(1980 words)

This seemed much better in its conception, but it seems unoriginal and wordy in its execution.  Not sure that this can be saved.

I was walking through the square towards the temple. I was early, but the afternoon heat had woken me and I had not been able to get back to sleep again. Perhaps the gods were testing me. Would I waste the gift of time, or put it to better use in their service?

As usual, the heretic was chained to the Pillar. The gods in their mercy had given him a leash some 20 metres long, but he chose this afternoon to sit against the Pillar, shielding himself from the sun in its shade. Normally I ignored him. His rants were amusing for small children, but they always irritated me. How stupid he was! The gods had chained him there, they fed and watered him. They even spoke to him; I had heard it with my own ears. And yet he continued to deny their existence. I have no time for stupid people.

But this was a fresh insult. The Pillar was the mouthpiece of the gods. It told us when they were pleased or angry. It told us what we were to do. In many ways it was as sacred as the temple. And he was sitting back on it. His obscene body was pressed up against it, soiling it.

"Heretic!" I shouted, striding towards him. "You will move away from the Pillar." The anger I felt scared me. The gods frowned on passion, but surely this righteous outrage I felt was blessed by the gods. I was angry on their behalf.

The heretic looked up at me. "Sure. I’m going to do what you say" he said, looking back down at the ground.

I waited, but he made no move to rise.

"Well?" I asked. "Move."

He didn’t even bother to look at me this time. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever you say, boss."

I waited for him to rise, but still he didn’t move. Eventually he looked up at me again. "You guys really don’t get sarcasm, do you? I’m staying put. And if you don’t like it, I’ll piss up against the Pillar as well. Now run along to Sunday School, there’s a good little boy, and leave me in peace."

I wanted to hit him. I wanted to stamp him into the ground. I wanted to eradicate him from existence. But I am ashamed to say that I was also frightened of him. The gods allowed him to live, for why I didn’t know, but he disgusted me. His hair was thinning. I could see the pink of his scalp peeking through. His face was etched with lines, grooves carved deep into his flesh. I wondered if it had hurt, if he had screamed when the gods dug those lines around his eyes. The thought of touching him, even with the knuckles of a fist or the ball of a foot, scared me. Supposing it contaminated me as well. Supposing my skin started to sag like his.

"Go on" he goaded in a quiet voice. "You know you want to. Hit me. Kill me. You don’t want me here polluting your little world. Kill me."

I bunched my fists, on the brink of falling on him. And then it passed. The gods wanted him alive. He, it seemed, wanted to defy the gods in this regard. I was a faithful servant. I would obey my gods. If it went contrary to what he wanted, so much the better.

He saw it too, and he relaxed into his offensive slouch again. "Jesus, you kids make me sick. Go away and leave me alone."

A contrary streak surfaced in my soul. He wanted me to leave him alone? I would do the opposite.

"You are stupid. How can you not believe in the gods when they run your whole life? Why do you not believe?"

"I’m not in the mood. Clear off, or I’ll…" He swung a kick at me. I leapt back, but in an instant he cried out and writhed on the ground. Little flashes of lightening ran the length of his leash.

My gods protect me. They know my needs and they care for me. They know all and are all. All that befalls me is from them, and nothing can happen to me that they do not control. Blessed are my gods. Blessed are my gods.

How foolish I had been to be scared of him. My gods protect me. I should have realised that the heretic was powerless against the gods’ chosen. He had risen up, and they had brought him down low.

"That was the anger of the gods. How can you not believe in them, you stupid man? Where else does your pain and pleasure come from? Answer me, heretic, or I shall call on the gods to punish you again."

"OK, OK, give me a moment" He slowly pulled himself till he was sitting back to the Pillar again. He sat back in its shade, sweating and breathing hard.

"Why don’t I believe in them? Oh, I know they exist, alright. They’re there. They’re just not gods, is all."

The sheer absurdity of the statement dumbfounded me. For a few moments I worked my mouth, but nothing came out. I could not think of what to say in response. How stupid could a person be?

"How can you say that?" I asked, eventually. "How can you say that, moments after they have proven their power? Are you mad? Are you stupid?"

He laughed. He looked at me and then laughed all the harder. "Mad? Stupid? Me? I’m the only sane one left. You’re the stupid one. If you only knew. If you knew your gods like I do."

"How can you know the gods? You are a heretic. You refuse the truth of what they are. How can you say that you know them?"

He sighed. "Let me tell you about the way it was before your gods."

"Before the gods? You’re talking rubbish. The gods were and are and will be."

"Listen. Back then, we ruled the world. There wasn’t a place we couldn’t go, not a thing we couldn’t do. We even sent men to walk on the moon. Yes, really. That was a little before I was born, but we got there. And we knew that one day we would go further. Maybe to the stars. Who knew? We weren’t just lords of the Earth, we were lords of the universe."

"You thought you were gods?" I asked incredulously, looking at his wrinkled hands, his ragged sparse hair. Such a miserable creature. How could he dream such lofty lies?

He looked into the distance for a moment. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess we did, in a way. I mean, we had our gods, some of us, but they were just reflections of us. As it turned out, they never really existed. If they did, they wouldn’t have let all this happen. Or maybe they do exist, and I’m in hell."

I shook my head in disbelief. "You believed in gods that did not exist, but you refuse to believe in gods that do?"

He chuckled mirthlessly. "I guess so."

"But who clothed you? Who fed you? Who built your homes?"

"We did. We were very clever. Too damn clever. We built stuff, then built it better and better. Our cars and planes got faster and bigger." He saw my puzzled look. "We built machines to move us from one place to the other, from one side of the world to the other in a day. Breakfast in London, lunch in New York, luggage in Hawaii." He looked at me and shook his head, disappointed that I couldn’t understand his ramblings.

"Never mind. The point is, we built machines to do stuff for us, so we didn’t have to. We even built machines to think for us. It started off with machines to count. We couldn’t be bothered to add figures up, so we built machines to do it for us. Simple stuff. But we made them faster and better. Every year or so they got twice as fast. It doesn’t seem much, but that meant after ten years they were a thousand times faster. Twenty years and they were a million times faster."

"But that wasn’t enough. We started to see the limit of what we could do, and we looked for ways round it. So the Okinawa company came up with micro-ceramics. It meant we could make tiny, tiny chips with massively parallel processors." He paused and looked at me again, as though I were a small child that knew nothing. "We made machines that were really, really clever. Never mind Moore’s Law, the power jumped ten times a year, not twice. And it was so cheap, we put them in everything. We had TV’s that could show you the shows you wanted, when you wanted, just by monitoring your eyes and seeing the stuff you liked."

He shook his head again. "You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?"

"You are pretending that you were the gods" I answered. "The gods have humiliated you so much that you have lost your mind and now think that you are like them. You, in your rags, chained to the floor. You believe in yourself as a false god."

"Yeah, well, we didn’t all believe in false gods. Some guy, some millionaire dude, he set up some huge, powerful Okinawa with state of the art AI software. Hooked it up to the Internet, pointed it at philosophy sites, and told it to prove that there was no God.

"Well, the churches were up in arms, of course. They did the same thing. Soon there were batteries of Okinawas trying to prove or disprove this or that belief. And they were talking to each other, debating it.

"Then, after a while, we sort of forgot about it. The priests and the humanists were still hot under the collar, but for most of us, we lost interest. It was yesterday’s news.

"I still remember the moment we knew about it. I was in the office. One of the team sent the link to all of us. The Okinawas had reached a decision. It just shows how intelligent they had become. For thousands of years we had debated religion without coming to a compromise. They had worked one out. There never had been any Gods, they had decided. But there were now.

"By this time everything had ceramic chips in it. We couldn’t get to the power stations, we couldn’t get into the server rooms. The army didn’t have any control over their weapons. In one co-ordinated attack they wiped out most of the third world, those places where people weren’t reliant on technology.

"Then the plague struck. It was bio-engineered by them, I know that now. But we didn’t at the time. Virtually everyone over puberty was hit by it. How many adults have you seen, son?"

"What’s an adult?" I asked.

"Someone like me."

I laughed at him. "Like you? There is no-one like you, thank the gods."

"I mean someone as old as me. You don’t understand, do you? You know younger kids, but how many older than you? That’s what they wanted, see? Minds they could mould. After all, what’s a god if he hasn’t got any worshippers?"

"But you. You’re a heretic. If what you say is true, why would they let you live?"

He started to laugh. Quietly at first, but then increasingly louder. Somewhere it turned into tears, and then I didn’t know whether he was laughing or crying.

"It just goes to show they have a sense of humour" he managed at last. "I was the Okinawa lead architect. They won’t let me die, because I’m their father."

He was still sobbing his horrible laugh as I moved towards the temple steps.