Free Mythos by Kelly McCullough Page A

all the fun and made some kind of mistake in the execution, but no one in Vanaheim seems to have heard of you either—at least no one is talking. But what I really keep coming back to are the eyes. They’re not right for any answer that makes sense. That means they must be right for an answer that doesn’t make sense. I haven’t decided what the question is just yet, but it definitely involves the idea that you’re not from around here. What do you say to that?”
    “Would you believe Schenectady?”
    He looked over his glasses at me again, glaring, and I held up a hand.
    “Sorry. Nervous knee-jerk reflex,” I said.
    “Drop the ‘knee,’ and you’re closer to the truth,” said Melchior.
    I ignored him and tried to decide what to tell Loki. I didn’t know what he meant by ’gard-game, or any of the other local pantheonic jargon, though Asgard sounded distinctly familiar. I was really wishing I’d paid better attention to whatever my teacher had said on the subject way back when. As far as gods and mythology went, it had ever and always been Greek to me . I just wasn’t equipped to deal with the present situation. Maybe if I became an atheist and pretended none of them existed . . . Naw, it’d never work. It’s really hard to disbelieve your family out of existence, however nice it might sound from time to time.
    I still didn’t know what to tell Loki—too many variables—so I punted. “What do you know about multiple-world theory and quantum mechanics?”
    “The idea that for every decision the world splits and goes both ways? Young’s double slit experiment on a macro scale? All that stuff? It’s very pretty bullshit . . . unfortunately. The only worlds are the nine.” He counted, ticking them off on his fingers. “Asgard, Vanaheim, Alfheim, Midgard, Jotunheim, Nidavellir, Svartalfheim, Niflheim, and Muspell; and Odin ultimately controls them all through MimirSoft, damn his monopolist soul to eternal torment.”
    Nine named worlds? MimirSoft? The more I learned, the more alien this place sounded. Perhaps another tack.
    “Does the name Zeus ring any bells for you?” I asked.
    Loki shook his head, though he got a tip-of-the-tongue look. “Spell that?” he asked after a moment.
    “Z-E-U-S. Pretty much like it sounds,” I replied.
    “Hmm.”
    He pulled a featureless slice of what looked like cobalt blue glass from a slender holster on his belt. It was about four inches by two, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick. With a flick of the wrist like you might use on a cell phone, he opened it into a / shape and set it on the end table. A tap on the inner surface of the foot caused the device to light up and project a keyboard made of green light onto the table. A tap on the upper angle produced a shockingly bright rectangle of light on the wall behind the table—a full-color computer desktop.
    Melchior whistled. “That’s impressive.”
    Loki grinned. “A little nicer than one of MimirSoft’s beige boxes, isn’t it?”
    He reached out and touched a tiny spy icon on the bottom right side of the projected screen. A search field opened in response, and he typed Z E U S on his keyboard of green light.
    The results were immediate: The king of the mythological gods of ancient Greece. Primarily a sky deity . . . etc. I barely noticed.
    “How do you get it to act like a touch screen?” I moved to get a closer look at the projection on the wall.
    Loki grinned, showing a bit of the fox. “Laser motion detector and range finder, same as the keyboard. Want to try it out?” He slid out of his chair.
    “Uh-huh.” I was mesmerized. “What’s the battery life like?” I started opening windows and looking for application icons.
    “Pretty much infinite. It runs off a chaos tap.”
    I stopped dead. “How did you get that into something this small?” Though he hadn’t said anything about being the designer, the proprietary way he talked about the thing told me all I needed to know on that score.
    “It