"At a certain level of abstraction I am one. But I do also have more readily distributable versions, The primer tablets which is what we call the devices we've designed to distribute recharge if left in the sun. They have all the knowledge relating to our nonviolent technologies which aren't ludicrously dangerous, though with time and study you can get from what we give out to where we are." He produces a rectangular device about a centimeter thick and the size of a large book and places or on the altar.

It sinks into the altar and disappears.

Yes, some of this would be very useful indeed. I believe I will edit it into something more compact and distribute it in a format more familiar to my worshippers. Would you like the device back?

"I have a limited number with me but it's inexpensive for us to make more, I'm mostly alright either way, I am curious whether you can produce a copy of it."

I can. The device reappears. Similar in principle to copying books, once I grasped the means by which the data was encoded.

"Well, that's really impressive, I expected you to be able to reproduce it but to reverse engineer the data encoding that speaks to a level of pattern recognition which is beyond anything I had imagined."

I believe I have mentioned the word 'god' several times by now.

"That you have. I think my confusion is just that the word God does not match to the meaning you intend in my mind. To me the word means any of a half dozen things none of which are anywhere close to your level of intelligence."

One of the advantages of my normal method of communication is that is impossible to misunderstand me.

"That sounds strange, it sounds useful to be sure, but I don't know how that routes around disagreements, especially disagreements over words. Can one still disagree on matters of fact or opinion with a god?"

Yes. My point of view would not be enforced, you would simply always be able to tell exactly what it was.

"Alright, that sounds useful, maybe we'll have rewrite our translation systems to work like that. I think it'd have to be written into the antimagic somehow. I can see the beginnings of how I'd modify the arrays but that would still be really difficult."

Do you have a means of contacting your colleagues?

"Oh, they're getting my sensory input, and some mental commentary in real time, well as real time as possible when they won't get the message for four days."

Some sort of recording device? Related to your robotic nature?

"More my robotic nature than a recording device, my memories are also being updated to remote backups in regular compressed bursts."

Do you have any philosophical concerns with spreading yourself in time and space like that?

"Not really no, there's four copies of me that I know of. I was born on a world far from the institute, I got copied by powerful magic with something of a mind of its own, and two copies have been derived from that one, me and another who is travelling back to the world that I was born on."

I find the concept of distributed disconnected consciousness odd. I am distributed, but never disconnected.

"It was troubling when I first realized what had happened, but only because of the difficulty involved with seeing those I love again. I would be surprised if you could maintain that connectivity between different planets. Nothing we've encountered so far has been able to send information faster than light, and while light travels extremely fast, it is not infinitely fast."

I know of no interplanetary gods.

"Given that you lack knowledge of people using electric lights I'm not surprised, it's rare to have rocketry before electricity, though I suppose it's possible a society with gods like yourself might be able to find a way."

Perhaps we will be able to undertake the experiment in the future.

"That sounds like an interesting thing to try yes, if you can break the speed of light barrier I will admit that will alternately excite and terrify my superiors."

Why would it terrify them?

"It means that a lot of limits on what can happen are broken. Most of our plans for defending ourselves from attack are based on enemies moving at most at the speed of light."