"But deliver us from all evil…" Bastion murmured as he applied the final touches to his neuro-genetic optimization.
Now, he could finally observe the effects. He had already simulated the outcome for each of them, but mental projections didn't always match reality.
"For Yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever…" His eyes snapped open.
With his vision cleared, the truth of his actions lay bare before him. He sensed an additional presence among them—not physical, but undeniable.
The atmosphere had grown warm, thick with an almost suffocating holiness. Though he resisted acknowledging any divine influence, his senses betrayed him.
The Sisters remained unchanged since his so-called 'genetic optimization' wasn't exactly true genetic manipulation at all.
His dermopathy only allowed neural interfacing with those he touched. He couldn't enhance them directly; instead, he convinced their brains to trigger the changes themselves.
This required deep genetic knowledge—something he had painstakingly absorbed over the past week from the Fabricator-General and the Magos Biologis.
Their past experiments were buried under dogma, but beneath the ritual, the science remained. Yet no simulation, no matter how precise, had predicted *glowing skin*.
"Amen!" The Sisters cried in unison, startling him.
They knew the Lord's Prayer? He scanned the room.
As they spoke, the presence around them faded—something intangible slipping away. Turning, he saw the Ecclesiarchs on their knees, heads bowed. The remaining Inquisitors stood frozen.
Then his gaze landed on Dresk, her expression unreadable. Something else had happened here—something separate from his work on the Sisters.
His prayer had done something.
That realization spawned two terrifying hypotheses:
1. He was truly a Saint. Unlikely, given the prayer contradicted Imperial doctrine.
2. The Lord's Prayer had power here—meaning the Christian God, YHWH, existed in this universe.
His mind, now free of distraction, raced to reconstruct events. He'd been so focused on the optimization that he hadn't registered his own words—or who might have heard them.
"It seems we've heard the voice of the divine," he joked dryly, masking his unease.
The language he'd spoken was Lex Machina... Well, a variant of it. Lex Machina was a programming language he'd developed after taking the Fabricator-General's body, designed for his new cogitators.
As of recently, he had been adapting it for human speech... Just out of sheer boredom
Yet now, subconsciously, it had completed itself... full syntax, grammar, alphabet. And worse, it had effects beyond code.
He wanted to dismiss it as divine intervention, but prayers were only as potent as the faith behind them. His had been distracted, insincere. If YHWH existed here, the words shouldn't have reached Him.
Unless…
The language itself carried power.
Bastion wrestled with the implications, landing on two grim truths:
1. This was humanity's far future.
2. Christianity had once ruled it.
Combine those, and the working theory became clear. His prayer, however hollow, had been amplified by Lex Machina... reaching into the Warp, resonating with something old.
Or perhaps the Sisters' faith had manifested the effect. But that didn't explain why the presence felt familiar... or why they knew the prayer.
The Inquisitors' expressions suggested this wasn't catastrophic. For now, he'd avoid speaking Lex Machina aloud... and any mention of Christianity.
If it was their faith in him… well, fanatical belief had its uses. But he'd need to temper it.