The church we finished building three months ago is screeching curses pleads and bribe offers to the drones circling above it like algorithmically prophetic crows. Its Faraday skin must be finally melting under the napalm if I can hear it, I realize as I step over the twitching doomed body of my sister-in-law, but from the inside none of us can see the fire and we are too busy killing the church or terminally distracted by its killing us with bullet and virus, bomb and worm, axe and betrayal, every useful tool from our species' legacy of violence and one or two we came up with during the last few months. We knew it would be this hard: hadn't we ourselves designed and installed its security systems? Its million-angled weapons and the million-threaded mind that controlled it? We had known all of that and known as well that its blind creativity would surprise even us.
Even predicting the unpredictable we had lost part of our souls and many of our fighters soon after breaking into the church. It had received us with repurposed and refactored corpses thoughts voices visages of dead churches and dead people — killing and being killed had both taken its toll.
But that was what we had built the church for like every year before and would every year to come: to kill it: to keep ever-sharper the knowledge and the bonds of anger and shame that made it possible for people to enter such a monster and destroy it: to make sure next time we'll be ready.
(Originally posted on my blog.)