How would you imagine a God?

  Would they be angelic?

  Perhaps they would be a marble-esque woman of unrivalled beauty?

  A miserly old man with a long white beard?

  Would a god strike you as an athletic young man in the prime of his years?

  As it happens, there are gods of all kinds. Short, tall, handsome, comely, strong, weak, smart and stupid. As many gods as you could picture and more.

  But there are other things as well.

  Things not unlike gods. Things that pass behind the echoes of Gods. Things that, for all the light in all the universes, remain hidden in the dark.

  I will tell you of my time spent struggling against these things-that-are-not-Gods and how, in the end, even the Gods began to fall.

  But this is a long tale, perhaps one you won't live to hear the end of, so don't fret over the small stuff and let's start where all good stories start: in the middle of it.

  ***

  I didn't remember dying, or falling asleep, or even falling unconscious.

  On reflection, I supposed it was never easy to say with certainty when, exactly, one became unconscious; the line between the two states of wakefulness had always been hazy. And the mind had a habit of making the transition a vague experience, so that I had no memory of it didn't truly surprise me.

  One moment I was... where? I was... somewhere... at work? Was it my home? I couldn't remember; it felt like I had been everywhere simultaneously; I had existed in every place I'd ever been all at once. Almost like time had compressed to the point where my entire life had become a single, blazing, infinite moment.

  All of my friends and family, every birthday and vacation, all the dinners and recesses, all the laughter and the rage—it all happened to me at once.

  It was like a gunshot—loud and instantaneous, a massive amount of potential energy being used up and expelled in less than a second. It all blended together, a confusing soup of who I'd been.

  Bits and pieces flared up. Milestones, emotional moments, feelings and ideas. Slowly... very slowly, I pieced together an image of who I had once been, but still couldn't quite remember what I had been doing before this moment. Moving? Was I moving? Going somewhere?

  And then... I was... here? Wherever 'here' was... I hadn't opened my eyes, partly because I wasn't certain I still had eyes, and partly because I wasn't sure if I even wanted to know what I'd see.

  Instead, I spent this time tucked safely away within my head. There had been no violence, no crash, no fight, no screaming or shouting. Nothing stood out to me that would show a sudden and unplanned end to who I had been.

  I didn't think I'd gone to sleep; there was no impression of being in bed, or the darkness that came with night. Instead, I got the distinct impression I'd been standing... walking? It had been bright... perhaps too bright?

  A flash! Yes, there was a blinding flash, like the birth of a new sun. The heat had been so brief that it didn't even register to me—an instant of warmth and then nothing.

  Outside... I could see the shadows of buildings, tall concrete monoliths that were permanently embossed on my vision by the flash... the orb... the burning swell of omnipotent light.

  I couldn't nail down exactly what had happened, or what I'd been doing; all I had was the overwhelming sense that everything had been 'normal' one moment and then... somehow... not.

  The flash indicated to me the turning point, the defining line between mundanity and the bewildering irregularity of my current state of existence. It seemed like a bomb had dropped on my old life, and the resultant calamity dumped the remnants of me 'here'.

  A bomb... What else could it have been? Nothing I could imagine fit the impression I'd gotten nearly half as well as a bomb did.

  It seemed so unlikely to me, but I supposed not entirely out of the question. For all the time I'd spent thinking about 'What-if' scenarios; I'd always pegged the chances that I'd kick the big rusty bucket within the opening seconds of whatever earth-ending apocalypse took place on the relatively low side.

  I had imagined myself racing to my family's home, gathering them up and hauling ass down the road until we could hash out a more solid plan than: not-fucking-dying-in-the-opening-barrage-of-world-war-three.

  I had known somewhere in the back of my mind that the statistics weren't on my side. With the number of casualties a bomb like that would incur on the capital city of my country, I would have found myself snugly piled under the mountain of corpses it left behind. Likely alongside everyone else I knew. So, for it to turn out exactly like that was both oddly vindicating and horrendously depressing.

  As the memories bubbled their way out of the jumbled mess of my entire history, it seemed increasingly likely that my last moments were spent being atomically flash-fried.

  The world had been in a state of upheaval; major powers had been at each other's throats, and the people had been increasingly on edge.

  Global shortages, increasing natural disasters, several pandemics, innumerable wars, the infection of social media and the pseudo-civil war that had produced.

  The more I thought about it, the easier it became to see: why wouldn't someone strike at one of the world's most powerful countries whilst it was in the middle of tearing itself to pieces? Take the initiative and sneak in a preemptive strike, cripple what infrastructure you could, and do your best to weather the counterattack. Then sweep in and mop up the resistance.

  So that was it, then. I'd been vaporised in the opening moments of our third world war, likely alongside everyone I had known.

  My family similarly reduced to the same highly irradiated particles I had been; all my friends, buried in rubble or worse, smoking piles of ash as well.

  Everyone I'd cared about, gone. Just like that. Never to share a laugh with me again, or lament the passing of time on each birthday, or welcome the joy of nieces and nephews; no children of my own; no more pizza and beer on sunny weekends; no more griping about the stress of having to slog through nine hours of work five days a week—sometimes six!

  I hadn't been the most well-off man on earth, but I hadn't been struggling terribly hard either. I had a loving family, accepting and trustworthy friends, and had been afforded a stable life in the middle class.

  It had been a good life, a warm life, a life that I cherished with every cell in my body. And it was now a life that had been viciously torn away from me in the blink of an eye. No goodbyes, no tearful farewells, no final "I love you's", nothing. Just the complicated pile of memories I had left of everything I used to have.

  As the sorrow welled in my chest, something struck me as rather peculiar.

  Not that I had much experience with being annihilated in atomic fire, but I was fairly certain that I had died regardless of whether I remembered the exact moment. And as far as I knew, people who had died did very little thinking. In fact, I was supremely confident that people who had died were extraordinarily incapable of thinking.

  So, the simple fact that I found myself doing a rather profound amount of it wasn't quite adding up.

  Either my maths skills were dreadfully worse than I'd remembered, or... I wasn't quite as dead as I believed I should have been.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Running some simple addition in my mind, I eliminated the former option and was left with a puzzling conclusion.

  I was alive.

  Startlingly so. Not only that, but there wasn't a single spark or crackle of pain across my whole body.

  I wiggled my toes, flexed my fingers, twitched my nose, and every nerve ending I had was reporting all systems normal.

  Finally, I opened my eyes and immediately felt my optic nerves overload from the sheer amount of information they were bombarded with.

  It was much like my first time visiting the Grand Canyon. The scale was such that my brain struggled to comprehend what it was being exposed to; the sense of distance and size were so horribly mangled and stretched that I just couldn't determine where I was in relation to... it.

  Like those fleeting moments where you spot a building on the horizon and think,

  "Is that building absolutely massive, or just a lot closer than I think it is?"

  Only in this instance, I was staring up at the inside of a spherical planet.

  One made entirely of machinery.

  Dials the size of cities, springs and latches longer than any highway, steam geysers that would have wiped Yellowstone off the face of the globe. There were pipes so large you could nestle the entire United Kingdom inside them. Pistons with enough travel to cover the Great Wall of China in less than a moment.

  And the wires... everywhere I looked it was nothing but endless wire; it surrounded me in every direction. The snaking copper strands turned every square inch of this sphere into a writhing, pulsating mass of tendrils.

  Some terminated into dead air; others looped and looped and looped until there was no way to determine where one ended and another began. Some of them were as thick as the Nile River; others frayed into a static hiss of reddish mist. The wires seemed to be all-consuming; a never-ending maelstrom of metallic veins. It was maddening. Blinding.

  The sheer enormity of it sent me into spastic shivers of uncontrollable anxiety; the flashing LEDs and fluorescent tubes and halogen bulbs the size of the Great Lakes further drumming into me how utterly impossible any of this was.

  Somehow, something suspended me in the center of this... thing.

  Held aloft by some force I couldn't feel, whipping my head around imparted a slight torque to my body, and I rotated in place.

  Digital numerals zipped by my face like gnats. Holographic 'ones' and 'zeros' flitted around as though the density of information in this space was so great it had no other option than to physically manifest.

  It gave my surroundings a hazy, claustrophobic feeling; I wondered if I had been breathing them in as my chest heaved violently. It was the same in every direction I looked.

  Endless machinery.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, gritting my teeth until they creaked against each other. Every thought in my head bubbled away like the last few ounces of water in a boiling pot.

  I started hyperventilating in full; the thrumming, chaotic beat of my heart so horribly out of rhythm that spots swam across the blackness behind my eyelids.

  A small part of my mind recognized that I was going to pass out; like some bystander casually mentioning what the temperature was, this idiot part of my mind felt it absolutely necessary to state the obvious to me.

  ***

  I didn't really wake up; it wasn't like waking up.

  More so, it was as though I'd always been awake and had only just then come into consciousness.

  There was no speech; there were no words or intelligible sounds, but regardless, it communicated with me.

  The hum and buzz of information streamed into my mind just as assuredly as my own thoughts would bubble up from the depths of my subconscious; images and feelings, ideas and concepts, pressing up through the folds of my brain until I felt as though my skull would split open from the sheer volume of knowledge being implanted within me.

  And then, it did.

  But even as I could hear my bones splintering, and my skin pulling apart, and my head literally unfolding like a crimson flower peacefully blooming in the depths of this infinite wire monstrosity, I did not die.

  There was no escape from the soul-crushing reality of my pain; I remained fully aware that my mortal shell was being dismantled around me.

  As my body was stripped of every atom, every fibre of my humanity, my mind continued to blossom. Held in place, nailed to the fabric of space, it grew and grew, absorbing what this whistling and clicking Machine was pouring into my existence.

  I expanded like some grotesque balloon, stretching and swelling, overlapping myself in the rapidity of my growth.

  I gained knowledge of things—impossible things.

  The precise time I had been born; down to the zeptosecond, how long I'd lived to the same number of decimal points. The exact count of every different atom that made up my body; their atomic weights and how they functioned in relation to each other. Complex mathematical formulas, scales of physics no one human could learn in a lifetime; from mechanical to nuclear, from quantum to optical, from statistical to relativistic.

  The universe was unveiling itself to me in an entirely horrifying way.

  I knew the principles of creation; levels of engineering that would implode the skull of a 70-year veteran.

  Mechanical design, resource management, supply chain, information transmission, energy harvesting and transfer, data acquisition and interpretation.

  I'd learned none of this, and yet I had a complete understanding of all of it.

  Linguistics, zoology, physiology, psychiatry, agriculture, architecture, ecology, economics, geology, mineralogy, astronomy, sociology, and computer sciences. I could feel myself separating from my humanity. It was being torn from me as my mind buckled under the weight of the knowledge being injected into it.

  How I saw myself, and how I saw myself in relation to the universe fundamentally shifted.

  Who I was now... and who I had been mere moments ago were two entirely distinct entities. The vastness of space and time began resolving into strings of mathematical notations.

  My rapidly disintegrating carbonic body was no longer a mystery of trillions of independent systems overlapping one another, instead simplifying into chains of acids and proteins. A self-fueling chemical reaction whose every thought and motivation became increasingly alien as the utter insignificance of its purpose in the grand scale of the universe eventuated before it.

  I knew that this... construct, this gigantic machine of inevitability, had existed far longer than my native universe. That it was larger than any universe I could fathom, and that it had selected me.

  I knew it was doing this to me; I knew it was doing this for me. I also knew that it wielded powers far beyond even the comprehension it had given me, forces that no sane mortal could even attempt to understand.

  I knew that even an infinitesimally small fraction of the knowledge required to begin perceiving the depths of its true workings would cause my soul to crumple into a black hole larger than the entirety of my native universe from the sheer mass of the information alone.

  Ages passed in picoseconds; eon after eon ticked past my soul as I was reforged under the omnipotent eye of the Great Steel Construct until, suddenly, I popped.

  Encompassed by such a fantastical light that my soul recoiled back into itself; spinning and burying itself within the folds of its own essence. And in that moment, I was made whole; galvanised into a radiant star of knowledge and life.

  This glowing orb of continuously fusing and splitting atoms; creation and destruction warring against each other in a torrential fury that made up every aspect of my existence.

  My heart, it seemed, had been made new again by this titanic Machine-God of incomprehensible power.

  How could it be anything else? Something of this scale, something of this omnipotence—no other word could truly do justice to its immensity.

  Gods create worlds; Gods manipulate space and time as they please. What else could I possibly call something that tore me off of my planet, stripped my flesh and blood from my bones and then shoved so much information into my mind that it formed a fucking star?

  Sure, it was a machine, but this particular machine possessed a power that not only breached the realm of the gods, but used that realm as a damn footrest.

  Then began a rumble; a deep vibrating of reality itself.

  The very fabric of the universe undulated around me, and as if from some great, far off distance there came a single word.

  It struck me with such force that I compressed, literally, into a point so small it punctured my local reality and tapped into a hole so deep and dark that even trillions of years of exploration by a photon wouldn't truly plumb its depths.

  [[V???I????T????A??]]

  My soul rang out like a massive brass bell as it was hammered.

  A chime that reached both into my past and into my future; a never-ending tone that touched every part of what I was. As it washed over me, I knew it to be my name. Every name I ever had; every name I would ever have. Every single instance of who and what I could, or would be all sounded back in a clamorous echo of 'Vita'.

  A name given to me; bestowed upon me by this massive collection of gears and chains formed into a God. My Reforger, my sculptor and manufacturer, a name to be carried with me through all time and space. Simultaneously, while my soul trembled and quivered, I was physically remade.

  A body formed below the blazing soul that was gifted to me. But where once there was flesh, cold, hard, unyielding steel now stretched and curved away.

  Churning cogs, spinning gears, tightly wound springs, pistons, computer chips, kilometre after kilometre of wire spread through the limbs and cavities making up this homunculus body.

  Each iterative part got progressively smaller and smaller, more refined, more tightly packed, more knotted and interwoven until finally my body was a writhing mass of unimaginably minute components. They swarmed over each other; an incoherent mob of machine cells racing to find their designated spots.

  As the fingers and toes resolved themselves from the chaotic dance of minuscule machines, and my arms and legs coagulated into an approximately human outline, a torso grew.

  Rippling and bulging, swelling and settling, pockets of sentient robotic organisms aligned themselves with one another to connect my limbs.

  Then, finally, they crept up to encompass my radiant soul, entombing it in shifting, flowing grains of nanoscopic robots.

  I had no heart; I had no liver or spleen, no kidneys or lungs; there were no muscles, no immune system, no nerves or spinal fluid.

  My entire body was one organ, and yet, I could feel every single individual piece of the whole. Just as clearly as you could feel the tips of your fingers, I could direct them, manipulate them, as effortlessly as one would close their fist or take a step.

  I was both a singular unit and a legion. I knew the makeup of every piece, what mechanism moved it and where its power came from.

  The sheer level of control would have driven a normal mind into mad, stark-raving lunacy.

  The great mechanical Colossus prepared my featureless body like a canvas, a mannequin ready to be dressed.

  The surface of it shimmered as a crystalline 'skin' formed, the top layer of nanobots networking into an incredibly fluid coating. Harder than diamond, more durable than tungsten, as resistant as stainless steel and as soft as satin with just a simple thought.

  I could feel the lattice of their webbing cover me, knowing intrinsically that it would take energy on the scale of atomic fission to even so much as damage it.

  My cells could shift elemental combinations instantly. Diamond. Hydrogen. Gasoline. I could produce atoms of any weight—shaping the nuclear forces with just a thought.

  I could become pure uranium, or a collection of corn kernels, these ingenious little cells of mine operated strictly by manipulating the strong and weak nuclear forces. Able to tear apart or patch together atomic bonds with a simple thought.

  Fingernails began resolving, but instead of the typical hazy transparent keratin, a pitch black steel claw formed, pointed and matte.

  Pores opened across the surface of my body, purely aesthetic. Eyelids formed, creeping languidly over my vision, turning the hazy cosmic glow of data streams and quantum dust into a dark abyss of nothing.

  Eyebrows next, then fine body hair, lips, ears, long strands of rich rust-red hair spread out in a halo around my head. I was being refined, like an ore being processed.

  This God was taking the grit and debris of my soul and forging me into a solid metal ingot.

  The outlines of taut muscle appeared, like dents in steel sheeting. The hues of my skin shifted, darkening, losing the reflective lustre of liquid metal and swarming particles, instead dulling into a rich earthy tan.

  My eyes developed a calcium-white sclera to surround the gold and silver of my iris'. Pigments colored my lips and cheeks, and my genitals, with testes, descended from my crotch. Nipples formed on my chest, a spinal ridge bisected my back, and freckles dotted the bridge of my nose.

  Then, in the silence of finality, it was done. I was born anew, deep in the glowing centre of this Machine behemoth.

  I understood all of this. Just as one understands how to breathe or blink, there was no thought of how or why it could be; I just knew it.

  Floating through the dense fog of information permeating the core of this God, I basked in the care and attention that was being taken with my form.

  The minute prodding and pulling, the shifting and sculpting, I was rapturously aware of this God's... my God's... ministries. And then it spoke to me.

  Through my mind, through the code of my existence, it spoke into the fabric of my soul. It spoke to every past version of me, every future iteration of my soul. Stretching across both time and space, it touched every aspect of me that ever was or would be with its voice.

  And they all listened.