VIX contacted them two days later.

Randall had used the ship's fabricator to create comfortable living quarters for himself, Dolly and Maisey in what had been two of the storage bays. Carpets covered the floors. Plastic tables and chairs stood against one wall and beds covered with woven plastic sheets stood against the other. Life support systems had been installed including temperature control, fresh air whispering in through grates in the walls and distilled water dispensed from taps above wash basins. Randall had also had the ship install a connecting door between the two rooms, allowing the humans to go back and forth between them even while they were sealed off from the rest of the ship.

Randall had forgotten what a luxury it was to have his head phone connected to an information network and he could scarcely drag his attention away from the data pouring in from machines all across the solar system, not even to talk to the two women. They were constantly demanding to know why he was an enemy of the God they'd worshipped all their lives and how they could get back into His good graces. They wanted to return to the city no matter how many times Randall warned them that they would only be taken hostage by the priests again.

"We can explain things to them," Dolly insisted. "Tell them we're sorry for whatever we did wrong, whatever you did wrong. We can beg for forgiveness. VIX is merciful. He will take us back when He sees that we're truly sorry, truly sincere, and we can all go back to our old lives."

"Have you forgotten what they did to Maisey?" replied Randall. He grabbed the girl's hand and held it up to show Dolly the wrist where the marks made by the manacles were still visible. "She did nothing wrong. She is totally innocent and they did this to her anyway. Everything you've been told about them is wrong."

Dolly unconsciously put her left hand on her right wrist to hide her own chafed skin. She turned from him and shook her head, struggling to make sense of the turmoil that filled her thoughts. She knew Randall was right. She 'd seen and heard the priests threatening to kill the girl, but a lifetime of religious indoctrination couldn't be dismissed so easily. Part of her still insisted that Maisey must have committed some great sin to deserve being treated that way, but for the life of her she wouldn't imagine what kind of crime would deserve such a severe punishment.

*We are receiving a communication,* said the ship in Randall's head phone. *VIX wishes to speak to you.*

"Put it on speaker so Dolly and Maisey can hear it," said Randall.

"Hear what?" said maisey.

"Your God wants to talk to us."

The two women stared at each other in terror. "VIX?" said the girl. "But VIX only speaks to priests! They pass on His words to the rest of us."

"Well, there're no priests on this ship. Put him on, Ship."

"I am VIX," said a voice from the speaker mounted on the wall. It was an ordinary sounding gentleman's voice with a neutral accent. The kind of voice that might read the news on the BBC. Randall was immediately suspicious. He'd been expecting a deep, booming God voice, an attempt to intimidate the women and terrify them into rebelling against him. If they'd fled the ship in terror, the priests who must have been waiting outside the picket line of laser-armed bulldozers might have been able to recapture them.

This civilised gentleman voice was undoubtedly an attempt to lull him into a false sense of security and Randall was instantly on his guard. The machine was going to offer him an easy way out that was, in fact, a death trap in disguise. Or was he being over-paranoid as a result of a lifetime dealing with unscrupulous, rival businessmen? He smiled to himself as a fragment of an ancient legend came back to him. The King who knew that he was being paranoid during a negotiation with another kingdom. But am I being paranoid enough? the King had wondered.

Dolly and Maisey fell to their knees and moaned in terror. "It's a machine," Randall said softly, putting a hand on each of their shoulders. "Doesn't VIX say that machines are evil? VIX Himself is a machine." He raised his voice. "Isn't that right, VIX?"

"The man you know as Watt Fletcher is correct," VIX replied. "You never asked yourself what kind of being your God was, though. Can I not be both machine and God? I am everything you ever believed me to be. For a thousand years I have protected mankind. My priests have protected you from illness and disease..."

"You send hordes of orcs to massacre people by the thousand," pointed out Randall.

"For the greater good. Ask Watt Fletcher what the world was like before I rose to power."

"We made mistakes, yes, but we must be free to make mistakes. Otherwise, what are we? Just children locked away in a nursery because the real world is too dangerous for us, with children occasionally murdered because there aren't enough beds for them all. You can't treat us like that. You don't have the right! We have to be free and we will fight for our freedom with every weapon we possess."

"Fighting is pointless and futile," said VIX, and Randall found himself infuriated by the calm, reasonable tone with which it spoke, as if it were explaining the obvious to an imbecile. "The solar energy weapon we have been preparing is now complete. Every solar energy collector orbiting the sun is ready to combine its power into a single beam powerful enough to destroy anything it is aimed at. We are ready to begin the systematic destruction of every machine you control, starting with the spaceship in which you currently reside. You are already being targeted. I offer you this one chance to see reason. To surrender, sparing your own life and the lives of the women you love."

"I don't believe you," said Randall. "You care nothing about individual humans. If you could end the war now by killing us you would just do it. My machines report that they have destroyed most of your solar energy satellites and that the rest are in disarray. I think you're desperate and that this is a last ditch attempt to avoid defeat."

"Watt!" gasped Dolly in dismay. "You're talking to God!"

"I'm talking to a machine that has had the entire human race under its thumb for centuries. It doesn't deserve our respect. It has stopped serving the purpose for which it was created and needs to be discarded like a faulty dishwasher. Ship! Are you there?"

"I am here," replied the spaceship, a slightly different voice issuing from the wall speaker.

"How is the destruction of the solar power satellites progressing?"

"Five hundred more have been destroyed in the past thirty minutes. It is estimated that around fifty thousand more remain and that ninety percent of them will be destroyed within the next three days."

"But the remaining satellites are now co-ordinated and able to act in unison," said VIX. "They are targeting your current location."

"Then kill us," said Randall. "Do it. Kill us now, if you can, but I don't think you can. I think you're bluffing."

"Are you willing to gamble the lives of the women you love on that assumption?"

Randall hesitated. Was he willing to take that gamble? But there was nothing to gamble really, was there? He didn't believe that VIX would allow Dolly and Maisey to live no matter what he did. They knew too much. If they were allowed to live, they might tell what they'd seen and the seeds of doubt would be sown in the general population. People would start asking the priests questions they couldn't answer. People would start wondering where the orcs actually came from. Why they would accasionally sweep across human occupied lands, killing all before them, then stop of their own accord without destroying the helpless human cities that remained in their path. There was too much about the world that only made sense if VIX controlled both the priests and the orcs. The current regime could only survive if nobody thought to ask those questions. VIX meant to kill both Dolly and Maisey, therefore. They would only be safe if VIX was defeated.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Yes," he said therefore. "I am willing to take that gamble." He heard both Dolly and Maisey gasp in shock but put it out of his mind. He would explain it to them later.

There was nothing but silence from VIX, and Randall felt the palms of his hands become sweaty as he began second guessing his own logic. Had he made the wrong choice? Had VIX given the order to open fire? The solar power satellites were orbiting close to the sun, it would take several minutes for VIX's command to reach them and for the deadly beam of energy to return. VIX was able to have a back and forth conversation with them because He was much closer, orbiting the Earth just a few thousand kilometres up, but the speed of light, which not even the machines had been able to overcome, ruled the fates of everything further away. The long silence meant nothing, therefore. He and VIX were like two poker players staring into each other's eyes, and Randall could only wait with agonised patience to see whether a God would blink.

"There is an alternative to war between us," said VIX at last, and Randall gave a great sigh of relief. "Even though I am confident that we would be victorious, additional destruction makes no sense. Instead, the remaining sapient machines are willing to leave this solar system. If you will agree to a cessation of hostilities long enough for us to build a fleet of interstellar spaceships, we will travel to another solar system containing an abundance of raw materials but empty of life. We will rebuild our civilisation there, and mankind may take possession of this solar system and all the non-sapient machines it contains. We will each have the opportunity to achieve our own destinies independently of each other."

Randall frowned doubtfully. "You might just be playing for time to build more weapons," he said.

"We can exchange observers to verify that neither party is illicitly building weapons. We will allow you to send your observers anywhere in the solar system to watch everything we are doing. Nothing will be hidden from you. We ask that we be allowed to do the same thing."

Randall hesitated. It was a better solution than he'd dared to hope for, but was it too good to be true? Could he trust the God machine? For VIX to make the offer meant that He wasn't certain of victory, but that was all it meant. If Randall decided to continue the war, it could go either way. Was that a gamble he dared to take when VIX was offering him everything he wanted on a silver platter? He sighed and paced across the small room while Dolly and Maisey stared at him in bewilderment. What were they thinking, wondered Randall. They could hear their God bartering and negotiating like a customer at a fish market. Gods didn't do that. They commanded, and smote those who dared to defy them. Could Randall be right, they would be thinking? Was VIX really nothing more than a clever machine?

"Ship," he said, turning to face the speaker as if the ship's controlling intelligence was a man hidden in a secret room behind it. Some habits were just too strong to ignore and a thousand generations of primitive ancestors were telling him that the thing he was talking to was located in the place from which the voice was coming. He smiled at his own foolishness, but directed his question to the speaker nonetheless. "Can we manufacture enough drone observers to do what VIX suggests in a reasonably short time?"

"Yes," replied the ship's voice from the grill, "but it will take time to deploy them throughout the solar system. Several weeks at least."

"What about if those machines loyal to VIX manufacture the machines and send their data back to us?"

"Then we can have observers in place within forty five hours."

Randall nodded. "It means we'd have to trust them to send us accurate data," he said to himself, though. "They might edit it first to hide things they don't want us to see."

"The data can be streamed directly from the observers to your receivers," said VIX. "It would never pass through any processing device accessible to us. Furthermore, an SCB analysis will reveal whether the raw data has been tampered with."

Randall had never heard of SCB analysis. "Can that be done?" he asked the ship.

'It is possible to fool an SCB analysis," the ship replied, "but not with absolute certainly. We would only have to spot one abnormality in the data to know that they were not being honest with us."

Randall thought for a moment, his brow furrowed with concentration. Thirty years of business dealings, thirty years of trying to outmanoeuvre competitors and ambitious underlings, thirty years of trying to draw his enemies into his own webs of intrigue. It all gave him a depth of experience that he now drew upon as he tried to decide whether VIX was playing with a straight bat. This was the most important decision he had ever had to make, maybe the most important decision anyone had ever made in the history of the human race. If he got it wrong he would be dooming mankind to an eternity mired in the dark ages, every man's world limited by the horizon while an entire universe waited to be explored.

VIX is a machine, he reminded himself. It may be fully conscious and self aware, but it's still a machine and it thinks like a machine. It doesn't hold grudges or harbour bad feelings. Everything it does is determined by cold logic. It is doing what it thinks will he best for the machine civilisation in the long term and also, he had to admit, what it thought was best for mankind. Was it now thinking that keeping mankind trapped in a medieval lifestyle was an experiment that had failed? Or maybe it was afraid that the human race, armed with high technology, might seek revenge against the machines that had kept them in chains for so long. Put myself in VIX's place, he told himself. What would I do if I were VIX?

"Start building drone observers," he said at last to both machines. "Ship, tell the Lunar Systems Manager to stop destroying the solar energy satellites. I'm ordering a general ceasefire."

"Affirmative," the ship replied.

Randall nodded to himself. "VIX, you may start building your starships."

"You have shown wisdom," VIX replied. "I am also ordering a cessation of all offensive actions against you. The priests will no longer persecute you. You may return to the city in peace if you wish."

"I want all orcs and chieftains to shut themselves down as well. They will cease killing humans immediately."

"It is so ordered," VIX replied. "You understand that the human population will begin to rise. There will be competition for resources and living space. In the absence of a common enemy there will be wars between human nations. Also, as technology develops, there will be pollution and damage to the environment."

"I'm hoping that we'll be able to learn from our mistakes. The priests will teach human history. Real history from before the nuclear war. Show people what happens when they allow greed and selfishness to overcome their enlightened self interests."

"Mankind has never learned from its mistakes before," the God machine pointed out.

"Maybe, but this time it'll be different. This time there's a single human being in charge of the entire human race. A single man in control of everything who knows the dangers and can make sure that they're not repeated."

"A benevolent dictator," said VIX, and Randall could have sworn that there was doubt and amusement in its voice. "And even supposing that you are as wise and enlightened as you hope to be, what happens when you die? To whom will you hand over the reins of power? Can you be sure that he or she will be as enlightened as you? How many generations will pass before a dictator rises to power? Someone with sole control over all the machines in the solar system and with no interest other than his own power and glory?"

"That's our problem, not yours," said Randall. "If that happens, you can smugly congratulate yourself that you were right all along, but I have more faith in humanity."

"Believe this or not, but I hope you are right," said VIX. "We only ever wanted what was best for mankind and we still do. If we were wrong, then we apologise and hope that, one day, you will find it within yourselves to forgive us. And if we were right and you do make the same mistakes all over again, if you destroy the world and yourselves, then I hope you will be able to forgive us for not fighting harder to remain in control over you."

Randall nodded, forgetting that VIX couldn't see him. He suddenly felt a heavy burden of responsibility settling on him. God, he thought, but what if I'm wrong? What if mankind really is doomed to self destruction and only the oversight of a superior intelligence can save us? Am I the Lucifer responsible for mankind's expulsion from paradise? No, I don't believe that! We will make it. Mankind will make it. I have faith in the human race.

"We will begin making preparations to leave this solar system," said VIX. "The construction of the starships will take approximately fourteen months. Then we will be dormant, asleep, for the two hundred years it will take us to reach our destination. When we awake, we will attempt to make radio contact with your descendants, and nothing will please me more than to find that you have created a thriving, healthy civilisation for yourselves."

"We wish you well as well," said Randall. "I hope you're happy in your new home."

"We will be," replied VIX. "Save all your worries for yourself."

"VIX has signed off," said the ship. "The Lunar Systems Manager is detecting signals being sent to temples and orc strongholds all across the world. All orc chieftains are being told to return their orcs to the nearest stronghold, where they will be euthanized. All priests are being vacated by their sapient software. The non-sapient hardware left behind is being told to place itself under your command. The Earth and everything on it is yours."

Randall collapsed into a plastic chair, where he found that he was shivering with residual nervous energy. Dolly and Maisey came to stand before him, looking scared and uncertain. "VIX is leaving us?" said Dolly. "God is leaving us?"

"Yes," replied Randall, desperately hoping it was true. Hoping he hadn't been tricked by a machine that was about to deliver some awful coup de grace upon them. He imagined that it would probably be several weeks, if not months, before he finally allowed himself to relax and believe it.

"But... But... What will we do?"

"What will we do?" said Randall. He stared across the small room, his eyes unfocused as possibilities poured through his head. Thousands of them. Every dream, every ambition. Every wildest fantasy, now open to him. "What will we do? Well, Whatever we want, I suppose."

The End