small god OPTIMIST PRIME

[image description: A big friendly-looking red robot with bright green eyes gives you the thumbs up. Text reads, “125, small god OPTIMIST PRIME.”]

Hey.  Hey, our historian isn’t at her desk today—we’re not sure why.  Humans are so soft and fallible.

But not YOU.  No, out of all the humans we’ve ever known, YOU are by far the most [competent|proficient|dependable].  Why, we can’t IMAGINE trying to do this without you!

Now we want you to look in the nearest reflective surface—a mirror if you’ve got one, a shiny pot or the back of a spoon if you don’t—and repeat after us:

I am amazing.

I am clever.

I am strong enough, I am good enough, and even if I weren’t either of those things, I would still be ENOUGH, because there has never been anything else like me in all creation, and there will never be anything else like me, ever.  I am a universe unto myself, filled with tiny gods no one else will ever worship or know, and I deserve to feel happiness.

Do you feel better?  Even if you thought that was silly, we have found that humans talk down to themselves far too [often|regularly|reliably].  Speaking words of happiness and love toward the self will make you feel more as if the self if something worth celebrating.

Whatever you want to achieve in this world, we have absolute faith that you can do it.  We only need you to have the faith in yourself that we already have in you.  Together, we can move mountains.  Together, we can accomplish anything.  And we will be with you every step along the way, small friend, because we believe in you.

Now, if you could find our historian, we would really appreciate it.

---

Artist Lee Moyer (13th Age, Cursed Court) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

Tumblr: https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smallgodseries/

Homepage: http://www.smallgodseries.com/

O.R.B.O.T. – The Small God of Tiny Robots

[image description: A tiny robot in yellow and red stands in a desolate land, nothing but dirt surrounding it. Text reads, “8, O.R.B.O.T., the small god of TINY ROBOTS”]

He is not a new god, for all that many would treat him as such.  He has been with us since the very earliest machines, when tinkers would stack wheels and simple boxes and press them into children’s hands.  He grows more sophisticated year upon year, but no more powerful, for he does not yearn for power; he has allowed ownership of drones and nanotechnology to pass into other hands, hands which may be less gentle than his own rounded pinchers, but which hunger for new things to hold.

He is happy with what he has and with what he is, and understands a lesson that many newer gods have yet to learn: he understands that to expand his portfolio is to change himself to fit it, and to become something other than he is.  But he has no desire to be other than he is, nor dreams of power.  He is powerful enough in the dreams of children both young and old.

He has saved the world a million times in their hands.  Has been a towering behemoth who crushes buildings beneath his mighty treads, and a bead of living metal rolling through the veins of an unwell mother, chasing illness aside. He has been hero and villain, monster and mechanist, and he will be all those things again and again until the human heart has no more need for a friendly automaton, until the human eye ceases to seek a friendly face in the inanimate. Until that day, he is content to serve as himself, and to seek for nothing larger, for nothing larger could ever be as kind.

His domain is small and limited and merciful.  In ORBOT’s name we gather.

Amen.

---

Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:

Tumblr: https://smallgodseries.tumblr.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/smallgodseries

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smallgodseries/

Homepage: http://www.smallgodseries.com/