Free Mythos by Kelly McCullough Page B

wasn’t easy,” he said, “but if you’re willing to let your imagination of what a device should be define your specs instead of letting the limitations of current design straitjacket you, it’s amazing what you can accomplish. Never build for the engineers; always build for the end user.”
    Melchior had drifted over to stand by my elbow and stare at the device. “It’s gorgeous, but it’s soulless.”
    “What do you mean?” asked Loki, obviously stung.
    “It’s not a person, just a thing with no AI inside,” replied Melchior.
    “And what is artificial intelligence but another pile of gorgeous lies?” sneered Loki.
    “You might be surprised,” Melchior replied, his tone mild.
    Loki sniffed dismissively, and Melchior went back to looking at the microcomputer, finally saying, “Doesn’t it get distracting, having it light up from inside like that?”
    “Only if you want it to.” Loki tapped the inner surface of the foot again.
    This time I was close enough to see the LCD display embedded there. He tapped a lightbulb icon, and the device went dark, though the projections remained. I noticed another icon, a circle with three smaller circles within, one red, one green, one blue. The green was lit up, so I tapped the blue. Instantly the color of the projected keyboard shifted from emerald to cobalt.
    “So, why did you mention this Zeus?” asked Loki as I pulled up some sort of first-person shooter game. “You’re not going to try to convince me you’re from another world with different gods, are you?”
    “Nope.” I ran my finger around the edge of a circle of blue light that had come up beside the projected keyboard when the game started, and the view on the screen rotated to match the gesture—a virtual trackball. “I’m not going to try to convince you of anything. What you want to believe is entirely up to you.”
    “Actually, it’s not,” said Loki, and something about his tone made me stop playing with the microcomputer and look him in the eyes. “Wanting to believe something and actually believing it are not at all the same thing. Take, for example, the idea of you being from outside the ’gard-game completely.
    “I’d really love to believe that, because it would mean the universe isn’t as I have always understood it to be and that things don’t necessarily have to go the way it’s been foretold they will.” He rubbed a point between his eyes as though in anticipation of some great pain. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe any of that. At the moment, I believe that you are the result of some game of Odin’s, a scheme to entrap me, perhaps. What do you say to that?”
    “Here.” I picked up the microcomputer and flipped it closed, handing it to him. “You’ll be wanting to take this with you when you go.”
    “Are you throwing me out?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous.
    “No.”
    “Then what makes you think I’m leaving?”
    “You’ve called both Melchior and me liars in the last five minutes, and you claim to believe we’re only here to trap you. What earthly reason could you have for staying?”
    “Maybe I intend to force the truth out of you,” said Loki.
    “I don’t think that would be wise,” said Tisiphone, though she didn’t drop her camouflage.
    Loki turned toward her voice and looked over his glasses.
    Then he nodded. “Perhaps you’re right, my dear. Perhaps you’re right.”
    He tucked the microcomputer into its sheath, nodded, and stepped into the faerie ring, vanishing. I hurried to the window to see whether he would come out in the bottle cap.
    “Well?” asked Melchior.
    “Nothing.”
    I returned to the ring and placed my hand inside, feeling for the network. In just the time it had taken me to cross the room and come back, a dozen more rings had been added to the network, though which of them he’d exited through I couldn’t tell. As I stood up, Tisiphone faded into view.
    “Interesting,” she said. “Dangerous, too. I couldn’t