Wells’ ideas struck a chord with people who had been alarmed by the dawn of the nuclear age, and by 1963 he had amassed enough followers to quit his former occupation and purchase a building for the Acolytes. There, they kept a “representative example” of “each aspect of the future Deus” and practiced worshiping it even as they also used publications like Popular Mechanics as holy texts to look for new and better models. One photograph from 1964 shows Futuros gathered around a 1963 Chevrolet, a blender, a Kirby vacuum, a Zenith television set, and an RCA radio. The Deus, Wells told his followers, would manifest itself from the merger of all technology at a singularity that was fast approaching. So, he held, it behooved them to worship and minister to its nascence.

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