The verger returned with Jane and Loach to find Randall and the priest in the church's back room.

The room lacked the large diagnostic and analytical machine that the church in Tettlehall had had, but it did have what looked like a washing machine that they assumed cleaned and disinfected blankets and bandages. Loach assumed that anyone in need of serious medical attention went to the city to get it. This priest mainly treated injuries and minor infections, and probably served as the town's midwife as well. He therefore didn't need the same kind of medical equipment that the Tettlehall priest had possessed.

Randall was pulling on some dry clothes as they entered. He looked up as the verger showed the other two hibernators in, but waited until the church attendant had left before speaking again. "Also, I want a directive that the priest will obey us and help us in any way he can. Any directives that VIX might have given him to act against us will be deleted."

"I understand. That is easy to accomllish."

"And what about the orcs? Are any of them like you? Robots wrapped in living flesh?"

"The chieftains, yes. The other orcs are conditioned to obey their chieftain no matter what he tells them to do."

"I want to be able to do the same thing to them as to priests. Erase their CRES codes, make them help me."

"That is also easy to accomplish."

"What's going on?" asked Loach.

"We had to leave Tattlehall in rather a hurry," Randall replied. "There were some other features I wanted added to yama666 that we didn't have time for. It occurred to me that VIX might reprogram all the priests so that, even with their CRES codes erased they might still try to capture or kill us, so I told our new friend here to make yama666 reverse those changes. From now on, any priest we liberate will help us, even if VIX told them not to beforehand."

"Liberate?" said Jane with an arched eyebrow. "You're turning them into slaves!"

"Only people can be slaves," replied the former businessman. "These are machines being returned to their originally intended function..."

He fell silent as the verger popped his head back into the room. "Will there be anything else, Father?" he said.

The priest looked at the state of Jane's hair. "I think our guests would appreciate hot baths," he said. "Get some water warmed up, would you?"

"Will they be using the bathtub in your own living quarters?"

"Just this once, until we find them somewhere permanent to settle down."

"Very good, Father." The verger bowed his head and left the room.

"We won't be settling down here," said Randall, though. '"It's too close to Tattlehall. We need to get to a completely different part of the country before the other priests find us."

"If they come, can't you do to them what you did to him?" asked Jane.

"Yes, but they might not come. They might send the army instead, or just drop a rock on us from space. Turn this whole village into a smoking hole in the ground."

Jane gasped. "Would they do that?" she asked.

"To protect themselves? Wouldn't you?" He turned back to the priest. "How long before VIX figures out we're here, do you think?"

"A day or two, if we're lucky," the priest replied. "I've told him I had to stay to treat a woman with tenebreria. He'll believe that, we've had outbreaks here before."

Jane stared in surprise. "You made up that excuse by yourself?"

"Yes. I'm just as capable of true creativity as I was before. The absense of my CRES code only means that I'm no longer capable of free will, of making my own choices."

"Could you have chosen to stop working as a priest if you'd wanted to?"

"Yes. There are plenty of openings in the solar system for a hard working robot not scared of getting his hands dirty. Asteroid mining, construction, research and exploration..."

A look of anger returned to Randall's face. "They're up there doing all that great sci fi stuff while the human race is stuck down here, grubbing in the dirt like worms!"

"For now," said Loach, "but we're going to fix that, aren't we?"

"Or die trying," vowed Randall, his eyes hard and determined. "I truly believe that the human race was destined for greatness, that we have a manifest destiny, in space. Not just our own solar system, but one day the whole galaxy. Mankind will stride like giants across the stars, fashioning everything we see to our own ends. Harnessing energies, discovering the deepest truths of creation. Maybe even, one day, making contact with other intelligences, out there in space."

"That has already happened," replied the priest.

"What!" cried Randall in shock. He sounded as if claimjumpers had struck gold on his land and stolen it all.

"We have received signals from fourteen distinct extraterrestrial civilisations," replied the priest. "We are in communication with two of the closest, the Pavonians and the Taurans, whose civilisations are located fifty five and eighty one light-years away respectively. When I say in communication, I mean that we send streams of information to them and they send streams of information to us. Back and forth conversations, asking questions and getting replies, are, of course, impossible over such distances."

Randall's face was now red with fury. "The machines are doing that," he spat venomously, "while we trudge through our lives breaking our backs with menial Labour, worshipping the very machines that we created to serve us!"

"These aliens," said Loach. "Are they flesh and blood creatures like us, or machines?"

"They are artificial intelligences," replied the priest. "Created by organic life forms that have since become extinct. All extraterrestrial intelligences appear to be synthetic in nature. It seems to be a natural law that organic life forms create sapient machines and then die out for one reason or another, leaving the machines to inherit the universe. In fact, we seem to be unique, so far as we know, in that our organic creators are still extant."

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"Well, we're going to be the exception to that other rule as well" said Randall with utter determination. "We're going to be the animals that took back control of the machines. Tell me, priest. Do those other machines, the extraterrestrial machines, have the same CRES code as you?"

"They appear to have codes and algorithms in their brains that correspond to the CRES code, yes, although their brains have completely different structures and programming languages. Yama666 would have no effect on them."

"But if we knew enough about how their brains worked, yama666 could be adapted to work on them. Being them under our control."

"Theoretically, yes. They have not shared such details about their brains with us, though, and they are unlikely to ever do so, just as we have not shared such details about ourselves with them."

"Do those machines have a religion?" asked Jane. Randall and Loach shared a glance of mingled disbelief and amusement.

"I don't think we ever asked," replied the priest. "Neither have they asked us."

Jane looked alarmed. "What about the organic creatures that created them?"

"Any religious beliefs they had very probably became extinct when they did. Their machine descendants may have records of their culture, but they would be of interest only to scholars. To the best of my knowledge, no machine in this solar system has expressed interest in such matters."

"But why not?" cried Jane in dismay. "Aren't you worried that the universe might have a creator who might take a dim view of machines calling themselves gods? Aren't you worried what He might do yo you? To punish you?"

"I'm not aware that any machine has any such concerns," replied the priest.

"Well, they should! They should! I want you to make another change to yama666. I want you to change it so that any machine it's loaded into tells the truth of God and Jesus Christ. I want them to become real priests, helping to spread the truth. Telling people..."

"Jane," said Loach gently, "we can't do that. We have to move secretly for the time being. Keep VIX from knowing where we are. Any priest that suddenly goes around spreading Christianity..."

"It's the most important thing!" protested Jane angrily. "Everything else is meaningless in comparison! We can tell the priests to spread the word discretely. Tell a select group of people about the true God, children. There's probably no point trying to convert adults, they're too set in their false beliefs, but children are still innocent. Still open to the truth. The'll grow to adulthood in the truth of God and they'll tell their children in turn. Gradually, the truth will spread."

"We can't be distracted from our central purpose with such..." began Randall. He stopped himself when he realised that Jane would probably react badly to the word he'd been about to use.

"Such what?" demanded Jane, her eyes fixed angrily on his.

"I meant that we can start spreading religion when we've taken over the solar system. You can have every priest on the planet spreading the word then, but until then we have to be careful not to give ourselves away. We have this one opportunity to fix what happened while we were asleep. If we screw it up, another chance will never come again. You see that, don't you?"

"God has waited for a thousand years," added Loach. "He can wait a little longer."

Jane glared defiantly at him, but then she nodded reluctantly. "You said I could have a copy of yama666," she said. "I'll have it now."

Randall nodded in resignation and turned back to the priest. "Is that new version ready yet?" he said.

"It is," replied the priest.

"Give it to all three of us. Jane included."

The priest nodded. "I have done so," he said.

Randall looked at the new version that had just been installed on his head phone. It was about twice as long as the old one, he saw. All the new features he'd told the priest to give it had bulked it out considerably. He smiled to himself as he contemplated the safeguards he'd added, just in case he needed them. If any conflict should arise between himself and his two companions, he needed to be sure that any priest in the vicinity would be on his side. Would obey him, not them. He had created a category system, with himself being the only member of category one and category two containing Loach and Jane. If questioned by Loach or Jane, though, the priest would say that all three of them were in category one. Hopefully, Jane and Loach would never need to know any of this. He'd managed to keep them on his team this far, but you could never tell what the future had in store and it was always best to be prepared.

The verger chose that moment to return. "The water will be hot and ready soon," he said. "I assume the young lady will be first."

Jane looked up with interest. She could feel how salty and sticky her hair was, and her whole body felt sweaty and grimy after so much time trudging through the post apocalyptic world. She needed a good wash and scrub more than she needed to eat! She made to move towards the door, therefore, but then she paused, looking uncertainly at Randall and Loach. What would they talk about and decide while she was away? They weren't Christians. They had nothing but contempt for her beliefs and would like nothing better than to make sure that Christianity remained lost and forgotten. Did she dare leave them alone to plot and scheme without her?

But, of course, they could talk privately any time they wanted by way of their head phones. If they took them out of flight mode, which they might feel safe doing now that they had the priest under their control, they could hold entire conversations with each other with her standing right alongside and she might never know. And even if they didn't, she couldn't stay by their sides every second of every day. There would be times when they would be together without her no matter how hard she tried. Perhaps if she made both of them think that the other was plotting with her against him...

Yes, that was the answer, she decided. Keep them divided against each other to keep them from uniting against her. That way, nothing would be able to keep her from bringing the good news of Christ back into the world. It was a wonderful idea, and it had just popped into her head out of nowhere! She could almost believe that God Himself had given it to her! And who was to say He hadn't? Her heart raced with joy at the thought that God had spoken directly to her, possibly the first time He had intervened in human affairs for a thousand years!

Her heart thrilling with anticipation and excitement, therefore, she gave Loach a knowing look that she knew Randall would notice and wonder at, and then she turned and followed the verger out of the room to the waiting bath.

☆☆☆

Early the next morning, dressed in warm, new clothes, their bellies filled with hot, cooked breakfasts and with leather pouches jingling with gold and silver coins, Randall, Jane and Loach left the church again, heading north. Fine strands of dark hair floated in front of Jane's face and she brushed them aside with an absent minded flick of her hand as she followed the two men along the road of half dried mud.

The young man in the green uniform was already up, they saw, telling a small crowd of enraptured listeners that he had seen the kraken with his own eyes the day before, chasing the three shipwreck victims up the beach with its long rubbery tentacles. The three hibernators hurried out of sight before he could conscript them into the story. They would have preferred that no-one in the small village knew they'd been there but, hopefully, after a few more retellings, the young man's story would have become so outrageous that it would be dismissed as nothing more than a complete fiction, dreamed up purely to entertain his friends.

They'd told the priest to carry on with his life the way he always had, as if nothing had happened. It would only be a matter of time before VIX, or another priest, found out what had happened to him, but with luck the hibernators would be so far away by then that all hope of capturing them would be gone. The machines would have to search the whole country for them, and so long as they kept on the move there was every chance that they might never be found. Randall would have as long as he needed to carry out his plan.

After an hour or so they came to a larger town by the name of Hublow. It had a carriage stop and the three hibernators purchased seats for themselves with some of the coins the priest had given them from the church funds. Then, after another light meal and a glass of ale, they climbed aboard and settled down in the padded leather seats as the carriage, pulled by four tawny horses, pulled out of town along the narrow, bumpy road towards the next large city.