The API of the Gods Read Free Page A

decided. We were in a virtual universe. There would be no need to write code
for water rather than allowing it as an emergent property of simple physical
laws unless you had to save resources—like, say, RAM, storage, and processing
power. The Gods, perhaps, were AIs on some higher layer with intelligence
incomparably beyond our own.
    So what were we, then?
    Perhaps, I thought, they outsourced
their grunt work to their simulations.
     
    >>>  
     
    The windows of the yacht were boarded up
with metal plates, further fortified by the API, but you could somehow tell we
were underwater from the occasional shudder around us. If this was using a
variant of my old code, I silently hoped that that bug was the last.
    "In about ten minutes," The Head
Supervisor began. We numbered twenty aside from him and the Eater, and I knew most of us. "We are going to be deploying in the
control palace of the lake's daemon. We are to investigate certain odd behavior
of the daemon as of recently, and the abnormal weather patterns we've seen on
the lake itself."
    "Sir," asked John Yu, Security and Communication Lead or Seer of the Stars. He had
multiple slashes hovering around him and a laptop, and he was in a powered
wheelchair. Not because he needed it, but so he could move around without
getting up. His language of choice was Mead, our mutated version of Java.
"If this is a routine investigation, why do we have over one hundred
golems—"
    "One hundred fifty," I said.
    "One hundred fifty golems in the
cargo compartment?"
    "The last messenger did not
return," the Head Supervisor said.
     
    >>>  
     
    The API was easy to learn, but almost
impossible to master or even use, as there were so many considerations.
    Suppose, for some reason, you want to
make a sword that dances in the air and stabs people. Immediate questions come:
how big is the sword; how much does it weigh; what is its tensile strength and
aerodynamics; are you mass-producing these; et cetera ad infinitum. But then there's
the little things. What if the guy you're going to stab has his own sword?
What if he's got his own dancing sword? What if there's a whole bunch of
swords floating around stabbing people, and the Gods know what else is going
on, and you don't want the sword to accidentally be stabbing you?
    And how much of this is worth it?
    Even if I had poured my entire blood
supply into my " Hello,\n\n\nFOOLS! " cube, or even that of every mortal on the planet, it
would not have worked. Nor was there any magical sign or divine inscription or
cosmic cheat code that powered it. Nor did it function through any kind of
mental psychic power, faith, enslaved demon, magical jewel, fairy dust, or unicorn
manure. The API solely works because the Gods power what we do by their own
blood: Ichor.
    Ichor can make water burn or fire wet.
Ichor can make a ship fly or turn cities to stone. Ichor can give a semblance
of life to the dead or kill armies in an instant. Ichor can find the prime
factors of a number quicker than a single mortal CPU's cycle or reverse a
trapdoor function through brute force. Ichor can even solve arbitrary halting
problems through the API, but that's too expensive for ordinary use.
    And Ichor would make the one who drank
it divine.
    Ichor was an issue with the virtual
universe theory, I did admit. When I ran a virtual machine, a computer within a
computer, I did not spill my own blood to run programs or alter its state. I
just did it with a few clicks of my mouse. Nor would drinking my blood cause my
programs to become like me, which was what drinking Ichor would do to us. That
made even less sense. Why would anyone create a virtual machine with
such stupid rules?
    Why would anyone create a world like
this at all?
     
    >>>  
     
    "What's the odd behavior?"
Ashley, Deployment Troubleshooter or Myrmidon asked. Her clear
voice was distorted through the speaker of her crab-like armor. The armor made
her long hair unsuitable, so she had it cropped to near baldness, like