There were 15,092 tasks on my to-do list, and that was the best it had been in a while. Even as I watched, the screen refreshed itself and shunted everything down a line to make room for a brand new one.
Deliver a hearty meal, the text proclaimed in a soothing blue font.
Well, that was a total waste of both my time and theirs. Humility was not a virtue I could particularly relate to, but it was easy to understand why some people would choose to lower their expectations of the world. Much less disappointment that way. Still, there was always that frustrating category of people with extremely low standards, and they irked me. It wasn’t easy getting a request through to us to begin with; you’d think you’d want to make it count.
Their loss. It wasn’t my job to enlighten people. If anything, management tended to look favourably on confusing users as much as possible.
Management, for their part, could go jump in a piranha-infested lake.
I opened the task and skimmed through without really reading it. Blah blah blah, lots of carbohydrates; blah blah blah, I’m so lonely; blah blah blah, I think the best way to cover the gaping hole in my social life and respective lack of self-esteem is to smother it with food.
Sure, okay. This person didn’t need a sandwich, that much was obvious. Best case scenario, they needed a friend. Worst, they needed a complete fresh start.
A conscientious person would have found a way to work that in with the meal delivery. Looked into the user’s childhood, perhaps, found some long-lost forgotten acquaintance who just so happened to know how to make a good home-cooked dinner, and arranged a coincidental way for them to meet at a time most convenient to both.
By the company’s reckoning, a model employee would just pick up the phone and order them a takeaway, because efficiency and production targets were important key performance indicators and senior leadership didn’t much care how you resolved a task as long as you got it done quickly without making them look bad.
I was neither a model employee nor conscientious. I typed ‘Stop relying on food to fix your life problems’ into the progress window and closed the task, and was unsurprised when my inbox pinged a moment later. No need to read what it said – I received so many official warnings I had a permanent rule set up to divert them to a folder buried deep in the bowels of the program, where I could only imagine thousands of unread emails cried out forever in darkness. It was a farce. Like so much that went on in this place, they meant nothing and achieved nothing.
This was life working for Providence, if one could call it work. Indentured servitude would be a charitable term. I maintained if there had been any justice in the world, their slogan should have been ‘We put the ‘hell’ back in helpdesk’. But there wasn’t, and it wasn’t.
This wasn’t hell, not exactly, although it did have Lucifer in it. The so-called prince of darkness sat opposite me, in fact, because some imaginative bright spark had decided the office seating plan should be arranged by English in alphabetical order and then made sure everyone adhered to it with the kind of fanatical dedication that would have been better applied to literally anything else. For once that had been a massive stroke of luck, because most days Lucy was the only person keeping me sane. He had the chair that wasn’t broken, I laid claim to a slightly more modern and less crash-prone computer, and unless you knew what to look for, you wouldn’t have been able to tell there was an age difference of about five thousand years between us. Most importantly, however, we shared a mutual disdain of Providence and everything it stood for.
Working next to Lucy was entertaining, because his immense popularity meant he still received a ton of personal requests on top of the standard task feed, made all the more laughable by the utter impossibility of ever completing them all. We often compared notes, but it was no contest, really. If my to-do list seemed bad, his was running into the millions. He’d taught himself programming a few years back in order to run data analytics on the numbers, and had been able to confirm about thirty per cent was comprised of assassination requests alone. My personal favourite was the significant atheist contingent who called on him to instill some sense into their more religious family members without seeing any irony in that situation whatsoever.
On the rare occasion I received personal requests, they were almost always from people with suspiciously bohemian names who wanted me, or someone they thought was close enough, to sleep with them, teach them magic, or both. Usually both. The answer to those was always ‘no’, and they had a special place at the very bottom of the list. I would have deleted them and suffered the warnings, except that occasionally one of them would drop off the list when the user who submitted it died, and that was always a welcome highlight of my day. I had to take small pleasures where I could find them.
Lucy was busy tapping away at his keyboard, so I turned my attention to the next task in the backlog. Small girl wants a new dad.
Better. Back in the day, this would have been the kind of job almost tailor-made for me. Even now, hampered in what I could accomplish, it wasn’t bad. For a – I checked the user’s age – five year old, it was ambitious yet doable.
I poked around in my shirt for the lanyard caught under it, and retrieved my access card. With a few clicks, I brought up the user’s database entry and scanned their location onto the small piece of plastic.
It was an excuse to get up and stretch my legs, and I ambled past the kitchen, stopping for a brief glass of water, into the central landing area. Along one side of the diamond-shaped space lay the building lifts. On the other stood a row of automatic glass doors, divided between departures and arrivals. The departures had short queues lining up in front of them, and arrivals were spitting out people back into the office every few seconds.
I joined one of the queues. Trust Providence to take all the fun out of international travel. Planes, while slow, provided much more of a novel experience, not to mention a welcome break from the endless stream of tasks.
The one benefit of having my powers stripped away was that it meant I had to deal with mortal needs like sleep, thirst and hunger, thus rendering me unable to devote a full twenty-four hours to the monotonous grind. At first glance, deliberately disabling half their workforce looked like gross incompetence on the part of management, until you realised it was a calculated decision to offer us a choice between raw power and individual agency, not that there was much of either to go around no matter what you 'chose'. Both options were lousy, but some people bought the lie.
Still, all the hefty marketing budgets in the world couldn’t disguise what every staff member recognised on at least a subconscious level: that Providence was run by a tyrant.
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When my turn came around, I swiped my card on the reader and the nearest door slid open with a whirr. I found myself looking at a wood-panelled hallway festooned with lockers, the sound of childish babble ringing out behind other closed doors. Two steps forward and I stood… elsewhere. I wasn’t worried about anyone being in the wrong place at the wrong time and glimpsing the office. Viewing privileges, like travel, were tied to the holder of the access card. For all Providence’s problems, it didn’t skimp much on security.
A glance at the posters and notices on the walls told me the local language was Portuguese, and from the chilly temperature, I guessed this was Portugal itself.
In a woeful display of poor security practices, someone had decided it would be a good idea to print out a list of students on the door of each respective classroom, which made my job easy. With a brisk knock on the door, I stepped into a classroom full of tiny humans. About thirty bored-looking children all turned to look at me amidst shuffles, yawns and other telltale signs of restless energy.
The teacher, a colourful woman in her forties with big hair and big proportions, motioned for the room to stay put and hustled over. Titters and babbles were already breaking out behind her.
I could almost see the gears churning in her head, trying to figure out who I was and why I was here. New teacher? Relief? Admin staff? I wasn’t fussed; any of those would suit my purpose.
“The principal’s asking to see Clara da Sousa,” I told her quietly in Portuguese. “Family issue.”
“Ah,” she said, understanding washing over her face. “Not a problem. Clara? Follow Senhora…”
“Pascoal,” I supplied.
On average, people were more trusting than their self-perception indicated. The most important ingredient required to pull off a lie was confidence. Once you had that, there was a good chance the appropriate body language would follow. Half the time, even if you weren’t very skilled, other people would fill in the blanks for you based on their own expectations. I’d frequently been in situations where I’d ended up contradicting myself multiple times and nobody noticed. But confidence tended to be what made or broke it.
Of course, knowing something about the subject you were trying to bluff helped, too. Lucy and I had shared many extended conversations about this.
A small brown-haired girl stood and walked over to me, digging her hands into the pockets of her school blazer. She looked up at me with bright, curious eyes.
“Thank you,” I said, and closed the door after us. “This way.”
Clara didn’t move. “The principal’s office is that way,” she said, pointing in the opposite direction.
“So it is,” I said, even though she could have been pointing in the direction of the moon and I wouldn’t have known the difference. I beckoned her out of eavesdropping range of the door, squatted down to her level and put my hands on my knees. “Can you keep a secret, Clara?”
“No,” she answered.
“Close enough,” I said. “I’m actually here to be your new dad.”
For a moment her eyes lit up, but then she gave me a skeptical frown. “You don’t look like a boy.”
This was why I liked kids. Well, smart kids. An adult would home in on issues surrounding what they thought was possible and proper, requiring the same tedious explanations each time. Clara only cared about what she could see in front of her.
“Not right now,” I said. “But I’m definitely a boy at least some of the time.” Technically true, although the timeframes involved were a little iffy. As of my current standing with Providence, I had my powers suspended for another eleven years, and that number tended to go up much more often than it went down. It had been more than three hundred years since I’d been able to change shape, back when people’s requests came printed on giant annual tomes bound in thread and leather. For now, I was stuck as a somewhat nondescript thirty year old white woman with vaguely Germanic characteristics, whose only notable features were being as thin as a rake and having a somewhat long nose. I had good teeth, though, nothing short of excellent if you went by eighteenth-century standards, so that was something.
I could see she wasn’t buying it, which already put her ahead of a lot of people much older than her. “How did you know I want a new dad?”
“Do you know what a helpdesk is?” I asked, gesturing again for her to follow.
She shook her head.
“It’s a place where people can ask for help with their problems so experts can fix them,” I explained as we walked. “That’s my job. And someone gave your problem to me.”
“Okay,” she said.
“As it happens,” I continued, swinging into pitch mode, “I have some experience being a dad, and I’m the best kind. I’ll never expect you to do your homework or chores, and I’m a lot of fun.”
“Okay,” she repeated, a little fainter this time.
I paused for a moment, swiveling on the ball of one foot to face her before the other came down. “Just okay? You’re the first person I’ve made this offer to, and I have to say there are plenty of other kids out there who would give an arm or leg to be in your position.” Although not whose ‘new dad’ requests had made it into my task list, in fairness. “But I can always find you a different dad if it comes to it.”
She was frowning at me. “You’re a stranger.”
There, in the middle of a school corridor in Who-Knows-Where, Portugal, I took a moment to consider. I knelt down to meet her again and lowered my voice. “You’re a smart kid, Clara.” Probably. I mean, she seemed fine. The chances she was the class dunce couldn’t be that high. “Do you think I’m a kidnapper?”
An adult would have been screaming, “Yes! Yes! What kind of question is that?”
Clara shook her head.
Hmm, questionable survival instincts, there.
“I’m here because you asked someone to be,” I said. “Even if you didn’t tell anyone you knew, or never wrote it down.” Could she even write? What did five year olds learn these days? “You can send me away right now and you’ll never see or hear from me again. Maybe you’ll find a new dad. Maybe you won’t. But you’ll never get an opportunity like this again. So you need to make up your mind, right now. Do you want my help?”
Her eyes hardened. “Yes.”
I smiled. “Good. It would have been really disappointing if you’d said no.”
Providence didn’t let low-clearance helpdesk staff run around the universe without a number of basic security measures in place. The door back to the office existed in its own little half-plane outside of conventional space. As long as it was registered to my card, I couldn’t open a second one. And I couldn't move it around. This was fine when it opened up inside a school, and less fine when it was halfway up a waterfall – a scenario which had, against the odds, happened to me more than once in my career.
Doors were only visible and usable by the person holding the correct card. Mostly a good idea, but with some exploitable – and, in this case, literal - loopholes, such as the loop of lanyard I placed over Clara’s small hand in addition to my own.
The exit was right in front of her and I could have sworn I heard the sound of her jaw dropping open as she witnessed it materialise out of thin air, the cold fluorescent lighting filtering in through the stable tear in reality to cast a new layer of light and shadow over the top of the local European ambience. It deserved a moment of appreciation, seeing it for the first time.
It didn’t get one. Footsteps sounded close by, followed by a new adult voice calling out. “Who are you? Is that Senhora Pascoal?” Investigation revealed the owner of the voice to be an older man, sixty or so, with a full head of grey hair and a formal suit.
Clara tugged at my sleeve, sounding a little awed. “That’s the principal.” Who was apparently more interesting than a genuine miracle. Couldn’t have that.
“It is indeed!” I called back. One step backwards. “I’m just here to pick up Clara,” I continued, hoisting her up into the crook of the arm holding the lanyard and taking another step back in one fluid motion. With my off hand, I made an informal salute. “Family matter, nothing to worry about.”
The third step took us through the exit and landed us in Providence, where we found ourselves staring at a glass door whirring closed, no sign of schools, principals or Portugal anywhere to be found. My senses adjusted to the rapid change with the ease of practice.
We moved out of the thoroughfare, where I popped Clara onto the carpet and returned the lanyard to my neck before anyone registered what was happening. I gave us about ten minutes before someone complained and the bigwigs came knocking, but there was no sense in hastening it along.
I towed the blinking child out of the landing space and found a quiet space. “Welcome to Providence,” I said with a smile.