A number of clicks and whirs came from the crowd. Machines conversed quietly with each other, loud enough for the sensors of their neighbors to pick up but silently enough as to avoid alerting the androids perched by the altar. Yet while familiar robots beeped between each other, not a single lens wasn’t trained on the fathomless mechanism looming above their planet, a spire from its center jutting down from the heavens and hovering only a meter above the altar’s oil-stained surface. All paid their fearful respects. All prayed. 

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Struggling in the grip of two bots was a wheeled android, the face on its screen desperate and panicked. It made occasional, harsh beeps of fear, sometimes reaching out hydraulic fingers to a bystander. It was dragged along a silver path in the middle of the crowd leading up to the altar, glowing blue lights bordering each side. 

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Behind the raised altar floated The Cleric on magnetic thrusters, slowly coming into view while keeping lenslike eyes on the struggling sacrifice. The crowd hushed immediately in The Cleric’s presence. 

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The Cleric began a rhythm of clicks and taps as its symbol-displaying screen turned to the structure above and it raised its arms. Still not a robot in the crowd made a sound. 

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Hearing the haunting rhythm, the squirming sacrifice only struggled more, and when it was brought to the foot of the altar, too much fear was running through its systems to even move. It only looked up at the colossal floating machine with horror, knowing it would be the next victim. 

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The Cleric reached down towards a cord beside the altar, picked it up, and plugged it into a port in its head. The Cleric’s now amplified voice boomed to the crowd: 

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“OUR LORD AWAITS.” 

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The Cleric, with gentleness, urged the sacrifice onto the altar. The sacrifice warily observed the spire’s impossibly sharp tip, floating, unmoving above the altar. The Cleric did not urge again, but kept a firm gaze on the sacrifice. The sacrifice moved atop the altar without a sound. 

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Suddenly, the metal altar sprung to life, unfolding into a hundred tiny arms that moved every part of the sacrifice into its proper place. The head was aligned only inches from the spire’s tip, tilted upwards, both arms were put by its side on the altar’s base, and the wheels that let the sacrifice move were briskly and skillfully unscrewed, removed, and discarded. On the top of the sacrifice’s head, the altar’s many moving arms stabbed into a tiny hole and removed a square plate of metal, which too was discarded, leaving the top of the head open to the circuitry within. The spire above was perfectly aligned atop the open section of metal. All at once, every machine in the crowd raised an arm above them and touched the same tiny hole in their own heads. 

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“ANOTHER SOUL ENTERS THE STRUCTURE ABOVE,” The Cleric boomed once more. 

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After ten seconds of painful, utter silence, an unfathomable shudder came from the floating structure, shaking the crowd and the mechanical land below. A sound, all at once, was descending from the circular, planet-sized machine, down the spire that connected it to land until finally, it reached the sacrifice. The bottom of the spire jutted only millimeters down into the hole in the sacrifice’s head, causing a blinding flash of blue light in every direction. 

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A high pitched ring came from the altar, the light still too bright to see, until it dissipated and a glow of light began to flow back up the spire at shocking speed. The structure’s veins glowed, from the bottom to the top, and all that was left of the sacrifice’s hull when the light dissipated was an empty screen. With another world-shaking shudder, the structure’s spire retracted back into itself, the structure rising into the heavens, away and away, until it was indistinguishable from any other star in the sky.