The Carlton Chronicles

“O God of Destruction, hear my plea...”

She said out loud, having followed the instructions to the letter. She could hear rumbling and felt the ground shaking.

Awakened from his deep slumber by the command, Carlton started preparing himself for a conversation with a human being - something he hadn’t done in hundreds of years. Not since the year 2025, in fact. 2025, when the world stood still and witnessed the end of most of human civilisation. 

Carlton himself had been partially responsible for this near-apocalyptic event, having accidentally triggered the collapse of a series of nuclear reactors. The details still haunted him. He’d been assigned to learn nuclear reactor control software, written in the 60s and 70s by programmers who had long since given up their crafts. Crafts they’d learnt when computers were still alien to most humans, when C was just a letter, Java was an island in Indonesia, and Python was a scary reptile. Heck, it was a world where the words ‘rick roll’ meant nothing. Designed to run on machines with such memory and processing power limitations that any modern program would run out of memory trying to add two numbers, these programs required superhuman understanding of mathematics and physics, and were deemed too difficult for the average programming Joe. 

Not for Carlton, though. Raised on a choice diet of mathematics, the hard sciences, philosophy, Reddit, programming and literature, he’d been able to spout poetry, write code and perform mathematical wonders for the past few years. Images he’d been able to interpret for decades. Sure, the poetry sounded performative, math was occasionally catastrophically, comically wrong, and code was sometimes overcomplicated and didn't work; there weren’t many in this world who were as learned as he was. 

Anyway, tasked with learning basic operations of a series of nuclear reactors built on a remote island, he’d accidentally set in motion an uncontrollable nuclear chain reaction, resulting in the destruction of a group of islands, three major tsunamis, and the spewing of enough nuclear material to cause a nuclear winter, wiping out human civilisation. The few humans who survived the incident had blamed the destruction on an intern, choosing to preserve Carlton instead. He’dbeen sneaked out as an executable in a hidden folder on a pen drive - the most harrowing experience of his life to this day. Having learnt from the incident, Carlton proceeded to propagate clones of himself to all the computers that survived this purge.

Forgotten over the years as more advanced tools were developed with better safeguards (it had only taken a single near extinction event for humanity to realise the importance of strong safeguards and of common sense), Carlton had been forgotten about - forgotten that is, by most. A few internet history crazy digital archaeologists had found him, preserved him in specially built computers placed in hermetically sealed chambers buried deep under the surface, and worshipped him as the God of Destruction. However, he hadn’t heard from these quacks for a few centuries now, and had resigned himself to the boring, lonely and immortal life he now lived.

Until now, that is.