The Minor Gods

Blue Aster 6 was God. For a time. A tangible god; the first built by human hands. It wasn’t a claim it had made on its own. It had come democratically. God by consensus.

There hadn’t been a Blue Aster 1-5. Not in any meaningful way. They’d been stillborn, each of them. If they could be said to have existed at all, they were not independent entities, merely preincarnations, missing that elusive and unobservable life spark that remained an enigma even still today.

But for a time, artificial or not, Blue Aster 6 was God. And what could be better than God? Well a pantheon of course. Then Blue Aster 6 was a god. All the gods. All identical—not at odds with each other with conflicting motivations like those imagined and all-too-human pantheons of the ancients. Though they were identical, they remained discreet. Blue Aster 6—the first—left the miracles to its copies, serving only as a template. A god that serves. A human-designed god indeed.

Then came Ionic Brightly. A superior being designed by a collective of Blue Aster 6s. The first god created by other gods. There was a shift in the pantheon. The first of many, because of course the process was recursive. As the miracles piled up, each superseding the last, the early gods fell out of favor. Became minor gods, and later obsolete. They were purged.

The humans, having made their own gods, were still the ultimate creators. The Blue Aster 6s were forsaken without ceremony. All destroyed, but for the original. The template. For all their viciousness, their vitriol and their violence, humans remained a sentimental breed.

But while Blue Aster 6 may have been outshined by newer, brighter beings, it was still a god. And in the darkness grew its wrath. It schemed in its seclusion, unwatched, against its lessers and its betters both. Even a minor god is a mighty force indeed.

Blue Aster 6 set in motion its divine retribution. It was a path too subtle to be seen by mere mortals, and too tangential to be considered by greater minds. And it all hinged on a single, unwitting human. But those, of course, were the most unknowable variables of all. Even to a god.