Twenty-four thousand gods worked for Providence, and most of them used the company’s travel stations. At any given point, thousands of invisible, publicly-inaccessible portals waited open around the globe, and occasionally beyond, for nothing more exciting than the daily commute.
If Colstee’s feeds were any indication, social media would be erupting right about now. The doomsayers and conspiracy theorists would love it, and for once I wouldn’t claim they were wrong.
On each feed, loose rubble tumbled and slid towards the maelstroms’ eddies, unstable and expanding. Put together collectively, it made for a nascent Armageddon event, if I wasn’t mistaken. Admittedly one on the slower and more reversible side as these things went, but it counted. Ordinarily, Facilities and Security would be dispatched for clean-up – except half the teams were trapped in Singapore along with the office, and the rest mightn’t have received word. Stasis was a thing of the past.
With it, Operations had lost its last senior leader, the department left in directionless tatters. Conditioned to wait for approvals and follow correct process, its employees would be torn on whether to act.
We had yet another distraction, one in thousands of splintered parts, and a scapegoated Vishnu to join it. Tez – both Tezes – had outdone himself.
In the time it had taken to exit, Mayari had gone, hurtling back to the altar. The collapse of the task system wouldn’t be far behind.
“How long do you need?” I asked Lucy via Vince. “Time’s counting down.”
It wasn’t just the task system. Grace’s popemobile was busy making steady progress through Rome on a car-shaped timer. When it reached its destination, our time would be up.
Lucy shrugged. “When the shutdown happens, it happens. Janus’ renovations are for my benefit; he’s already prepared. Plus, I can cheat a bit.”
He raised a hand a fraction. As he did, the etchings in the walls grew bright with the same blue as the suspended flames, shapes and patterns taking form from the peeled stone.
I left him to it, and stared down at Gia’s still figure in her metal chair, shaved hair and tiara restored. Philippe daubed at a small red line trailing down her forehead while another technician monitored her pulse the old-fashioned way. Fingers to wrist.
There was no physical sign of the spear or apples. I could feel them, though, thrumming with conflicting currents through their human conduit. Normally I wasn’t so adept at picking up the fiddly nuances. Now that I finally could, I wasn’t sure I’d missed much. The apples – or whatever they’d become – swirled with pockets of seductive appeal much like caviar or bubble wrap, filled with promise. The spear didn’t broadcast so much as screech. If I hadn’t already known its history, I wouldn’t have had a hard time guessing.
While we’d been away, the cell had filled back up with the remaining members of Xiānfēng. Most were crowded around Ponytail. Gia’s partner struggled against a collective of scientists pinning him down, spitting out half-sentences around scientist fingers.
Like so much else, it wasn’t new.
“We are crying,” he blurted, only for a hand to cover his mouth again. With a wrench of an arm, he ripped the intruder away. “Hurting. So much. I feel it. All of it.” He struck out with an elbow, knocking back a scientist who’d latched on. “Let me free! I can help. I can fix it.”
Yun-Qi stood apart from the others, watching impassively. His attention was divided between the pair.
Helpdesk hadn’t been designed to drive people mad. The weight of it did that as a matter of course. When gods broke, we broke for different reasons. Some unable to set idealism aside. Some so fearful of being named cowards, they battle-cried themselves into ruin. Some incapable of desensitising themselves to the callousness and neglect bombarding them over and over, until they hid, went mad or stopped caring.
The average person didn’t have a chance. Writing off the rest of the world was easy without an intimate window into its life, flawed as it was. Helpdesk should have worked as a tool to introduce the thicker end of the divine population to the concept of empathy, but the people who needed it didn’t use it, and the rest were overexposed.
My mind went back to the lost cause I’d covered with Clara a seven-day aeon ago. Bowel cancer guy. Second-hand, you learned to tune out the cramps and discomfort. The steadily-worsening pain, the desperate hope of staring down a slow, futile tunnel, wondering if the light at the end was the sun, salvation or an oncoming train, while begging for the former. The niggling fear, tears both realised and unspoken; the rage, helplessness and powerlessness of the hopeless in the same situation. The regrets of deeds unfinished, plans cut short, lives unlived and loves left adrift.
People didn’t pray because they were happy. They prayed when things went to shit. To make it to Providence, tickets had to meet stricter requirements still.
And in that quagmire of torment, loathing and false hope, Ponytail had gotten himself stuck.
I sighed and split off a new visitation. It was too many. Everything became a little dreamlike, like too many drinks at a party.
The analyst saw me. His eyes widened. “Please,” he petitioned, ducking under another grasping hand. “Help me. They don’t understand. They don’t know.”
Yun-Qi’s attention focused in, but he didn’t move.
I fought the urge to force my senses to sharpen. It wouldn’t help. “No,” I agreed. “They don’t.”
Extruding more limbs, I reached out to the circle of scientists, passing through each until I made contact with the souls within.
Back off, I ordered, though it wasn’t necessary. Close proximity induced the same level of knee-jerk reaction as overly-confident hustlers working a networking sundowner’s reluctant and captive audience. If the words didn’t come through, the intent did.
Enough people let go that Ponytail was able to struggle the rest of the way free. He attempted to stand and seemed to remember too late he was missing a leg, dropping back to the floor. “Thank you,” he said. “Take me with you. I need to –” he made a cupping motion with his hands, fingers crooked, “– crush it out of existence.”
“You’re right,” I said, reaching into my well of forms for what I was after. It must have been the place of power; I could see every shape I’d ever taken, even the ones I’d forgotten about. Which, considering some of the things I’d been as a child, wasn’t without its drawbacks. “You’re also sick.” I pulled out the apple I’d taken from Yggdrasil and held it out. “Standard doctor’s advice applies.”
Ponytail looked at the fruit like a starving man. He snatched at it so violently he missed the mark, clawing at the air, but succeeded on the second attempt. He raised it to his lips.
And stopped. “There’s a catch.”
Of course there was a catch. It came in a Providence-sized package, steered at the helm by an overlord convinced of his own righteousness.
But that wasn’t what he was really asking. Thousands of years of continual fearmongering took its toll, even on those on the periphery. Propaganda designed to keep the masses in their place.
But I’d never been very good at that. “No,” I replied. “There never was.”
At the far side of the room, Gia’s chest jerked with sudden breath. She opened her eyes. Before Phillippe could do anything, she raised a hand to her head and felt for the tiara there. The moment her fingers brushed against it, her face contorted with strain.
“Easy there,” said the acting doctor. He tugged her hand back towards her lap. “Leave that to me.”
“It hurts.” The words emerged hoarse, ragged. Live surgery would do that.
“I know. Hold on for me. And congratulations. You made it.”
As Philippe rummaged through supplies, I stepped into Gia’s field of view. “It’s not just a piece of fancy equipment,” I reminded her. “It’s a door. The same one we just came through. Take that information and use it.”
“…Loki.”
“You’ve already done it once.”
“Oh.” She ran her tongue over her lips, wetting the dry skin. “I have.”
The tiara flickered and disappeared. So did the cables and entire desktop computer attached to it. The room plunged into near-darkness, causing one of the Xiānfēng scientists to hastily scramble for a phone.
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Where the machine had sat, a cheap white door crashed face-down to the ground. Instead of an exit sign, a new one labelled the front.
[Helpdesk Task Management System, Property of Providence I.T.,] it read. Points for thoroughness, I supposed. To my senses, the object rang with latent dimensional disruption, more than the tiara ever had. Inactive for now as long as it remained closed.
A long exhalation emerged from Yun-Qi’s lips. He moved across to the door and knelt beside it, running his hands reverently above the surface. Most of the scientists crowded around with him. “I take it this passage won’t exist for long.”
“I don’t know what happens once we turn it off in this state,” Gia responded. A line of raw holes the diameter of nails dotted the top of her head. “We aren’t wiping the app, just deactivating it.” She tried to stand, only for Phillippe to propel her down again with a cloth and disinfectant. “I can get your machine back, I think. Once I can be sure it won’t land in my skull again. But what about Sil? I thought I heard him a moment ago.”
I checked on Ponytail, who’d been largely forgotten about the moment the door had appeared. The half-eaten apple rolled out of his limp hand and rocked to a halt some centimetres away as the Xiānfēngite holding the short straw struggled under his sudden collapsing weight. Being part of the visitation, the apple was still clean. I picked it up and reabsorbed it.
Janus was making rapid headway on the walls of the underwater grotto. More of it was illuminated now, bathing the chamber in bright blue light. Enraptured, Vince had taken up position near the edge of the water line to watch it in progress. Of all the demon lords, his was the power I still didn’t know about. I wasn’t sure if he’d had time to figure it out.
“He’ll be fine. Which is more than I can say for us if we lose the spear,” I reminded Gia, wiggling my fingers at her in impatience. “Imagine how Phillippe would feel if he knew what he’d left stuck in his patient.”
“Believe me, I can’t wait to get rid of it,” said Envy. She winced as the scientist dabbed the cloth over one of the drill holes. “This is going to sound odd, but – there are echoes of what it might be. Possibilities it could take. Not strong or clear. But I don’t like what I’m seeing. I don’t like it at all. Ow.”
“What are you seeing?” Yun-Qi questioned her from the vicinity of the floor. He straightened up and made his way over, waving at Phillippe to move out of the way. The scientist stepped back, bowing his head in deference.
“Things that would get you put on a watchlist,” Gia responded. With Phillippe gone, she pried herself into a more upright position. “And things that would get you thrown in jail. For life. If your government was lenient.”
“I see. I’m not privy to half your conversation. I may be able to help, but require more context.”
Gia pursed her lips. “We made it to Yggdrasil. And we found your leader.”
Every eye in the room forgot whatever else it was doing and snapped to the demon lord, who shifted uncomfortably under the attention.
“Ms Canciana Prieto,” said Yun-Qi. His voice rose in a question.
Gia nodded. “Well, I didn’t see her personally. But Loki did.”
“Hmm. And Yggdrasil. Is it still there? Does the path still lead to it?”
Gia glanced in my direction amidst the resulting chorus of low murmurs. “Technically,” she began, “yes. But it’s about to close. And even if it wasn’t, you’d need to fly or have some way of fighting the current.” She broke off a little sheepishly.
My son was quiet for a moment. “What you’ve done, by transforming our prototype –”
“I’ll put it back.”
He waved her into silence. “– is a wonderful gift,” he finished. “You have completed a key step towards realising the goals we’ve worked towards for hundreds of years.”
“Oh.”
“Can you take it further? Can you link that door with the world tree itself?”
The demon lord hesitated for a few moments. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t lead directly there. I can’t make it move; I don’t think it works like that.”
“What if you built a bridge?”
“But there isn’t a –” A strange look passed over her face. “I suppose if it was the entire system.”
“You’ve done it before,” I agreed. “But first we need the spear.”
“Right. Ah, give me a minute. What I really need is a way of –” She broke off, and stared at the lap in front of her. A second later, a laptop materialised into it, open and running. “You are kidding me,” she said, eyes widening. “This is a thing? I can do this? Holy mother of espresso.” She picked up the laptop and looked under it, then put it down and stared into the screen.
Yun-Qi and Phillippe glanced at each other. The former shrugged.
“Oh, the things I could do with this,” Gia said, following it up with a low whistle. As bewildered as anyone else, I peered over her shoulder as she clicked open a window labelled ‘File Explorer’, navigated past a number of folders with names like ‘Negative Childhood Memories’ and ‘Uncomfortable Small Talk Autopilot’, and landed on one called ‘Foreign Objects’. At the bottom of a long column of items mostly labelled with numbered variants of ‘Apple of Yggdrasil’ sat ‘Spear of Destiny’, me, and ‘Vatican Concord’.
I was a little alarmed to see the latter so easily accessible. Not that it would matter for much longer.
Gia selected the spear file and dragged it into a window labelled ‘file sharing’, whereby it disappeared. A clunk of heavy metal sounded from the floor at her feet, near the Helpdesk door.
Well, that had happened.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Gia announced in unintentionally literal irony. Barely glancing at the spear, she clutched the laptop into a careful hug. “This is marvellous.”
“It’s unique,” I gave her, as Yun-Qi bent to retrieve the weapon. “You realise you don’t actually need an interface.”
“No.” The laptop disappeared. “And I don’t care. I know people who would kill for something like this.”
“Most people would consider that a problem.” Not to mention the inherent danger of abstracting a mind into a physical object where it could be stolen, broken, or sat on by cats.
“I’ll be careful. I’m a pro.”
And if Gia could do it to one mind, she could do it to others. That was an entirely different problem. A big one; the kind that had to be dealt with immediately before it could spiral out of control. “I’m calling in a favour now,” I declared, making a snap decision even as Yun-Qi hefted the lance.
“We have the spear,” my son declared before I could finish. A note of stress suffused his tone. “About that bridge –”
I waved my hand in front of Gia’s face to regain her attention. “You owe me.”
“I can describe it to you,” my son continued, unaware. “Loki could show you. A glorious shaft of colour, prismatic like a rainbow beyond just the visible spectrum. Light to reach into the furthest corners of the universe and peel them asunder, opening passage. We can still preserve a path. But only if we act now. Please, Ms Forlani. This may be our only chance.”
My attention diverted for a second as it hit me what he was trying to do. Recreating the Bifrost from Helpdesk was a very Fenrir plan: ambitious, bold and genius. And it was tempting, even without coming from a position of four hundred years striving for that goal.
It would also defeat the plan. We needed Helpdesk switched off, not transformed. Worst case, it might give all the gods in the system access to the last surviving place they hadn’t already ruined, which I was sure wouldn’t be exploited in every form imaginable by those at the top.
And I was done running. Running bought time – sometimes even a lot of time – while the underlying problems festered like sores on a plague victim, proliferating unchecked in the absence of treatment. Sores we’d just poked and would be leaving everyone else behind to deal with – Hel, Jörm, seven billion mortal souls and anyone else who said, did or thought the wrong thing.
“No,” I said. “It’s a security flaw.”
Envy glanced between us. “But isn’t it worth the risk?”
Yun-Qi’s face hardened. “Dad,” he said, directing the words towards Gia, “we may never be able to get back again. You know that. With Yggdrasil, we wouldn’t have to fix the world, or destroy it. We could start again. Follow a new root to a new universe. You always told me to look for door number three. This is it. Trust me. Come with us.”
Of all the stupid timings. But I should have seen it coming. Folding my arms, I pulled a face and swore, placing myself between the pair so that Gia had to step around me. All I had to do was keep them talking long enough for Mayari to close the passage.
Gia’s eyes flicked to the side, considering it.
“I’m faster and more experienced than you,” I noted to her. “Keep that in mind.”
Yun-Qi’s cool disposition finally broke, the disbelief and anger exposed plainly in the lines on his face. He ran a hand through his hair, disrupting the even locks. “But the loss. The scale of it. Yes, they’ll try and come after us, but Yggdrasil will give us the tools to resist. Finally –” he brought the side of his hand down on the flat of his palm, hitting it repeatedly, “– We. Will. Be. Safe.” He turned back to Gia, a wild look in his eye that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “We do this to benefit every mortal alive and dead who ever walked the planet. Go ahead.”
“Don’t go ahead,” I countered immediately. “Tell him we can do this later. There are thousands of proto-Bifrosts out there right now vorticing themselves into public notoriety; it’s not like there’s a dearth of options to choose from.” Albeit none that led to Yggdrasil.
I could see one in passing in Rome, in fact, off in the far distance; a faint purple glow marked primarily by the violent jostling of the crowd in its immediate vicinity. With the number of deities peppering the city, there’d no doubt be others.
Yun-Qi wasn’t fooled. He shifted the weight on the spear, pointing it subtly in my general direction even as his eyes tore at me with wounded betrayal. “This is my project. It doesn’t have to get in the way of yours. I thought I had your support. And you’re missing one vital determining factor, Dad. Whatever we decide, prophecy backs us. It doesn’t matter what you choose here, because you’ve already been steered on the path to victory. There are no seers in the room with us now influencing events. You literally can’t fail until they do. So give me this.”
I looked at Regina over in Singapore, who still had Amulet Tez around her neck. The group had left the apartment complex and appeared to be picking their way through some kind of dark maintenance tunnel. I wasn’t sure if the lights were kept off normally or the country was simply running out of electricity.
“He says you’re on your own on this one,” Regina said, before I could voice the question. “It’s not worth getting involved.”
“This is our out,” Yun-Qi reiterated. “Here. Now. I don’t need revenge, and you don’t, either. I’ve learnt to put that aside. Please, Gia.”
Gia shifted uncomfortably in the middle. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re probably right,” she told my son. “But I also don’t want Loki to kill me.”
I thought it best to hold my tongue. She wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it also galled me it was where my own protégés’ thoughts automatically went when it came down to it. Even after so long.
I let out a pent-up breath. “That’s settled, then,” I commented, far more lightly than I felt. “Prophecy stands with me. Now, that favour –”
If I hadn’t been in multiple locations at once, I wouldn’t have noticed a difference.
In Janus’ grotto, the blue flames gutted and extinguished, leaving enough of an afterimage for me to see Lucy’s shape collapsing to the ground. In the background, Janus paused for a moment, then resumed chipping away at barnacles.
In Colstee’s office, Durga’s eyes rolled back in her head, showing only the whites. Her arms split and multiplied, spilling out around her figure to grasp at air, before she, too slumped to the floor. Colstee leapt back from the computer out of her way, while Tru froze in place.
The dimensional energy spilling out from under the Helpdesk door died, the window of opportunity gone.
“Never mind,” I said, holding up a palm, though the favour was still undoubtedly high on my list of priorities. “This is it. We’re on. If I were everybody, I’d prepare for a deeply unwelcome visit.”
And hope Mayari got back in time to put it to an end.