. There, that’s the place where my torture begins. By the time I close my eyes–out of pure tiredness rather than a true sense of sleep–I start seeing it, or him, or her.
A shapeless form that has all the angles of the known world, a mathematical miracle coming to life right in front of me, as it seems to mock me through its sheer absurdity. It is a mess, a chaotic mess of perfect ramifications. Doesn’t matter how much I try; I can’t avoid it. It is always there. God. The face of God. It’s always there in my dreams.
God reaches for me, its hand a chromatic mutation of indecipherable spectrums, as if all colors existed at the same time on the top of its spaceless skin. It seems to have no contour, no depth to it, as it was made from the matter of existence itself, part of the known universe.
I always tried to resist, but it doesn’t matter, it touches me anyway. It grabs my hand, and I can feel the cold embrace of an indifferent misery. Like kissing the void, it is a doom of the mind. The moment it touches me, the dream starts.
God has taken me to many places, many locales, many worlds. Cities, villages, towns, deserts, forests, mountains, jungles, oceans, lakes, rivers. Everything and anything in between. I have traveled vividly through a thousand different locations that don’t exist, and don’t even dare to. The colors: too out of place to feel real. The geography: too insane to even be logical. How can they even be? Rocks that extend so far into the sky that almost seem to touch the stars, and rivers so wide and so long that they hug the entire world. The ocean, so absurd, so ridiculous. There are cavernous worlds filled with water, hidden away from prying eyes. Nothing makes sense, nothing feels real. Everything is a paradoxical joke that makes fun of the universe itself. A farce of epic proportions that taunts me.
How could anything like this be real? The machine wouldn’t allow it. The machine is perfect and glorious. It exists because it can, and because we help it keep living, and as such, it moves, and if it moves, it is alive.
But this? These dreams are omens of death, and I am tired of them and of God. It doesn’t let me rest, it doesn’t let me close my eyes for just a moment so that I can avoid the unreality of its bizarre landscapes. No. I was born for the machine. I have a purpose, fulfilled, satisfied, and directed. My goals are set, and I have achieved them for a lifetime of happiness.
And yet God, it dares challenge the machine. It dares oppose the ultimate truth of everything that is and will be. Nothing can exist without the machine’s consent. God shouldn’t exist, it shouldn’t come to haunt my dreams with its humorless sneers; a hoax of my mind that has turned against me. And yet, it exists. I have seen its face. God is a faceless creature that underneath the fabric of the universe, it laughs at me, it laughs at the work of my life. It points at me and tells me how everything I’ve done, but this pales to what is shown to me in my dreams.
And then, I wake up.
The rust exits my lungs as I cough up clots of blood. God is gone, and the machine remains. For it is real, it is palpable, and I can clearly feel its essence seeping into the pores of my palms.
Yet I can’t shake off the feeling that something is wrong, different. The air tastes heavier, like lead inside my mouth. My saliva dries quickly and no matter how much hydrant I take, my tongue feels the same and the odd taste is never fully washed off. Despite the machine being a labyrinth of rust and pollution, I have never felt like this before in all my years since I’d started working inside the guts of my one true master.
But now… Now, I have begun to despise it. It feels so indifferent, so unimportant. What am I even doing here? What is it that the machine wants that it needs me so much? Is this some kind of test? Am I dreaming these nightmares as a punishment? Why are my eyes now so teary as I wonder the meaning of my own breathless life?
Every night, the cycle repeats. There is no escaping it as long as my consciousness remains. It is always there, always watching with no eyes, always hearing me with no ears. I can see something moving inside it like a mouth babbling senseless barf. There are no words there, no sound, yet it always feels so loud as if it was pumping me with the entire knowledge of the world at once. But no, there is no world outside the machine. The machine is the world.
I try to work more now, but I cannot go against the will of the machine, or I will be punished and sent to the lower levels to suffer the sweet agony of redemption… Maybe that is what it wants. Maybe the machine has tired of me already and now it wants a new replacement, a new generation of me. For all that, no carebot has been sent to my location yet, which means I haven’t expired yet.
The days go by, and the cycle keeps repeating. Every day I wake up from the dreams of God. Its faceless features watch me as I tremble across entire universes of illogical realities and altered states. It tortures me with false promises of escape. It teases me with concepts impossible to be. It mocks my own existence by showing me the futility of it all.
It laughs at me. It always does. I hate it. I hate it so much; I cannot bear it any longer. I don’t want to meet God again.
I failed to meet my schedule today. On purpose. I stood still in front of my chamber door as the pipes roared with frustration and a distant hum of a warning called to me. I didn’t do anything. I just waited, my eyes not even blinking as I gazed upon my incoming doom. It only took them a handful of minutes to come for me. They weren’t men nor machine. Something else. Something worse. The Grabbers, I call them, for that’s all what they do. Grab people and throw them down the steel throat into the lower levels.
I broke my back as I fell. I tried closing my eyes to not think of the pain, but it was impossible to ignore. I tried crawling and then I realized how the floor was so wet, so slimy. Oil. There was old oil everywhere. It felt familiar, it felt like embracing my mother. A mother. The one I never had. I crawled until I reached a corner filled with broken cables and took refuge. I curled up in a ball and began crying as I realized that everything had been for nothing. So many years, I worked for that machine. So many days, I did nothing but serve it, to complete its will and satisfy its every need. I never once asked for anything in return and yet, the machine punished me. The dreams, the dreams. I hated them so much, but now, there were no more dreams.
The machine roared loudly, and in the distance across a sea of endless identical metal columns, I could see its heart opening within the infinite dark. A red, bright blaze slowly growing as it prepared to spit its fire.
Now, I just had to wait.
I had seen the face of God.
And God laughed at me.
About the Author
Christian Blair enjoys reading a little too much. When he is not writing, he’s reading, and when he’s no reading, he’s getting ready to read. Fantasy and sci-fi are the passions of his heart, and every once in a while he also enjoys a good epic movie and playing RPGs.
