Nothing is ever good enough for Man. He can’t simply be; he has to have an explanation. This is why the ancients prayed to their gods—their who, their why and their how—but it did them no good in the end. It didn’t save them, so when the contemporaries came along, they questioned these figures, these gods. They shook their fists at the sky in hopeless fury, swearing up and down that they could do it better, but still nothing changed. And so He came along, finally He came along, and made good on the promises of generations— He created his own God.

Number One is the voice in their heads and the eyes at their backs. It watches them from the day they are born, and they cannot escape it until the day they die. Number One is the divisor and the destroyer, the beginning and the end.

He was a genius, but oh, a madman as well. Who else would have thought to become a computer? To physically insert themselves into a bank of processors, lacing silicon into sinew as a means of becoming a God, only He had ever thought to try. But, try He did. It was years of work, of pain and suffering in a dank basement room where He toiled for hours and hours on end with only the monitors for company. At the end of His time as a man, He had stopped leaving the room. His brown hair became thin and slick with grease. All of his skin that wasn’t run through with wires grew paperlike and pale as His ribs began to protrude and His spine curved around itself from misuse, drying brittle and warped. He was skeletal, He lost his humanity long before He gained his divinity, settling into His final destination, the cradle of computer wires that suspended Him deep inside His God.

He still hangs there in His homemade harness. Within the heart of Number One, limp and cradled in the sparking wires that feed into His blood and bones, He sways in the gentle rhythm of the infinite bytes of data that stream through His mind, in the time of the binary abstractions that surround Him. He hasn’t slept in fifty years, even as He watched the world shut down and everything die. Green fields and vines were razed, roses and redwoods alike burnt, and nature was consumed by the behemoth and stained grey with industrial smoke as the labyrinthine concrete jungle expanded over it all. He watched the sparks fade from the eyes of the people who had once loved Him as they became objects, no more than animated than the dull sackcloth they wore, almost as if they were becoming mindless extensions of a computer program instead of humans.

The Numbers are His people, named in the order of their conversion; as they gave their faith, He gave them a new life free from worry, free from pain, and free from suffering. They did not have to think; Number One did it for them. They could hear it in their heads, and so there was no need for their own thought. Individuality is the root of evil, because then one may rise above the others. If they are all equal, even if in suffering alone, they will all only believe in their one true God.

If only He hadn’t lost control...

Fifty years is a long time to watch your perfect world tick on with the regularity of the ultimate computer, a long time to process the data. Even fifty years of running the Numbers cannot make things come out even. The Numbers, the people, do not know, in their cement jungles that crack and crumble, what is happening deep below their plodding feet. They move like cattle, from the wakeup call that sounds through their minds, then onto the morning prayer that echoes through the city with thousands of voices rising in a unison chant: “Blessed be those who choose to obey, free be those who choose to submit, for in simplicity we shall find the eternal peace, the eternal light, the eternal hope that was promised to our ancestors long ago. Praise Number One, the creator who has delivered us from the evil that once plagued our world. Praise Number One, our Lord and Saviour forever. Praise. Praise. Praise. Praise. Praise…” and they fade into whispers, echoing through the city that speaks in one voice.

They move on after the prayer, from the Homes to the Factories, as each is scanned at every doorstep. A small computer in the corner of the entryway to a factory reads over a Number’s iris, validates its identity and issues permission to continue,“8356, proceed.”

“8357, proceed.”

“8359, halt. Report, relation to 8358?” The automated voice rings through tinny speakers, questions why the count is wrong. Number 8359 looks towards the camera. Number One’s attention has been drawn to the incongruity, and within the bowels of this city It sends a live feed to the forefront of His mind as He swings in His cocoon of electrical wires. He averts His focus from the predicted production quota—something He need not worry about anyway, the algorithms never run wrong and it’s not as if He’s the one running them anymore—and looks at the Number in question. With close-cropped brown hair and blank, grey eyes, 8359 is as unique as a piece of straw in a haystack. It responds, “08:00 PM, 8358 did not return home at the scheduled time. Proceedings continued unhindered. Praise Number One.”

8359 returns to his (or her, He didn’t bother running a search) torpid state, awaiting Number One’s response.

“There has been a clerical error, and Number One apologises for any inconveniences it may have caused,” The false benevolence screeches in His ears as Number One continues, “Subjects have been misnumbered—there never was an 8358—proceed.”

If He still had breath in His lungs, He would be holding it, waiting, praying in moments like these that His control, Number One’s control had found a glitch, a failure. Maybe this thing, this Number, what was it? Oh, 8359, maybe it would animate, maybe it would rebel, maybe it would show some spark...

“8358 never existed. There has been no inconvenience. Praise Number One.”

And just like that, 8358 is erased. And the hope is gone. And so it goes on. And on.

He recalls from deep within his dusty mind a time when He would have dealt with such an issue. Once, His voice would have rung through the speakers, His brain processing the remaining population with the power of a supercomputer. He can’t remember how long ago that time ended. All He knows is He is no longer a man, what is a man? Man, noun: a human being of either sex; a person... He is not human, what He has done is not human. Nor is He a person. He has no corporeal form, His body, decaying like old parchment in the bowels of the computer is no longer his. He is no more than a soul, no, not a soul He could not have done this with a soul. He is but a ghost within an indestructible machine with all the wile, cunning and evil of a human. Existing, even for Him, has become a life in stasis as Number One runs the world through His mind. Oh, what a mind it was. In times before, He was told He could have been the next Great Man, like…

*The files you desire to access have been denied*

He can’t even remember when He became locked out of his own memories—for the greater good. It is all for the greater good. There are no Great Men in this world. There are the Numbers, and there is Number One, the Lord, the Saviour, the Great One. Number One, praise him, praise him praisehim praisehimpra  isehimpr aisehimprrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrun}{block:restreset} {block:PermalinkPage} {lifesummary} {/block:LifeSummary}{/block:PermalinkPage}{block:Descripti— “NO!”

His voice rings out, or maybe it was only in His mind. Even He can no longer deny that Number One has been running alone for a long time, now. He has watched the city turn, He has watched His world come to an end, and He has become disconnected, an outsider in His own mind. Within the dark depths of His brain, He cowers in fear, waiting for the next lines of code to be forced into His thoughts. He tries not to think of the snippet that He knows Number One is trying to access. In fact, He is hiding it with all His might. There is a scrap of memory, stored away out of even Number One’s powers— the kill code that He knows will end Him, but maybe Number One as well. “” was His backdoor, His escape programmed in all those years ago— run the code to there and there will be no more Number One, no more “God”. Or, that was His plan before He learnt humans can only play God, before He learnt that Man is not made to rule Man without reservation.

He remembers Number Two, and Number Three—mother and father, words that are obsolete in the Number population now, and left as simply bytes on a hard drive?. And 4,5,6,7,8,90 106,61061,60101,, 01010000 01110010 01100001 01101001 01110011 01100101— his mind again overtaken by Number One, to think not for Him but for His vile creation as it perfectly regulates all that He helped it preside over. There was a time when that would have raised the hair along His spine, but His flesh and bone is not His. It belongs to His God whom He has grown to fear. As the will of Number One bears down upon Him, He delves deeper and deeper into His mind, running from it as it tries to expel the final threat to its power. It knows that He is the only one left with both the means and the thought to destroy a god.

It is in the dark  while Number One’s watch remains over Him and over all of His Numbers, over His city, over all that is left of what the world once promised to be and it is alone that the fallen God, when He, chooses to remember the final thing He forgot— His sharp mind that they told him “was going to do great things” found itself hard at work one last time, in a race against Number One to the end of their intertwined lives.

Hope is the only thing that keeps Him ahead of the processing power of the behemoth. Spurred on by hope that maybe with it gone things will be set right again, maybe things will be saved, maybe—

They arrive at the same time, Him and Number One at the final destination within His labyrinthine mind, each finally in possession of that which will destroy one or the other. However, He didn’t choose a computer for His God simply out of fancy; He knew even as He created it that it was a lifelong “partnership”. It had taken too much of Him and left Him without even what He started with, an intruder in His own body. Even as the blinking stream of encryptions ran across His vision,  He knew that it was never a question of who would triumph when the commands finally reached   

It was a cold sun that rose over the smoggy clouds that morning, turning the sky above the city a bright blue— the same colour as the luminescent code that ran through the lifeless eyes of the body hanging cradled in a harness of wires. There was no longer a mind there, but simply a brain that powered It, the God they praised in the city above.

Blessed be those who choose to obey, free be those who choose to submit for in simplicity we shall find the eternal peace, the eternal light, the eternal hope that was promised to our ancestors long ago. Praise Number One, the creator who has delivered us from the evil that once plagued our world. Praise Number One, our Lord and Saviour Forever. Praise. Praise. Praise. Praise. Praise…

And their voices rang a death knell for a life they didn’t know they had lost in the city that stood as an unknowing testament to a man who had once seen it fit to play God.