The API of the Gods (2 page)

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 cracks, 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.

"Wyrm dash-aye tee-ess-dee dot
wu-wai," I said.
wyrm -i tsd.wy
appeared in my vision, and I clicked with my tongue to run
it. Wyrm was what had once been the python binding of the API, but I had
evolved it into a new programming language altogether, one more suited for what
we did. Some mocked my work, seeing it as far too inefficient to be
justifiable.

And yet there was nothing like saying
"
golems
= GetAllGolems(); golems.activate()
"
and seeing row after row of golems turn to me in unison, bow, and salute me
with their blades.

That would have taken
far
too long
to get right with C++, especially with arbitrary golem types. Duck typing for
the win.

>>>
 

I never met the Gods.

After orientation, which was a short
PowerPoint full of buzzwords mixed with mythopoetic phraseology, I went
straight to work. I had feared that the API would be even worse the deeper I
worked in it, until it was horrible kludges and hacks at the very base as it
drew its mystical power from the heart of the world or whatever. But it was
worse.

I had once known a developer who was so
much smarter than I it wasn't even close. I'd have an idea, and he'd either
thought of it himself or could see some problem with it, or see some awesome
extrapolation of it and run off with it.
His
ideas, I would never have
thought of in the first place, and the problems with them I did see he had seen
first, and if I had something to add he had something to multiply that. He was
always congenial about it, but I always had rather our positions were reversed.

Working with divine code was like that,
times a thousand.

I saw it for the first time when I was
hunting down a bug with part of the Python module involving buoyancy. I asked,
and was granted, brief access to the source code of water itself. It was less
than half a page, written in terse Logos. And yet it was truly beyond any human
creation, code so clear it required no comment and yet so complex in its
elegance that no words could describe it anyway.

I was afraid the bug was in such beauty,
but actually the culprit was a typo somewhere in the API. I couldn’t stop
thinking about it for the rest of the day and then sleeplessly through the
night. How it showed a completely different universe, one not made of simple
particles making atoms making molecules making water. Rather, rules using rules
in perfect patterns,
not
mere code, but like music. Music,
like a symphony playing in your sleep, and you, hearing
it
,
dream of worlds.

I couldn't be in the original universe,
I decided. We were in a virtual universe. There would be no need to write code
for water rather than allowing it as an emergent property of simple physical
laws unless you had to save resources—like, say, RAM, storage, and processing
power. The Gods, perhaps, were AIs on some higher layer with intelligence
incomparably beyond our own.

So what were we, then?

Perhaps, I thought, they outsourced
their grunt work to their simulations.

>>>
 

The windows of the yacht were boarded up
with metal plates, further fortified by the API, but you could somehow tell we
were underwater from the occasional shudder around us. If this was using a
variant of my old code, I silently hoped that that bug was the last.

"In about ten minutes," The Head
Supervisor began. We
numbered twenty aside from him and the
Eater,
and I knew most of us. "We are going to be deploying in the
control palace of the lake's daemon. We are to investigate certain odd behavior
of the daemon as of recently, and the abnormal weather patterns we've seen on
the lake itself."

"Sir," asked John Yu,
Security and Communication Lead
or
Seer of the Stars.
He had
multiple slashes hovering around him and a laptop, and he was in a powered
wheelchair. Not because he needed it, but so he could move around without
getting up. His language of choice was Mead, our mutated version of Java.
"If this is a routine investigation, why do we have over one hundred
golems—"

"One hundred fifty," I said.

"One hundred fifty golems in the
cargo compartment?"

"The last messenger did not
return," the Head Supervisor said.

>>>
 

The API was easy to learn, but almost
impossible to master or even use, as there were so many considerations.

Suppose, for some reason, you want to
make a sword that dances in the air and stabs people. Immediate questions come:
how big is the sword; how much does it weigh; what is its tensile strength and
aerodynamics; are you mass-producing these; et cetera ad infinitum. But then there's
the little things. What if the guy you're going to stab has his own
sword?
What if he's got his own
dancing
sword? What if there's a whole bunch of
swords floating around stabbing people, and the Gods know what else is going
on, and you don't want the sword to accidentally be stabbing
you?

And how much of this is worth it?

Even if I had poured my entire blood
supply into my "
Hello,\n\n\nFOOLS!
" cube, or even that of every mortal on the planet, it
would not have worked. Nor was there any magical sign or divine inscription or
cosmic cheat code that powered it. Nor did it function through any kind of
mental psychic power, faith, enslaved demon, magical jewel, fairy dust, or unicorn
manure. The API solely works because the Gods power what we do by their own
blood: Ichor.

Ichor can make water burn or fire wet.
Ichor can make a ship fly or turn cities to stone. Ichor can give a semblance
of life to the dead or kill armies in an instant. Ichor can find the prime
factors of a number quicker than a single mortal CPU's cycle or reverse a
trapdoor function through brute force. Ichor can even solve arbitrary halting
problems through the API, but that's too expensive for ordinary use.

And Ichor would make the one who drank
it divine.

Ichor was an issue with the virtual
universe theory, I did admit. When I ran a virtual machine, a computer within a
computer, I did not spill my own blood to run programs or alter its state. I
just did it with a few clicks of my mouse. Nor would drinking my blood cause my
programs to become like me, which was what drinking Ichor would do to us. That
made even
less
sense. Why would anyone create a virtual machine with
such stupid rules?

Why would anyone create a world like
this at all?

>>>
 

"What's the odd behavior?"
Ashley,
Deployment Troubleshooter
or
Myrmidon
asked. Her clear
voice was distorted through the speaker of her crab-like armor. The armor made
her long hair unsuitable, so she had it cropped to near baldness, like some
kind of cancer survivor. Though, from what I had overheard, she might be one.
Pantheon Solutions offered healthcare in an entirely different sense than
mortal employers. Her power armor, as she called it, was controlled by pure C,
and would have been written in raw assembly if they had let her.

"Heck if I know," the Head
Supervisor asked. "I can barely understand Upper Management when they
talk. For all I know the CEO thinks there's not enough bird poop in the
lake."

"There's been a spate of lost boats
on the lake recently," said Andy,
Bearer of the Arrow that Kills Gods
or
Deployment Technical Specialist.
He wore little armor, but his bow
was taller than he was and usable only with gauntlets that made him like a
steampunk boxer. He really did have an arrow that was covered with centaur's
blood and so could harm a divine
being, though the higher
ones would not be harmed much. Andy had quietly told me that he made another in
secret, just in case. His bow was also Wyrm-based, and he was the other primary
maintainer for Wyrm itself.