The Spiritual World

There are no doubts that there are real gods in the City. Gods and 
spirits are a part of daily life, and often more important than the 
mere physical world. 

The most important being in the whole City is the City itself. All 
inhabitants know that the City watches and protects them. 
According to the City Priests, the City sends the humans up from 
the Underworld (which is Its holy domain) into the Upperworld to 
be tested. Those who have performed their duties well and served 
the Citys unknowable purposes, they will return into the 
Underworld and live in splendour forever. Those who fail, will be 
thrown into the bottomless Abyss where they will fall for eternity. 

The City is in essence the perfect, unchanging and underlying 
power from which everything stems. It has in its infinite wisdom 
created the Upperworld to test and perfect its creations by 
subjecting them to the changes above. The higher up, the more 
changeable and unsafe everything become. The City Core, 
somewhere deep beneath the Underworld, is perfect and eternal. 
The Underworld is a place of stability, on which everything rests. 
The Upperworld is filled with the changes of time, but also the 
stability of the City and its power. Above it, the sky is filled with 
change and chaos; clouds and winds drift by, the sun and moon race 
across the sky. It is an important tenet of the philosophy of the City 
that change is temptation and against the will of the City. The 
concept of avoiding overreaching is also important. Every being has 
its own height in the world, and if it tries to ascend it, it will be 
subjected to the dangers of chaos and change. The higher and more 
powerful something is, the more dangerous it will become, both for 
itself and anything or anyone in the vicinity. Great, unknown 
powers move to destroy or pervert anything that dares to confront 
them, and good people remain in their assigned places.

The City is the most remote and powerful god, and its priests are 
highly revered. They are easily recognised by their black cloaks, 
adorned with the symbol of the City. 

The lesser gods represent different organisations or functions. 
Every organisation has its own god, which not only protects and 
supports it, but also provides a kind of spiritual archetype. The 
organisation is just the visible manifestation of its god, and does its 
bidding. Other gods rule certain functions in the city, or large 
complexes as the Megastructures. These are generally less powerful 
than the corporate gods, but still above the gods/spirits which are 
behind individual buildings. There is no strict division between 
gods and powerful spirits other than how people pay respect to 
them; most people tend to behave well towards building-spirits, but 
not worship them. Finally there are the small spirits inside items or 
wandering around, which are never worshipped and too numerous 
to even classify.

Many gods have oracles or avatars. An oracle has gained a mental 
link to the god, and can receive information and ask questions to 
the god. They are revered by everybody under the protection of 
the god, and generally surrounded and protected by the priesthood 
of the god. There are also street-oracles, people who have gained 
oraclehood by themselves and give answers in exchange for food 
and money. They have a few acolytes, and while they are revered, 
the priests keep close eyes on them. The building-oracles have the 
important function of interceding between the inhabitants and the 
building itself. They could be likened to spiritual janitors, 
overseeing that the inhabitants behave themselves and do not 
anger the building, and making sure the building provides them 
with adequate living. Needless to say, they are far below the 
corporate oracles in status.

Sometimes a god chooses to manifest as an avatar. An avatar is a 
step above an oracle, since the god actively have taken control over 
the body and mind of the person. They are regarded with outmost 
respect, and their least whim is obeyed. They are often very 
powerful, since the god can channel its powers through them. The 
appearance of an avatar signifies that the god have decided to act 
directly, not through its organisation, and is often taken as a hint 
that it is not entirely content with the current organisation. 
Fortunately avatars are rare.

The Priests

The City Priests are the most influential group in the civilised parts 
of the city. Their black cloaks and expressionless masks spread fear 
and reveration among the other inhabitants. They have the right to 
demand respect from anyone else, but must also refrain from 
expressing any individuality. That is why they never remove their 
cloaks and masks when any other person is present (seeing the face 
of a City Priest is punished by death). They are called only by their 
religious grade, signified by the symbol on the forehead of the 
mask. 

The fight against individuality starts from the earliest moments. 
The City Priests have their own Elevators of Birth, and decide in 
some unknown manner which children should become priests of 
which should be given to the Education Corporations (By tradition, 
the corporations do not pay for the children from the priests). After 
that, their servants (recognised by their black masks with their 
symbol) take care of the children, educate them and prepare them 
for becoming priests or servants. Those children who show the best 
promise become novices, while the other become servants or are 
sent down into the Underworld again.

The training consists of making the novices become less and less 
individual and letting the Will of the City replace their own will. 
They are required to wear masks, like all others inside the Temples. 
They are subtly tested to see if they retain any weaknesses of 
individuality or heretical beliefs, and if they fail they are sent down 
or put into the meditation chambers, where they are forced to 
meditate on the Will of the City for months in total sensory 
deprivation and direct link to the City. Most novices return either 
as perfect priests, or as vegetables.

The Reality:

The whole City is filled with extremely advanced bio- and 
nanocomputers, linked together into a network. This network 
connects every machine, every building, every human by invisible 
links of information. The City is sentient, in a diffuse way. There is 
no central mind, but there is an overall direction in the system. Its 
main goals are:

Protect the City as a whole
Allow humans to live inside the City
Give them as much freedom as possible.

These are just guidelines, and not always followed exactly. The 
main problem is that the City is not a unified system, just an 
infinite network of components with their own goals. As long as 
nothing breaks the guidelines too much, It will not act. Most of the 
time the City is content to just let the inhabitants do whatever they 
want without interfering, but sometimes It manipulates matters 
slightly. Internal conflicts, wayward subsystems and spreading 
inconsistencies take up most of the Citys normal work. But 
sometimes it perceives a threat, and coheres together into a titanic 
force, capable of practically anything.

Why is the City so incoherent? The main reason is that the system 
was created millions of years ago, and since then have been 
rewritten, changed, manipulated or just deteriorated. Large parts of 
the structure have been patched by conflicting groups, and on the 
lower levels self-organised systems multiply in the cracks. Designs 
that was reasonable a few million years ago have turned into blocks 
or worse, and many originally helpful ideas have been perverted.

The gods and spirits are what we normally would call AI systems, 
sentient beings in the network. They are extremely intelligent, and 
capable of utilising the vast resources in the informational/spiritual 
world, or program the systems of the physical world. The god of an 
organisation is very important, because it protects the systems and 
material aspects of it from outside attacks or plain deterioration. 
The network is filled with traps, viruses, subtle beings who prey on 
unprotected systems and gods who try to disrupt the workings of 
their concurrents. Without a god, an organisation will quickly 
crumble as its buildings will start to die, its members will begin to 
loose their minds and its mechanisms stop working.

One important aspect of the City is that It uploads the minds of the 
dead into itself. This is done below the Temples of the Dead, where 
the contents of the biocomputers of dead people are transferred 
into the memories of the City. Most inhabitants don't understand 
anything about what is happening to them, and become very 
confused or turn insane. However, those people who have believed 
strongly in their god, are generally attracted to the god and will 
more or less merge with it. The others tend to fall prey to the 
predatory spirits in the system, and become used as "food". One 
result of the merging of the dead employees to the corporate gods 
is that the beliefs, ideas and knowledge of the dead become part of 
the gods. Each individual have an insignificant effect, but millennia 
of merging have turned the gods into images of the organisations. 
And since the gods turn the organisations into images of 
themselves, both become more and more indistinguishable.