Prompt of the Week - Week 164

“Take a look at this shit.”

A collective groan echoed from the entire tech crew when they saw the bright golden header on the top of the print-out. No one even needed to read what was on the page; just the fact that it came from the Department of Apocalyptica and Resetting was enough for them know exactly what it was going to say, exactly who it was going to blame, and exactly what they were expected to do.

This was despite their constant reminders that A, it wasn’t their responsibility to clean up and DAR just because they didn’t want to deal with their own problems, B, they lacked the resources required to adequately reset a universe after it was so thoroughly fucked with, and C, they were tired of doing it and this close to declaring any such affected reality as condemned until further notice.

Further notice of course being DAR getting off their ass and disciplining this idiot shitkid who refused to listen to regulation.

Then again, they all knew why they didn’t. It’d be one thing for them to come crashing down on some low-level grunt who just recently achieved divinity and didn’t really know how things worked, or even a mid-level manager who got too careless with the way they threw around universe-ending disasters… but this one was different.

This one was a nepobaby.

Well, at least as far as any godling could be a nepobaby, seeing as deities didn’t exactly reproduce in any conventional manner. But their lineage was one of association, with the same worship pipelines that ascended them having ascended others who, coincidentally, just so happened to also be in positions of upper management, and who, coincidentally, hired this inexperienced jackadoo in front of the literally millions of more competent workers who’d been waiting aeons for a promotion.

And what did this shitkid do? Start triggering growth- and hyper-based universal apocalypse events just to get their rocks off.

They got it. Everyone in the Department of Tech Services and Prayer Maintenance understood exactly why they did it; hells above, some of them had even considered asking for special dispensation so they could run a temporary simulated reality just so they could experience what it was like to be keyed into a universe when it went tits-up in the most literal sense possible.

So yes, they understood what it was like. The difference was that they were all adults in positions of responsibility, and knew damn well better than to actually do something like that without authorisation. Not only did it severely upset the balance of power amongst the pantheon (even a single universe was still worth trillions to quadrillions of souls, after all), but the sheer amount of work required in the aftermath made it a nightmare to handle, even in the best of circumstances.

And, under said best of circumstances, it’d be DAR who handled cases of grievous mishandling of reality failures. Only they had the authority to dictate who could and could not terminate an instance of existence, through what means, and in what timescale and schedule; only DAR, the one and single department entrusted by the Creator to handle the unfortunate task of destruction, could authorise a universe to end, even if it was through natural causes.

So, whenever someone stepped out of line and did something stupid, like, say, make it so that everyone in a given universe suddenly turned into hyper-busty slimes capable of out-producing several multiverses’ worth of dairy farms in a single second, DAR would step in and kindly remind them of who was in charge. It rarely happened as well; very few people were stupid enough to try and tangle with the one department in the pantheon that still had a direct hotline with the Creator itself.

Well, very few still implied more than zero, and now they had this shitkid pulling stunts.

The one saving grace amidst the bullshit was that they weren’t physically moving in and messing things up, as that would have likely ended in such a massive amount of inter-departmental fighting that the pantheon was likely to split itself apart in a multi-way civil war (again). On the other hand, the methods they did use, being effectively the divine equivalent of script kiddie throwing around daddy’s credit card to get inside systems they shouldn’t, made the problem firmly DTSPM’s responsibility.

That, and the fact that DAR didn’t want to start a political bitchfit they knew they didn’t have the time nor patience for.

So, every once in a while, though far more frequently than anyone in IT would have liked, they received a message from DAR “informing” them of an “unauthorised” use of pantheonic infranet services which “regrettably” resulted in the loss of a universe; this was followed almost instantly by a very polite request for them to unfuck the situation before any of the deities responsible for the destroyed universes decided to press charges… or worse, lodge a formal complaint.

And this had been IT’s entire shtick for the past five or six cycles. Sit around waiting for the shitkid to screw something up, shitkid screws something up, and they receive a print-out from DAR letting them know their unfucking services were required. It was nonsensical and a waste of everyone’s time, and yet, there they were, having to go through it whether or not they liked it.

But not any more.

“Alright, gather ‘round everyone,” Lindius announced, signalling for that work shift to congregate by their work station, “I’ve been cooking something up for us to use the next time that asshole pulled something like this, and I think I have something very special.”

“It’s not gonna be a reverse code in-”

“A reverse code injection!” Lindius announced, drawing a cocked eyebrow out of everyone staring at their department head, “Oh, don’t give me that look, like y’all weren’t thinking the exact same thing every time you saw one of these reports!”

“I mean, yeah,” Serena, one of the newer hires, replied, “but like, I’m not sure poetic justice is what we’re looking for here?”

“No, no, boss has a point,” interjected Remus, the one person who never left their cubicle, “DAR’s not gonna do anything to kick this guy out, so we can throw that out the window. Only option we have now is retaliation, as strongly as we can muster, as harshly as we can manage.”

“Exactly my line of thought” – Lindius nodded several times, many of the ones present slowly assuaged of their doubts – “If we had any better options, I would be happy to take them. But I’ve sent far too many ignored requests to believe DAR will do their jobs in this case. But we, we are IT. We alone control the network that makes everything work properly! And if you fuck with us-”

“Y’all done fucked,” everyone completed the sentence, with unbridled enthusiasm.

“Yes! Good, if we’re all on-board here, then I have the solution to our problem: all we have to do is track down their workstation-”

“Which I’ve done already,” one of the techies noted.

“Yes, thank you Jim, which Jim has graciously done for us already. Now that we know this, all we need to do is inject our little friend into their system, and the next time they try and run unauthorised code into a random universe, it’ll turn back around and hit them instead!”

“Isn’t that… what they want though?” Serena piped up.

“What do you mean?”

“Well like, if they’re doing… w-what they’re doing” – a slight blush; Serena wasn’t the only one there – “then wouldn’t making it happen to them just be like, further wish fullfillment? We’d just be giving them what they want, only now it’s happening to them too!”

“Ah, but I’ve considered that option, and I made sure to account for it!” – Lindius’ tone was such that they didn’t even need that shit-eating grin they had plastered on their face – “The bug shuts down the pleasure receptors in the brain for a short amount of time; just short enough for the practical implications to make themselves known and for them to come begging for us to stop it.”

“And they’ll know it was us because-”

“Because I made it flash our name in front of their eyes, duh. I even added a cool skull gif that starts laughing after it triggers the whole thing!”

“Isn’t th-”

“Anyway, hands in the air, who’s for this plan?”

Some hesitation, but a majority of hands were raised.

“Against.”

Most went down, only a few went back up.

“Abstain?”

Carl. Fucking Carl.

“Approved by majority!” – Lindius’ tone shifted to the kind that they used whenever they did something particularly batshit; everyone in the room suddenly felt incredibly unsafe – “Now, if you don’t mind, we have better things to do with our lives, so, without further ado-”

A press of a key. The certain, known, but unseen spectre of a definitely illegal and absolutely dangerous jury-rigged program that would do gods know what to the person they were supposed to cleaning up after. And several moments of silence where the whole team sat there, waiting for something terrible to happen, knowing that was exactly how these things were supposed to go.

… but nothing d-

“Oh fuck’s sakes,” came Remus’ voice from behind a stack of discarded pizza boxes, “boss, what the fuck did you do?”

“I solved our problem, Remus, that’s what I did!” – despite the confident choice of words, Lindius’ chosen tone was nothing if not shaky, and that they immediately began sprint-walking towards Remus’ cubicle spoke volumes more than anything else did – “Why, why do you ask?”

“Because I have an alert coming in from one of the workstations up in management, supposedly one of th-”

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr…

Everyone fell silent. The building they were in had shaken, enough so that a couple of stray boxes of food fell on the floor, and even after the tremors subsided, the precariously-placed server racks in the corner (which someone was meant to fix up, Carl) were still wobbling from side to side.

Now, the obvious problem here was that their building wasn’t supposed to shake. Firstly, the whole thing was a psychodeific construct built from the collective expectations and beliefs of its constituent members: it wasn’t as if they were really eating cheap take-out, it was still mannah, but they were also insufferable nerds who adored a good aesthetic.

So in reality, that building didn’t really exist. There was no building, just a chunk of pantheonic space that had been earmarked as a control centre for the systems that kept their more mundane bureaucracy from being bogged down in having to do things by hand. Not to mention that pantheonic space didn’t really have a physical medium through which quakes could propagate in the first place, which made the technical non-existence of IT’s den even more of a non-issue.

And yet, they still felt that.

“… boss, what were the specs on the bug?” Serena asked, getting up from her workstation to check on Lindius’.

“I… I triple-checked them, it shouldn’t ha-”

“Boss, it says here you just flipped the flow.”

A moment.

A moment where everyone in that room very quickly realised just how much of a dumbass their department head was.

“… come again?”

“Boss, all you fucking did was make it so that whatever alterations that idiot made were pointed at him instead! You didn’t change any values!”

“So?! What should it matter, it’s not like changing sizes on average would do anything, they’re just one person!”

“Fuckin-boss, did you even read the report we sent you?! They’re not altering average values or constants, they’re using some shitty fucking injector that’s manually changing the size values for everyone in that universe. Individually.”

…

…

…

“… oh.”

“Yes! Oh!”

RRRRRRRRR…

It was louder that time. They all felt it. They all heard it. It shouldn’t have been loud at all, it shouldn’t even have existed, and yet there it was, clear as day, the rumbling and the groaning and the sudden forcing of a very sensual moan into the back of their heads, as soon as the management barriers started being torn down.

That was the primary issue at play there, and the reason why most of the department present at that moment promptly turned tail and teleported as far away from there as they could, knowing full well what kind of disaster was looming over them. There was more than just paperwork and office politics separating them, the lowly technicians working tech support and all the other bureaucrats actually making sure things ran properly, and the big shots over on Upper Management; more than just promotions and kissing ass and knowing how to brown one’s nose.

There were… physical barriers as well.

One was not simply promoted to a position like that one without metaphysical alterations to the very core of their being. To be part of Upper Management meant being in-tune with reality on a level deeper than most (at least in theory); ultimately, it meant that one couldn’t coexist with the rest of the pantheon on a common basis, requiring some degree of abstraction where even other deific entities had issues comprehending the nature of those presiding over them.

This was seen as a necessary compromise between a fully horizontal hierarchy that would never get anything done, and the old system of having to beseech the Creator for every higher-level decision, which inevitably resulted in an unacceptable amount of smitings.

Now, most of the time, this wasn’t a problem.

RRRRRRRRRRRRRR…!

Unfortunately, it did mean that whenever someone in Upper Management had something drastic happen to them, such as, say, having their bodily proportions severely altered by way of an unauthorised and sloppy code injection made by an idiot with not enough sleep under their belt… everything and everyone else got to feel it. Because there was only so much space that a Management worker could occupy before they started “spilling” out of their conceptual thought-space, and while someone with a greater degree of self-control might be able to hold onto themselves for a good while.

This one wasn’t exactly topping the charts.

“Yeah we need to go,” Serena noted, before promptly disappearing without another word, leaving Lindius increasingly alone as more and more of their department vanished into parts unknown, presumably picking pocket dimensions where the oncoming growthsplosion wouldn’t affect them too much.

Lindius, of course, just stood there, watching powerlessly as they became slowly aware of what was coming their way. They could all feel it, in one way or another: that thing, pressing on the back of their heads, trying to push their way inside to make more room for their bloated sense of self. Unlike the ones underneath them, however, Lindius was well aware of a certain, preoccupying bit of information about Upper Management that highlighted just how absolutely fucked they all were:

Upper Management was the lowermost layer.

There was an entirely separate celestial hierarchy whose sole job was to do what the Creator had once done by their lonesome, one whose form was so utterly alien to the rest of the pantheon that its mere existence was difficult to conceptualise, let alone any of its constituent parts. In many respects, the shitkid being in UM was a magnificently convoluted insult: they were promoted ahead of everyone, yes, but only to a position where they could not only know how they were little more than a liaison between two large groups of people who did the real work, but feel it in their very core, their very sense of self, on a second-to-second basis.

They were, to put it simply, middle management.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, inflated senses of self-importance rose; they didn’t sink. As their shitkid’s ego grew larger and larger in proportion to their body, they would begin breaching conceptual layers above the one they were entrusted to reside in, breaking open the floodgates so they’d have more room to grow into and expand. As each layer above them would have successively more space than the one directly below, this provided an optimal amount of growth potential for someone so lust-addled by the concept.

So the fact that they were feeling their presence on their level, far below that of Upper Management, was… concerning.

Lindius walked over to one of the walls, finding a window ready for them to use. There was, of course, no window, but they wanted to see what was going on, so their workspace provided for such a thing to be used. Beyond the smooth, clear glass, they could see a vast landscape of buzzing server towers, purely decorative Tesla coils, not-so-decorative Tesla Coils, and a near-endless supply of high-voltage current.

The sky, once so magnificently devoid of anything but circuitry, had been turned into a stark white expanse: various tones of the stuff, from clear to off to muddled to mixed, all of which were indicative of just what, exactly, what being done to the layers of reality directly above their own.

The rumbling was only getting worse now. Not a minute went by that Lindius didn’t feel everything quaking, didn’t feel that intrusive thoughtform attempting to breach the outermoust layers of their own consciousness. The presence was heavy, hefty, desirous and… extremely horny, from what little they were receiving of it. Definitely the kind of thing to be expected from their shitkid, though by that point, even the head of IT was starting to feel like kind of an asshole for having done this to someone who, for all intents and purposes, was just trying to have some fun.

Things were going to break. Severely. Indeed, they were probably going to be broken so hard that they were permanently screwed and unfixable. And eventually, they’d trace it all back to IT, and then to them, personally, at which point, it was game over.

There was going to be so much paperwork to fill out...