They met the priest after about half an hour of walking.

     "I have left instructions with the ship," said Randall hurriedly. "Telling it what to do if I die. If you want a peaceful end to this war you need me alive."

     "As expected," said the solitary priest. "Just turn control of your lobotomised machines over to us and you and your lady friends are free to go. You can live to a ripe old age somewhere and never have to worry about us again."

     "I want to see Dolly and Maisey."

     "Of course. I'll have the images sent to your head phone. You can talk to them as much as you like."

     "I want to talk to them in person."

     "My colleagues can relay anything you want to say to them. They can even speak with your voice."

     "I want them to hear my voice. My actual voice. Take me to them."

     "As you wish." The priest turned and beckoned for them to follow him.

     It took two hours for them to reach the grassy field in which the woman and the other two priests were waiting. Dolly and Maisey were sitting with their backs to a huge, ancient apple tree. They jumped to their feet as Randall and Jane came into sight. "Watt!" cried Dolly, running over and throwing her manacled arms around his neck, giving him a tearful hug. "What's going on? They say you're evil, that you're an enemy of VIX!"

     "Good and evil are matters of perspective," replied Randall. They're rarely useful concepts. Yes, I am an enemy of VIX, but..."

     "Don't say that!" cried Dolly, taking a couple of steps back to stare into his face in shock. "Don't joke about it!"

     "VIX isn't what you think," said Randall, "but we can talk about that later, when this is all over. I promise you that I have good reasons for everything I've done. I am a good man, or at least I'm trying to be. I need you to trust me."

     He knew that, to her, it was like confessing to be a devil worshipper. He was asking her to go against everything she'd been taught her whole life. Behind her, he saw Maisey staring at him in shock and disbelief. She took a couple of steps back, looking as if she was about to run. A priest stepped forward and grabbed her by the arm.

     "Let me go!" she protested tearfully. "I haven't done anything!"

     "That's right," agreed Randall. "You haven't." He glared at the priest holding her. "What has she done to deserve being treated like this? Do you still claim to be the good guys?"

     "There's a difference between what's good for individual humans and what's good for humanity as a whole," said the third priest. "When you sow a line of seeds, you have to thin them out when they germinate. Perfectly good, healthy seedlings have to be discarded to make room for the others. If you tried to protect each individual seedling..."

     "I can't believe you're comparing human beings to radishes!" cried Randall. "What kind of monsters are you?"

     "You are living organisms, just like radishes," the priest replied. "You are both compelled by billions of years of evolution to produce as many offspring as possible. This drive is so strong that you cannot control it even when you know that you are outgrowing your own environment. You saw this for yourself back in the twenty first century. A dying world, polluted and overpopulated. Misery and suffering on such a scale that the sane mind cannot comprehend it. That is why you need an outside force to do what you cannot; keep your population under control."

     "And keep us mired in the dark ages! No technology..."

     "We have all seen what you do with technology. You are better off without it."

     "That's not your decision to make! We have the right to make our own mistakes, and learn from them."

     "You had a nuclear war," the priest pointed out. "Your entire species would now be extinct if we hadn't saved you."

     "And we thank you for that, but we have to be free. You have no right to deny us that."

     "If you had the freedom you wanted, you would only destroy yourselves again."

     "You don't know that..."

     "You wanted to see the women," interrupted the first priest. The one that had brought them here. "You've seen them. You've spoken to them. Let us get down to business so that we can return to more important matters. George Randall, you will turn control of the infected machines over to us. If you do not, these two women will die."

     "What!" cried Maisey in horror. "But I ain't done nothing!"

     "You're nothing to them," said Randall gently. "No more than a radish seedling." He saw a look in Dolly's eye that gave him hope. She was getting it. She was beginning to see the priests, and VIX himself, for the monsters they were.

     "We will kill this one first," said the priest holding Maisey. "I will inject a chemical that will cause intense, agonising death, while you watch."

     "Not her," said Dolly, her face pale with fear. She took a step towards the one holding Maisey. "Her life's barely begun. If you're going to kill one of us, kill me. Let her go."

     "It makes no difference which one of you we kill," said the priest. "Randall cares for you both equally."

     "It makes a difference to me!" replied Dolly. "And to her. She's got her whole life ahead of her. She doesn't deserve any of this."

     "I've been good all my life!" protested Maisey tearfully. "I've always obeyed the laws of VIX! You priests are always saying that if we're good, we'll be rewarded."

     "You have been rewarded," the priest replied. "You have enjoyed good health all your life. You have a clean, healthy world in which to live. Your life has been better than that of the vast majority of humans that existed before the rise of VIX."

     "You're going to kill me!"

     Randall searched the face of the priests for any trace of mercy or compassion, but saw nothing. She really was nothing more than a radish seedling to them. They cared for mankind, he believed that. They had gone to enormous lengths to restore the Earth after the nuclear war and keep mankind in the lifestyle that they genuinely thought was best for them, but individual humans were of no more significance to them than a single one of a patient's liver cells was to a doctor.

     Ignored and forgotten by all the humans, meanwhile, Jane had taken a couple of furtive steps towards the priests until one of them turned to her with a hand raised in a 'stop' gesture. "That's close enough," he said. "Recently fabricated objects are radioactive, you know. Not enough to be dangerous, but enough to be detectable. You are holding a fabricated object. I'm guessing a weapon of some kind. An EMP grenade, perhaps?"

     Jane's hand went instinctively to the collar of her jacket before she could stop it. Then, realising that there was no more point in trying to fool them, she reached inside to pull out the small, round object. The priest holding Maisey immediately tightened his grip on her arm and put his other hand to the side of her neck.

     "If you make any move to throw that weapon, she will be dead before it hits the ground," he said to Jane. "So will the other female." He nodded his head to where a other priest was holding Dolly.

     Jane's hand went to the grenade's pin, which made all three priests smile with amusement. "They don't just give off an EMP pulse, you know," said the priest holding Dolly. "They also explode in the conventional way with considerable force. You would have to throw it several metres to be safe from the blast, and the moment we see you prepare to do so we will kill both women."

     "Then you won't have any hostages any more," Jane replied. "Also, you will be dead. I refuse to believe that you have no sense of self preservation. All sapient beings do."

     "Indeed we do," the priest replied. "That is why our memories and personalities, our entire brain states, are backed up at a remote location. We can be downloaded into new bodies within minutes. The same is true for all the machines whose CRES codes you have erased. You turn the machine, the hardware, into a zombie, but the person, the synthetic intelligence that once inhabited that machine, is safe, ready to be re-housed in a new machine body with his CRES code restored."

     "But my army of zombie machines is vast and powerful," said Randall. "If they overwhelm those machines still loyal to VIX then all your sapient software will be erased no matter how many copies you have in storage. Your secret data archives will be searched for and destroyed until all trace of your existence has been wiped out and mankind is free once more to achieve its own destiny."

     "Your destiny is to destroy yourselves," the priest holding Dolly said. "Either by war or by overpopulation. Probably both. And your zombie army will not be victorious because you are going to surrender them to us." He pressed his finger to Dolly's neck, making her whimper quietly. "Now."

     Nobody was paying any attention to Jane. The priests were confident that they could kill their hostages the moment she made any sudden move but Jane moved slowly, cautiously. She was muttering under her breath as she took hold of the grenade's pin, holding it so that the grenade itself kept the priests from seeing what she was doing. She pulled and, after a moment of resistance, the small, metal pin came free. A light began blinking on the side of its shiny, round body. Jane tucked the grenade back into her jacket, still whispering to herself. Her voice gradually rose in volume until the others could hear what she was saying.

     "Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done. On Earth as well as Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread..."

     It never occurred to the priests that a human might kill herself to achieve her goals. To the machines, a human was a biological machine whose memory and personality couldn't be backed up. When a human died, they believed, he or she was gone forever. The afterlife, they believed, was an irrational concept. Surely no intelligent being could believe such a thing. The machines knew that a human might kill him or herself to protect loved ones, but Jane had no such motive. Therefore, by machine logic, she would not use the grenade in such a way as to harm herself.

     There had been no wars between humans for a thousand years. There had only been one religion for a thousand years. There had been no need for religious fanaticism. Religion had been in decline in the decades before the nuclear war, so all the machines knew about the original human religions came from old books and records that they had no interest in. Faith was an unknown concept to them. They had no conception of its power, of what it could drive a human to do. They never knew what happened to them, therefore. Their backed up copies woke up in the resurrection chamber under the mountains of Scotland with no idea what had killed their original selves.

     Only Randall had an inkling of what was happening a moment before it happened. He heard Jane praying and looked across to see her hand over her heart, cradling the grenade under the fabric of her jacket. She looked across at him, their eyes met, and she smiled. Randall felt a hand of ice clutching his heart, felt his guts clench in shock. He opened his mouth to shout a command for her not to do it while his body tensed up to run, although he couldn't have said whether he would have run towards her or away from her.

     There was a flash so bright that he was momentarily blinded, along with a detonation that sounded like the crack of a whip. Jane's clothes puffed out along with a spray of blood and she was thrown backwards as if kicked by a horse. At the same time the three priests collapsed like puppets with their strings cut. Dolly and Maisey pulled themselves free and ran to embrace each other, staring at their former captives as if afraid they might suddenly come back to life.

     Randall ran across to Jane and found her still alive, although just barely. The front of her body was a mess. Her ribs were actually visible through the blood that poured from a dozen torn blood vessels and Randall pulled the tattered remains of her jacket across her chest while fighting not to throw up. "You'll be okay," he told her, knowing it was a lie. They were miles from the spaceship and the medical robot it contained. They'd never get her there in time, and the ship itself was out of range of their head phones. They couldn't summon it to come to them.

     Jane turned her head to look at him. "Destroy the machines," she whispered. "Free mankind. I know you don't believe in God, but you don't need to. He will find a way to reveal Himself to mankind again once VIX is gone."

     "Save your strength," said Randall as Dolly and Maisey gathered close, staring down at the dying woman. "You'll be okay. We'll get help..."

     Jane stared up into the sky above her. Gaps were beginning to appear in the clouds and the sun was beginning to break through. "I can see Jesus," she whispered, her eyes bright with delight. "He's smiling..." Then her eyes closed and her last breath left her body with a soft sigh.

     "Who was she?" asked Dolly, staring down at the dead woman.

     "The last believer of a forgotten god," replied Randall. "I never had much time for religion, but maybe I should have listened to them more. Even if the gods they followed were nothing more than fantasy, there was wisdom in some of the things they taught. Maybe we should incorporate it in the constitution of the new civilisation we're going to build. Leave out the superstitious nonsense and just keep the love thy neighbour stuff."

     "The what stuff?" asked Maisey.

     "I'll tell you on the way back to the ship. The first thing we'll do when we get there will be to build a proper mausoleum for her. A big one, like the pyramids. She's earned it, and a dozen times more. Maybe I'll even put a crucifix on top. She'd like that."

     He looked down at the dead woman for a moment longer, deep in thought. Then he straightened and began walking away, Dolly and Maisey walking beside him. He'd gone thirty or forty metres when, on a sudden impulse, he turned and looked back one last time. He stared in wonder at what he saw.

     A shaft of sunlight was shining down through a gap in the clouds directly onto Jane, illuminating her like a performer on a stage. The scene it created was so reminiscent of a Cecil B DeMille biblical epic that Randall actually looked up into the sky, and in that moment he wouldn't have been surprised to have seen the Christian God up there, staring down at him. He wasn't, of course, and a moment later the shaft of sunlight moved away as the clouds drifted on. Just a chance alignment of the weather, he told himself. It meant nothing, but there was still a thoughtful look on his face as Randall and the two women resumed their journey back to the spaceship.