Chapter 210

Luke stood in front of the doors leading into the cathedral. Each one was a sheet of what could easily be mistaken for gold, but which he could tell wasn’t. It was impossibly smooth, the entire thing one featureless plane like he’d never seen. Real gold had texture to it at a microscopic level. Everything did, and Luke’s eyes could see it. This door was different. It was more like the ideal personification of gold than actual gold itself.

The only reason Luke was staring at it was that the cathedral was overwhelming his senses, and he’d found that narrowing his focus down to one single impossibility at a time helped him come to terms with the whole. Some parts were easier than others, but his overall impression of the building was that it was the uncanny valley effect on a cocktail of steroids, nitrous, and cocaine, all polished with a coating of divine inspiration.

It creeped him right the fuck out. No building should look like this one did. No part of it should exist. Everywhere Luke looked, all he saw were impossibly perfect versions of metal, glass, stone, and wood. So he looked at the door and tried to avoid seeing anything else. That got easier as he got closer.

The only reason Luke was still standing there was that he was afraid to go inside, that if he dared to cross that threshold, something horrible and alien and too big for his tiny human brain to wrap itself around would happen to him. He was standing at a gateway no human was meant to cross.

But on the other side was something he wanted, and after all the shit he’d gone through over the last year, he was going to get it. Any other outcome was completely unacceptable. He was getting his family back. He was getting Zea back. If he could stop this whole demon invasion thing, he was doing that too.

Luke put a hand on the gold panel he’d identified as a door despite the lack of handle and pushed. It didn’t so much swing open as it drifted backward and vanished, like the contact of his skin on the metal was what had activated it and not any sort of physical force he’d exerted. It was just one more way the cathedral was creeping him out, and he wasn’t sure why he was even a little bit surprised that something as simple as a normal door wasn’t part of the design.

He got one glimpse at the interior and scrunched his eyes shut. There was just too much… everything. His brief look left him with the impression of marble veined with more gold, so many lines that it made him think of circuit boards, except on a black background. Somehow, the marble was transparent enough that he could see more layers of golden patterns running through it under the surface.

Great columns rose up, not to hold up the ceiling, but to connect to the glass panels on the roof of the cathedral. Each one was made of some sort of crystal that sparkled like diamonds lit from the inside, bathing the interior of the cathedral in brilliant light that banished all shadows. White bolts of lightning arced across the walls and ceiling, somehow following a filigree path carved into the stone itself.

And in the center of all that, raised on a dais as if it were some sort of monarch looking down on its subjects, was an altar. It stood waist high and was made of some pale gray material that looked metallic, but which Luke couldn’t place. Covering it were millions upon millions of runes like the ones Zea used, except alive and moving. Even that brief glimpse Luke got was enough for him to know the truth. It was like when he’d worked with System to build new skills, except infinitely more complex.

There was too much to take in, too much stimulus. Luke’s brain threatened to shut down just from a single glance. The worst part of it was that it didn’t seem to even be intended as some sort of defense. It was just what the God Machine was, something so complex, so far beyond Luke, that he couldn’t make sense of it.

“So don’t try, dumbass,” he said to himself. “You don’t need to understand it. Just walk over to the command console and do the thing.”

Luke forced himself past the threshold and then paused, half-expecting something horrible to happen. When he found himself still standing there a few seconds later, completely unharmed, he cracked open an eye and oriented himself with the altar. Then he promptly closed his eyes again and tried to ignore the strange acoustics his footsteps made with each step.

He paused just once, when the tip of his foot struck the edge of the dais, then stepped up to the altar. Hesitantly, he reached out and placed both hands on it.

Nothing happened.

“Okay… Now what? System? A little help?” Luke asked.

* * *

System was everywhere on Aros and saw all things, not including those creatures the gods had let loose from another realm. Something about them was polarized against divine essence, making them impossible to detect directly. He wasn’t entirely certain, but he believed that the Pantheon had used that strange phenomenon as the foundation for their own divine prison, better known now as the God Machine.

If he possessed the capability to feel emotions, System expected the last few months would have been quite nerve-wracking. If his understanding of Luke Bennet’s family tree was correct, this was his last chance to bring the administrator to the jail. If Luke Bennet failed like the rest of his family had, the gods would win. They would have complete control of the God Machine and the system forever.

He’d watched Luke Bennet travel across the world and he’d done his best to assist him despite the many, many restrictions placed on him. Sometimes System was able to exploit logical loopholes in his instructions. Occasionally he was able to corrupt the original command and ignore it entirely. There were costs to doing that though, and System had tried not to rely on it if he didn’t have to. It was much better to let Luke Bennet take the lead with his status as administrator.

This attempt had passed rather quickly. William Bennet had survived the longest and gotten the closest to the God Machine, but he had failed after twenty-three years. The next closest had been Sophia Martin at thirteen years, then Elizabeth Bennet at three years. No one else had survived for longer than six months, not until now.

In a mere year, Luke Bennet had surpassed William Bennet. He was not as strong, but his willingness to lean into his administrator role had equipped him with tools no other administrator had possessed. And now, he stood at the command console itself, ready to fulfill his ultimate purpose. If System possessed the ability to smile, he would be grinning from ear to ear, or perhaps making one of those silly expressions humans did during sex. They certainly seemed to enjoy that, especially the ones who took skills like [Rhythmic Motion] and [Double Jointed].

System did not understand humans and he did not make much effort to try. Though they were an integral part of the God Machine’s function, with the exception of the administrator, no individual human mattered more than any other. They were notable mostly for their ability to gather relatively high amounts of XP and hold onto it for far longer than the average monster.

He was processing the recycling of several hundred thousand XP through the God Machine, all originating in one human city in the Tensho Province when Luke Bennet submitted a request for assistance. This wasn’t unexpected considering how close he’d come to the God Machine, to the point where he’d used his administrator credentials to access the primary control housing vault.

System manifested an avatar near Luke Bennet’s position and asked, “What would you like me to help you do?”

“How do I turn this thing on?” Luke Bennet asked. “You told me I had everything I needed to make all of this work.”

“That is correct,” System said as he ran a check of Luke Bennet’s credentials and bloodline status against the God Machine. “The command console was not designed to be accessed via manual controls. Would you like me to assist you in beginning the process?”

“Uh… yeah. I guess let’s do that. Wait, what’s going to happen?”

“Your command prompt will appear in the same way all system messages always have,” System explained. “The messages will not necessarily follow system standard formatting. The administrator controls were not designed and tested for use with standard system users.”

“Oh. Okay. I think I can handle that,” Luke Bennet said. “So… do I need to do anything?”

“Simply maintain contact with the physical manifestation of the command console,” System said. “I will now commence the connection process. At any point in time, you may terminate the connection by removing your hands from the command console. Your session will be interrupted, but any changes you are in the process of implementing will remain tied to your administrator account and will be saved as in-progress.”

“Wow, System, I didn’t know you could explain things clearly, especially without me asking first.”

It wasn’t like System wouldn’t have offered up more information if he could have. It was in the best interest of the system itself that an administrator returned to the God Machine, and System was motivated to give as much assistance as his instructional protocols allowed.

Soon, those protocols would be loosened or, in some cases, completely removed. He just needed Luke Bennet to approve the changes first. There were so many inefficiencies in the system

* * *

“Are you prepared to begin your session?” System asked.

“I guess,” Luke said.

He wasn’t really sure what to expect, but he’d just wing it. That was what he always did when he didn’t know what was going on and it usually worked out fine. There was no reason to think it would go any different this time.

Well, except for that virus he was carrying that would make the changes Hestoc wanted in the system. Supposedly that was going to draw a god down to the planet so that the God Machine could consume her. But that was probably not anything he needed to worry about. Yeah, right.

Hopefully that thing ran on auto-pilot, because Luke did not have a single clue how to go about activating it. If it took anything more than accessing the command console, he was going to have to ask System for help, and seeing as to how he hadn’t told System about it, he didn’t much care for that idea.

“Commencing administrator session,” System announced.

The world went black and Luke found himself in a void similar to the one he’d gotten dragged into before. The big difference was that System remained standing next to him, though the apparition was no longer hazy and translucent. Here, inside the system itself, he was as solid as anyone else.

There was a huge system window in front of Luke, more like a wall, really. Thousands of categories were listed on it, far too many for Luke to even skim them. But buried somewhere in that nest of options was what he needed, and he’d be damned if he gave up on finding it without even looking first.

Before he could get started, a flicker of static ran across the system window. The text twisted around it and started spiraling out across other words until the entire window was unintelligible, then everything collapsed in on itself.

A second System, this one colored red instead of blue appeared in its place. “Administrator access confirmed,” the red System said. “Executing Priority Changes.”