I've only got fourteen minutes to make it to Mars, because the planet dies in fifteen.
I'm hooked up into a stolen Foundation attack ship, the neural interface jammed into the skulljack buried where my spine meets the brain. For the moment, I'm not a human piloting a ship, but a ship with a fleshy control unit buried at the center. I wouldn't say that the ship is an extension of me because it feels like the opposite, if anything.
The asteroid belt zips by in seconds. If I wasn't offloaded the bulk of my processing power into the onboard supercomputers, I would have smashed into an asteroid well over a dozen times in the past three seconds. But my reaction time is faster than the human brain can think, and my vision spans millions of kilometers. Nothing gets within two thousand kilometers.
Missiles are coming for me, from the back. Pursuers, sent to bring me in line. Probably sent by the Foundation, who have possibly learned of my little scheme. Dealing with their attacks is nothing more than smacking a fly off my shoulder. Lasers fire off my back and the missiles harmlessly explod, far enough away to do nothing.
This is a chase, now, then. I divert a little more power into the engine, and go from .8c to .9.
Consider the difference between a man and insect.
Consider how vast our powers are in comparison to even the greatest of insects; how little our movements and our actions can be understood by them; how easily we reshape the world around us. Even the least of our species far exceeds them in terms of raw power.
Imagine the contests of strength between you. The ant is strong and might, but you can easily lift up an object that would crush it. It tries to run past you, and yet in two strides you have run as far as it can in minutes. Let us not even begin to discuss feats of intelligence and logic!
Truly, the difference is immeasurable, is it not? Staggering and vast.
Consider the difference between god and man.
We find ourselves in similar roles to the previous thought experiment, but now we are on the reverse. It is us who are the pitiful ones, the ones who are the weaklings.
Consider how the god can twist and bend their surroundings with only a mere thought. Consider the scale of their lives and how momentary yours is to them. Consider how they must move with care to avoid breaking the shape of world irreparably.
You would be a fool to challenge them, wouldn't you? How could you ever hope to challenge them, or defeat them? Do you really think you could outwit them, pierce their skin or poison their souls? Do you really?
I explode out of the asteroid belt and in seconds I'm at Mars. A subroutine flashes the time into my eyes — we've made it with two minutes to spare. More time would have been nice, as always, but we've got enough to do what we need.
I'm fling myself around the planet and find myself above the target. It's an ancient thing, formerly worshipped as divine, and it wants blood and gold and glory. My sensors look down at the temple it was sleeping in and see that the chains are weakening, breaking and shedding off. Not much longer before it all goes to shit.
Flames burn into life as I enter the Martian atmosphere. I feel the heat, but my conceptualization of "pain" in this state is nothing more than a knowledge that something is probably wrong. It's not distracting, and I can simply ignore it. No need to get out of the kitchen.
My target is breaking through the ground
You should.
If you don't think that a man can kill a god then you are a fool, and not in the way that will let you break infinity.
Remember our lesson on the difference between man and insect. Consider the following: the Black Widow Spider. The Bullet Ant. The Mosquito. The Africanized Honey Bee.
If humans are so mighty, how has the mosquito mowed them down in the hundreds of millions, I ask of you. If man is so further beyond the black widow, why can a single member of her species kill?
Here is the secret of the world: there is no such thing as greatness. Power is a trap.
You cannot outwit a god. You do not need to. Do you think the bullet ant outwits the man when she stings? Yes, the man could simply kill the insect in return. But it matters little. The hive lives. Perhaps the ant survives. But the man dies nonetheless. Let him choke on his hubris.
To the gods, a man is like an insect.
To a man, an insect is a killer.