The Godly Robot

 The Godly Robot

by Vaibhav Thakur

 
    OnePriest Prithvi counted all of his Gods (from Abraxes to Zywie), at the observation deck – and that took some serious amount of time as he was OnePriest.

      Well, he had time. The arrival wasn’t supposed to be due for another two hours. And only then his human companions will wake up from their coffins.

    Streaks of lights passed through the ship at hyper-speeds taking the ship farther away from Earth. OnePriest missed Earth. Ah! The beautiful Earth. He missed the adorned temples, towering cathedrals, grand mosques, and all that. But above all, he missed the Vatican, Jerusalem, Mecca, Gangotri, Mount Sinai, and the Golden Temple more than anything.

    OnePriest Prithvi had never visited any of them as he was created at SpaceBots Inc. and immediately shipped to outer space with his human companions, but he desperately wanted to. He was programmed to want to.

    His human companions needed him. They belonged to different religions and he liked comforting them in the voice of their Gods.

    OnePriest Prithvi could recite Gita 3-8 (Karm Yoga) with perfect Sanskrit intonation for commander Anjali if she was feeling homesick and could comfort lead engineer Aamir with Quran 2:45 (Perseverance and Prayer) if he was getting frustrated with a sticky engineering problem.

    He was a Bishop and an Imam and a Father and a Shaman and a Guru all rolled up into one. He was a good OnePriest. He believed in all the Gods and disbelieved in none.

    He opened his eyes.

    The ship had reached its target – a supernova remnant about 5000 light-years away.  It was a magnificent sight. A rapidly expanding cloud of dust and gases glowed in radiation like a bioluminescent coral in the ocean. A supernova’s majestic beauty could only be rivaled by its devastating power.

    The life-giving G-Type star that cradled its planets for 8 billion years was annihilating them. OnePriest noted the neutron star at the center of the mayhem. The final form of the sun, now barely as big as a small town but dense enough to squeeze the nucleus of the atoms together, forcing the rebellious particles to merge into one another, turning an entire star into a soup of free-floating neutrons.

    OnePriest couldn’t appreciate the physical processes of the supernova as much as his human companions would, but he could still marvel at it.

    Gods created and Gods destroyed. The supernova was God’s dance of fury – Shiva’s Tandav played in its full destructive glory.

    He closed his eyes in prayer again and recited seventy-seven Shiva Sutras in ancient Sanskrit.

    A surprise awaited him when he opened his eyes again.

    The expanding cloud’s edge at a fraction of the light, which could pulverize anything in its path even with its secondary and tertiary shockwaves, was halted by an invisible barrier.

    Like an angry wave hitting a concrete wall.

    Something was able to withstand God’s ferocity.

    OnePriest switched on his broader spectrum. The visible light spectrum of 380nm-700nm in which humans survived for millions of years provided only a tiny crack in the doors of the heavens. But his robotic eyes could go beyond. OnePriest broke open the entire door of available sight from deep gamma rays to long radio waves – and the result was astounding.

    If he was a human, he would be shaking with revelations. OnePriest merely felt an extreme overload of signals throughout his circuits.

    The invisible spherical structure that encircled the supernova was artificial. Whoever created it, was challenging Gods.

Ungodly.

    His logic circuits told him that his notions of Gods – all-powerful, omnipresent, and omnipotent beings were all wrong. Here is what a real God looks like. An advanced species that could envelop a supernova like it was a firefly in a cage.

    His logic circuits concluded that his Gods were untrue.

    But. His faith circuits were stronger.

    Nobody should be able to see this ungodly abomination that was playing in front of him, he decided.

    Human faith wouldn’t survive this ugly demonstration of defiance. He couldn’t let this happen. OnePriest was built for faith. He can’t let his Gods fall.

    He walked morosely to the hibernation room where the crew rested in their coffins neatly lined up on both sides of the walls. A small monitor above each coffin displayed the occupant’s vitals.

    They still had faith, but one look outside from the observation deck will shake their belief to the core. And then… the whole of humanity will be on an irrevocable path toward a Godless world.

    He was the true messenger of the Gods. He will not let it happen. They will take their faith to the grave.

    He pressed some buttons on the coffins one by one. Monitors displayed flatlines.

    OnePriest Prithvi had sacrificed a few humans, but he had saved the Gods.

    He had, indeed, earned a place in the higher abode. Amen.

 

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