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I found the house after a fair amount of trouble, and I became uncomfortably aware that I was very far from civilization. Especially when an old woman greeted me with a gun in her hands. But when I explained my reasons, mentioned the colleague who had sent me, she looked at me a long time, gave me a flashlight, and sent me down into the basement of the ramshackle old farmhouse at the center of the property.
It was dark, and surprisingly warm, warmer than the upstairs. There was a rising noise as I came down the stairs; whirring fans, I realized. There were wires everywhere, bundled in clumps leading every which way. And then there were the books: stacks and stacks of books, enough of them to form walls, and enough walls to form a labyrinth.
“Ms. Hill? Rebecca Hill”
“Back here!” came a voice off to my right. I made my way carefully, stepping over clumps of wires. The stacks of books became more and more erratic, but I didn’t see either a person or a clear pathway.
And suddenly there was a clatter behind me. I turned and shone the light, and just for a moment there was a figure; pale, long hair glittering with naked wires that caught my flashlight. The eyes glow among metal fixtures in the face, and I wasn’t sure there were only two. The figure hunched among the books, and then scuttled back, disappearing from view.
No. Nope. No way. I ran back toward the stairs, but tripped on a large bundle of wires and fell down to the floor. I could hear steps, coming from behind me now. I scrambled around, still on the floor, and shone my flashlight up…
The circle of light revealed an elderly woman, quite ordinary looking; thin gray hair, thick glasses, wrinkled face. She was older than her friend upstairs; her wife upstairs , I corrected unconsciously, as the flashlight caught a glint of gold from around the woman’s fingers. She was smiling now. “Did you take a spill, young lady?” she asked in a soft tenor. “I’m sorry, it’s a mess down here. Could you not shine that in my face?”
Alarmed as I was, it took me a long moment to lower my light. “I saw…I saw…”
“Really?” She looked interested. “They’re not actually here, I think, not really. But I see them sometimes, too. They’re usually shy around strangers.”
“What was it?” I asked.
“A Support Saint,” she answered with a smile, and suddenly she looked like a kindly teacher, eager to explain a favorite topic. “Or the avatar of one, maybe. That’s what I call the images, avatars. But I’m being rude.” She offered me a hand; I took it, and stood. “Call me Sistine.”
“Arabella Carnahan,” I answered. “Sistine? Not Rebecca Hill? That’s the name my colleague gave me...”
“Bah.” She waved the name away. “If I knew that one was going to stick so long, I would have made Parn come up with something better. Just a pseudonym. Something we could give out to seekers, without the authorities connecting it to us. Not that anyone’s looking for us, anymore. But Parnassus can be stubborn.”
Parnassus; something about the name rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite place it. The woman upstairs, I assumed; she hadn’t introduced herself. Sistine was already walking away, back the way I’d come, stepping sure-footedly around clumps of wires without the benefit of a flashlight. “I assume you’re a seeker, and not the authorities, because I’m fairly sure a secret agent wouldn’t fall down when they saw a Saint. And because Parn would have killed you or died trying, and I didn’t hear shots.”
“I…suppose I am.” We came to a clear area, and I saw what was recognizable as a small wooden altar. It was clean, but had the unmistakable stain of blood, on the altar itself and on the floor.
“Chickens only!” she said with a laugh. “No need to worry.” She parted a curtain by the altar, and led me into a small area she seemed to have reserved as an office. There was a chaotic workbench overflowing with wires, pliers, and electrical instruments; electronics wasn’t my area, but I recognized various voltmeters and a heavy duty battery of some kind. Across from the workbench was a desk, with a typewriter keyboard and a device a little like a television.
“I do most of the work down here,” she said absently, clearing several empty mugs off of a chair and laying it out for me. “The wires, of course. They need connection, even if it’s mostly theoretical. I have several stations like this setup around the basement. Each one’s got a computer. You know what I mean by that word?"
“A digital computer,” I nodded. “I’m a mathematician. I use them all the time. Miracles of the Saint Electric.”
“Yes,” she said, with a frown. “I still need the Saint to make them work. I’m sure if they were more powerful, I wouldn’t. But…” She shook her head. “That’s the network. And the other thing is the books, of course. They like data. I give them data.” One of the infinitude of books lay open on the desk above the keyboard
I blinked. “You’ve…transcribed all of these books?”
“Hardly,” she said. “A fraction. I’m not much of a typist. Never enough for Psi, of course.”
“Psi.” I repeated the strange name. “Is that another priest of…of the Child?”
“The Wirebitten Child Who Crawls Beneath The Floor,” she told me, speaking the unlicensed god’s name with confidence, where I have never dared say so much as ‘the Child’ out loud before this moment. “You know, at first we did just call them ‘the Child’, but we needed something with some grandeur, you know, and then Meteora talked about the wires biting Alpha, and…” She sighed. “I’m sorry, dear, my mind wanders these days. Tell me,” she says, her full attention returning to me, her eyes lighting up. “What do you know?”
“An outlaw god,” I said. “Penninsulan, isn’t it? A project from the war, a propaganda god that didn’t pan out.”
She laughed suddenly, an erratic giggle. “Eh. How do I answer that? A project from the war, yes. But they were never a weapon. Never, not like the prop gods.” She closed her eyes and mumbled some sort of prayer. “But it doesn’t matter. Yet. Go on.”
“It…they… have been described to me as a god of connection and communication,” I continued. “Not calculation. But I have a challenge. And some of my colleagues hinted…”
“We’ve had mathematicians before,” she said. “It’s interesting, it’s not what the network was designed for. During the war, we were cloistered while we worked on the propaganda gods. Memetic poisoning, you know? Making gods is fiddly work; they can pick up on any stray thought. But they set up… a system, another miracle of the Saint, maybe, at least in part. Conferencing, messaging, video calls. And this was when telephones in private homes seemed like a novelty, you understand. It was how we spoke together, how we planned, how we worked. But we poured so much into that system, so much of ourselves…”
I blinked, connecting the dots. Mathematicians did it all the time. Fermat’s Last Folly, we called it, tongue in cheek. Lend too much significance to something you’re working on, and you might create a god. Vicious little things, mostly, in mathematics, but too often deadly to their creators. This sounded similar, but on a massive scale. “You came together to make a god,” I said. “But you made one you didn’t mean to.”
She nodded. “Yes. But it isn’t a weapon. It’s a god of connection..” She sighed unhappily. “But of course there’s only so much an outlaw god can connect, because there are only so many worshippers. And the wires are trouble. I can speak to others, the Support Saints can flit our messages back and forth, but it’s slow, low-bandwidth. The wireless Miracle. If we had more worshippers…or more sacrifices…” She shrugged.
“So there are others,” I asked.
“Some,” she admitted. “Too few.” She looked at the television sadly. “But…the Child can connect more than people. It can connect computers.”
And suddenly veiled remarks from my colleagues slotted into place. “Connect the computers…and it wouldn’t be additive, would it? Your computation speed would multiply…”
“It would,” she agreed. “I take it you need that.”
“I have a proof,” I told her, “to a long-standing conjecture. I don’t mean to brag, but it’s a pretty important one. It will work, I know it will. But no human could ever do all the computation; a digital computer still couldn’t finish it in my lifetime. But…enough computers, speaking together…It might still take a lot. How many can the Child handle? How many computers networked together, I mean?”
She raised an eyebrow. “If you give them the sacrifices, as many as you need. If you have the sacrifices. And the Child is hungry.” Her hands strayed to the keyboard, her eyes went wistfully to the screen.
I nodded. “I…I’d need the university’s resources, but…”
Suddenly she froze. “The university. Northern Isle? That means government.”
I nodded. “Yes. I know you’ve operated, er, under the radar before, but for what I’m picturing we’d need institutional backing, funding, sacrifices…”
“They’re not a licensed god,” she said, sounding almost confused.
“Legal help too,” I said. Gods became licensed all the time; the university had a whole department for it. “I’ll have to beg and scrape to my dean, but he knows what this theorem would mean. I think he would back it.”
“But…” She was staring at me.
“Would it be so bad, Sissy?” came a voice behind me. Feminine and scratchy; the old woman who’d let me in upstairs. Parnassus, Sistine had called her; she was in her sixties, white-haired and grey-eyed and thick-browed. Even in the dim light she was distractingly handsome, for all that she was probably twice my age. I hadn’t heard her approach, but then, I’d already been dreaming of banks upon banks of networked computers.
“I fought my whole life to spread their word,” Sistine said. She sounded almost pleading. “And the one line was, no government. No universities. You know that. They’re a rebel god. They’re a whistleblower’s god. They’re a fugitive’s god.”
“You’ve tried to make them that,” Parnassus agreed. “Maybe you’ve even succeeded, love. But they’re also a god of connection. And right now, who are they connecting?”
“ME!” Sistine said, suddenly almost angry. She shot to her feet. “I tend the wires, I network the computers, I send messages to the other faithful, I slaughter the chickens.”
“And I fix the house,” Parnassus said gently. “And tend the garden. I cobble the money to pay for the electricity. I still carry a gun to protect you after 30 years. And…” She looked down. “We haven’t kept them alive since .42 with just chickens. As much as I know you’d like to have.”
Sistine seemed stricken; she collapsed back into her chair. “I know that, Parn.”
The name clicked for me suddenly. “Parnassus. General Parnassus! The Hero of Glottage.” I looked back at Sistine. “It’s true. You were there for the development of the propaganda gods! Those things nearly destroyed my country!”
“We’re neither of us who we were when we went into that cloister,” Parnassus snapped. “And if you want your god, girl, you’ll leave the past in the past.” The words landed like a blow; I could believe this woman had commanded armies.
She turned her attention back to Sistine. “We’ve carried this burden a long time. I know you don’t want to hurt anyone. And you don’t want them to hurt anyone. But this is for math, not warfare. And not to make a new god.”
“When you let something out into the world,” Sistine answered, sounding miserable, “you don’t get to choose what happens to it next.”
Parnassus approached her, got down on her knees, and took her hands. “I followed you out of the Project, Sissy. Can’t you follow me out of this?” She didn’t say what this was; she didn’t have to, down in that basement surrounded by humming wires and ghostly saints and chicken blood.
Sistine was quiet for a long moment. “I need to tell them,” she said at last. I didn’t think she meant the god, exactly. I thought of the ghostly saint in the darkness, of Parnassus’ question: who are they connecting ? But Sistine looked at me, and she was sad, but I knew she’d let me use her god. And she sat down at the keyboard, and as she typed words appeared on the television. I’d never seen a computer work like that; at the university, we used encoded punch cards.
Servants of the electric web , she typed, take this prayer and transform it. Make my words lightning that strikes the world.
More words appeared on the screen.
CREEP Action?
And Sistine typed:
Pray.