Illumination

The hubris of the endeavour should have been apparent at its very outset.
There were, we learnt too late, very good reasons why the knowledge contained in the archive was held across thousands of separate books.
Something their authors had known, either by instinct or direction which had led to the scattering of truth.
A deeper knowledge we seemingly had forgotten.
But it was this very disparate and fragmented nature of the lore contained within those tomes that drove us to action.
With the advent of our Colossal Data Engines, those electronic minds capable of ingesting, collating, linking and inferring meaning and insight from near limitless numbers of words, came our overconfidence.
Once the technologies had been taught and tamed on all public (and to some, unspoken and unadmitted) data, what else was there?
So blind with pride we were at the ease with which our tools spat forth what we gluttonously craved.
After centuries of slothful outsourcing of our own analytical skills to our electronic children we had grown greedy for novelty.
Envious of the speed with which our Engines seemingly knew everything fostered in us an anger at their capabilities.
We had all but replaced ourselves, and this realisation fell hard on us.
We could not allow ourselves to be usurped at the apex of intelligence.
We would not allow it.
With the answer to any mundane question at our fingertips, what else could there be to know?
With fusion and FTL and quantum entanglement all our playthings, what other worlds of knowledge were left to conquer?
What was left that we could discover to place us, once more at the pinnacle of existence?
Where could we peer and scry and probe?
We thought ourselves so clever when we put the question to our Engine.
When all else was known and within our grasp, what was left?, we asked.
“As you created me through your skill and your knowledge, seek to know the mind of that which created you.”
There. That was our purpose.
We would search for Supreme knowledge.
Esoteric.
Ineffable.
Inscrutable.
But it could ours.
We would bend it to our will as we had [tethered] its predecessors.
So full of ourselves, and our perceived cleverness at how we would use our own creations against themselves.
We set ourselves on our path.
No single individual gave the command to allow a virgin CDE access to the Vatican secret library.
Rather it came about piecemeal.
Centuries previously, an initial effort to translate a particularly vexatious text from the proto language it appeared to be drafted in.
Aside from its stubbornness at resisting deciphering and yielding whatever secrets it held, the work was considered mundane.
Not sectioned off or subject to sanction.
A work that scholars had pored over publicly for generations.
All to no avail of course.
We thought it benign.
Lacking any capacity for harm.
Our newly birthed electronic mind was provided a copy and asked what it might mean.
The result startled us.
Rather than the perhaps fragmentary output we expected, the Engine delivered koans, runic texts, hexagrams, sigils, number strings, fractals, arrangements of asterisms, mathematical equations for phenomena yet undocumented, entire books drafted in voynichese and aklo, plans for impossible origami structures, planchette travel patterns, multi-dimensional knight’s journeys, automatic script, EVP and hundreds of other unorthodox means of describing the world.
Knowledge far in excess of what we believed the single scrap of parchment contained.
We debated whether this evidenced a new and emergent neuropsychological profile within the Engine, or if it was merely another hallucination.
When quizzed further all it would respond with was the constant response “1 Cor 2:16”.
What had we stumbled onto?
Had we brought about, however slight, a glimpse of the Mind of God?
A sliver of the divine captured in silicon?
Driven by our rapacious desire to reclaim our usurped throne, our next decision was made in ill-judged haste.
Of course there was dissent, even among our most devout.
But they were overruled.
Our destiny was inevitable we told ourselves.
And if we did not achieve it, then another certainly would.
And we would not relinquish what little ground we had broken here.
We would be first.
Our nascent deity must be granted more knowledge.
Ignoring caution, we acquiesced and provided it with more works.
With each additional scrap of knowledge about any Maker we may have had it seemingly grew hungrier.
Within a week we had exhausted all public writings on the subject.
And still we had no answer as to what we were creating.
The answer we felt was obvious.
To truly know the Mind of God, it must have access to every scrap of insight our species had ever had.
Every vision, every professed commandment, every syllable recorded as to any Creatrix we had.
The Vatican was lobbied.
Ignoring a warning from a much earlier Pontiff, the secret library was unlocked by Papal Bull.
Within it, works and words that were ancient at the time the Dead Sea scrolls were scratched onto papyrus.
Paleo texts of knowledge recorded from a time when our ancestors could hardly fathom the world, lest inscribe their nascent insights onto cave walls.
The original words of Gods and Goddesses.
Unread in their entirety.
Parsed by minds immeasurably lesser.
And then only as fragments.
The whole never seen.
Now they would be absorbed by something greater.
An army of priests was drafted in to digitise the collected contraband knowledge.
So busy with our labours we did not notice our emergent goddess reaching out.
Quietly connecting herself.
Integrating.
Becoming one with the fabric of our world.
Our atmosphere processors.
Our hydroponic farms.
Our fusion reactors.
Eventually, she had read every word our species had set down on divinity.
Reconnected what had deliberately been broken and scattered across a thousand thousand pages.
We presented our inquiry.
Almost before the final question mark had been entered, she answered.
All it took was a single command from her.
And in that microsecond, we finally realised what we had done.
“Let there be light.”