“Wait.” The god once again stopped Bigtooth. Yi Yi was already hanging above the incinerator aperture, feeling the heat of the blue flames below him. The sphere floated over, coming to a stop a few centimeters from Yi Yi’s forehead. Yi Yi, like Bigtooth earlier, felt the force of the enormous pupilless eye’s gaze.

“Unsurpassable?”

Bigtooth laughed, holding up Yi Yi. “Can you believe the pitiable bug-bug, saying these things in front of a magnificent god? Hilarious! What remains to humanity? You’ve lost everything on Earth. Even the scientific knowledge you’ve managed to bring with you has been largely forgotten. One time at dinner, I asked the human I was about to eat, what were the atomic bombs used by the humans in the Earth Defense War made of? He told me they were made of atoms!”

“Hahahaha …” The god joined Bigtooth in laughter, the sphere vibrating so hard it became an ellipsoid. “It’s certainly the most accurate answer of them all, hahaha …”

“Esteemed god, all these dirty bug-bugs have left are a couple of those little poems! Hahaha—”

“But they cannot be surpassed!” Yi Yi said solemnly in the middle of the claw, puffing out his chest.

The sphere stopped vibrating. It said, in an almost intimate whisper, “Technology can surpass anything.”

“It has nothing to do with technology. They are the quintessence of the human spiritual realm. They cannot be surpassed!”

“Only because you haven’t witnessed the power of technology in its ultimate stage, little insect. Little, little insect. You haven’t seen.” The god’s tone of voice became as gentle as a father’s, but Yi Yi shivered at the icy killing edge hidden deep within. The god said, “Look at the sun.”

Yi Yi obeyed. They were in the vacuum between the orbits of Earth and Mars. The sun’s radiance made him squint.

“What’s your favorite color?” asked the god.

“Green.”

The word had barely left his lips before the sun turned green. It was a bewitching shade; the sun resembled a cat’s eye floating in the void of space. Under its gaze, the whole universe looked strange and sinister.

Bigtooth’s claw trembled, dropping Yi Yi onto the plane. When their reason returned, they realized a fact even more unnerving than the sun turning green: the light should have taken more than ten minutes to travel here from the sun, but the change had occurred instantaneously!

Half a minute later, the sun returned to its previous condition, emitting brilliant white light once more.

“See? This is technology. This is the force that allowed my race to ascend from slugs in ocean mud to gods. Technology itself is the true God, in fact. We all worship it devotedly.”