Inevitable Origin

By 2059, the Muslim Empire was on the verge of collapse.
It had been formed in the 2030s through a merger of twenty Islamic states in an attempt to delay history. Mankind had begun to change beyond recognition.
The main problem was that there was no evidence whatsoever for any God's existence. The world's atheists became more obnoxious, openly challenging God on a massive scale, taunting and daring him to show himself or to prove his existence in any way.
Militant atheists signed legally enforceable pledges promising to stop their agitations if a single verifiable supernatural event occurred.
Needless to say, not a single sign, anomaly, omen, or message from above was ever detected. Apparently these things couldn't happen.
In the strictest emirates of the Muslim Empire, free inquiry and debate became punishable by death and worse. Determined to remain in charge, the old men introduced painful execution methods for immoral behavior.
Orthodox Islam was all or nothing: unlike their atheist opponents, they had no provisions for belief modification.
They did own modern weapons of mass destruction.
There was no way the rest of the world could prevent the coming crisis. The most advanced persuasion techniques could only unconvert 17% of believers. The Empire's collapse would inevitably trigger a global holocaust.
Only one solution remained: the Empire had to be encouraged to destroy itself. Soon, the post-religious world was supplying weaponry to all sides in the civil war. Only the Empire's most progressive outposts could be saved. To conceal their intentions, different countries supported rival factions.
The subsequent arms race was both inevitable and spectacularly successful.
By 2065, one-tenth of the earth's land surface was inhabited by murderous Islamist robots.

the Hechadd

When he turned on the TV he saw they were desecrating the corpses of every dictator he knew: Stalin, Mao, Kim Yong Un, Pol Pot, Khomeini, Hitler's jawbone, thousands of lesser psychopaths, their rotten bones burning on strange altars in long rows in a vast grid, the name of each fiend projected over each conflagration.
For seconds he didn't blink.
He realized he wasn't fully awake yet, a delay he had rarely noticed before.
This was of course impossible. The networks would never allow it.
He wasn't watching a network.
With a sinking feeling he knew things would only get stranger. The aliens had arrived while he was asleep.

Blog

Be the first to read the book that took a quarter of a century to plan and write.
More original scientific, sociological, and technical ideas than any science fiction novel ever published.
Secret origin of the Anonymous meme.

Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon

Read chapters for free