God of Newest York

For the hunt to work, I needed to familiarize myself once again with mine domain. I might have been its god, but I hadn’t set foot in Newest York in years. In those years, I had no doubt that some elements of the town had changed. I needed to walk through, relearn everything. I was just an aged ghost haunting the city at the moment. Before I could become useful to my friends, I had to be more. I had to return to godhood.

Three elements have to coincide to truly be a god. Omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. At least, over one’s own domain. Omniscience meant I had to tap into the network, to listen in on all the datastreams, phone calls, and other transmissions criss-crossing Newest York’s massive platforms. Omnipotence, I mostly already possessed. For the most part, it was internal. The part that wasn’t internal meant I needed to plug my mask’s system into the city management systems. So I would be able to change the city itself with but a gesture. Like I could in the old days. Finally, Omnipresence meant I needed transport. My tunnels were under the city’s waterline before. I’d just needed to find paths down. Pressing a button inside my glove, I called up Lucy. “Luce, everything online on your end?” I asked.

Lucy, predictably, was still unhappy with me. “Jase,” she replied, “What’s wrong?”

“Just needed to decide the next step,” I answered.

Lucy sighed. “Is one of the choices coming home?”

I laughed. “I am home,” I replied.

“I see,” she said, “Your meds have completely worn off, haven’t they?”

“In any case,” I shot back, “Which should I regain first, my omniscience, my omnipotence, or my omnipresence? Unfortunately it’s three options, or I’d’ve just done a coin flip.”

“And here I thought you had something serious to ask me,” Lucy complained. Understandable, for a non-believer. “If you’re near omniscient, shouldn’t you know what to do first?”

I thought for a moment. “That is a good point. Many thanks, Luce,” I said with a smile, before I pressed the button again, hanging up. As usual, an external viewpoint provided useful insight. Luce was especially good at providing insight, both intentionally and unintentionally. In this case, as well, she was right. My return to omniscience needed to come first. Once I’d achieved that, the others would fall in place easier.

Walking up stairs and out of the Empire, I breathed in the open air. Fresh, clean. Relatively speaking, by Newest York standards, in any case. The hackers who’d taken up residence kept the area around the Empire clean. The city had seventeen information nodes I’d need to place a packet into, scattered around the floating city. For all but two, it would just be a matter of updating the already installed packet to the newer city software. The other two would take a little longer. Hopefully the back door I’d put in the city’s systems when I was sixteen was still there. I never admitted to that bit, and no one in this city’s government had been great enough to match my wits back when they cared about me, so I assumed it was never fixed. With a whisper, a map appeared, translucent, over the upper left corner of my vision. A series of simple pingings crossed the map, emitting from several of mine own old systems and echoing off the nodes around the city. A smile plastered onto my face, under the featureless mask, I headed towards the nearest node. Preparing for the game was such fun.

On the third node, I noticed someone else was there, in my old home. I couldn’t tell who, like me they were good, but they were like me siphoning massive amounts of data. This newest opponent in the game was to be a worthy one, evidently. I could barely wait for the game to start in earnest. Them against me, no holds barred. It was to be such an entertaining match. But, noting the skill of mine opponent did not change my preparation. If I was to fight a pretender to mine godly throne in earnest, I needed to return to it first. That meant once again becoming omnified and deified. Which meant getting to all the nodes.

It was easy enough to return to my all-knowing nature. After all, it was mine natural state. Add to that the fact that, as I correctly predicted, no one patched my backdoor, the packets were all installed and updated in no time. With the final packet in, I returned to the Empire. I headed back down the stairs to my computer system and a few keystrokes later, my system was once again receiving data from everywhere. The right side of my vision returned to its old translucent scrolling text transcripts of every conversation happening in the city. Merely by looks and winks, I could zoom in on any conversation. It felt good to have my usual vision back. My earbud buzzed. “Yeah?” I asked as I pressed the button.

“Your vitals just spiked, then dropped precipitously,” Lucy said, “What happened?”

I chuckled. I couldn’t help it. Being a god was such fun. “I returned to omniscience. It was a rush, but now I’m back to normal.”

“No, your heart rate, breathing, everything is well below normal,” she insisted. She didn’t understand. I was back.

I sighed, then chuckled some more. “No, this is normal. You just have never had to see me at my norm.” Hanging up, I returned up to the city’s floating platforms. Next up was omnipresence. The longer I spent above the waterline, the more likely people were to find me. I headed down into the last entryway to my system that I’d used before being gently forced into leaving Newest York. A block west of the Empire and down inside the platform, I opened my hatch to the water surrounding the base of the floating city. There had only been a few feet of platform drift. That was fortunate. As the water rushed in, it brought the tubing closer. I grabbed and restrapped my semi-flexible tunnel to the hatch. Water spilled in from the tube. It seemed full of it. I grabbed my oxygen tank out of my backpack and, after attaching it to my mask, I entered the tunnel. The small, motorized roll cage with wheels was still there, waiting for my return. Climbing into the cage and locking it shut, I pressed the button to disengage the brake lock, and started speeding through the tunnels. I needed to reconnect this tunnel system to the hatches, so I could use it without the need for external oxygen.

At each stop along the track, I engaged the brakes, climbed out of the cage, and pulled the flexible tube back up to the hatch back into the internals of the floating city, opened the hatch to check the seal, then closed it and returned into my wheeled roll cage. After travelling through the tunnels and returning to the first hatch, I clambered out of the half-filled tubing onto the no-longer wet floor of the city’s interior. Omnipresence completed, and only took up seven hours. I returned to the surface of the city.

Night was drawing near. The shift change at the city management office was happening in two hours and seven minutes. The trip, via my newly reformed tunnels, was roughly a ten minute drive. That meant leaving the Empire about thirty minutes before shift change, to account for the travel to and from the tunnel. Which gave me an hour and a half to kill, going through my newly reacquired data to find anything that had even the slightest chance of being related to the game, as well as any intel on the mob that had taken over the South end.

I walked back into the Empire and nodded to one of the younger people milling about. The hackers were a reliable, if all together untrustworthy resource. The young of them did not remember me. They needed to know me, for what was to come. “You,” I said to the man down there, “With me.”

The youth was hesitant in the presence of a near-god like myself. “Why me?”

“I wish more eyes than mine own,” I answered honestly, “And you must learn respect for your god, kid.”

He looked like he was going to object, to make my day fun, but one of the members from years back, placed a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Trust me, Che,” the middle aged woman said, “You don’t want to start shit with him.”

“You best listen to Deb, Che,” I add, “I’d hate to strike you down.” Then, as I turned to the stairwell, I stated, “I will see you down there within five minutes.” It was not an offer, rather a statement of fact. I’d let them talk out their problems for a minute or so, but I needed youthful eyes on my information, to parse through the data for blackmail material on the gangs. I headed down the stairs to my equipment and started going through the conversations I’d flagged with winks as possibly related to the game. I’d let the kid deal with the gang stuff, I trusted the untrustworthy ones with that knowledge. But the game was something they couldn’t understand, and being so intricately intertwined with my friends, I didn’t want people whom I didn’t trust trying to learn how to play with all the data.

Four minutes later, Che arrived. “Why do you hang out in this dank area. You know there are offices with amazing views if you go up instead of down, right?” Che asked.

“Kid,” I replied, “You’ll learn fast. No matter where I set it up, my office has the best views.” I pointed at a second terminal attached to my set up. “There is a day worth of information on htat. Find me material on the Mob.”

“What’s in it for me?” Che asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t get mad at your punk ass,” I began with the stick, then switched to the carrot, “And whatever information I don’t use over the course of my game, you can use after I’m gone.”

“And if I want to use the information while your, whatever you’re doing, is still being done?” he asked.

I answered him honestly and frankly. “Then I shall get upset. And, as I’m certain Deb told you, When I get upset, people in the general area get significantly less healthy.” Then, I turned back to my screen and continued reading through the seemingly innocuous conversations between my friends and their mysterious foe on it, as well as the messages that had superficially similar syntaxes. I had plenty of time to look deeper, to analyze the messages I was certain were from my opponent in the game. I needed to learn my opponent, to know them as well as I knew myself.

“And what are you looking at?” Che asked, though smartly he did not stop his task to ask.

“Other data,” I answered, “Of interest to me and no use to you in the future.”

“Okay,” Che said, unsatisfied with mine answer. After another moment, he asked the question I had been expecting first and had been pleasantly surprised when it was not his first inquiry. “Why’d you pick me?”

I groaned. “You are new to the squatters here,” I replied, “And the other youth looked at you with mistrust and discomfort. That means they respect and fear you. If you fall in line with my godhood, the rest of the youth will follow.”

“So, nothing else? Cause Deb mentioned back in the day, you took someone under your wing,” he began.

I cut him off before he made a fool out of himself. “You’re far too old to learn how to be a god. Also the last person I trained tried to kill me. After I tried to kill her. Our relationship was a complex one. Mine with you will not be.” Then, as a non-sequitur, I asked, “The city officials still wear the same uniforms, no?”

“Yes?” he replied, uncertain of why I was wondering.

Excellent, I thought as I took a moment to check my trunk. I still had my Newest York Janitorial uniform and badge. Becoming omnipotent would be easier done than said. Just a matter of a costume change. I returned to my work as I waited. Godhood awaited, it was only a matter of time.