The API of the Gods (5 page)

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.