Book 7, Chapter 122 - The Venerated (1/2)

Book 7, Chapter 122 - The Venerated

“Venerated?”

An eight-legged creature encased in a beetle-like carapace descended from a silken thread thick as a vine. It regarded the newcomers with four surprised eyes.

“Two are. Two are not.”

Another soft-bodied citizen of Gehenna responded. This one was unique, roughly palm-sized and shaped like an octopus, but its ‘body’ looked like the folds of a brain. It rode around in a cyborg meat suit. The body it controlled was human in appearance, only without a head or neck. Perched on the shoulders was an apparatus filled with fluid wherein the octopus creature resided.

It saw Cloudhawk and Abaddon in their demonic armor and assumed they were ‘the Venerated’, as they were called here. Legion had taken the War God’s form for his own and Belial wore the skin of an old man. This body was familiar to him, the one he’d worn for over a thousand years. Only in periods of extreme duress did his real form peek through.

“This presence is unfamiliar.”

This time it was a quantum creature, which surprised Cloudhawk. He didn’t think beings in the quantum realm had the same sort of intelligence that others did. It had a humanoid shape, but its ‘body’ was a loose collection of blue lights. The strange glow radiating from it made the large being even more intimidating.

As Cloudhawk and the others moved through the city they observed the many denizens. If he had to guess, the population of these different creatures likely started small and increased over centuries. Now the city was quite crowded.

But there were so many. You’d think that so many different races would create a mess of a settlement. But Gehenna was a multi-species home, a microcosm of the universe. In this legendary city there were representatives of countless civilizations, yet their technology was not wholly unfamiliar or fantastical.

Gehenna was an enormous pocket dimension. The laws of nature were different and that came with both advantages and drawbacks. The city had existed here for potentially tens of thousands of years, but hasn’t progressed very far. Indeed all civilizations eventually reached a bottleneck.

“Please, stop!”

A mechanical voice reached them. Two electric blue figures descended from overhead to bar Cloudhawk’s path. They were made of some sort of alloy and bouts of flame gushed from their feet to keep them afloat. Robots by the look of them, and quite complex.

Cloudhawk peered at them, using his spatial sense to probe their bodies.

Not robots, but living things. Only there was not an ounce of flesh or blood in them. If Hellflower were here she’d be fascinated. This was a completely different type of life form.

There were many differences between silicon- and carbon-based life forms. Silicon-based creatures had higher storage and information-processing capacity. They could perform millions of calculations in the space of an instant. However, with bodies of stone or metal their evolutionary potential was far more limited than squishier humans.

Silicon-based life changed very little over time. Stability was a staple of their construction. Carbon-based life reproduced and evolved tens of times – hundreds of times faster, but when silicon-based creatures evolve to the point of society their technology is far more advanced.

In fact, most silicon-based life was born from carbon-based societies. It would be fair to call carbon-based life an incubator for silicon-based beings. Back in the heydey of human civilization there were highly intelligent robots everywhere. They were capable of independent thought and replication – and at that point, what made them separate from any other living thing?

Another example was Father, back on Ark Base. It wasn’t merely an advanced artificial intelligence. With control over the human habitat and all of its functions, it was hard to differentiate it from a god.