“Provvy…?”

I repeated the name a couple of times until she got it right. Just knowing the name with an inkling of what it meant could be an entranceway into getting to know some important people, and any daughter of mine, however mortal, would need to have a trick or two up her sleeve sooner or later.

The company hid in plain sight much like a field of freckles could sometimes conceal a cancerous mole. Providence was not the world’s largest company, and certainly not a well-known one, but its tendrils reached into every corner of the globe. It fell into the category of the B2B industry – business to business – and billed itself a ‘global consultancy’. The accuracy of this categorisation was up for debate. It never engaged in direct advertising because there was no need. Yet it had a presence in every country on the planet. Publically listed on every national stock exchange. A website and social media accounts. It was right there for anyone who knew to look, with only a few layers of corporate jargon and badly-formatted documentation to deter interest.

And as much as I hated to admit it, it was a work of genius. Forget clandestine rituals and hidden clubhouses. All you needed to do to keep a secret was make it boring enough.

“I take it you got bored again,” Lucifer observed when I turned up to my desk with Clara in tow. It had been all of about fifteen minutes since I’d walked away.

If you were going to be stuck in a single body for eternity, Lucy’s was the way to do it. He had the appearance of a very attractive twenty-five year old, the kind of looks that were liable to make people start questioning their sexual orientation. Dark brown hair, slender frame, ambiguous ethnicity. When he walked down the street, he turned heads.

“Clara, I’d like you to meet Lucifer,” I said in Portuguese. “He’s a workmate and friend.”

Thus one of the most infamous figures in Earth’s history poked his head around the desk to examine my pseudo-daughter, eyes widening in delight.

He replied in the same language. “What an adorable visitor! Let me guess, six years old?” He punctuated the question with a quizzical look in my direction.

“Five and one quarter,” corrected Clara.

“Clara da Sousa. Potential daughter,” I said with a grin. “She needs a dad, I need entertainment. Can’t go wrong.”

Lucy snorted. He came around to our side of the desk, extending a hand to Clara along with the kind of smile I’d seen make grown adults faint. “It’s very nice to meet you, Clara.”

Unfazed, my proto-daughter shook hands with the devil.

“So. Are you going to make it official?” my colleague asked. “I can send you the link to the form I use when people want to sell me their firstborn.” This happened surprisingly often. I wasn’t sure what Lucy did with all those children. He’d probably mentioned it at some point, but it hadn’t sunk in. Part of me wondered if he had a giant storage cupboard full of them somewhere. One day I was going to get around to asking.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” I said, watching as Clara sat in my broken swivel chair and tried unsuccessfully to make it spin.

Lucy took pity on her and wheeled his own chair over. “Suit yourself,” he said, claiming mine. Without a place to sit, I awkwardly leaned over the desk and took a look at where the tasks were at.

In the short time I’d been away, four more had arrived. It never stopped.

At the top of the list was a request from a user called Ambrosia Moondance. No two guesses as to what that would be. Straight to the bottom of the list it went.

The next task was as standard as they came: A cure for cancer.

I opened it and skimmed through. Bowel cancer, advanced. The user was based in mainland China, and was forty-eight years old. He had a teenage son and a wife, both dependents. Managed a local convenience store. Liked to watch compilations of motorcycle stunts, etc, etc.

And the important bit: that he was a nobody. Just some guy living in a cheap city apartment like millions of others, no notable achievements to his name. His death would have no impact on anyone but the people closest to him, and even they would move on in time.

Management didn’t expect us to fulfill every task, because it was impossible. There were exactly 24,219 employees on staff, which I only knew because this number didn’t change very often, and a good twelve thousand of us were on helpdesk. This made for an amazing org chart visualisation, if nothing else. Those twelve thousand people were responsible for fixing millions of daily requests, and that was after whatever automated vetting procedure said requests went through.

The process Providence followed in these situations was clear. Priority went to those who mattered most in the grand scheme of things in the name of good. Famous people, rich people, people who would leave a greater impact after they were gone. Altruists and artists and, above all, obedient believers.

‘Good’, as defined by Providence, was nothing but a global marketing exercise, and a highly successful one. People wanted to believe in absolutes, mortals and gods alike. Heaven and hell, reward and punishment – those dichotomies as most of the world knew them didn’t really exist. But this had never been about acting in humanity’s best interest.

It had always been a culture war from start to finish.

Bowel cancer guy didn’t rate. He just didn’t. After you’d seen a few thousand of these cases and condemned most of them to die through inaction, it was hard not to become inured to it. To slip into that mindset of it being a hopeless and unavoidable outcome, the consequence of long-established corporate procedures so entrenched they were regarded by many to be impossible to change.

The most soul-crushing part was that Providence did have the potential to help the world, if it tried. But that wasn’t the business priority here. First and foremost, it was about keeping the executive suite in power. Threats had to be monitored, quashed and consolidated and they had to stay quashed. That took resources. Everything else came a distant second.

Long before my time, Lucy had been the first to take a stand against it, back when the world was smaller and crueler, and had paid the price. History was not kind to the losers. Others had followed later to similar fates, albeit more obscure. Providence had been something very different then, not the monolithic entity it was today. But it had devoured the competition nonetheless, conducting mergers and acquisitions under what I understood to be alternative definitions of those words.

It was pretty hard to get Lucy to elaborate on his old life, but he wasn’t the kind of person to give up in the face of adversity. Chances were he would have a long-term plan or two brewing away in the background. And maybe it was his influence on me, but so did I.

For now, you could still slip small wins through the cracks. Providence might have been run by a tyrant, but at least he wasn’t a micromanager.

While I’d been reading, Clara had made herself sick on the swivel chair and was emitting a variety of unhappy dizzy noises. Those few people nearby who hadn’t already noticed the presence of a child were starting to catch on.

I put a hand on the back of the chair, bringing it to a halt. “You’re going to help me help someone,” I told her. “He’s a man with cancer. Tell me, how can you make his cancer go away?”

Clara opened her mouth and burped, then kicked her feet. “Tell him to go to a doctor.”

“Congratulations, she isn’t braindead,” said Lucy, making no pretence of having abandoned his responsibilities for the moment.

“There’s no one right answer,” I chided him.

“Some are definitely more right than others,” he replied.

I turned back to Clara. “Let’s arrange a doctor for him, then.” He already had one, according to the ticket, but there was plenty of room for improvement.

Fun with databases, I thought with a sigh, as I tabbed out to the desktop and opened a well-used directory application. Within a few keystrokes I had what I was looking for and instigated a phone call to China.

“This is Executive Assistant Lien Yun-Qi, People’s Clinic of Hangzhou,” a man’s voice responded in Mandarin.

“Hi,” I said in the same language. “Yang Yinzhu calling from Providence.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “I’ll put you through to the General Manager.” Gold star treatment right there. He’d dealt with us before.

Lucy was translating the conversation for Clara, with a few extra embellishments thrown in. “I did not call him a disgrace to his family,” I corrected, while the small girl giggled away, putting the call on mute. “Trying to get something accomplished, here.”

“For someone who claims to be an entertainer, you’re not doing a good job of it,” he said. “Someone has to pick up the slack.”

“Are you telling me,” I paused for effect, “that bringing a child into an office to watch me fill out forms is less than riveting for everyone involved?”

He eyed me. “I’m saying it’s not your usual style. Something’s up.”

“The child?”

“The forms.”

I let the on hold music play out for a few seconds, one of those bland instrumental covers trying its best to hide the fact the original had been about a gangster fight in a nightclub. “There is something,” I admitted at last. “Not the kind of -”

The music stopped and a new voice answered. “Quan Wei speaking. What do you want?”

Much less genial, this one.

“This is Yang Yinzhu from Providence. We have a request.”

“Oh, do you? Well, my assistant will direct you to the appropriate department. Goodbye.”

I could actually hear a splutter of protest in the background as presumably the phone was handed back over.

“We’re not done yet,” I told the assistant, keeping my voice carefully neutral even as I heard Lucy translate it as ‘and then she told him to eat cat food’. “Give him back the phone.”

Faint sounds of argument traveled down the line, and eventually it was back with Wei. “I don’t know who you think you are,” he said, “but no one is above due process. End of story.”

“Even if we were to make a substantial donation to the hospital?” I asked.

There was a pause. “I take it this isn’t a philanthropic offer.”

“Oh my, no,” I said, amused at the thought. “Although it is generous.” More generous than he deserved, after his display of rudeness. He was lucky I wasn’t one of the staff who cared about that sort of thing, because that was the segment of the pie chart encapsulating most of my coworkers.

“How generous? And what do you want for it?”

“I’m thinking five million yuan. And all you have to do is get your team of specialists to treat a particular patient.”

“A pittance,” he stated gruffly.

“Do you want it or not?” I snapped. “Save a few extra people, buy some equipment or line your own pockets, I don’t care. We can always switch from the carrot to the stick, if that’s what you prefer.” I mean, five million yuan was a pittance in the scheme of the amounts he was dealing with, and laughable in the face of what I needed to get my job done, but it was the majority of my daily budget and more than a fair trade for what I was asking for.

Lucifer shrugged and informed Clara I’d said he had a stupid dog. She giggled loudly enough that I had to cover the microphone, lest the People’s Clinic of Hangzhou start thinking of Providence as a bunch of amateur prank callers.

“My assistant will take care of it,” he said, and I heard the phone being passed over again.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” I said out of habit, although I was pretty sure Wei wasn’t even on the line anymore.

Yun-Qi, for his part, was very apologetic. “My most sincere apologies for what just happened,” he said. “He’s an excellent General Manager. He just doesn’t -”

“Believe? That’s understandable. No hard feelings. This time. Now I’ve got some paperwork to send to you and I trust I can leave it with you to get sorted out. All good?”

He didn’t respond immediately. “If you don’t mind me asking, who have I got on the line?”

“You already know that,” I said.

“I know you’re not Yang Yinzhu,” he returned. “Last time I had one of these calls, I had Eris as – ah - representative.”

“Yeesh,” I muttered, before I could help myself. That wouldn’t have gone well.

There was a notable absence of background translation, and I turned my head to watch as Lucy moved his – my - chair closer to the phone to better listen in, with an intent expression.

“Well, aren’t you surprisingly well-informed?” I mused, recovering my composure.

“I might be stepping out of line,” said Yun-Qi. “But may I arrange a meeting with you? In person?”

“I don’t do charity,” I said. “Don’t even bother asking.”

“I’m aware of how Providence operates. This is for purely selfish reasons,” he clarified. “For my own curiosity. I have to know.”

Lucy gestured in my peripheral vision to catch my attention and began using sign language. he signed, punctuating the sentence with a warning embellishment.

“Alright, Mr Curious,” I said down the phone. “Name a location. I’ll be there in one hour’s time, for thirty minutes. No longer.”

Lucy put the flat of his palm to his forehead.

I put the phone on mute for a second while I copied down the address. “This actually gets interesting and you expect me to bow out?”

“No, I expect you’ll dive right into the middle of it,” he replied. “The problem is, so does he. And he got that accurate a read on you in less than two minutes, over the phone.”

“We’re done here,” I said, taking the phone back off mute. “See you in an hour.”