The API of the Gods Read Free

there was always the
temptation to try it for myself. Just to take a tiny sip. I couldn't, of
course. Even if I worked out some way to trick the geas into not physically
stopping me, maybe with some other series of tubes, and even if the geas also
didn't kill me, the Gods would notice me immediately. I suspected that would be
fatal to my continued existence.
    But the thought was always there.
    I pulled out the miniature cork and
tilted the vial into the funnel, careful not to let a single drop fall
elsewhere. The shining light of Ichor was like no earthly light. It seems
always as if from a dream, or perhaps we were a dream and it was the reality.
It disappeared down the funnel and slid through the tubes, and I felt—perhaps only psychologically—a
stirring in the suits of armor.
    "Slash!" I called, and a small
black tablet with winging appeared over my shoulder. Each Spoken Language
Aerial SHell looked different, and—perhaps because the Gods had a sense of
humor—the battle capable ones always had big googly eyes over their flat face,
and hovered around with butterfly wings. I whispered my secret name and my
password and it flew into my face and wrapped itself around my eyes.
    slash (spelled lowercase) was truly divine in
origin, written in Logos, the original language of the Gods—and what they wrote
our world, in, too. slash took your words and typed them, and would not only hear what you said, but type
what you meant, anyway.
    "Wyrm dash-aye tee-ess-dee dot
wu-wai," I said. wyrm -i tsd.wy appeared in my vision, and I clicked with my tongue to run
it. Wyrm was what had once been the python binding of the API, but I had
evolved it into a new programming language altogether, one more suited for what
we did. Some mocked my work, seeing it as far too inefficient to be
justifiable.
    And yet there was nothing like saying
" golems
= GetAllGolems(); golems.activate() "
and seeing row after row of golems turn to me in unison, bow, and salute me
with their blades.
    That would have taken far too long
to get right with C++, especially with arbitrary golem types. Duck typing for
the win.
     
    >>>  
     
    I never met the Gods.
    After orientation, which was a short
PowerPoint full of buzzwords mixed with mythopoetic phraseology, I went
straight to work. I had feared that the API would be even worse the deeper I
worked in it, until it was horrible kludges and hacks at the very base as it
drew its mystical power from the heart of the world or whatever. But it was
worse.
    I had once known a developer who was so
much smarter than I it wasn't even close. I'd have an idea, and he'd either
thought of it himself or could see some problem with it, or see some awesome
extrapolation of it and run off with it. His ideas, I would never have
thought of in the first place, and the problems with them I did see he had seen
first, and if I had something to add he had something to multiply that. He was
always congenial about it, but I always had rather our positions were reversed.
    Working with divine code was like that,
times a thousand.
    I saw it for the first time when I was
hunting down a bug with part of the Python module involving buoyancy. I asked,
and was granted, brief access to the source code of water itself. It was less
than half a page, written in terse Logos. And yet it was truly beyond any human
creation, code so clear it required no comment and yet so complex in its
elegance that no words could describe it anyway.
    I was afraid the bug was in such beauty,
but actually the culprit was a typo somewhere in the API. I couldn’t stop
thinking about it for the rest of the day and then sleeplessly through the
night. How it showed a completely different universe, one not made of simple
particles making atoms making molecules making water. Rather, rules using rules
in perfect patterns, not
mere code, but like music. Music, like a symphony playing in your sleep, and you, hearing it ,
dream of worlds.
    I couldn't be in the original universe,
I