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
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