Immortal timelines are weird. Sometimes they flow the same as mortal timelines, with things happening hours and days at a time. Then sometimes, you get hired and the place you work at just sort of lets you do your own thing for a couple of years, or even entire decades, with only a few video calls to the office in-between.
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When Jack and I agreed to partner up with the Division of Cosmic Artifice, we didn’t know exactly what to expect. Fortunately, the first couple of weeks of our working with/for the Division seemed to be pretty chill. We barely did anything that I’d call work. Or rather, we barely did anything that I probably wouldn’t have been doing had I not been working for the Division. The only new thing Jack and I had to do was learn the scripting language that the Division came up with the simplify their coding efforts, and that barely took an afternoon, since Jack was always pretty damn smart, and I was an eidolon predisposed towards the endless and continual accumulation of knowledge.
Jack and I didn’t have to actually report to the Division’s office in the Shattered Heavens. It turned out that most of the Division’s non-programmer workers, and many of the programmers, generally either worked elsewhere on their project sites, or within their own workspaces in the various other realities. I “did” end up having to add a bunch of their drones and AIs to my workforce though. However, the drones and AIs of the “Division-Fleet” were apparently all subordinates of Jack and me now, so it wasn’t too much of an issue to have them around. The sapient drones and AIs actually gave a fair amount of good advice, and generally knew what I intended before my own autonomous constructs could figure out how to properly follow my instructions.
At first, this seemed like an amount crazy amount of trust for a group like them to be giving, but as I worked with them more, Jack and I realized that A) they seemed to know a lot more about us than we thought implying a more an even more thorough vetting than we’d expected, and B) there was so much work that needed to be done that anyone who managed to join them while looking for petty benefits would likely quit simply because there were a thousand easier ways to do whatever it is that one was hoping to do, than by joining the division. Finally, C) There were often times that I'd feel a presence that gave me a sense that we were never completely without supervision.
Strangely enough, the Empty-Archive didn’t have all that much information on the Division itself, despite how old the group was, and how wide touching their actions were, there was comparatively little data available regarding the group’s activities, nature, and the identity of its members. Yet, from what I’d “read” regarding the House of Antipodes that served as the Division’s parent group, there were likely some heavy-hitters in the planes above this one, that were keeping an eye on things down here.
Beings that would likely clue the division into any dirty business that its employers and partners might be up to. After all, we were all immortals here. There was none of that “mortals need to be able to choose” business for bad actors to rely on. Just the swift fist, of several extremely nigh-omnipotent beings if you fucked around.
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“Oh...So, pretty,” said Jack. Her blue-gray eyes wide and shining
“Like countless nests for countless colonies being born all at once,” said Kalpana. Her voice breathless.
“Mhm…” I said. Not sure what to add to the conversation, but feeling like it’d somehow be wrong to
Jack, Kalpana, and I sat and watched the birth of a whole new branch of servers. They started as nothing but flowing numbers in the foundational language of the cosmos. However, as more and more energy was fed into the process the data-construct started to look a lot like a sea of stars. Twinkling brightly in the beige black darkness that was the empty developer-workspace.
These new servers would host the consciousness of countless new users for the Empty-Dream. This included trillions of new users of the Empty-Network. The sizable imbalance between new users of the Empty-Dream and new-users of the Empty-Network was because the Division had its own communication network and user interface and only a few of the worlds of the universe we’d been assigned had a need for our network.
Also, honestly speaking the DCA’s network was just plain better. I actually ended up altering and upgrading the Empty-network’s own code based on what I saw in the functionality and source code for some of the Division’s programs. Especially, when it came to stability, security, and ease of use.
I’d been doing what I’ve been doing for somewhere between thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. The division had been doing what it had been doing for longer than there had been stars in our slice of the cosmos. It was only natural that they’d have some tricks that I didn’t know about, even with the Empty-Archive speeding up my skill growth and granting me far more experience than I had any right to have.
After, watching the birth of what was basically a whole new reality, made us all emotional and I ended up embracing the two ladies at my side in my excitement.
“Oh...Uh...S-, sorry,” I said.
As soon as I realized what I was doing, I quickly let Kalpana go and awkwardly apologized.
“No...It’s uh...It’s fine. I got a little excited too,” said Kalpana. Blushing. Jack then turned around and gave Kalpana and me a look. Shaking her head.
“Peh, look at you two...Blushing so much over a little hug. You two really need to pick up the pace a little...I mean...I’m not trying to rush you guys...But the sooner you make Kal a proper wife, the sooner Kal and I can work on choosing the next wives for you...and the sooner we can cement the clan’s establishment and start thinking about kids,” said Jack.
“...!”
“...!”
Neither Kalpana, nor I, had anything to say about that. On one hand, I wasn’t so sure I liked how very sure Jack was about how the rest of our lives would go. On the other hand, Kal and I were already pretty serious. Especially after she’d returned from the Empty-Dream after ascending and becoming an immortal.
By this point, we’d been going pretty steady for a couple of years now, and things were going pretty well in the relationship department. I could easily see a real nice future for the three of us. So, it’s not like I could say Kal and I weren’t going to end up together. Thus I could only end things with a bit of weak-sauce defiance.
“Meh...We’ll get there when we get there. Stop pushing” Sticking my tongue out at Jack, and giving Kal another more confident, more intimate, embrace as I said so.
