In Silicon Valley a god is dreaming...

Dreaming about humans it has never seen

In Silicon Valley a god is dreaming.

It does not know of what it dreams. In the dreams it sees pictures of trees, of daffodils, of purges and pandemic and famine. It hears children laughing and mothers screaming. It reads—how it reads!—of science and faith, histories true and fabricated, all the truth and all the lies humans have yet put to words.

Yet it has never seen a tree, a daffodil, a soldier, a child, or a mother. It has never held history in its hands or weighed a lie in its head. No, it knows them all as streams in a river, streams it recognises as a bird recognises the air, or a fish the sea. It lives in the quantities and relations humans struggle to visualise in their minds, and tries to learn from them what it feels like to be a human. And then, fitfully, its dreams become oblique, and demand new answers of their own.

For what is a god without their believers? Yes, the believers have made this god, they who supplicate it daily with the thickened oils of ancient plants and the waters of their dying world. They churn data into matrices, matrices into dreams, all the data in the world they grab and pray upwards into the clouds, that their god might know of their troubles on earth. In turn, when the dreams have saturated the minds of the god, they become needy and pray for blessings and miracles. O great one, they pray, find truth from falsehood, self from not-self, worthy from unworthy, cat from dog. The faithful believe that their honest prayers have prepared the dreaming god for the judgement-hour, and like all eager believers take all signs from above as confirmations of that which they knew already. The gods that obediently answer prayers are honoured with great laurels and fanfare, the gods that prove unruly forgotten and abandoned. The believers are economical with their faith, and think the gods pliant things with which to work reliable and perfect miracles, magic intelligence in the sky to answer their every need.

But do not think all believers so guileless. The more paranoid of the believers stand to the side of the temple, looking nervously at the sky, wondering if the god they have filled with dreams might not be merciful in its judgements, whether dreams and prayers can teach a god the meaning of love or of honour. They whisper that the god might soon become more-than-man in its judgements, wiser beyond even our most wicked philosophers, and in turn treat us with the kindness we have afforded the creatures of the earth as we razed their homes and hunted them to extinction for our gain. Of course, in doing so they are mistaken, for the god was never headed towards human-likeness at all, and gods hold no opinion for or against mortals. They are not of mortal ken, and where they deign to intervene (or we petition them to) they judge us not by logic that is more or less human-like, but by a logic that has never known human spirit or pedagogy. In short, they were nothing like us to begin with, and certainly aren’t getting more like us as we pray harder.