[AgentZero]

The God That Failed






The God That Failed
by
Tim McElwain

Prologue


They say gods can not be killed
They say gods can never die.
They say gods are eternal.
They are wrong.

Since the first glimmer of the divine sparked inside the mind of some unknown ancestor, gods have been living and dying like any mortal. Granted, their life spans far exceed that of any mortal I've ever met, but they die just the same.

At first, our gods were everywhere; in the earth and the sky, in stones and streams, in plants and animals, in ourselves. Peace and harmony were held aloft as the truest of ideals, though reality is very different. For though it was agreed that god was in everything, no one could agree on how much of him was in a given stone, stream, plant or animal, or what he was doing there. And this gave us reason to kill. After all, violence and death were just part of existence. In time, these gods died off and were replaced by gods that lived high atop mountains or in the clouds. Peace and harmony were still held aloft, but not quite as high, as we had discovered so many other ideals. And as we spread we created pantheon upon pantheon of new gods until there were thousands of divine beings competing for our attentions. These gods warred amongst themselves for millennia before dying off to be replaced by one God. The True God. Peace and harmony were yet again held aloft, while violence and death were cast down from their pedestals and abhorred as unnatural. Though all the while we worked feverishly to discover new ways of inflicting violence and death on a greater and greater scale. But only to protect ourselves, we said. After all, we are all servants of the One True God. But even then the divine found no peace, for there were many One True Gods. And slowly these competing One True Gods died off and were replaced by gods of our own creation.

Then they came. Finally, we thought, we have truly found the Divine. But we were wrong. And now we have no gods.
Only demons.

Chapter I


It was a beautiful, bright summer’s day. The sun radiated gentle heat across the land, birds soared across the bright blue sky, and the plants turned their flowery faces upwards to bask in the sun’s warm glow.

Yes, Prium Alvec Hoon agreed to himself, it was a truly splendid day. And even if it had been a cold and miserable day, it is doubtful this would have dampened Hoon’s spirits any. He had far too much to be joyful about this day. His wives were ripe with new offspring, his eldest son had been accepted into the Academy, and despite having only been promoted some three months earlier, Hoon himself was soon to be accepting an even more prestigious, and much better paid, positions. He would have an office at the top of the highest building in Port 7. He would have offices on all the major colonies, and his own ship to get him there. Best yet, his salary was set to increase tenfold, which would easily let him afford another wife. Or perhaps two. And all this because of the simple press of a button.

He shook his head ruefully at the memory. Over a thousand Worker Units had malfunctioned and turned against their Operators in an orgy of violence and death. The attack shocked the whole Management Department into inaction. After all, it had been thought the last bugs had been fixed several generations ago. And while the rest of the department stood in shock, unbelieving, he alone had the presence of mind to act. He alone vaulted heroically onto the Command platform and he alone gave the order to terminate the malfunctioning units. It had only taken a few hours before the last one was tracked down and deactivated, yet the Board treated him as though he were a mighty general who had just won a glorious victory against insurmountable odds.

Still, if they wished to lump prestige and glory upon him, he was happy to-

Prium Alvec Hoon’s musings were interrupted as a semi-solid slug slid easily through his office window, through his front cranial plate, and splattered his happy brains against his office’s back wall. All that remained of his half-finished thoughts was a fine red mist wafting over his lifeless body.

Hearing the sound of shattering glass, the Prium’s secretary hurried into the room, fearing her clumsy superior had broken another vase. Entering the office, she saw nothing out of the ordinary, aside from the lack of a Prium. A large ornamental plant obscured his body from her dim eyesight. As she shuffled towards his desk she noticed something odd about one of the windows. Moving closer, she leaned in until her nose was almost touching the glass. Odd, she thought, that the Prium would have put a hole in the window, given how he was always complaining about the stench of the city. Turning away from the window, her eyes finally fell upon what had once been Prium Alvec Hoon, and even her poor eyesight could not conceal the grisly scene before her. After diving behind the former Prium’s desk to ensure she didn’t share his grim fate, she did what any normal person would do, and screamed.

By some strange twist of physics, her scream struck a strange resonance pattern that travelled the whole way down all three hundred and seventy-nine stories of the building. Upon reaching the concrete, the leading edge of the scream’s sound wave rebounded and crashed into the rest of the wave, causing the window to explode violently, showering glass over a poor young girl named Keira Asen.

“Bloody [censored]!” she exclaimed, scrambling backwards and shaking glass from her bright blue hair. “Bloody [censored] [censored]!”
After assuring herself that no serious harm had been done to her by the flying glass, Keira stared studiously at the