They really were coordinating. I eyed the access card, turning it over. On the back was displayed a miniature head and shoulders shot of Shitface looking nonchalant for the camera, along with his name, position and employee ID. Was he really stupid enough to give me a functional copy of his security pass?

Grace, I checked in with the demon lord. Can you ask Apollo if he sent me an access card?

He did. He said you’d ask. And he wants it back tonight.

I dangled the lanyard in Mayari’s general direction. “What are the chances you could make another copy before tonight?”

“You mean these?” She made a gesture and a small panel clicked open in the far wall, through which several identical lanyards tumbled out into the centre of the room, before slowing to a halt in midair and floating about in what appeared to be a localised bubble of zero gravity, clacking against each other as they spun about in slow, lazy circles.

I shot Tez an amused look, and he shrugged with all the innocence of a newborn baby. “I mean, technically the ideas were hers first. I just passed on the message.”

“Buddha’s cheeks. We’re wasted on Helpdesk.” I looped the original copy over my neck and tucked it away under my shirt collar. “Any more prep like that to pull out of the hat? I’m planning on making the trip now.”

“Based on Tez’s haphazard glimpses of the facility, no,” she replied. “And not at short notice. But I’ll bring a bag with a few useful pieces.”

While Mayari rummaged through tool racks, Tez turned back to me. “I won’t be there in person, but if the timeline changes I’ll send you a message through Grace. Try not to ignore him.”

“Noted,” I said, and reluctantly shifted my attention back to the pope, who hadn’t stopped trying to regain my attention over the last minute and a half. Alright, fine. What is it?

Lucifer wants to pass on a request, he declared.

Oh?

He’s organised some forensic comp sec experts about a password, and needs you to provide the address. There was a pause. What the devil is comp sec?

Locksmithing for computers, I answered, and gave him the address. With everything else going on, the creepy Peruvian machine had taken a bit of a back seat in my list of priorities. Good thing Lucy had been working on it.

Tez was watching me curiously, so I signalled at him to wait a moment and warped back to the residence of Canciana Prieto in mosquito form to check the computer was still there. It was; the house undisturbed since my last visit. If nothing else, it was only a matter of time before the local utility providers stopped receiving payments and cut the electricity, and if that happened, any active data would be lost.

Detour number two, back home to the penthouse. I retrieved Canciana’s wallet and homed in on the fehu rune, which wasn’t difficult seeing as it was in Tru’s bedroom. I found him passed out half-naked on top of the king bed, heater running, an empty bottle of vodka lying in a dribble of its own contents on the carpet. Above it, dangling over the edge of the bed, glimmered the fehu rune in scintillating purple light. The curtains had been drawn shut and taped together with gaffer tape, of all things, to ensure they stayed that way. I peeled it off, threw open the windows and yanked the duvet off the sleeping demon lord.

He groaned.

“Wakey, wakey,” I encouraged him, flicking the scrunched up gaffer tape onto his chest. “Remember that address you gave me? I need you to use your powers to find out the details of the electricity provider and pay its power bills.”

A second groan. “What the -“

“You can have your hangover later,” I said. “I don’t have time to wait for you to sober up. Here.” Taking Canciana’s bank cards from her wallet, I thrust them into Tru’s less sticky hand. His fingers curled around the small plastic rectangles and gripped them tight. Then, much to my surprise, he burst into tears accompanied by fat, blubbery, uncontrollable sniffs.

“Oh, great,” I muttered, and sat down beside him on the bed. I had a lunar goddess waiting for me to conduct a time-sensitive raid determining the fate of one of my closest allies, but never mind that, apparently. I picked up the gaffer tape and sent it on a one-way trip into the same volcano I’d used for Canciana’s cremation, then batted at Tru’s stubble-covered cheek with my fingers. “Okay. This is what happens when you have an entire bottle of vodka, you dolt. Your powers aren’t going to save you from this one. Focus.”

“I just want it to go away,” he wailed. The bank cards slipped through his fingers back onto the sheets, and he didn’t seem to notice. I sighed and returned them to the wallet. This would have to wait until another time.

“That’s generally how hangovers work, yes.”

“Not that.” He made an unhappy noise, whereupon I understood my mistake.

I warped through to the toiletries section of my local supermarket in Singapore, picked a couple of boxes of tissues off the shelves, and brought them back to the blubbering mess on the bed. “You think you do,” I said, handing them over. “You don’t have the full picture. Same thing you told me re: the system’s understanding of your musical murder quest. There are -”

Tru’s eyes flew open, and his features contorted into sudden rage. “That’s not the same!” he roared, working himself upright. “I have fucking brain damage. The kind they do surgery for. I had to be a shut-in because it took me years of treatments before I could stop yelling inappropriate things at strangers in the streets. You think your precious system picked up on that, though, huh? ‘Course not. Now I’ve got even more things messing with my head, and my body -” he lifted the rune hand limply, “- and I find out that the only person I ever trusted to get me through life thinks I’m nothing but an insane killer. So you can piss off with your fucking presumptuous airs. I might have to share my house with you, but I don’t have to listen.”

The effect was spoilt somewhat by him then tearing off the top of the tissue packet and pulling out a handful of white papers, most of which ripped on the way out. He wiped them across his nose and glared at me. Watching him gave me a pang of nostalgia for my old road trips with my foster brother and his ever-present entourage of snotty Vikings. Long gone, those days.

Well, the system didn’t catch everything.

Brain damage, then. I guessed that explained the rap verse. Though not how he’d managed to get it onto the Helpdesk task system. Lots of people had brain damage, and you didn’t find their tasks written in coded language. Yahweh’s reality slice captured facts, not stylistic copywriting.

Unless it was just another symptom of the recent irregularities on the task manager. The timing was wrong, though; Tru’s data capture had been taken three years ago. Hard to believe there would be a connection between that and the sabotage. Anomalies did show up on rare occasions.

And yet.

I tried to think back to the ones I’d encountered. Selective bias, perhaps, but I couldn’t remember an instance going back more than ten or so years. First harmless irregularities, now hacks and security flaws that shouldn’t have been possible. What if these disparate events weren’t the underlying cause, but only the symptoms?

Was the task system degrading?

Shivers pulsed through my body as all my hair stood on end. Hacker incursions were one thing; system degradation was another entirely. Codified and automated though it might be now, Providence’s task management software was built on a far older bedrock. About as far back as there had been mortals to desire things. The earlier in history, the easier the demands had been - by sheer volume if nothing else. Before computers, there had been books; and before those, we’d had to rely on messengers or suffer being bombarded directly. But there had always been something. It was one of the constants.

If Helpdesk software went down and processes reverted to factory settings, so to speak, it was no skin off my back. Indeed, Yahweh’s reaction to millions of tasks reverting to him without warning would be priceless.

But if the problem wasn’t with the software, but the bedrock itself… who knew what it could mean? Widespread change on a massive scale was a given. Whether it was desirable or not – and for whom – that was anyone’s guess.

Without more information, however, speculation was next to useless. For now, I had a raid to conduct and a demon lord to console.

“You know,” I said, passing Tru another handful of tissues, “brain damage is fixable. If that’s what you want.”

Apollo could do it in his sleep. If he’d been on Helpdesk instead of Head of Security, we would have been seeing a lot more of those cancer cases being resolved. Though he might not have agreed to it. Shitface, as he was wont to remind me at every opportunity, was all about the ‘greater good’. I couldn’t see him being happy with extending a few lives an extra ten or fifteen years when he could have been swanning around doing his disaster prevention thing to delay the inevitable on a larger, flashier scale. He would have avoided Helpdesk from the start. No matter how I looked at it, it felt like all roads led to our current situation.

And now, after millennia, he was finally coming round.

Shame the same couldn’t be said for Rap Boy. “And what price would you take in return, demon? I’ll take my chances.”

“Really? You’re still holding onto that notion?” He didn’t reply, simply continuing to scowl in my direction, and I shrugged. “Whatever. Go back to sleep. Let me know when you’re up to having an actual conversation.”

In the meantime, it was time to hit up Facility J.