Fantastic Metropolis

“In retrospect,” Epimetheus began, thoughtfully steepling his fingers, his face bleached by the monitor’s antiseptic glow, before he was interrupted.

“Would you be so kind as to just shut up, O Brother?”

Epimetheus resumed his vigorous clacking on the keyboard. It sounded like a Fred Astaire tap number, providing Fred Astaire were cooked up on crystal meth at the time. Prometheus meanwhile hunted and pecked for his keys like, well, like an eagle after a Titan’s liver, of course.

“Prometheus, don’t be cross.”

Prometheus squeezed his temples and rubbed at his eyes. Eventually, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore, and he’d gouge them from their sockets or he’d smush them back against his skull, and the vitreous humor would ooze down his fingers. Out, vile jelly! However it would finally happen, it would finally happen. It would be the same as always. It would be very Greek.

“I’m sorry. In retrospect what, O Brother?”

Epimetheus spun in his multi-adjustable, ergonomic swivel chair so he could directly face his cubicle-mate.

“I was just going to say that, you know, in retrospect maybe it was somewhat foolish to put all our eggs in the client-server basket. When it comes to keeping the world running, all that brute batch processing and all, there’s really no substitute for the Big Iron. You really do need the mainframes. It probably would’ve been a good idea all along to go ahead and remediate them. You know, just in case we didn’t get capable client-server technologies in place in time.” He hesitated. “Like we didn’t.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

A winged sandal icon briefly flashed on each of their screens, and millisecond-staggered beeps emanated from their terminals sounding like the bleating of a sheep. Prometheus blanched.

“I wonder who that could be,” mused Epimetheus.

“Brother, it’s nearing midnight Olympus Standard Time, New Year’s Eve—the eve of the millennium—and the mainframes that run our reality have yet to be certified compliant. Whom do you suppose it might be?”

Epimetheus opened up the email and read aloud:

Forever shall the intolerable present grind you down.—Z

Prometheus slammed his fist down suddenly on his keyboard. “Would it be too much? Is it too much to ask for those imbeciles up top to exercise a little vision and get some fucking utilities around here? Some change management tools, or FILEAID at least!”

Epimetheus nodded sympathetically as he typed. Prometheus tithed an ironic smile in response and knuckled his tear ducts. Throughout his brother’s many millennia of inching ever so slowly but inevitably towards the nook of corporate middle management, the sympathetic nod had served him best. That and the ability to recognize vision after the fact.

“So, are we going to make it? Will we meet the deadline? We have to meet the deadline, Prometheus. You remember the ire of the Olympians, don’t you?”

Prometheus shackled Epimetheus with his gaze.

“No, O Brother, we are not going to meet the deadline. And yes: I, perhaps better than all others, remember the ire of the Olympians.”

“But… the readiness disclosure to the mortals. The pantheon certified that we don’t have any non-compliant code running in the production environment. We’re not going to run it out of test, are we? I don’t think that’ll go over very well.”

Prometheus pushed at his eyes with the palms of his hands.

“Epimetheus, O Brother, you nimrod… There’s only one environment! These machines make reality. They run everything. The only option is—and this is the only option there has been all along—to fully remediate. So no, there’s no chance, not in all Hades’ dark kingdom, that we’ll be ready by midnight. Once the system clock rolls over, any and all of existence is suspect.”

Epimetheus stopped typing. “So, what are we going to do?”

“Do? We’re going to shut down.”

“Shut down. As in the end of the show, close the curtain, last one out unplug the coffee maker and turn off the lights. That kind of shut down?”

Prometheus nodded. His brother looked suddenly dazed.

“So the mortal soothsayers were right. This is it. It really is the end of the world.”

Silence scolded them while Epimetheus considered his own alarming revelation. Then his brow furrowed. “But Prometheus, those systems run me, too. And the gods. And, well, everything.”

“In retrospect,” Prometheus said wryly, “yes, I suppose they do.”

Epimetheus paled. “Brother, I don’t want it to end. I don’t want to end.”

“Relax, O Brother, I have taken measures.”

Epimetheus brightened. “A contingency plan?”

“Of sorts, yes. As it happens, I backfill the databases with production data every night. Last night I loaded yesterday’s data. We will lose today, but tomorrow we shall have it to do over again. The mortals will not notice. The gods will not notice. For that matter, you will not notice either, my brother. I alone will be aware. I am right now rolling back the system clock. Momentarily I will power down the mainframe. And then tomorrow morning, when I IPL the Host, today will run once more. I have you backed up as of yesterday. You won’t even suspect.”

“Oh, Prometheus, what a relief! For a moment, well… for a moment I thought we were all in a lot of trouble.”

“Fortunately, you are not. I am ready to begin the power-down, O Brother. Be ever so good and go into the other room to watch the mainframe for me, just in case.”

“In case?”

“In case there are any problems.”

Epimetheus’ jaw dropped and began to quiver as though bouncing on a string.

“There won’t be,” Prometheus reassured him. “Now go. We haven’t much time.”

Epimetheus leapt to his feet and hurried from the cubicle. Prometheus watched him go with some relief. No matter how often it happened, it was never easy to see somebody’s reality vanish right in front of you. Epimetheus poked his head back around the concrete-gray divider.

“So, it’ll be like it’s always been. You and me, and everything else. Nothing will change, right?”

Prometheus smiled wearily at him. “Nothing always changes, Epimetheus. It always does. Now hurry.”

Epimetheus’ footfalls faded down the corridor, and, satisfied, Prometheus began bringing down each of reality’s systems with practiced ease. The theogonies first, of course - all the gods and lesser powers. It hadn’t taken much foresight to figure that one out. Then the noetic systems - the politics, the aesthetics, the epistemics. Under the working assumption that what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Finally he turned to the core applications, hoary code, older even than any of the Olympians, ancient when Prometheus himself was young and rambunctious and free - the physics, elegant and intricate, the ideal Form to which Hephaestus’ every act of creation aspired; and the metaphysics, the nebulous urstoff of reality, intolerable spaghetti-code all of it, tangled and convoluted, which made even his great mind bend in knots and ache. He shut them all down. They were mere instructions then, idle, useless as a recipe sans ingredients.

He sat there in the near quiet, the emanations of his terminal humming like tinnitus in his ears. He looked at Epimetheus’ screen. His brother had failed to logoff before leaving. With a longsuffering huff, Prometheus reached over and rattled the mouse, dispelling the endlessly wandering screensaver of Minos’ labyrinth. On the desktop was an open window, the word processor from the Athena suite. As he prepared to close the program and logoff, the document arrested his attention. It was a memo, TO: Zeus, FROM: Epimetheus, RE: Prometheus’ Performance Appraisal.

Prometheus cupped his chin in his hands, and his stoic expression slowly eroded as he read his brother’s evaluation. Tears began to dribble down his face, little rivers flowing through the wrinkled canyons of emotion they’d carved out over time. Prometheus has tremendous vision, his brother indicated at the end of the memo. I have every confidence in his wisdom and his abilities. He sees things in full detail the rest of us see only in dim outline, if at all. He will see us through this moment of crisis, too.

Prometheus’ tears flowed freely, and his hands crept up to conceal his grief from the empty universe. His fingers pushed at his eyes, as if to stem the flow like plugging a leak in a dyke. But the tears crept through, the moist salinity smearing on his palms, and he continued to press harder and harder, amidst strangled noises of sorrow and despair, until, finally, the Titan wept out his vitreous humor as well.

He reached out blindly, then, feeling down his leg to the shackle and the attached adamantine chain. He stood up and walked from the cube, pulling the chain through his hands and following its length down the empty corridors to its end, where it was anchored into the mainframe’s side like the tentacle-appendage of some great mechanical beast. He pawed the metal’s cold surface until he found the protrusion. And then he pressed the switch, and with an innocuous click the universe turned off—even Prometheus’ vast and efficient corporate habitat, anything’s last lingering vestige.

A cold wind howled about him. He was chained to a lofty mountain eerie, suspended high over the void. Above him, invisible to his destroyed eyes, small orbs of light smoldered in the black heavens. Once, long ago, too long to reckon, he had reached up and snared one of the spheres, pried it apart, discerned its mystery, and taught its secret to man. A secret to burn back the cold and the loneliness. A secret to breathe life into the hearts of magnificent machines. A secret whose most miniature sparks would dance through tiny, lifeless brains, impossibly small yet vast as cities, giving birth to entire universes. A secret to light the darkness.

He stood there a moment, hesitating in the belly of forever, before he reached down and pressed the switch again and nothing changed once more.