Gods and Robots, Part I

There was a belief that the gods of old received all their great power from our prayers, that out sacrifices, supplications made them so strong we’d look on and despair. But it turned out the truth was quite different, when we were confronted by the gods of old, they cared not a bit for our murmurings, what they were looking to take were our souls. As in they literally fed upon the metaphysical soul we possess, each was a morsel, a bit of power, which they thirsted for to keep them from death. We learned this when they came back to our Earth after an absence of thousands of years, to see Zeus and Thor in downtown London without question struck many folks as weird. All of the gods, of all the pantheons that belonged to the great pagans of old, strode upon the earth, brilliant balls of light, and to all human concerns they were cold. We learned this when then started touching folks, only for those people to just drop dead, obviously worried, we raised a fuss, and the gods laughed, these were the words they said: “Does a wolf care about what the deer thinks? Does the deer care about a blade of grass? We created you, and all of this realm, did you think there was no reason for that? “This universe, in truth, is our garden, we made it to ensure that we could feed, you are our cattle, our livestock, our grain, that we shall take and slaughter as we need.” Amidst the terror, some things now made sense, the great extinctions that riddle Earth’s past, they weren’t grant events of geology, they were immortals just breaking their fast! Worst of all there was no way to resist, these fell beings were from another plain, not flesh and blood, and not bound by physics, beyond injury, and death, and real pain. People began dying as they moved through, feasting on the souls of what they had grown, no afterlife, no great meaning to this, to them we were just crops that they had sown. In those hellish years, amidst the dying, it was clear nothing living would survive, any animal that had consciousness was ran down viciously, and then drained dry. When it was coming, nobody could tell, time and space were no object to these things, sometimes they taunted us, dragged it all out, but in the end that proved their undoing. You see back then I was in robotics, I worked in new, cutting-edge nanotech, we thought it could help in terraforming, and let mankind achieve what must come next... CONCLUDES IN PART II.