Iahset has a minion!

Tock the Time Bot

Iahset

I was a small god. It didn't take very long, just short of a millenia, really, for my alters to be abandoned and my name slowly forgotten. As my body slowly began to break down from fewer and fewer voices invoking adoration, I began to replace it with parts. Bits of metal, to help my physical form get along. The others laughed at me. "Just let it happen! We all fade." But my time was so short. I wasn't ready to fade. Besides, I'm a god of innovation. It's in my nature to problem solve, to invent, to puzzle and fiddle and mend.

I am a god that no one notices. I'm always muddling around shops and workstations, looking for parts to make my parts work better, as well as my fellow former-god-now-automation companion, Assyrian. I'm still a god. My nature hasn't changed. So the people who are shopping along with me get their best ideas just from standing beside me as we sort through nuts and bolts. The shopkeepers I visit most often feel more inspired than their neighbors. They give me discounts out of the goodwill they feel towards me which they can't explain, and don't try to, and unwittingly, that is worship. Their offerings return to them as blessings. I am an unanonymous god, with unanonymous, subconscious praise.

Though I began in the Sacred Plains, I live in Ziara city now. I've lost track of how long I've been here - ever since inventions first started happening here, really. I was drawn to their creative energy like a magnet, like a ship to wind, like a hungry creature towards the smell of food.

There is no organic piece of me left. I am all self-built automation. The adoration I receive is not enough to grow back any part of me, which is why I don't trade out my name. I don't want to grow back any limbs or organs. That would be rather inconvenient, in my current state. I go by an old word no one remembers the meaning of, from an old language only found on ancient temple walls, the pronunciation of which has long been lost to the world. It means "creation." I am my own creation, and I like this better than anything else. My true name is a secret even I have almost forgotten, and only a few scholars have murmured it as they've run across it in ancient texts. I feel it like a shiver running down my spine. A past gratefully buried in sand, which the wind sometimes toys with.

I met Assyrian not long after moving here. He was limping along, a demigod hero trying to cling to an immortality that wasn't doing it's part to cling back. He was resentful and scared, left behind by a people who'd called him a hero, only to not find his story important enough to pass down to their children.

"There was too much peace," he told me, rasping through his ventilator as I tried to tighten the rusty bolts on one of his limbs. "They didn't need the stories of warriors to carry them through anymore, as they had when there was war and imprisonment and alienation. And there were so many of us-" he coughed, and steam came out of too many places. I frowned, abandoning the hopeless bolts to inspect his tubing. "-so many warrior tales to tell. So many names. They mixed them together, out of confusion, out of forgetting, out of efforts to simplify things. Before they forgot my story, long before, they'd already forgotten my name."

I held up a bit of busted tubing. "You're leaking badly," I told him. I'd heard his story a million times already, from a million slowly decaying mouths. So many of them were wretched and weary, wondering if it was worth it, to fight to live this kind of life.

He looked at me with eyes that had barely a spark of life left in them, but the spark that was there was angry and red. "The gods told me they were giving me a gift, when they gave me this, this immortality. But they lied to me. No one lasts forever. Soon, this illustrious body they gave me will give out completely, and I will join them in feasting and singing and drinking forever, never again knowing anything but mirth. Never again knowing anything of importance."

This prodded my interest. I was used to the mournful and depressed, but this bit at the end - "What is important, in your eyes?" I asked, pausing my investigation to look him full in the face.

A second light came on in his eyes. "Every history," he said, his voice now rumbling out of what was left of his chest. "Every story we tell each other. Every scientific discovery, every mathematical equation, every dream we wake up remembering, every poem spun out of feeling. Every bit of art." Here he grew even more emotional, crouching forward with the feeling of it. "Every movement of dance, every stroke of paint on paper or wall or canvas or skin, every carefully drawn line, every sketched abstract vision."

I held his gaze for a long moment, caught up in his vision. Then I examined the hodgepodge collection of parts he'd collected in a desperate attempt to survive, with new eyes. Ideas began to form themselves in my mind, blueprints forming in my thoughts.

"I can remake you," I told him. "I can remake you so that, even metallic, you can hold a brush and make art, you can record every passing notion, you can learn every dance." I looked him in the eyes, holding his uncertain gaze. "I am not a god like the ones that made you," I told him, "But I am the kind of god who can remake you. Not into what I want out of you, but into what you want out of yourself."

He was silent for a long moment, thinking it over. His breath rasped through the leaking tubes and something was squeaking, in need of oil.

"I'm not sure that I want to live like this," he told me. He thought for awhile again, and then asked, hesitantly, "How do you find it?"

Somehow I knew what he meant. I smiled at him with my metal mouth which I had worked out through a hundred designs. I was my own daily project, enhancing what I had first made - those creations that were a race to survive, working against a deadline unknown but fast approaching. In those days, every day had been full of pain I never made mention of to anyone, and I didn't mention it to him now. I would have to leave my projects of perfection for later, and reenter the race for survival - his this time, instead of mine, but for some reason, I was willing to do it. No more intricately designed, smile capable mouths for now. I was willing, for the first time since I'd struck out on my own, to pour my work into someone else, to keep this stranger, this warrior who wanted to stay not because he was afraid of death, but because he loved art and stories - I wanted to keep this one with me, for my long eternity. I knew, instinctively, that he would light my otherwise tedious days. If only I could keep the light on in him, in this moment, on this cliff edge he was standing on.

So I told him, "I spite the universe by continuing onward, and every day I find myself more alive."

He looked at me then as if I was his last lifeline of hope. Well, I guess I was. Both physically and metaphysically. He took a deep, damp breath, and said, like a sigh of relief but also with a note of determination, "Very well then."

And that is how our life together began.

And it is true that without him, I would be more machine than a living being, going about my business in a methodical way that it would have become such a routine that it would have no longer required much thought, and I would have made my rotations like clockwork and never looked up at the sun. But he interrupts me. He paints the sun and I remember that it is there. He drags me along to art museums and takes me to festivals and teaches me dances and reads me the latest, greatest novels while I work. He fills our apartment with color and shape. I built taste receptors so that we can taste the work of master chiefs and upstart bakeries.

When I go to my local mechanics store and stand in line under the buzzing fan with the low hum of pleasant conversation around me, I could be asleep to the world, wrapped up in my own progress of invention. But instead, I can smell the seafood being fried down the street because Assyrian didn't want to lose his sense of smell and so I added it to my list of enhancements. I find myself humming along with the radio that can be heard faintly from the backroom, because they are playing a tune that Assyrian introduced to me two decades ago, and I can tell you the decade it's from because he makes each day memorable enough to number them.

Those old gods of my court would be appalled to see me now. Made of metal and humming along to mortal tunes. They don't know what they're missing out on. They were so caught up in being glorious that they missed out on this, the muddle of glory mixed in with small sighs and puffs of smoke, or caught in the light filtered through dusty windows and hanging in the air before disappearing in shadow, or melting so quickly on your tongue. The pursuit not only of making it, but in finding it in what others have made. The worship of something other than yourself, whether or not it be greater.

I will go home and find lunch on the table and he will be happy, even after a millennia, to see me, and we have only just begun, really.

It has been such a long time, and yet it has only just begun.