The API of the Gods (4 page)

I vomited what felt like my entire
intestinal tract after that thought.

Either the warlocks—there had to be more
than one down here—were jamming our farspeakers, or we had all gone radio
silent after my announcement. I suspected it was more likely the former. But
enough of us knew that if they knew our API, they could probably hear our
channels, too. I was security-paranoid with my golems, and I just killed the
guy who would know most how to deal with them so those were likely safe. Anything
else was suspect.

I got up, retched again, and began
taking off my broken bracer. Warlocks explained any kind of odd behavior of the
daemon. And the more Ichor they had potential access to, the worse things they
could, and would, do.

Words appeared over my vision: WARNING!
TIMER OVER!

It had been an hour. And now we were
stuck in here.

>>>
 

But how would I get the Ichor? This was
a perpetual problem with all my schemes, and it kept me up nights, thinking of
plans to get it and then the flaws with the plans, and then solutions to the
flaws and flaws with the solutions and then scrapping the idea altogether. I
struggled on, no matter what cost. I no longer sought any kind of relationship.
I might not even survive what I planned to do. But I would do it; I had to.

>>>
 

Going through the control palace was
morbidly similar to one of those old dungeon crawl games. I mean, aside from
the lack of treasure chests to loot and resurrection spells in case of virtual
death. I nearly died two more times: another ambush and then stumbling on
another warlock, who was surrounded by orbiting rings of whirling knives.

I was surprised when I counted at least forty
golems with me when I reached the door of the daemon nexus. Those orders I had
given earlier must have worked perfectly, or at least well enough for small
groups to be continually finding and joining me. Perhaps I should wait until—

"Michael Arnold! I know who you
are!" The foreign voice broke through my farspeaker. "Come! I offer
parley!"

I had a thought, a quick, deep thought.
nearby.break("door").inside()
.
The golems crashed through the nexus door like linebackers
through movie glass and I charged in with them.

The daemon hung from the vaulted
ceiling, a once beautiful form of otherworldly jewels now tangled with dark
webs stretching out into the shadows. From how decayed it looked, I was
surprised it even still worked.

Under the wretched bulk was the wannabe
dark lord himself enthroned on a marble dais, complete with twisted staff and
hooded cape with absurd collar. I mean, he could rock the look, yeah, but—This
was someone who had let someone else kill innocents just to use their
skeletons. To hell with his fashion. I charged.

Blades of icefire tinged with dark
emerged from his hands, and he leaped forward. I slowed while climbing the
stairs, and my golems formed around me. He might have more theoretical access
to Ichor, but we simply outnumbered him.

He held his blades like a diagonal cross
in front, but did not advance. "Hold! We have much to offer each
other!"

"Now that I killed your construct
commander, you mean?" I asked.
ninja = random.choice(nearby)
.

"He told me about you. He said you
were brilliant. Brilliant, but dissatisfied with the so-called gods," he
said. He must have seen my twitch. "Have you ever considered a jailbreak?
Some way to get out of our virtual uni—"

"I know what a jailbreak is, you
idiot," I said.
ninja.flank(quiet =
true).wait_for_opportunity().attack()
.
The golems slowly shifted around me.
"What makes you think you can do it?"

"If the 'gods' could have stopped
me, why haven't they done so already?" he asked. "Why not send a bolt
of divine fire to incinerate us both?"

"The will of the Gods is
incomprehensible," I said, and we both knew I didn't believe it. "You
killed people. Those skeletons—"

"Were of corpses already on the
lake bottom, and we simply repurposed them. And this?" He motioned above
with a blade. "The daemon is not alive. What difference does it make what
we do with it? If the opportunity for power is ours, why not take it? Do you
want to know how to break your geas?" he asked. "Get some Ichor for
yourself?"

"In exchange for serving
you
?"
I hissed.

"Serving yourself. I do not care
what you do with the knowledge. Any enemy of the 'gods' is a friend of my
own." The bitterness in his voice was not rhetorical. "Listen, and I
will tell you anyway. It is simple."

"What?" I asked with a little
too much eagerness.

I lowered my sword, he lowered his
blades. "The secret," he said, "is to—" and the golem I had
designated
ninja
saw an opportunity to dash at the warlock from behind and slice off his head
and went for it. The warlock swung a blade backwards and blocked it, but my
other golems registered that one of their own was under attack. "NO!"
I screamed. "Stop! Stop!" But the golems did not listen. By the time
I could shout
nearby.stop()
he had screamed his last. When I got to his side and the
golems regrouped around me, his body was in pieces.

A moan came from my mouth, and my
stomach was hurting so I would have vomited again if I could. The feeling, so
familiar, so deep, so close: almost, and yet never enough, and what I wanted
was lost forever.

No. No, I told myself. I breathed
deeply. All was
not
lost. The warlock was lying, anyway. I hadn't gotten
angry at the Gods until after Alfred the would-be necromancy had left. Wannabe
dark lord had probably just been probing for something and succeeded.

But there had to be
some
exploit
in the NDA geas that let
warlocks exist in the first place. But
what was it?

I looked up at the daemon, which looked
back disinterestedly. The warlocks had clearly been sapping its Ichor. Was the
secret to draw blood rather than spill it—but the geas prevented taking any for
oneself. Or did they just hack the daemon into running their programs? It wasn't
hard to repurpose a daemon, but Gods help you if you did it without permission.

But you could do it. And what I really
wanted, after all, was a kind of daemon.

import
daemontools as dt
.
I hesitated. Did I really want to—Yes, I
did. Enough hesitation. Hesitation kept screwing me over.
from
hyperRAM import hyperd; daemon = dt.GetNearbyDaemon(); daemon.add_task(hyperd)
.

There was no response from the daemon,
and I didn't expect one. What I wanted was subtle.

>>>
 

My work consisted of two components. One
was an extremely low-level API daemon task that did nothing but receive, store
and transmit a series of zeroes and ones for short periods—a series that was
for all practical purposes infinite.

>>>
 

I sat by a weeping Andy.  "And
Ashley—she just charged in. Took several down, but more—the servitors—the
goddamn servitors—broke through her armor..."

Over by the daemon, the Head Supervisor,
who was remarkably calm for having lost an arm, was arguing with the
Eater
of Dreams.
"You can't just kill it! How are you going to explain a
Great Lake just
breaking?"

"The daemon is clearly corrupt. We
can't leave it continue to malignly affect Lake Superior, either."

The daemon watched them, as did I. I
would have been praying the Head Supervisor would win the argument, but I
wasn't sure what cosmological entity would be appropriate.

"
What
did you do to your
arm?" Emily asked me. She tapped my scar and it rang with a metallic
hollow.

"I did what I had to do," I
said. "I wasn't going to bleed out over there." I resisted the
desperate urge to suddenly ask how she survived an Ichor spill. I would win if
the daemon survived. There was no need to risk anything now. Might—

"Did you use your golem repair
module on yourself? Do you realize what kind of infections—"

"I don't care!" I screamed.
Andy jumped back, but I grabbed him. "Treat
him.
He just lost his
fiancée!"

"And I can do nothing about that!"
she screamed back. Her voice rose to shrill, "You think he’s the only one
who lost someone?"

I looked around with sudden, horrible
clarity. There were less than five human beings here, and that wasn't because
others hadn't arrived yet.

Emily took me by the arm with her gloved
hand and dragged me off with amazing strength into a corner. Her mouth moved
and I felt the familiar dulling of her analgesia script. But before I could ask
for an explanation she had taken her glove off and reached with her glowing arm
into and through my arm, whereupon she yanked the metal scar out.

I have never felt such pain. I think I
blacked out, because the next thing I remember was lying on the ground feeling
my arm's flesh being re-knitted. Emily held up a thick wafer of crumbled metal.
"
This
is why you do not use your repair module on yourself,"
she said.

"I didn't know you could do
that," I moaned quietly. I knew the touch of the higher management could
do things like that, but...

"And no one else will know,
either," she said. "
Especially
not the managers." She
helped me stand up.

We walked back to Andy, who was rocking
himself and babbling. I didn't know what to say, so I just put a hand on his
shoulder.

The
Eater
raised his hand.
"Prepare. We have orders."

Emily and I took a step back from Andy,
who stood up and became silent. His mouth moved, and the bow hovered to him.
Another movement and a dripping arrow came to his gauntleted hands.

There was only one thing that needed
direct orders from on Up.

"This is insane!" the Head
Supervisor said. The daemon's head drooped down next to him. "You can't
just kill it. Look, it's—"

The daemon tore itself from the ceiling,
claws struck out from every side and three things happened at once:

Emily was lanced through by a claw.

"Spill blood!" shouted the
Eater.

Andy fired but the arrow missed and
struck the ceiling where it shattered.

Chaos, and yet I had a few seconds of lucidity
as a claw swept across the side and killed Andy.
import
rudra; rudra.bow.to(me.location)
The bow flew into my hands.
rudra.bow.ready(centaur = true)
.
Another dripping arrow flew out of Andy's quiver and into
my hands. Someone was screaming to fall back, but I ran under the daemon, aimed
upwards, and
bow.fire()
.

I will remember the daemon's death to
the end of my life, however soon that will be. The final shriek, and the
falling jewels and drops of Ichor splattering across the ground, like a worn
but priceless ancient vase shattering into beautiful pieces.

A black sphere covered with green
symbols fell and rolled by my feet. I reached for it, but the
Eater
shouted. "Don't touch the core dump!"

I stepped back. Of course. They would
want to debug what happened to the daemon in detail. And they would find, in
the core dump, evidence not only of what the warlocks had done to it, but the
small
task I had ordered it to do.

I had not only ended the daemon. I had
ended my own dream.

>>>
 

No one asked me about my side project,
the first component. Unless you requested Ichor, you could work on almost
anything without questions.

The other component did not technically
violate the NDA. But if it was discovered, I would be, in the most literal
sense, terminated immediately.

>>>
 

Somehow they were able to get a second
vessel to the palace before the Ichor had even started to congeal on the tiled
floor. The
Eater
was talking with a few others who appeared human, while
a golem by them nodded and occasionally spoke with my voice. It was easy enough
for them to forget that not only was my armor identical to that of the golems,
but conversely, the golems' armor was identical to my own.

I was with my golems and with them
carefully sucking every available drop of Ichor from the floor to put in vials.
Another set of constructs that had been brought in were gathering the jewels,
and eventually the entire floor tiles would be ripped up and ground for
any
possible divinity that could be squeezed from their dust.