The Deus Ex Machina

By Jalal “JJ” Hajeer

            Legend speaks of a god who sleeps a lot. He is a young god, barely a couple of centuries old. He was not around when the gods and pharaohs ruled over Egypt and the Olympians over Greece. Nor was he around when the Norse gods breathed their last breath before becoming overwhelmed by the forces of Christianity. He had no interest in gaining power or followers as the other gods did. He granted no miracles and answered no prayers. All he would do is sleep, sometimes decades at a time.

            One year he found that he could not sleep. Indeed he fell ill with a frightfully incurable bout of insomnia which he had never before experienced. As even gods fall to boredom, he decided to look down onto the world of man. Humans had never interested this god, for to him they all seemed the same. A change in the fabric of their clothing or beliefs seemed to be the only variations among mankind.

            However, as he looked down on the world of man, he found their creations far more interesting. Machines of every make and model did everything that man had been previously restricted from doing. Machines took humans from place to place at incredible speeds no mere human would be capable of alone; machines let humans contact and learn about other humans thousands of miles apart; machines kept humans alive and healthy; machines just made living livable for the humans.

            He was enamored by all of these machines and more. Since he could still not sleep, he decided to leave his godly plane and investigate these contraptions of man from a closer distance.

            The first machine that he decided to examine more closely was a strange box that could heat a human meal without a fire of any sort. Getting a closer look at its handleless door and its strange flashing pad full of human numbers, the god decided to touch the strange machination. As his astral hand passed through the box, he was suddenly struck with all the knowledge of the strange machine and how it worked. He learned of its many wires and circuits and what each one did. He learned how it heated meals with small signals of energy and how each button affected the time that the machine would remain active and how much energy it would use for the meal. His curiosity towards the box sated, he moved on to new curiosities.

            He next found a strange building where the components of the strange box he had touched were being made. As he inspected further, he saw arm-like machines fusing a variety of wires to panels in quick succession. These machines seemed to operate without any help from humans and never grew tired. As he inspected the arm closer and touched it, he found many wires and circuits like the boxes, but he also found that it had its own strange language that told it what to do and how fast to do it. Still not growing tired, he moved on to many more machines that year, his curiosity towards these creations never seeming to be completely satisfied.

            One day he found himself at a strange festival of humans. He saw many machines he had never witnessed in all of his travels across the human plane. What caught his attention, however, was a group of humans seated in front of a stage with a single human behind a podium and a red tarp covering something that the god could not make out. For whatever reason, the god’s curiosity towards the tarp covered object was almost insatiable. Unable to resist this temptation, the god found his way to the stage and peeked through the tarp. To his surprise, all he found was a single, unmoving human female. However, as he looked more closely, he saw that it was in fact not a human but another machine. His curiosity now at an all-time high, he touched the hand of this strange human-like machine. The machine’s skin and hair were synthetic, yet it was made to closely mimic regular humans. The fluids and organs were similar to a human’s even though they were also synthetic. Finally, its mind seemed to be made of a language similar to that of the robot arm, but it was far more complex than any machine’s language he had come across.

            The human on the stage suddenly pulled the tarp off the machine human and the group of humans who had gathered around the stage roared with excitement. Even with this noise, however, the god began to feel drowsier than he had ever felt before. He yawned a great godly yawn and muttered to himself that he wished to rest now. As the god left, the audience’s feelings had already transformed from ecstatic excitement to silent transfixation towards the android who had just spoken in a god-like voice and now seemed to be acting to its own wishes rather than that of its creator’s directives.

            When the god returned to his plane of existence, he found his favorite spot to sleep and laid down. As he drifted off to another one of his decade long naps, the god seemed almost completely unaware of the effects on the human plane that his innocent curiosity had caused. Amongst many other things, he had caused the formation of a new religion that worshiped him and whose prophet was a now sentient android, an artistic robotic arm that created works of art equitable to artists of the renaissance and a microwave that no matter the food placed in it, no matter the setting or the timing would always produce food that was completely burnt.