The Birth of a Deity

January 7th, 2123, the plastic-looking white tanks were close at hand and the outer periphery of the city was in tatters. This was the end, I already knew, as the capital city was being overrun by the most detestable kind of guerrilla revolutionaries. What did the future hold for us now? In fact, for all of civilisation?

‘We’re going to put the fortress into hibernation mode,’ I finally said to my assistant. 

A look of horror came upon his face.

‘There aren’t enough cryogenic caskets for everyone.’

‘I know. I’m going, and so are you and the rest of the scientific management core.’

I was not going to let a bunch of savages get their hands on my life’s work. The capital – they could have. The fortress – they would never put a finger on, as I would have it descended so far underground that not a thousand years of persistent shovelling would allow them to find it.

There was panic in the corridors, slackening of the chain of command – researchers, guards, and assistants all in various stages of denial and despair. 

I climbed into the casket, confident that my assistant could be trusted to perform the rest. The latch closed above me and I felt the whole space being filled with liquid. I breathed out with intent and allowed the liquid to fill my lungs. Then, everything went dark.

Flush, I heard the water subsiding again. There was a very unpleasant, hot stinging sensation at the root of my back. My muscles were very uncomfortable, but it seemed like I was being exhumed.

My mind was mushy, which indicated that I’d been locked away for quite a long time. I anxiously waited to see what it would be that would greet me on the other side of the latch when it opened.

The latch arose, and as my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw in front of me an odd man, overweight and dressed in rags, with what looked like a very dirty face, looking at me with eyes and mouth wide open.

‘Mmm,’ I arose, feeling the pain in the back accentuate. He stood there, frozen, as though he’d just seen something completely unimaginable. 

After coming to my senses, I felt a different constitution of the air around me, as though it was filled with sand. The ventilation system must’ve given out.

I finally looked at him and spoke:

‘Who are you?’

Upon hearing me speak, he threw himself into a fit and began waving his hands and shouting something in an unknown tongue, eventually storming out of the room.

I staggered out and noticed that no other caskets were present. This was extremely worrying.

Exiting the casket repository, I felt a new, evermore detestable smell reach my nostrils – the smell of rotten fish. The walls of the fortress were not lit up in proper fashion, which meant that the two-thousand year long power supply had either been exhausted or cut. There were windows bored in the metal walls, some in the most ridiculous locations, clearly showing an abject lack of understanding of electronic circuitry, as in some instances the openings were made right through pivotal electronic infrastructure.

‘Why would someone ever do this? They wanted our fortress all along. Why would they do that to it?’ I mumbled to myself in a daze, limping down towards the odious smell. I could hear the voice of the man rambling something and voices of others responding just as loudly. 

Finally, I turned the corner and saw something unbelievable. Right there, in the main corridor, were lined many, many people clad in dirty rags, sitting around stalls with foods, vegetables, seeds, and nuts. What had before been the secure entry point was gone – there was nothing, not even a wall, as beyond the gathering place extended a street of impoverished structures, which I could only assume were living accommodation. It seemed to open up onto a plaza where stood a hulking sculpture of a man, above whose waist I couldn’t see due to his location and size.

‘Ahhah,’ the man pointed eagerly at me again, triumphantly blabbering something to the fish stall beside which he had stopped and around which were gathered curious onlookers. They all fixed their sight on me in disbelief. It was then that I’d noticed how much smaller than me they were, perhaps a foot or so. 

The reeking smell, the mutilated walls, the absolute dilapidated state of the structure. I had expected anything but not this. As the mumbling crowd surrounded me with prying eyes, all seemingly wanting to touch me but feeling scared, I began to feel sick. Where was my assistant? What had happened to everyone else?

‘Sir-e! Sir-e!’ I heard from behind me. Somebody had brought a tiny little man, shrunken and old, with a long white beard, and he was addressing me in my tongue.

‘Sir-e, you be imperial? You be imperial?’ He asked with the same intonation, as though he himself wasn’t sure whether what he was saying was correct.

‘Yes,’ I answered, slowly, ‘I am.’

The old man’s eyes widened and he shouted something to the crowd. The mass of people exploded in speech as some finally started running up to me, touching the brim of my uniform or shoes.

‘You be imperial?’ he uttered again. Then, after a slight delay, he bowed and said, ‘I Joavaxim. I scholar of sacred tongue of imperial.’

‘What?’

‘It is true that imperial come back to sacred cathedral and bring a lot of gift,’ he seemed very proud of his great effort at speech, ‘Sir-e imperial, please say, what be you name?’

‘Samuel Benoit.’

The man dropped to his knees and clasped his hands together, seemingly even more shocked than before, and shouted out my name with a very twisted accent. The crowd quickly followed him. 

‘Samuwel Benvuwatt,’ he mispronounced my name again, ‘you be great imperial. I welcome you to you sacred cathedral.’

Utterly perplexed, physically tortured by back pain, and anxious to see my team and find out what was happening I pressed on rather rudely.

‘What the hell is happening here? What are you saying? What do you mean, “sacred cathedral”? What are you talking about?’

This seemed to have exceeded his knowledge of the language, so he simply smiled, rose back to his feet and said:

‘Please follow, please follow.’

He lead me down through throngs of people looking to either stare at me or touch my clothes, which were now thoroughly dirty because of it. Leading me towards the statue, he gestured at it:

‘You! You!’

I walked around the statue and saw the shape of a man in imperial uniform; with a masculine, determined face; holding some strange trident-like object in his hand; muscles almost ripping through the clothes. I looked down and read the plaque: VDLIII, Imperial Samuwel Benvuwatt, Build of Cathedral, Make Know and Enquiry.

‘The year 5553?’

‘Yes, statue ancient.’

‘What year is it now?’

‘The year seven thousand seven five.’

‘7705 or 7075? Ah!’ what did it matter really? I later found out that it was the latter. 

The society I discovered in that world, as I used the old man’s help to try and understand it, knew nothing of the past to any reasonable extent. I was recited the great narrative of the war of four thousand years ago, about how the body of a god had been sacrificially lowered beneath the earth by other gods, how through countless wars and conflicts the cathedral had been recovered and modified, by wave after wave of people, each adding or removing something from it, never properly understanding what the building even was and what it had been built for, nor understanding the immense technological sophistication of it. The layers and layers of functionality that I had spent my lifetime wrestling out of the imperial bureaucracy and implementing appeared to have never been used. 

The destiny of my assistant and the scientific core remained a mystery, as the stories all relayed that only one body had ever been lower under the earth. This uniform agreement was a wonder given just how many different narrations, dramatisations, poetic variations, and songs there were about it. Every other people claimed that indeed they were the descendants of the “imperials” – a word which had completely lost its original meaning – and that they were the rightful owners of the cathedral alongside that city, which didn’t resemble its former self in anything – nor layout, nor structure, nothing. Even the roads seemed to have been ripped out of the soil and replaced. 

In this world, that knew nothing of archeology, history, science, or mathematics, all of my attempts to explain what had truly happened were met with awe-struck prostrations. Some even began writing down my ‘sayings’ and seeking to ‘interpret’ them by scholarly means. All of my attempts to discover the true events were met with failure, until I finally realised that there was no use. Four thousand years was such a long time – too long to comprehend for a regular human being.

The casket had apparently been too effective, and that was my last and only scientific success.