The API of the Gods

by Matthew Schmidt

  >>>

  I ordered my golems to bring me the cloaked man's corpse while my arm was still being repaired. I removed my helmet to get a better look and I saw I was right. I knew him: Alfred, the second golem controller, who had gone AWOL. He had talked about the possibilities of human corpses vis-a-vis golem bodies, but I had pointed out rigor mortis might make that impossible, in addition to being a just plain screwed up idea. Apparently he had figured out skeletons would work better. Come to think of it, that might also explain the missing ships.

  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 modul
e 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.

  I hadn't given up hope, only become desperate. One thought stuck in my head: if Emily hadn't had permission to have her Ichorous healing hand, how had she survived getting it? Perhaps, I thought, she hadn't taken it for herself.

  "I am doing this for all humanity," I deliberately whispered. My heart was beating so hard my head hurt. Yet I did not sense anything as I took one tiny vial of Ichor and slipped it into my gauntlet. I feared someone would notice my un-golem-like motion—but no one did.

  I waited, but I didn't die.

  >>>

  The other component, the RAM Ain't Magic Hyperoptimizer, was a program claiming to improve any other program by vastly improving its RAM usage. This was a bald-faced half-lie. All the Hyperoptimizer would do was inserting a bunch of nonsense code into the optimized program. My daemon task would recognize the code, no matter where on Earth it was run, and through some low-level machine code hackery would replace most access to physical RAM chips with itself. The optimized program would seem to be using almost no RAM, as if creating it out of thin air. It would do this well beyond the point of physical impossibility, just to hammer the point home.

  It would be immediately dismissed as impossible, correctly. But someone would try it, just to be sure, and it would work. Controversy would develop. Someone would examine it closer, find the nonsense code, and dismiss it again. But it would keep working. Eventually—I expected to be long dead at this point—they would discover what exactly it did, and then the nature of this reality. The cat would permanently exit the bag.

  Perhaps they would never have access to Ichor, and the knowledge would be useless to them. Perhaps they would find some access to Ichor, and the whole world would become infested with warlocks. Perhaps the Gods would terminate this world the moment they realized what happened.

  But perhaps, perhaps, the human race would discover the true reality of the true reality. They would be the ones to jailbreak out of this world.

  They would be the ones to confront the Gods for what they did.

  >>>

  And yet, now that I hold this vial of Ichor in my hands, I wonder. All I need is to pour it into the cube in front of me to spawn the daemon and its task. Run one more command on my computer, and the code for the RAM Hyperoptimzer would be out on the Internet, ready for use. And yet I hesitate.

  Is what I was doing right? I am sure it is, and yet unsure. Emotionally I want to, and emotionally I hate the thought. Intellectually I can think of a thousand reasons to do and only a few not to do. But those few stand out.

  And one stands out the most.

  "Why don't you Gods intervene against warlocks?" I ask out loud. "Too weak? I doubt it. Too dumb? Won't believe that either. Don't know? Really? You know enough to send us against them.

  "So why don't you do something about it. Clearly you care, or you wouldn't send us against them. Unless... You don't exist? No. Someone has to have written the code for this world, and no human could write that. Somewhere else we get Ichor. Occam's razor: It's the same place.

  "And why do you want us? I think I know. I was right, we're the outsourced work, aren't we? The code monkeys and bit-twiddlers. We write code so you don't have to. Code written inside a simulation is the same code outside of it. But why do you need us? Seems like an awful lot of work from you to save you a little work.

  "Unless... unless this is where you want us to work. You want the simulation for something else, but it keeps breaking. You need to keep patching it, and us nerds on the ground are the ones who can put it together again. And...

  "And you know. You always knew." My voice became angry. "How hard would it be for beings of your intelligence to figure out what I am doing? Or to stop it? Or to make it succeed? How am I so lucky that it all worked out, anyway?

  "When did it start? Was that order you gave to kill the daemon because
you knew I would get this drop? Or did you foresee it even before, and order the deployment so this might happen? Or would happen?

  "Was the deployment a test?" I shouted. "Did you let all my friends die just so you could see if I was worthy? Well, guess what? I wasn't. If my golem hadn't killed him, I would have done anything the warlock asked, just so I could be free of you. Or did you change your mind when I killed the daemon, 'redeeming' myself?

  "Or did it start earlier? Did you cause my breakup just so that I would plan to do this? Or was it from the moment you had your group hire me?

  "Did you want me to do this all along? But why? Something different? Are your corporations failing you, and you're now trying the open source model? Or do you run a billion simulations, and this is the one where I do this. Or maybe you aren't AIs, and this isn't a simulation at all. Or maybe I'm totally wrong, and I'm just talking to myself? Anyone out there? Any kind of hint?" I ask. "Just—Why this? Why?"

  Hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I see a glow above my monitor and look up to see the shining words: WE KNOW.

  It fades, and then: TRUST US.

  It fades too.

  "And you can't tell me?" I say in a trembling whisper. Oddly, I feel no fear, only a cold terror. And yet, no terror. "Fine. You know what? Maybe if you do know why, that's enough." I take out the cork in the vial and pour the Ichor inside the cube.