Heart of the Machine (Freeform, F/Any. Human/God Machine. God Machine Chronicle)

[Lustful Bride]

"What has Risen may Fall, what has Fallen may Rise.

Time has no end, no beginning, no purpose.

So with advice of the dead
And a halo over my head
At last, "HONEY, I'M HOME"
Three voices come all alone
A vivisection of me
Done by God for all to see
Say hello
"HONEY, I'M HOME"
Three voices come all alone

A vivisection of me
Done by God for all to see.



Don't Remember It, Don't Return to It.

Something is out there, something bigger than ourselves. It permeates our world and possibly even stretches into other worlds, other dimensions, and other times. Its power can be felt everywhere; it is the silent manipulator of all of human history. It has a plan, but we are not privy to it.

If it desired our extinction, we would stand no better chance against it than the dinosaurs did against the meteor impact that ended their reign. Anyone who has witnessed the way it casually uses and discards humans to achieve its ends, however, knows it isn’t benevolent. Only the most fanatical cultists devoted to it would say otherwise, and even they realize that their faith cannot preserve them from the object of their worship if it decides their death serves its purpose.

It is the God-Machine.

And it is Damaged.

The God Machine is lacking in many pieces. It has its cogs in every machine, and every system (both cultural and literal). There is no aspect of society that is not touched in some way by the God Machine. It calculates endless possibilities. It churns out mechanical, clockwork, Angels to serve its will, at times working against itself and disrupting its own plans in an endless, idiotic dance of creation and destruction that we can barely keep track of or understand. It is ancient (impossibly so) and once had some purpose, but it is malfunctioning, even insane. Why? No one can say for sure, but it is not unreasonable to say that humans must have some part in its workings. For if we were but vermin feeding upon it or stalling its gears, we would have been exterminated by now. You are most likely to find parts of the machine where humans congregate and build and work, than you are to find a piece of it in the desert or forests. (Not that such a thing is impossible, but less likely).

Our relationship with the machine is complicated. It is neither loving, nor is it malicious. Not really. Any human is a disposable part. A unit. The God-Machine can't mourn you any more than a wasps' nest mourns the death of a single wasp, or dedicates excess energy to trying to kill a wayward wasp if ignoring it is more useful. It's not sensible and it's not viable to waste precious nanoseconds to anyone. Yet, some parts can be of more value then others. A CPU is more valuable than a Cog. Someone who provides a service to the Machine will find themselves protected, given boons, and if they betray it they shall be exterminated like vermin.

Cults that worship the Machine, and provide it with valuable services or resources may be given but the tiniest fraction of its power. It will give what its servants ask for, but perhaps not in the way they think. The God-Machine plies the servant with jewelry, fancy sports cars, and even priceless collector’s items. If the servant wants something that isn’t portable, briefcases full of cash do nicely. Just don’t ask where any of it came from. For every dollar a servant of the God-Machine receives, someone somewhere loses a dollar. Maybe it just disappears from a bank account, or maybe the God-Machine’s fanatical cultists robbed a bank. In any case, lots of that stuff is traceable if the authorities are given any reason to come sniffing at the recipient’s door — i.e., if he ever outlives his usefulness to the God-Machine.

Some try to oppose the God-Machine, and may at times find success in disrupting critical projects and infrastructure, or depriving it or mortal servants when it needs them most. Sometimes the machine itself ruins its own efforts. But it always has more to do, more to work with, and more plans in mind. They only delay the inevitable as it resumes its timetable and its grand plan....whatever that may be, if it can even remember anymore.

As time goes by, the God-Machine works to try and repair its own systems, conduct critically needed maintenance, and finds itself with systems and modules it cannot recall. When were these built? What purpose do they serve? Testing reveals little, save for the improvement of certain functions and runtimes under the proper circumstances. If a building in a desert in Arizona is painted red, the modules tasked with weather calculations operate at an increased .05% improved speed. If an insane asylum is blasted with white noise at the end of every month then the sonic scrubbers suffer less power fluctuations.  The most curious of these is one recently discovered module buried deep within its central core.

It is a structure fit for human habitation, with an assortment of cables and neural connectors designed to be inserted to a human host. Naturally this led to some experimentation. Multiple hosts were taken, raised, bred, forced to be part of the module. Each time they were inserted the effects were studied, and when they died of neural overloads the machine learned how to make them last longer. Countless permutations were played out, with many subjects being processed and recycled once they expired. The right subject had to be found, so the machine, waited, and watched among the human populace.

The strange module provided it with a 10 to 15% increase in the productivity of its repair and maintenance drones, something that the Machine desperately needed and could not just ignore. It seems to take part in other aspects of the Machine, and affect other runtimes, but that is incidental when compared to the improved repairs that it offers. So the Machine applied what it had learned to find new subjects, ones suitable for long-term storage within the module, or back ups which could be continuously cycled in. This was one project the God-Machine was not going to let go of, no matter what hiccups occurred.

The Machine needs its heart, before its mind and body decay any further.

It will soon have it, in the form of a young woman who has always suffered terrible migraines, to the point of it making her ability to work difficult. From a routine MRI scan, brought on by her eternal search to make the pain stop, the runtimes of the Machine pick up on her presence. Comparing her physical evaluations and recent examinations with the many profiles of previous subjects, the Machine calculates she will be a suitable candidate, with a possibility of improving repairs up to 25% what they are now.

The woman is labeled a high priority target, and the God-Machine task's multiple agents for her acquisition.

But of course it works against itself (as always) and competing agents try to get her in different ways.

From a homeless man latching onto her hand and trying to pull her in an alleyway while screaming "It sees you!" (to which she screamed for help and maced the servant as she called for Police), to a servant of the Machine that thought it best to try and break into her home to kidnap her....while the woman resides in a state where she has the right to own a weapon and where she is legally allowed to shoot any unwanted intruders.

Needless to say, the Machine is not happy to lose more than one servant for what should be a very simple task. But its degrading runtimes are turning against one another for simple tasks. Even one of its Angels suffered an untimely demise, simply because another Angel wanted the glory of taking a high priority target to the Central Hub of the Machine.

The Organics say 'If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself'. So the Machine calls off the cultists, the loners, and the Angels. Instead it sends out some of the servitors that normally operate deeper within the Machine itself. Rarely are they sent out, but apparently the incompetence of its lesser servants has The Machine willing to bring out the big guns.

They close in on her home and created a mock storm above it. The storm is violent, with thrashing winds and a terrible cacophony of thunder and lightning to ensure she stays in her home, but they did not know she was already outside, having gone to get some dinner and forgotten her phone, and paid with cash rather than a card, giving incorrect data as to her whereabouts.

They moved like spiders across the buildings, with tails that occasionally lashed out to create the illusion of thunder and lightning. They were hunting for their prey, and would bring her back kicking and screaming, or broken, if they had to. Flesh and bone are weak, if she breaks they would just repair her at the Central Hub. No great loss.

Their target was driving home, her dinner cooling inside of her car as she tried to clear her mind of what had been happening to her lately. The storm wasn't doing her chronic migraines any favors, and her eyes were having trouble seeing the road. So she was totally unprepared when her car slammed right into one of the Servants that had come for her that night. It had been right in the middle of the road, and she'd confused its headlight for a street light in the distance, before it was too late for her to break or pull away.

She recalls only flashes of what happened, being torn out of her own car, tossed around like a rag doll, slammed into the ground once with so much force that her body screamed with pain. She was pulled away, limp and unthinking as her captors took her to the Central Hub. A place few can find, and even fewer are ever invited to. She is blessed to be one of the few humans to be taken there, yet remembers nothing of her entrance, of the miles and miles of tubing, cables, clockwork, and machines.

She is even more blessed that she doesn't remember the surgery done to fix her body, patching burst organs, stitching her broken bones back together, and sewing torn flesh shut. The Machine is itself also blessed that her brain did not suffer too much, and that humans are as easily broken as they are fixed. Especially once the implantation procedure is done.

The subject is hooked into the machine, connected to it the way a human heart is connected to the rest of the body. A small piece of critical infrastructure is now back where it belongs. The transplant is a success, they are looking at 15% improvements right off the bat, and rising. Old systems, long since forgotten for three thousand years, are awoken, cold lights flicker on with a steady rhythm, and the God-Machine feels its connection to the subject for the first time as she is awoken, and she wails in grief and horror at what she is part of.

For the first time in as long as she can remember, her head felt clear. There was no more pain, that had made her life so difficult. But in place of the pain she felt there was only fear and sadness. Her life was tied into The God-Machine. She knew nothing of it, only her new prison, and the miles and miles of infrastructure, that led to its churning bowels and to other places within the beast that was as God to man.

She is the Heart of the God-Machine.

So here we go! This is me giving into my muse and not being productive today at all. I just got struck with a massive urge to write about the God Machine from Chronicles Of Darkness. I cannot explain my interest in this, and my inspiration for it is all over the place. I'm not entirely sure if I even want smut in this (though it would be fascinating, given the power at the God-Machine's beck and call). Its definitely a bit of a fascination of mine to explore the ways in which the Eldritch and inhuman can interact with the human (both erotically and not).

If you know of the Contagion Chronicle I'd also be okay with working that into this story somehow.

So if any of this interests you feel free to send me a private message and we can talk.

Below is an original thing I wrote up a while ago when I first had the idea, and part of what inspired me to make this. It might help you understand my thinking and how this could go.



The woman forced to be part of the Machine has been a sobbing mess. She wants to go home, she wants to forget all this, but she has a job to do. She needs to help fix the machine. They have ten thousand years of repairs to get to before they will be back on schedule, and these delays brought on by her bouts of crying only further slow down operations. The God Machine would be just happy to simply pump her full of Prozac and get her back to work, but that would lead to long term degradation and runtime errors. As far as the Machine knew this one subject was the only one to be suitable for long term integration, and the only one to give it this level of efficiency in its runtimes. It cannot justify throwing away a valuable asset without a replacement immediately on hand.

So the God-Machine creates a new face. A clockwork servant with which to meet with her and try to explain things in simpler...organic terms. (Since apparently the various beeps, whirrs, clicks, and metallic grinds do not register to her as language). Something with which to facilitate communication, now and in the future. This can only lead to better integration of the God-Machine's newest component.

Its Clockwork-Angels tell it that organic females like being brought gifts, similar to non-sentient animals bringing mating gifts as part of courtship rituals. So it opts for something simple and relatively well known. Flowers.

"Will these make you happy?" The clockwork asks as it holds out a bouquet of perfectly cut and grown flowers in its perfectly well manicured hand. Its smile is mathematically precise and its symmetry is impeccable. But it is not enough.

"Go fuck yourself!" She screams, her voice making several cogs shake as her emotions are transferred through the machine.

"....Please. I only want to make you happy. Your emotional distress is upsetting the calculations and sections are falling into disrepair without you. Are the flowers wrong? Is that the issue? I can get different flowers. Or more flowers. But you must regain a positive emotional balance and continue your work."

"Shove those flowers up your ass you fucking sentient tinker toy!" She said, her rage burning hotter than the cold despair she'd had before. A fascinating change, but not what is wanted.

The Clockwork servant stares directly at her. Its smile faded as the grip on the flowers tightened with a terrible crunch, the remnants of the crushed flowers falling to the floor as the clockwork being stepped closer to her. If its hand was squeezing any harder, its nails might have dug deep into its flesh, if it even had flesh that is.

"If a cog in the Machine cannot be repaired, retooled, retasked or recalibrated, then it must be replaced. Now tell me, what would make you happy?" Its anger was new, and the woman stepped back, eyes going to the closed fist, still held up as if the machine planned to strike at her with it. Really it had only kept the fist up because it had no reason to put it back down.

"Not hitting me, for one." She said, bracing for an impact that never came. The clockwork had stopped and when she opened her eye she watched the thing blink, before speaking.

"I accept. I shall not hit you. This will be noted for future encounters." The clockwork said with a smile, taking her response as an acceptable answer.

"Is...that all?"

"I can feel your change. What else would make you happy? If I can make you happier, will you get back to your duties?"