They’d seen the other patrons sitting in the diner and a distinct lack of me, and had clogged up the entrance to discuss whether to go back or head in. Once they spotted me, they made a path for me to step through and into the diner, then proceeded to follow me in.

  I took up my position in the far corner where I’d been before; people wandered over to the bar and ordered. Mostly alcohol, but there were a couple of orders for food as well. Once everyone had gotten their drinks, they came to sit at and around my table.

  By this point, 15 people had come in and were in the process of settling. I figured the maximum occupancy for the diner was around 25, as it wasn’t a banquet hall and was never intended for meetings of any large scale.

  Of the 15 people, 10 were women, 3 were men, and two were children who had accompanied their parents. An interesting spread of curious people, I’d need to find out why they’d chosen to come, and what motivated their transition from the church of Rel to Mechanriel.

  Once everyone had gotten their drinks and was seated, I addressed them.

  “Welcome, people of Hilst. Before we begin, I would like to address some critical points that cannot be passed over. First, thank you for taking time out of your nights to come and see me. I know hours are precious and idly spending them is wasteful for you.”

  I smiled bashfully as I looked at the gathered faces, trying to appear humble and apologetic.

  “I hope my offer of food and drink will make up for any sacrifice you might have made in being here. Second, I must extend my warmest and most sincere thanks to both Trekka and Rumi for supporting this small engagement. Their efforts have allowed me to entertain your curiosity. I bow to their accommodation and hospitality.”

  I directed a salute at the two hosts behind the bar, and the small gathering clapped politely.

  “Please make sure you treat them with the utmost respect. And last, for those of you with children, I have prepared a small stipend to aid in their raising. It’s not much, but our youth will one day carry on the work we left undone, so they need to be as fit as possible. I know some of us harbour heavy burdens.”

  There was a small cheer and some laughter.

  “Right, so now we move into the major topic of why it is you’ve gathered here…”

  And so it went; for several hours I conversed with the people who had come. Over the course of the discussion, more people arrived, either having finished what chores needed tending to, or changing their mind about showing up. The number of people in the dining room swelled to 45, well past the physical space available to hold them.

  Some stood in the entryway and listened as they sipped their mead. Again, most of the 30 that arrived were women. I found this interesting and illuminating. Something in the way I had conducted myself upon the steps of the Hilst Trading Company had appealed to the women of the village far more than the men.

  I suspected it had been the way I interacted with the children, but I didn’t rule out my looks, either. I was aware of my attractiveness, having spent my life as a rather bland human I could appreciate the beauty of the body my God had given me.

  We spoke about their reasons for coming, the foremost being the safety of their families. They no longer felt safe committing themselves to Rel and dealing with the Rel Church. My display made it abundantly clear to them that I could offer the safety and respect they sought.

  Second was just the flat-out rejection of the actions carried out by the church; some people didn’t have families but no longer wished to support a church that would condone the actions they had taken. This sentiment was parroted by everyone in attendance and somehow seemed to be less of a motivating factor than their safety.

  I guess as long as it wasn’t happening to them, then it wasn’t such a concern; this was unfortunate, but not terribly uncommon. I knew it had been a rather large problem back on earth so I could understand it at least.

  Eventually the conversation rolled into what exactly it was that the religion represented. What were they worshipping? What was it they needed to believe in? How was this a religion? This was not a simple thing to explain, as this religion behaved quite a bit differently than they were used to.

  Obviously they would be worshipping Mechanriel, but it wouldn’t be as simple as just offering prayers every morning and then just going about their day. Worship for Mechanriel would be an active thing. A path you needed to walk in order to achieve his blessings.

  I presented a necklace for the group to inspect and explained to them that the crystals they harboured would need to be abandoned in order to convert. Some people balked at this idea, likely under the same impression as Armela, that the body became dependent on the crystal’s power in order to sustain itself.

  I reassured them that each necklace was imbued with the power to wean them from the crystal slowly, and that they wouldn’t even notice it happening.

  Further to that, the necklace would provide them with a much more robust system than the crystals ever could. I opened the menu and allowed them to fiddle with it, tabbing through various pages of information and statistics. I explained that every necklace would have a function like this that would attune itself specifically to the wearer.

  Tailoring the list of objectives and requirements to suit their lifestyle, body type, mentality, and ambitions. They would be mighty tools in better shaping the future to their whims and, if utilised to their fullest, would lead to a much richer and much longer life.

  This technology would be a black swan event for the planet; drastically altering the course of their species once they were widespread enough. A few of the gathered people questioned what the catch was; something like this must come at a heavy price.

  They weren’t wrong; the price was fairly steep in order to get one of these necklaces. But honesty was the best policy in letting these people decide their fates. First would be the removal of their crystals. They would no longer have access to sigils or any power related to them.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  I would replace that system with a much more robust one, so I hoped the offset didn’t make it too hard a pill to swallow. The second, and likely bigger, price would be my unfettered access to their lives and information. By necessity, I needed direct access to the necklaces to provide them with power, since they were a part of my body.

  There really wasn’t any way around that fact, but I did heavily emphasise the fact that I could not possibly look everywhere at once, so the more people who had the necklaces, the greater the anonymity would be. This unsettled them, but it didn’t really seem to be much of a hurdle.

  The last and, arguably, least impactful price would be a two-part requirement: first, they would need to offer a daily prayer to Mechanriel, and second, they would need to offer material to the necklace as it requested it.

  The first part was relatively simple: a brief prayer in Mechanriel’s name would enable the function of the necklace to continue. It was included in the daily tasks list to not get forgotten; no prayer meant no necklace.

  Someone from the back of the room asked if that meant the necklace would be permanently dead if no prayer was given to it. I assured them it would always reactivate once a prayer was received by its bonded owner. The necklaces would each go through a pairing process once worn, and could not be used by anyone other than that person.

  Even if they were stolen or removed from a corpse, they would remain inert. This was not the case for the second requirement, however. As they functioned, the necklaces would slowly shed material through natural processes: atomic half-life, wear and tear; they would break down slowly as they were worn and used.

  Each of them would need materials to facilitate repairs and updates to their function and design as features were added downstream.

  Each person would be required to ‘feed’ the necklace whatever material it requested of them when the time came. Usually with enough of a grace period to give them an opportunity to collect the material without the device degrading to the point of being inoperable.

  If that were to ever occur, it would be simple enough for another necklace holder to facilitate the repairs for said broken necklace, though it would remain paired to the original owner regardless of who or what repaired it.

  At the mention of taking a necklace from a corpse, there was another question from a woman seated directly in front of me with her child across her lap. She asked what the afterlife offers those who serve Mechanriel. Did the soul go to some paradise? What rewards were there for those who served a faithful life to Mechanriel?

  This was easy. Upon their death, they would be returned to the great machine; reunited with all those who had passed before them, and joined by all those who passed after. Like I had been, they would be accepted into the heart of our God, where they could live out the rest of their time amongst their most cherished friends and family.

  In reality, both the necklaces and their bodies would be recycled for the construction and maintenance of my God’s body. Where their soul would ultimately end up, I did not know.

  It was possible that my God could collect their souls to use in its endless algorithm, or perhaps they would end up amongst the trillions and trillions of souls in the great Legion of the Universal Song that both myself and Nia’cyl shared.

  I toyed with the idea of copying their minds and uploading them to some form of cloud storage and calling that heaven, but I didn’t have the infrastructure to offer that to them at the moment, and likely wouldn’t until construction had truly started on my mega-structure.

  I would do what I could to give them a paradise in which to retire; it was the least I could do for people who had dedicated their lives to my cause. For the moment, though, I would need to sell a little snake oil.

  All they needed to know for now was that in serving my God, happiness would be obtained; I could even sway those with a more pragmatic worldview, who couldn’t believe in something without first seeing proof of it.

  Through my machines, my God would make its presence known to even the unbelievers and naysayers by working miracles and providing useful things for them to live with. I was casting an incredibly wide net with my religion, and it would hopefully pay dividends.

  By the end of the discussions, all but two of the people who’d come wished to convert immediately. There was no chant, no ritual, no zealous hocus-pocus to legitimise the transition, just a simple vow to serve Mechanriel and then a little necklace to go around the neck.

  One of the very first functions of the necklace was to invade their body; seeking the crystal and then breaking it down over time, chipping away at it and moving the material into the necklace. The next function was to travel to the host’s eyes and construct a small filament array against which their heads-up display would be projected.

  This would overlay their vision with their status screens, menus, and other information. It would work to change their sight, removing the need for glasses while also providing useful tools like being able to highlight objects.

  Any object that was highlighted would remain tagged in their system ‘vision’ until deselected; this meant that regardless of where they looked, or how far they travelled, that item and its location would always be known to them.

  There were other functions that the necklace had, like being able to establish communication networks with other hosts; both verbal and written messages could be sent and received from anyone you granted access to. Essentially, operating like cell phones did on Earth.

  Because the necklace could ‘see’ and ‘hear’ the world around it, there was a limited ability to record and store images for later projection into the eyes as well. These images and videos could then be sent or received as the user wished.

  I didn’t explain any of this to them, though; it would need to be something they worked out and discovered for themselves as they grew accustomed to using them.

  I warned them, however, that the necklace could not be used for offense; it would not respond to those prompts, so attempting to use it for such things would only result in failure. It would defend their lives to the best of its ability, but it would not attack, even if they attempted to hurl it at someone.

  I told them it wouldn’t take long for them to receive the notice that the necklace had done what it needed to do, and to do their best not to be startled by the activation sequence. With that, they departed from the inn.

  The internal communications network would be a fantastic way to create a very ‘in-group’ mentality among the people who had it and, whether they knew it or not, the burgeoning desire to be a part of it among those who didn’t.

  Soon a small portion of the village would eat healthier, work more effectively, and communicate better than the rest, and it would show. Hopefully, this new direction would be what I needed to establish a foothold here among the churches and God’s who had long since held power.

  But I had a deeper, more subtle design for the people of Hilst and, to a wider extent, the world. The necklaces would eventually rummage through their genes to correct any errors they encountered.

  Once enough of the population had been given enough necklaces to establish a statistical baseline for what their ideal gene shape should be, the necklaces would begin adjusting their genetics to present the absolute best they could be.

  This wouldn’t be anything as barbaric as eugenics; there were no racial or ethnic motivations. It was just a wholesale improvement to the general population of the planet. It wouldn’t be noticeable for a few generations, but eventually, people would note the abnormally healthy and long-lived members of the Mechanriel faith.

  Their children and children’s children would grow taller, with denser muscles and heartier immune systems. They would be smarter, more creative and passionate, and they would outlive everyone else around them by a wide margin.

  The necklaces would subtly nudge their evolution, speeding them along the pathways of competitive adaptation. Ensuring every single one of them had the biological equipment to survive whatever environment they found themselves in.

  My god’s limb would be astoundingly massive. The number of interlocked biomes would number more than any of them could reasonably conceive as a number. Explorations through the limb would last eons without ever repeating a place you’d visited.

  Every biome would be linked through my gates, making travel from end to end possible for those who might be granted immortality, as I had. They needed to be ready for those challenges. I did not know what forms of life would come to live within my god’s body, but I would preserve as much as I could.

  There would be constant risks for them, and they needed the tools to overcome that.

  They would need the necklaces.

  With the loot system I’d implemented, the proof of my God existing would be concrete, and would give the people something definitive to place their prayers upon. With enough hard work and dedication to my system, there was a very real chance for their fortunes to be turned around with one lucky roll of the algorithmic dice.

  But they weren’t gambling, not in the genuine sense. There was no way to cheat the system, no way to bribe it or hack it, no way to get someone else to roll those dice for you. It was all based on the effort you put into it. And the rewards would be commensurate with that time and effort.

  Not just through the items gained from it, but the quality of life that it afforded you through participation.

  The foundations of my forces would begin here on this planet; the transformation would take generations, but by the time it had fully taken effect they would be ready to transition to the ark I would build to house them, and our conquest could begin in earnest.

  For now, I needed to focus on creating as prolific a reputation as I could for myself down here on the surface. My name needed to be on the tongues of every living being here, a figure of change and import the likes of which no one had ever seen.

  A unifying force that would smash the pathetic boundaries of kingdoms and landmasses in order to bring the scattered herd together onto one singular path.