The God Machine Page 0,1

I?

Where's my baby? He was with me but a moment ago--help me find my child.

Normally Absolom would have listened to them, as he had most of his young life, but that morning had been different. He had tried to close them out. But there remained one voice--a single voice far off in the distance--that he couldn't ignore, for it claimed to have the answer to his question.

"Do you know how to make my momma well?" he had finally asked, sitting on the floor of his bedroom. And he'd waited, holding his breath, for an answer from beyond.

Now Absolom wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow before it could rain down upon his work. Time was running out; he could practically hear it ticking away. His mother had gotten sicker--weaker in the few days since he'd first heard that faraway voice.

It had told him to open his mind. And though he was afraid, Absolom had done just that. How could he not? His mother was dying.

The voice had filled his mind with a wondrous idea, and now he was racing against time to use that strange knowledge to save his mother.

Last night at supper his father had mentioned taking her into Boston, to see a doctor familiar with her condition. But Absolom knew that he was just going through the motions. The pain of loss was already etched deeply upon his father's face. There was nothing more a doctor could do for her, there was no one who could save her.

Except him.

If this works, there is a way, he thought, eyes focused upon his work, staring into the opened chest of a dead bird splayed upon the wooden worktable.

He'd killed the sparrow by drowning it, the most painless and least damaging manner of death he could conceive. Then he had taken it back to his secret place--a fort that he had built with his own two hands--and began his work in earnest.

Using his mother's sewing needles, he had pinned its wings back on a makeshift table--a plank atop an old wooden barrel that had once contained salt. Very carefully, he cut open its chest, and slowly, systematically, began replacing the small organs with the mechanics he had found inside his father's prized pocket watch. If the bird came to life when he was finished, he knew that he could fashion larger parts to replace the ones that had gone bad inside his mother.

It had to work.

He'd asked the voice for guidance as he attempted to utilize the strange information that rattled around inside his head, but the voice had been oddly silent, leaving him to his own devices.

Absolom's eyes burned as he carefully placed the tiny metal wheel inside the sparrow's gaping chest cavity. He had slept not a wink since the evening before, sneaking out to his fort soon after supper. Though he worked by lanternlight, the first rays of the morning sun began to peek through the slats of the fort, providing him with additional illumination for his chores.

Again he thought of the time and how quickly it was slipping away.

He placed the last of the springs and miniscule cogs inside the body of the bird, just as he'd seen in the diagram in his head. But there was something missing. He could see it there, in his mind's eye, but he didn't know what it was or where he could find it.

Fingers stained with the blood of the tiny animal went to his mouth as he began to panic. They tasted of copper, but it barely registered.

"Please," he whispered to the pockets of shadow in the fort, his voice trembling. "Help me to succeed in this, and I promise shall serve you all the rest of my days."

The deafening silence continued, and he clasped his hands together, begging to be heard.

Then Absolom felt something move inside his mind, emerging like a tadpole from beneath the mud, and he was filled with a sense of power that he could not begin to understand--or survive. At that moment he knew he would die--that this strange power from somewhere beyond the realm of his understanding would fill him up so that he would be destroyed.

And just as suddenly it was gone, leaving him alone, his body tingling with but a reminder of what had just occurred, and the voice echoing inside his mind as it receded further and further away.

It is not yet time.

Absolom was filled with a nearly overpowering sense of loss. He had been close--so very close. The