Time passed as Bastion went around changing a few things in his government but couldn't do much as his main proxy was still hospitalized due to the incident. He couldn't reform the government without a prime minister.
Meanwhile, as the Fabricator-General, things were going as smoothly as he wanted. The Omnissiah's will program performed as well as expected, such that the temples were being redesigned as laboratories all over the planet.
This wasn't a forced decision; the tech priests themselves had decided to revamp their own because it was effective. If research was worship and ideas were sacred, then laboratories were places of worship, and sacred archives to immortalize their ideas were born.
From these two tenets, Bastion was able to restructure the Mechanicus to fit that of a true institution for the controlled research of science and technology. At the moment, within a large temple in the upper hive, the Fabricator-General (Bastion), Aserius-21, could be seen sitting on a small stool as he stared at the six men in front of him.
Each one was contained within what seemed to be a glass prison, a small device attached to their heads. Each one was facing the others. Sometimes, experiments required sacrifices.
"Lex Machina test 18, specification and consequence test," Ascrius-21 said before immediately issuing a command.
"#$@" One of them screamed at the other, and almost instantly, both blood and gore spilled.
Seeing this, Bastion merely shook his head as though he had somehow expected this, but deep down, he felt a chill run down his spine. He did understand the point, though.
A language that affected reality in such a profound way must definitely have its cost—that was the point of today's entire experiment. Seeing the body explode, a new wave of gratefulness filled his heart.
"Next," he thought as the other person began in Lex Machina.
"May your cells begin to decay," the second person said. Almost immediately, the person standing before them began to falter as their body itself seemed to wither.
As for the speaker, Bastion could see their left arm immediately begin to wither as well.
"How the hell am I even alive?" Bastion thought, seeing the results of the experiment.
The summary of it all was that no matter how precise you were or how small the target was, there was always a cost. And the Lord's Prayer is one of the vaguest prayers in Christianity.
The prayer could be interpreted in many ways, meaning that precision was out of the window, which meant that he should be dead now if he had not been praying to an actual God.
Without hesitation, he continued on with the next one. After all, the goal of this experiment was to figure out the limits of this language. What could it do? What was the cost? And how high or low could he go with it?
So far, he had faced no drawback when he used it for programming. The entire Noosphere was rebuilt using this language, and yet he felt nothing—no drawback or cost on him.
But after checking, he had found out that the language didn't care about the main source of it but who spoke it. When he created a program or software with it, it was the machine that spoke it, hence it drew a bit more power from the machine's power source.
Hence why he had come up with this method of experimentation: multiple synthetic bodies, all neurally linked to him, to test the capabilities of the language. And so far, neither he nor the real body had suffered any drawback.
"Next," Bastion said as he noted down more things.
"Your heart shall stop for five seconds," the third synthetic body said, and almost immediately, the target body fell to the ground, unconscious.
As the body was also neurally linked and controlled by him, Bastion immediately lost connection to it. Turning to the systems close to him, he could see that the body's heartbeat did pause for five seconds.
However, looking at the speaker's vitals, Bastion only saw a negligible level of weariness… The speaker had not gotten any physical effects, just mental fatigue, and that was all.
Looking at his notes, Bastion quickly realized how Lex Machina worked… like any other language, but this wasn't communication between two people.
It was between a speaker and the universe, which wielded absolute effects. If you weren't precise in your wording, then just like any human may misunderstand, the universe misunderstands, and thus the cost is much higher.
If you are precise, then the cost is less. It was just how things were. With all that confirmed, Bastion mentally commanded some mechanisms as flames immediately erupted within the three glass containments.
Plasma flushed the blood and gore clean. Mental fatigue. This was a very broken ability if one thought about it.
"The laws are pretty well defined," Bastion noted as he shrugged. Immediately, as though responding to his thought, the three glass contaminants were covered in flames.
The flames continued for almost half an hour to ensure that everything was burnt to ashes. After all, he couldn't take any chances. The likelihood of some horror scene taking place just because he let them be wasn't exactly zero.