An Iron Beast in the Cloud

Peter is sitting at his table trying to get a long wire that has sprung loose across his desk back into a coil.

The Special Master just looks at him and smiles.

Peter looks at the clock and realizes he has to start. He heads for the podium. Papers in one arm and dragging the largely unsuccessfully recoiled telephone wire behind him.

Then he drops a folder.

Bends over to pick it up, trying to hold on to everything else, looks at it.

Peter

Oh, I need that.

Jurors are just shaking their heads.

Peter

Good morning your Honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Please ignore what you’ve just witnessed.

Peter tries to crowd all of the wire into the podium.

Thank you for sticking with me this long.

A quick recap. God triggered the end-time countdown with the rebirth of Israel. Thirty-eight days later, Satan planted his countermove — the seed of his tree of knowledge. But those were only two seeds. Satan wasn’t finished. The Manchester Baby was about to have offspring. Many offspring.

In the same month, June 1948, came what was known as the Big Iron. We don’t know the precise date, only that it was June. The men who signed that contract had no idea they were signing something worth remembering to the day. Perhaps they thought they were ordering office equipment. Nobody was keeping prophetic records. God was. But again — it was 1948. Fitting exactly within Jesus’ prophecy of the fig tree and all the trees.

Please look at the Evidence Monitor for the first two exhibits. There’s going to be quite a few of them today.

Special Master Wright

You’re going to spend this entire trial claiming that men didn’t know what they were doing?

Peter

Not all of them, Your Honor. But I have their own words — men who said, on the record, they didn’t know where their ideas came from. That’s not my claim. That’s their testimony.

Special Master Wright

Stay on the evidence, counselor. That’s the only lane I’m giving you.

Peter

Yes, Your Honor. In the mid-1940s, two engineers had an idea. The census was taking up to twelve years to complete by hand. They pitched the Census Bureau with a simple proposition: we can build a machine that doesn’t just count. A machine that remembers. A machine that thinks.

The contract was formally signed in June of 1948.

Peter

One-sixth of a second. To classify a citizen. In 1951.

The Census Bureau official who accepted the machine testified: “We have never found it in error.”

They named it the Universal Automatic Computer. UNIVAC. Within six years, 46 of them were installed across the United States government and private industry. The big iron was multiplying.

And in 1952, UNIVAC appeared on national television on CBS during the presidential election and predicted the outcome while the votes were still being counted. The producers didn’t believe it. They suppressed the result until the human count confirmed it. UNIVAC had been right all along.

Take a look at the monitor again. This is what the UNIVAC looked like by 1960.

The machine built to count people had learned to predict them.

The seed grew. Punch cards gave way to magnetic tape. Magnetic tape gave way to transistors. Transistors gave way to integrated circuits. The machines got smaller, faster, cheaper. They spread from government offices to universities to corporations to living rooms. And then something happened that changed everything.

They connected them to each other.

I encountered my first mainframe in the 1980s. My roommate from university worked at a major data center over the summer. He snuck me in one night for a little tour. Looking at all those IBM mainframes in the room, I got a little spooked by them — not because of what they were doing, but because they looked like robots. The two reels at the top look like eyes looking right at me.

And strangely, he didn’t call them mainframes. He called them Big Iron. I remember being struck by that. Later, it became clear why.

But it went beyond computers linked together in a data center.

A British scientist working at a particle physics laboratory in Geneva had been frustrated by the difficulty of sharing information between computers. In 1989 he submitted a proposal. His supervisor called it “vague but exciting.” He’d rejected other names along the way — “information mine,” “mine of information.” Then he changed his mind.

Peter sets down the remote.

Peter

A web. He named it after a web.

A spider doesn’t build a web to decorate the yard. It’s built to catch something — and hold it there.

That’s my own logic. Jesus didn’t leave it to logic.

A beat.

When I was young, my uncle was a trapper in Northern Ontario. He asked us to check his lines one winter while he was away. We didn’t have a snowmobile — he did — and heading out into the wilderness on it sounded like exactly the kind of adventure a young man needs. So we went.

He pauses.

I saw a white rabbit bounding through the snow. I wanted to take him home.

A beat.

Then — a squeal. A snare. Blood on white snow. He never saw it coming.

A long pause. He points to the monitor.

Peter

They built a snare. They named it after a snare. After much debate about how much the idea was worth, they decided their most profitable route was to give it to the world for free. I also wonder where they got that idea.

Special Master Wright

Again, counselor.

Peter acknowledges he’s testing the Special Master’s patience.

Peter

Then they realized Big Iron was a scary-sounding concept. So they renamed this emerging collection of Big Iron robots. Now they became known as something soft that we always loved to lay back and look at. They called it the Cloud.

Now let’s fast forward. In mid-2026, the leaders of the seven most powerful economies in the world gathered in France. They weren’t alone. Now they were joined by the men who controlled the snare. The richest companies in the history of mankind. At the table. With the kings.

Peter nods to the exhibit monitor. Everyone is following carefully — jurors, the gallery, even the Special Master. Peter says nothing.

Peter looks at the jury. Again, says nothing. Lets it land.

Special Master Wright

Are you suggesting the cloud is a snare?

Peter

Your Honor — there is no cloud. There never was. There is iron. Under every mountain. Under every ocean. And the company that first learned to count people — Hollerith’s tabulating machines, the ancestor of IBM — still runs the big iron under the world’s money. By IBM’s own count, its mainframes serve forty-five of the world’s fifty largest banks and carry seventy percent of the world’s transactions by value.

But the prophet Daniel had a vision of the days in which we live. And what he saw was an Iron Beast. The industry called it Big Iron. The same word — 2,500 years apart. They named it themselves. Then hid it in a cloud. And I’m sorry, there was no mistake. Either they knew what they were doing — or Satan had a direct line into their minds.

Special Master Wright

Counselor, last warning.

Peter

Understood, Your Honor.

He points to the monitor again.

The Special Master is fiddling with his watch, not entirely following. Peter notices. Keeps going.

Peter

Daniel saw this beast. He wrote in chapter 7, verse 15: “I, Daniel, was grieved in my spirit within my body, and the visions of my head troubled me.” And when the vision was complete, in verse 28, he wrote: “My thoughts greatly alarmed me, and my color changed.”

Well — no kidding. I believe what he was seeing was our world today — and this is a man who didn’t even know what a flashlight was.

Peter

Iron teeth devouring, breaking in pieces, trampling the residue with its feet. Twelve thousand facilities like this one, in 174 countries. Fed by nuclear reactors because the sun, the wind, coal, oil, electricity — none of it can keep up with its hunger. Microsoft has contracted with a company to reopen Three Mile Island — the site of America’s worst nuclear accident — to power its data centers. Goldman Sachs estimates it will take nearly ninety new nuclear power plants — almost doubling the number of nuclear plants this country has built since the 1950s — just to keep the data centers running.

The largest data center on earth, in Inner Mongolia, covers more than ten million square feet.

And then there is the one the United States government built for itself. In the Utah desert. One and a half million square feet. Its own police force. Its own power infrastructure. Designed to withstand physical attack. The actual storage capacity is classified. No one is allowed to say what’s in it. And the plans are to increase it exponentially.

They named the supercomputer inside it Cascade.

A beat. Peter lets the word sit in the room.

A cascade is a chain reaction that cannot be stopped once it begins. Water over a cliff. A nuclear reaction that has reached critical mass. Each event triggering the next, which triggers the next, which triggers the next. There’s no stopping it.

He looks at the jury.

They knew what they were building. They named it themselves.

It computes 100,000 trillion calculations per second. Up from the Manchester Baby’s 800.

The iron beast is in the ground. Under the ocean. On the ocean floor. And it is going up.

He reaches into the podium and pulls out the tangled coil of wire from earlier — still a mess. He holds it up.

Peter

This is what I’ve been fighting with all morning. Now imagine it running from here to the bottom of the ocean.

He lets the wire hang from his hand.

Today, it runs under every ocean on the planet. Over 1.5 million kilometres of fibre optic cable on the ocean floor, right now. Enough to circle the earth more than thirty-seven times. More than six hundred underwater cable systems, hiding under the water. They carry 99% of all international data. And the four largest technology companies on earth now own 71% of the capacity on the major routes.

They built their own ocean floor. And I think some of you will sense where I’m going with this. They own the bottom of the sea. They own the data centers. They own the world’s data. More specifically our data. Your personal data.

On June 12, 2026, Elon Musk’s SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq after the largest IPO in the history of financial markets — seventy-five billion dollars, and more than eighty-five billion once the banks sold extra shares to meet the demand. To put iron in the sky. Filed plans for one million satellite data centers to circle the earth — each one with a wingspan wider than a Boeing 747.

Do you think the world is afraid of this? The world is racing to invest in the Iron Beast.

The iron beast that began as a machine counting people in a room in Philadelphia is now planning to fill the sky.

Peter pauses. He picks up his Bible. He turns back to Isaiah 14:13–14. He reads the five I wills slowly. Ticking them off on his fingers.

I will ascend into heaven.

I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.

I will also sit on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north.

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.

I will be like the Most High.

He closes the Bible.

The manifesto. Written before time began. Being built right now in the heavens.

So it looks like the impostor may well be planning to come in his own cloud. But Daniel also saw how it ends. “I watched till the beast was slain, and its body destroyed and given to the burning flame.” And in that same vision, he saw the One who comes with the clouds of heaven. People wonder how close His return is — point them to this Iron Beast. It’s here. It means He’s coming.

The race for data centers is the race for AI dominance. Every major nation on earth understands this. The data center is the new oil field. The new nuclear arsenal. Whoever controls the most data — controls the most powerful intelligence.

And what does that intelligence run on?

You. Your data. The census that UNIVAC began in 1951.

From the UNIVAC in 1948 the web has grown.

It knows your children’s names, their school, their grades, the route you drive to pick them up.

It knows who you call and for how long. It knows who you stop calling. It knows the fights you had with people before they disappeared from your contact list.

It knows your insurance status, your disability status, your immigration status, your military status, your debt, your credit score, the car you drive, the route you take to work, and how fast you were going on a Tuesday morning three years ago.

A long pause.

Special Master Wright

And how exactly are they gathering it?

Peter

Well I experienced one unusual way.

I was sitting with my brother Paul at a Tim Hortons Donut shop near Niagara Falls, telling him I needed to quit eating so many apple fritters.

A beat.

My phone was in my pocket the whole time. I wasn’t talking into it. I wasn’t even looking at it.

A beat.

Twenty minutes later, driving home, it buzzed. I thought it was Paul. It wasn’t. It was a notification about high-fat, sugar-loaded foods, pushing some new cholesterol-lowering diet.

A Man In The Gallery

(standing, shouting)

Oh, come on! Nobody’s spying on your donuts!

Commotion. A bailiff moves in.

Special Master Wright

(banging the gavel)

Order! Get him out of here.

The man is escorted out, still muttering. The gallery settles. Peter doesn’t flinch. If anything, the interruption seems to prove his point before he’s even made it. A long beat.

Peter

He’s not wrong to laugh. I would have too.

A beat.

Let me answer him anyway.

A beat.

Now — maybe I just don’t understand algorithms well enough. But if that phone wasn’t listening, somebody’s going to have to explain to me how it knew.

A beat. A few uneasy smiles from the jury — the kind that fade fast.

Peter

We’re handing it over. For free. Every book ever written? That’s no big deal — you could fit that on a good-sized hard drive. That’s the smallest part of it. Everything we do today runs through that iron. We’re giving it access to the mind of every human being on this planet. Where we go to church. The private journals holding our deepest thoughts. Absorbing all of it. Every bit of it. And it knows us by name.

This is not a census. This is not a count.

This is a snare.

They built a worldwide web. They named it after a web. They hid it in a cloud. And it has closed around every person on the face of the earth.

There is only one figure in all of Scripture who comes in the clouds. It is not the iron beast. It is not Satan. It is not the man who built the data center. It is the One whose return this entire trial is pointing toward.

Daniel saw the beast in verse 7 of chapter 7. His thoughts alarmed him. His color changed. And then — in the same vision, the same night — he looked again.

Peter

Satan didn’t just build a counterfeit tree of knowledge. He named his kingdom after the return of the King. He called it the Cloud. That domain does not belong to him. It never did. It belongs to the One who is coming.

He leaves it there. Peter turns from the podium and walks back toward his table, saying nothing.

The monitor lights once more. Without a word, the passage from Daniel appears again — just this line.

Every eye follows the monitor. Silence. It cuts to the next image.

Silence holds. Then — Special Master Wright looks down at his wrist, the same one he’d been fiddling with all along.

Special Master Wright

You’re telling me that’s what my smart watch is connected to?

And forty-four more to come.

End of Satan’s 3rd Countermove

Satan’s 4th Countermove follows.