The API of the Gods

by Matthew Schmidt

  The API of the Gods

  by

  Matthew P. Schmidt

  The API of the Gods

  Copyright © 2015 Matthew P. Schmidt

  All rights reserved.

  Published by O and H Books

  oandhbooks.theinspiredinstructor.com

  Author Blog: smithgift.theinspiredinstructor.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The shining fluorescent lights, the screech of metal being milled into shape, overpowered by the screaming of managers and CNC fairies, and the sweltering heat of the machine shop nearly overwhelmed me. But I did not have the luxury of going to a quiet place to cry. Not only had we to make up for our losses in the last battle—excuse me, tactical solution deployment—but we were ordered to make over ten times more of my golems for our next deployment.

  My title is Captain of Metal Armies or Deployment Coordinator, depending on who you're talking to, and how much they may know. At the moment I was glorified sword-machinist, grinding blank after blank into blades. Others with even higher titles had such offices as go-fer, drill operator, and wielder of oxy-propane torches or the primeval fire before worlds (whichever was handy). Middle management had shown up briefly to deposit a vial of Ichor on a workbench in the center, which would have disappeared within seconds had I not sworn to swear a geas to kill anyone who touched it. Rhetorical meta-oaths are frowned upon, I know, but no one asked if I was joking.

  Whence came the thought that I had reached the point where there were things I needed so much I would threaten to kill people over it. Where had I gone wrong?

  "WATCH IT!" the CNC fairy screamed at me. "YOU'LL LOSE A FINGER!"

  "I'll give you a finger," I said. "And shut up, you're not even sentient. Go bother someone else before I recycle you."

  The fairy hissed, but floated over to the part of the shop where they were making the armor plates.

  I sighed and wondered for the hundredth time how I had gotten myself into this.

  >>>

  The interview had gone swimmingly up until the interviewer told me what Pantheon Solutions, Inc. actually did. "We are here to leverage our information technology expertise to provide customer-focused reality-altering services to our Gods for reasons that we can neither question nor understand."

  I had no words for several seconds. "Excuse me, sir?" I asked. "I don't understand."

  "That's what I said," said the interviewer who had introduced himself as Sean. He was young (thirties, it looked) and extraordinarily handsome, and I wondered how hard it was for him to get a girlfriend. "Beings of our nature are so far beneath them that we cannot know what they truly intend, except what they decide to tell us in our inadequate way. We must only trust what they ask us to do is for the right reasons."

  I had three thoughts. The first was that I had just become a protagonist in one of those horror stories of jobs from hell that programmers love to swap. The second was that, no, I had only stumbled into an alternate reality game, which might have been amusing if it hadn't wasted several hours of my life in the process. The third was that even if Pantheon Solutions was serious or insane or seriously insane they still needed to pay me if I worked for them. If they didn't cough up the two hundred thousand a year they offered, I could go to court for theft of services. It still beat unemployment.

  Sean was still going. "...while normally we'd start you on bug hunting, with your experience I'd like to see you expanding the API's Python binding—"

  "The API," I repeated blankly.

  "The API of the Gods. Our core technology: a library serving as a programmatic interface to the transcendent powers of our deities. We currently have bindings for C and C++, a mostly complete binding for Python, and we're working on the Java side as we speak."

  "Are you seri—Are you seriously claiming to have a magical..." I trailed off. Horror story, definitely.

  "Supernatural would be the proper term. Yes." He looked at me with an eerily prescient gaze. "If you want to leave now, the exit is right down that hall and security will show you out. And, as long as you don't break the NDA, this will be the last we talk. Or if you'd rather see the API in action..."

  My logic that I told myself as I followed him down the other hall was that I might as well see the whole horror story. In some small corner of my heart, I had some tiny insane hope for it to be true. Who wouldn't?

  The desktop he showed me was an ordinary desktop, with a text editor already open. Plugged into a USB port was a bush of brilliantly colored wires dense enough to give an electrician a heart attack, and the wires ended in some cross between a stone tablet engraved with bizarre lines, a robot arm, and a 3D printer. I could have sworn I saw real gold in parts of the thing. Then again, I was within one of five tall office buildings within the expansive gated complex, and who knew how much all that had cost.

  Someone very rich must be very insane, I thought.

  "Go on," Sean said, motioning to the chair. "Write a hello world. I recommend C++."

  "Python is simpler," I said, sitting down.

  He frowned. "The Python binding is... inefficient. But if you insist."

  "Fine," I said and didn't add that he just wanted me to work with python. My mouth had already lost me enough jobs. "I'll use C++." I began to type.

  A hello world program is considered the most trivial program there is, one that does nothing but output "Hello, world!" I had written more hello worlds in more ways than I could count, and my only issue then was including the various parts of the API of the Gods that Sean instructed me to add. The final program was bizarrely large for something so simple.

  When I finished, I went to the menu, hovered over "build" and hesitated. "Is something wrong?" Sean asked.

  "One sec," I said. I waved at the mass. "Is this thing safe?"

  "Well, in a metaphorical or philosophical sense, no, but—" he began.

  I wasn't listening. I had been a stage magician briefly in college, and while he was distracted looking where I did I typed "nnnFOOLS!" over "world!" with one careful hand behind me. "Seems good," I said, turned to the screen, and started the build before he could react.

  The strange thing began to whir and hum, and I watched in freaked-out fascination as it began to assemble a symbol-covered gray plastic cube. When it stopped, the guy took it out and handed it to me. I could swear the thing it looked the most like was one of those cuneiform tablets. Except this was a cube of gray plastic with what looked like a printed circuit board from another dimension. The crisscrossed "wires" were so tiny they hurt my eyes to squint at them. My finger felt a small round hole at the top.

  "Okay, this is neat, but—" I said.

  "Hold it still," he said in a voice beyond that of a manager, like that of a distant ocean. I did what he said. He took from his pocket a sheath and took from the sheath a needle-thin dagger. He unrolled the shirtsleeve of his other arm and held on his arm over the cube, and I saw tiny scars all along it. Though I was squeamish then, I didn't flinch when he pricked a new one, and a tiny drop of shining blood dripped through a groove in the dagger into the hole.

  Let me explain. What I had expected was some trick; some "impossibility" designed to spectacularly say "Hello, world!" and fool a lesser mind than mine. (Yeah, I'm arrogant. So what?) But I had specifically changed the printed string to something else and put in a bunc
h of carriage returns (the 'n's) for good measure.

  What happened was that the word "Hello," (with comma) appeared in light and floated in front of the cube, and down by my knee "FOOLS!" appeared and then disappeared again.

  I somehow didn't drop the cube.

  "Do you believe now?" Sean asked. He did not even seem surprised at what I had done.

  I looked at him, the screen, the cube, then again, then again. "I—can I try something else? Um, ninety-nine bottles, the Fibonacci sequence—"

  "No." The voice like an ocean was stormy.

  "But—How am I supposed to know that this is really—" I protested.

  "What I have shown you as a demonstration could never be done with human power, nor could all humanity ever pay for what I paid to show you this. If you desire this, then join us. Otherwise, we shall go our separate ways."

  "Can't I at least think about it?"

  "Think all you want," Sean said, and now it was just the HR manager again. "Just answer by tomorrow, all right?"

  >>>

  Golem assembly is seriously complicated even with standardized parts, and I had no time to think between solving one misfit part and the next cry for help on some other section of the blueprint. I had relented and let one drop of "my" Ichor go into a golem assembly daemon. It was fascinating to watch it reach with twisted golden hands, daintily take up pieces from the tables or human workers and socket them together it midair.

  I forced myself to turn away. I only did so because of the deadline, an ironically accurate term. We had little time. And if anyone asked how to fit the fingers on again, I was going to go insane.

  If I wasn't already.

  >>>

  I couldn't sleep that night, not just because the emergency room bed was uncomfortable and they still wouldn't let me go home. Nor could I explain why I had repeatedly punctured my arm with a letter opener without sounding even more insane, and my feeble lies didn't convince the doctor of anything. They said they weren't going to commit me, thank god.

  Which I had long deliberately spelled lowercase, but considering what job offer I might be accepting in the morning, I thought, I would potentially be spelling with a capital from now on. Michael Arnold, programmer for the Gods. It had a nice ring to it.

  I had searched online until my eyes ached. Pantheon Solutions, Inc. had a shiny bland website and a mailing address, and nothing else. Google Maps showed their complex looked even larger from the air, including a warehouse I had not seen on the tour. The only mention I saw of the company on IT forums was quiet wondering as to what they were, since they had seemingly sprung out of nowhere about a year ago. The only post that mentioned a job offer was the guy turning it down because "they were crazy as hell." I tried to find any of the symbols I found on the cube elsewhere, but beyond geometric patterns, nothing.

  I did have the cube with me. I would have swiped it with my ninja stage magician skills, but Sean let me take it home without comment, except noting that it wouldn't do me much good.

  He was right. Dribbling any amount of my own blood into the cube did nothing. I think my last attempt opened an artery; by the time the paramedics arrived I was near passing out.

  I did have time to think in the emergency room. There was nothing else to do, and even if not committing me, they still weren't letting me out yet.

  When I was little, I always wanted to be a mage. True, mages did not exist any more than unicorns did, but that did not stop me from pretending with my little wizard hat and robes and staff. To pop-psychoanalyze myself, I'll say it's an obvious fantasy: smart kid now has magical power and cannot be rejected or hurt by anyone. I don't think it was harmful as some people think it is, but maybe I went too far. After enough high school RPGs, I might have gotten the imaginary wizard-ness out and learned to be a computer whiz instead. Maybe I was still grasping for any little straw, and I had really gone insane.

  Yet... yet if it could be the case...

  >>>

  The security end of technothaumatugy was beyond me, though I had tried many times. It was too much thinking in multiple levels of abstraction and reality itself, and I suspected those who did it didn't have completely pure blood. I had another small suspicion that they were a little too close to what mundane IT called black hats, not helped by their literal black-and-runed robes. But I was once told those served a functional purpose. No one disturbs a bunch of dorks with fake beards doing weird things in wizard get-ups.

  It seemed more likely to me that they just wanted to wear the wizard get-ups in the first place, but whatever helped them float our boat. (Or rather, unfloat it.) And if they wanted to be in them out in the summer heat by Lake Superior's beach, more power to them.

  One of them left his laptop and the chanting circle and came up to us. "We can keep the gateway open for five minutes at most," he said, and tugged at his gray beard. His youth made it look even more a fake. "That's how long the daemon takes to cycle its awareness through the palace."

  "We can deal with that," said the Head Supervisor of Tactical Solution Deployment (whose name is never spoken). He turned to me. "All your guys can get inside in that time, right, Mike?"

  I don't appreciate being called that, I didn't say. "The golems can, yes. How about getting out?" I asked.

  "We can hang in the vessel for a while," the robed dude said. The "vessel" was a converted private yacht, which we would ride to the bottom of the lake. The yacht was equipped with three separate turrets that shoot harpoons covered with centaur blood, preparations for an emergency that no one wanted to think about. "We can't stay for more than an hour—out of oxygen. Unless you could spare more Ich—"

  "No," the Eater of the Dreams of Foes, a.k.a. Lead API Support Liaison said. No one spoke his name, either.

  "We can't guarantee we'll be done in an hour," I said. "What if—"

  "Mike, how about you get your guys going?" the Head Supervisor interrupted.

  "Golems," I said, and went back to the trailer which contained the gateway to our complex. I knew when I was dismissed.

  >>>

  "So do I have to sign a contract in my own blood or something?" I asked.

  "No," Sean said. "The contract is more or less in my blood. We will enforce it, by the way."

  I didn't like the slight intonation of the word we.

  The contract was simple, a single page even. I read it a few times to make sure there were no trick clauses to enslave my soul or whatever the hell was really going on here. It was attached, of course, to one of those weird cubes. One line stuck out to me.

  "'And I shall not spill the blood of the Gods, nor take it for myself, save by Divine order.' What on Earth?" I asked, though I figured I already knew the answer.

  "More correctly, what off Earth. The substance we call Ichor is beyond our creation, control and comprehension. If someone were to attempt to misuse it..." he trailed off, and the distant look in his eyes was no dramatic flourish. "We would not want the Gods themselves to involve themselves personally."

  "Right," I said. "And that was what you used yesterday?"

  "In a sense."

  "Will I get less cryptic answers after I sign?" I asked.

  "Yes," Sean said conversationally.

  "Fair enough," I said.

  After a few more read-throughs, I signed it. The man rolled up his shirtsleeve, took out his dagger again and dripped several drops of blood into the cube. I felt an almost physical warmth all throughout my body as the geas locked itself around me.

  >>>

  There was no risk in leaving me alone in the warehouse with the vial. In any case, for complicated technical reasons, it would best if I was the one to pour the Ichor into the golems' hearts(es). Rather than individually pouring one drop into each heart of each golem, I had proven that it was statistically less wasteful to use a series of tubes (groan) that connect one funnel to all the golems. Those tubes had that faint, otherworldly light even with how little of the divine fluid could be trapped inside in some microscopic c
racks, simply from how often the system was used. It now burned one's hands to touch the tubes improperly. Coupled with the increasingly closer deadline, whoever had set up the tubes seemed to have been working as hastily as possible, which meant it hurt his hands, which made him work even faster. I counted three major problems before I gave up and completely reassembled it.

  When I had finished I had only a minute left before the golems had to be running. But still I hesitated before pouring the vial in. I was always afraid of it—had to be. But there was always the temptation to try it for myself. Just to take a tiny sip. I couldn't, of course. Even if I worked out some way to trick the geas into not physically stopping me, maybe with some other series of tubes, and even if the geas also didn't kill me, the Gods would notice me immediately. I suspected that would be fatal to my continued existence.

  But the thought was always there.

  I pulled out the miniature cork and tilted the vial into the funnel, careful not to let a single drop fall elsewhere. The shining light of Ichor was like no earthly light. It seems always as if from a dream, or perhaps we were a dream and it was the reality. It disappeared down the funnel and slid through the tubes, and I felt—perhaps only psychologically—a stirring in the suits of armor.

  "Slash!" I called, and a small black tablet with winging appeared over my shoulder. Each Spoken Language Aerial SHell looked different, and—perhaps because the Gods had a sense of humor—the battle capable ones always had big googly eyes over their flat face, and hovered around with butterfly wings. I whispered my secret name and my password and it flew into my face and wrapped itself around my eyes.

  slash (spelled lowercase) was truly divine in origin, written in Logos, the original language of the Gods—and what they wrote our world, in, too. slash took your words and typed them, and would not only hear what you said, but type what you meant, anyway.