I’d been to many places in my life, some of which had been up there on the strangeness scale. Despite this, I hadn’t considered I might one day find myself hitchhiking into project management software.

I’d thought it might be akin to the void, that inevitable hole of despair the dead called home. Instead, my first impression was of choices. Paths that split and forked one after another, each with their own conditions attached.

My sense of myself told me I’d become an impossibly tiny set of particles flowing within a field of fixed objects. Currently spread out too far and wide. I was hurtling past whole sets of forks, one after another, at what felt like a parallel angle to a dwindling central funnel. Smaller forks extended from it like spider legs, in turn with their own branches splintering out into more distant divides.

Things passed through them, travelling faster than I was. I could feel them, or some of them, jetting past as though sucked through a straw. Every so often, they hit something my mind could only interpret as a checkpoint, asking ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and assigning a new path based on the answer. Choices.

Space didn’t exist in here. Not in the usual sense. I was inside the software but somehow outside the system. Observer, not participant. The vastness of it spread out in front of, behind and around me; a huge spidery thing tapering away from its origins like arteries and veins. Or roots.

One other feature shared the space with us: a single checkpoint, disconnected from the others. It sat almost on top of us. I didn’t have to reach far to feel its choice presented clearly in my mind: leave or stay. An easy enough exit, once we found our way back to it.

Assuming we could find our way back to it.

It lasted only a moment. The red of the raidho rune pulsed somewhere near me, shining out to my senses in a wave blanketing everything nearby. It washed outwards and through me, vying for control for a split second. And then I was back in something recognisably human again, falling for real with a bank of what looked suspiciously like server racks rocketing up towards me.

Gia tumbled head-first next to me. I coiled into bird form and grabbed at her collar before our newest asset became paste on some Helpdesk patsy’s to-do list.

It proved to be needless. I glanced up and found Mayari hovering above us arresting our descent, no passenger in Gia’s head, but present in her own right. I let go of Gia and shifted back to human as we were gently deposited on top of a block of winking blue lights. Definitely made up of server racks.

The intricate network I’d sensed earlier seemed more distant than my earlier glimpse had suggested. I could see it – you couldn’t miss it – stretching infinitely high above and below us some few hundred metres away, as far as measurements meant anything here. From here, it looked less like a root system and more like a diagram of constellations, lines connecting the spaces between stars. Well, if the lines had been made up of glass tubing and the stars of confused snow globes. The tickets shuttling between them resembled confetti vomit, silver and paper-like, though they moved too fast for me to get a good look.

We’d been dumped in a vast area quiet of activity. If Providence’s task manager was a house, this was the gap between the walls, shared only by cockroaches and insulation batts. I suspected the suspended rack we stood on was something like the latter; pockets of inert data here and there dumped in from who-knew-where and taking up occasional dead space. I hoped we wouldn’t encounter the former.

A series of light clunks sounded as Gia lowered herself to a crouch nearby, her shoes and fingers rapping on the metal. She had her hair back again, the tiara nowhere to be seen. “Oh,” she groaned, as Mayari landed easily beside her. The rune palm flashed as she clutched onto the equipment. “Tell me there’s something holding us up, and we’re not as suspended in mid-air as we seem.”

“I’ve got you,” Mayari assured her, though her expression was less certain. Their voices sounded oddly disminished against the enormous chamber. “What happened here? I’m not meant to be here in person. Let alone with a body.” She stared at me. “And you’re meant to be in visitation. What’s going on?”

“I’m still in visitation mode,” I replied, walking across the frame between the banks of servers. Their lights blinked back at me. I stopped when I felt myself phasing back to the penthouse. “That hasn’t changed. As to how you can see me,” I added with a glance at Gia, recalling how the rune had flared on arrival, “I’m not the one you should be asking.”

Gia was still rising to her feet. “Me? I didn’t –”

I waited as she broke off.

“I mean, I felt something. I don’t understand. Isn’t this what’s meant to happen?”

Mayari raised her eyebrows at the woman. “If you got this far in your work and think this is how software functions, I’m going to have to have a chat with Lucifer about how he arranges his outsourcing.”

I cleared my throat. “If it helps, we’re not as human as we seem.”

I could feel it. Part of me, the dominant part, was made of familiar flesh and bone. But underneath that, I could still sense being the string of particles I’d glimpsed earlier. When I moved, I did it in both forms; they felt one and the same. It could only work if the space they moved through also existed in similar multiple states, even if I couldn’t sense them both directly.

“I’d guess we’re being affected by some kind of filter,” I continued, gesturing around at the landscape resembling a child’s sculpture of confused pipe cleaners. “Like an illusion, but real.”

Mayari frowned. She stared down at the servers below her feet and tapped one with the tip of her shoe. A hollow metallic sound rang out. “A complete local reality shift? Inside the task manager, we don’t know how this will affect the system, or who will notice. If Djehuti picks up on it –”

“I don’t think anything’s truly changed,” I mused, though I’d had the same thought. I swished a hand through the air, feeling particles flow through otherwise empty fixtures. “But as I said…” The hand came to a halt, palm up in Gia’s direction.

The analyst barked out a small laugh. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“No shame in that,” Mayari agreed. “Provided one admits it. In any case, this has nothing to do with pathfinding skills.”

“It does, though,” said Gia, looking down and to the side. She’d been listening to the exchange.

I raised my arms in the universal gesture for ‘I told you so’.

“I panicked,” the new demon admitted. “I felt –” Her mouth worked, struggling for words, and eventually she ended it with a shake of her head. “I just wanted to understand what was happening, and something gave, for lack of a better term. It felt like solving a puzzle. The setting just had to be arranged into the right configuration to view the solution.” She stared up at the vista ahead of her, less unsteady on her feet.

Mayari raised a hand to her chin, a strange look on her face. “A demon shouldn’t be this powerful. Not even a lord.”

I gave her a knowing look. This was up there on the scale of abstraction. “Have you seen Tru in action? It’s absurd. And Grace has a full-blown creation ability.” I held my thumb and forefinger together a hair’s breadth apart. “They’re this close to being new gods. Strong ones.”

“Shit. Is that what Lucifer’s been working on all these years? I thought he put that idea behind him with the Antichrist.”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Their emergence was rather unplanned. If Odin can be believed, it’s also a new branch of magic.”

“You’re telling me,” the goddess responded, looking troubled. “It worries me a miracle this significant was kicked off by accident. None of your other recruits had this problem, which indicates it could be the exposure sickness hitting. Early stages, not too severe, probably still only affecting things she doesn’t already know how to control. If so, it’ll only get worse. We can’t let it get out of hand.” Her head tilted back, up towards where we’d fallen from. High above, the lower rim of a wide glass tube peered back at us, though no tickets were shooting through it. From this angle, I could see the tube extended into a literal computer monitor the size of the side of a warehouse. Interesting.

“The cure should fix that,” Gia stated. “Right?”

“Yes, though I’m not sure how much time we have. We’d best hurry. Figure out where we are, and how to get to Yggdrasil from it.”

I recalled the funnel-like structure I’d glimpsed initially. It was less obvious from human eyes, but I thought the tubes became slightly fatter high above our heads, tapering narrower under our feet. “We’re in some kind of delirious tree diagram,” I said. “Not the tree, obviously.” Though the similarity made me curious.

“Then common sense would put its administration at the source point,” Mayari surmised in agreement. “That’s one solid plan to test. But then what about Yggdrasil?”

Good question. If it was out there, I hadn’t noticed it. But so much information had bombarded me in those initial moments that I could have easily missed it.

We wouldn’t need assistance to find the source of the data flow – all we had to do was head upstream. Finding the exit again would be a different matter – Mayari and I weren’t fully present and could leave at will, but Gia risked becoming another Canciana, trapped in the system with no body alive to come back to. Speaking of, the former Xiānfēng leader would likely still be in here somewhere, along with the other cultists to fail in their pilgrimages.

We didn’t have time to look for them.

“It’s past the source,” said Gia, answering the question for me as she pointed upwards. “We have to go there anyway. When I was speaking with Yun-Qi, he described Yggdrasil as the bedrock.”

“It’s a bedrock,” I clarified, following the finger’s trajectory. “Yun-Qi’s reciting from legends. Yggdrasil is supposed to be the source of all realms, not task managers, and for all anyone’s actually seen of it it might as well be a territorial possum. We don’t know the facts.”

“You’re supposed to be legends,” Gia pointed out.

“And we’re what you expected?”

Gia shook her head. “It’s not just that conversation. I can tell, somehow. I’m sorry for changing this place; I didn’t mean to. But it worked. I know that’s where I need to go.”

I stared out at the streams of objects flowing down through the pipes, data made physical, and could see why Xiānfēng hadn’t been able to make it to Yggdrasil. To reach it, they’d be pushing against a linear flow, currents allowing travel in only one direction. Climbing up inside the pipes would be like treading water – if we weren’t knocked back down. And while Xiānfēng’s exit had dumped us outside the whole system, there was still a current. In my current form, it felt like gravity. When I focused on the other, underlying aspect of myself, however, I felt it as an inability to traverse dead space without being drawn inexorably towards some unknown end region. The lost Xiānfēngites had probably ended up there.

But they hadn’t had the benefit of divine assistance. Or a familiar aspect overlaid on the landscape. It was a use of raidho I hadn’t considered; the rune could kick off transformative journeys as well as literal. But it might also have been Lucy’s influence showing. As the demon lord Envy, it wasn’t unfeasible Gia could alter – if not entirely change – reality to highlight a particular abstract focus.

Mayari glanced across at me. “I don’t have a better idea. You two should make a head start. I’ll convene with Xiānfēng and see how badly this transformation affected the task system. Try to avoid using your powers again if you can help it.”

“I didn’t mean to the first time!”

“I know. That’s the problem.”

“Actually,” I added, “I’ll do the same. From the other angle.”

Not waiting for permission, I let myself fade, the gaudy world of the task manager dropping out in favour of the familiar lines of Tru’s penthouse in subtle greys and creams. The low hum of a heater thrummed in the background, along with many other appliances my ears had been picking up for some time.

My housemate sat opposite me on the sofa, head resting on one elbow and knees apart. He looked immensely bored, which was the best mood I’d ever seen him in. His dark hair was atypically unstyled, tousled between his fingertips, and his irises glinted the slightest shade of purple matching the more obvious rune on his palm.

I hefted the spear still in my grip, and the demon snapped to the kind of attention usually reserved by people facing the disturbance of many angry townsfolk with pitchforks. Not that I’d know anything about that.

“Relax, I’m just checking my phone,” I said, manifesting the object in question inside a pocket. A few quick swipes and I had a version of the Helpdesk task manager open. Odin’s version, in fact, with full access to every ticket ever created. It didn’t give me the back-end functionality from here, but if anything were to go visibly wrong on the front-end, I’d be able to see it.

At first glance, nothing appeared out of the ordinary. I gave it a few more seconds, then tossed the phone to Tru, who caught it with a startled expression. “New job for you.”

“Yeah?”

“Keep an eye on my emails.”

His back deflated, the attention rushing out of him. “Oh.”

In fairness, the kinds of communications delivered to the Chief Information Officer were far more interesting than the standard offerings on Helpdesk. I’d had access barely a day and already seen everything from what to do about the contingent of distressed Hungarians camped out in the foyer, to clues on where to find Floor C, to potentially using black holes as an excuse to cover up a new research prototype’s accidental obliteration of a distant galaxy.

“Hey,” I said. “This could be the defining moment determining the outcome of the upcoming conflict. If anything comes in about the task system, let me know immediately. Got it?”

He sighed. The chin went back on the elbow, which went back on the knee. “Got it.”

“And don’t read any tickets unless you want to go insane and have your powers malfunction.”

My housemate sighed again.