Tongs, needles, sharp white lights.

Scales and the hands of dragons, the hands of a spider, the hands of an octopus.

What an easy thing. The sins of commission are the easiest—Avoiding them is a matter of simply laying still. If you don’t say anything, don’t do anything, don’t believe the lies, don’t accept the accusations, they can hurt the body any amount.

They can’t hurt the soul.

There is no need for the various nerve cells in a human body to be exactly adjacent to each other. As long as the chemical signal from one cell causes an appropriate chemical change in the next cell down the line, all the various nervous system functions can continue unimpeded.

Even a little faster than normal, he felt. They must have left a good deal of mechanoreceptors—he could still get pressure and a sense of movement, as though he was being slowly spread out over a whole city block. How much of it was real was impossible to tell.

And of course every nociceptor was immaculately maintained.

Of course he had no idea where his brain was anymore, but they had to have left it intact.

Much later, Jones Inkk yanked the wrench, hard. He was hands deep in a long white architectural nightmare out in the Arizona desert. If they had used nanomachines to construct the thing, why would they make human-usable service hatches?

These old American buildings were so unpredictable. Almost insane. That was part of the reason he almost appreciated, in a kind of sinister way, the Dampening that made such things impossible. Not that anybody could really approve of it, after the fact.

He had the lid off. These little gray boxes were threaded all throughout the building’s superstructure. He pulled one out, thick gloves on, breath held, and dropped it into a sample bag. How was he the one expected to figure this stuff out? It hardly fell under the heading of ‘infrastructure’.

Well, if it’s on your plate, you finish it off.

A year later, pilgrims flocked to this very building to hear the words of the saint.

Because suffering refines the soul.

“Send this to the lab. It seems to be some sort of nutrient bath, with little hair-thin wires running through it. I want to know what else is in there.”

“Sure thing boss.”

“And treat it as a serious biohazard risk. This could be anything.”

It wasn’t the words he said. And it couldn’t be the tone of voice, since all they had done was to hook up what was left of his Broca’s Area to a speech synthesizer left over from one of the old Babelfish units everyone had since the war. It had no inflection, and in fact usually reminded people of bad times.

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A few minutes passed.

“No, wait, there it is,” he said over the radio. “A building. Looks like a bomb shelter. I’m going to check it out.”

“Careful,” said his boss, Leonard. “We’ve just lost millions of people. No need to lose one more.”

“I’m not afraid.” He had pulled the lever as a child; there was no judgment on his head.

“That’s great for you. Listen, report back if you find anything – There’s a delegation here from some village. I’ve got to convince them they don’t need to start burning Notguilties to appease the gods.”

Daniel couldn’t help thinking that, in fact, they might.

He didn’t knock, because he’d be going in whether or not the inhabitants invited him. His power saw opened the door well enough, although the steel deadbolt meant that he’d have to replace the blade.

The walls inside were unpainted cinder blocks, erratically illuminated: One of the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling needed replacing. Stairs led down, where he finished ruining the saw blade on another locked door, and then he was in a large room full of moving air. His flashlight beam came back as specks and flickers, as though he was shining it at a broken mirror.

His radio spat static. The walls must have been reinforced with concrete. A metallic clicking sound, like rain on a metal roof, disoriented him with its irregularity.

He found the switch and the haphazard collection of bulbs stuttered to life, revealing a room full of silver pendula. Rows of them hung from each other in long chains, each bob smaller than the one it hung from, swinging back and forth in crazy, unpredictable arcs. Where there weren’t pendula there were thick bushes of wires leading for the most part from the high ceiling to the stacks of computers that filled the corners of the room.

There was a door at the other end, and no clear aisle in sight. He took a few unexpected blows from the cubic metal bobs as he made his way through, but he gave as good as he got, yanking several offending devices out of the ceiling and leaving them twisted on the floor. They weren’t booby traps, but they were irritating nonetheless.

Inside the second room was a man in bright white clothes.

When Daniel saw him, he threw down his weapons and begged for his life.

“Stand up,” said the man. His voice was like a pipe organ. “You will have no harm from me. I am merely a messenger.”

He gestured to a chair at a desk, where a dead man lay. If this is just a messenger, how terrible must the one sending the message be? Who cares about some dead guy?

“He is the reason I am here.”

Daniel lifted his head and looked more closely at the face. It was Anton Gray, the heretic! Of course.

“Oh mighty one,” groaned Daniel, on his hands and knees again, “we repent! We repent! Please, bring back the rest of the continent, I beg you on behalf of all our people!”

A part of him really was terrified. But there was another part with the presence of mind to turn on the emergency video recorder.

“What has happened to you is not of our doing – and it cannot be undone.”

“Then allow me to bring a representative of the Church to you. The Ardil himself would speak with you. We will bring sacrifices, say prayers. Every man will vote, just spare us!”

“No. No more voting. The old laws are done away with. You will be my messenger. Tell them this: The false gods who once ruled your universe have abandoned you. Your universe is now under the direct control of the One True God. You are free of all pilgrimages, all voting, and all the vain study to which they put you. But find for yourselves in their libraries a book called ‘The Bible’. This is the book of the One True God.”

“Tell men to take heart, and to study this book. All praise to the Living God! All praise to the God of all that exists! All praise to the God Who makes all things new!”

And then the man vanished.

A week later, the Church inquest entered as evidence the last page of the diary of Anton Gray:

“We are coming close to what I believe are the computational limits of this universal simulation. According to my experiments, the equation governing pendular motion has been getting simpler and simpler. The last time it shifted seems to have been Tuesday. It looks like an entire term dropped off the infinite series, and my preliminary finding is that it was 11 over 3072 times theta zero to the fourth. You just don’t need that term any more. They’re taking shortcuts!

“Why? Because my experiments are working. My rough estimate is that the room next to me is eating up more processing power than the whole rest of the continent. Perhaps a great deal more…

“What will the gods do when we push them?”

Of course, Daniel Brady was killed. New religions seldom begin without martyrdom. He was among the first of his race to die for real.

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