「Watery Abyss」
The way the train moves, it seems the water of the sea all around it is standing still. Blurry, but still.
It's how fast the train glides over the water. All the same the journey takes an hour out of her long life. At four hundred miles an hour, if the train were to hit a wave, it would disintegrate. The passengers would not quite disintegrate. That would not save them.
The floor shudders. Nen stretches back and rests her head on a foam pillow. It's a new pillow.
The previous one was stolen. A man came up and grabbed it and ran.
(He must've thought it had connecting fibers in it. — Leave it to Californians to weave computers, when they were small enough, into sweaters and pillows. — She really had none of these things, these toys. They weren't things she could afford.)
The train groans. Meanwhile she tries to inch away from the large man sitting next to her. Sitting next to her in a philosophical sense. — He fills up three seats.
It's a long ride, and he looked like the kind of person who'd spill his coffee.
He spilled his coffee.
He spilled it on himself, and on her. He spilled it on the floor.
The bot on the train wiped the coffee off the floor.
Nen has to change clothes, however. Coffee is not part of her uniform.
Yes, yes, her job has a uniform.
Jobs like that are common. Common jobs for common people. People like her.
Light drizzle.
Wind swept beaches. Islands. Empty roads. Burnt bridges.
The acrid smell of smoke; the sight of melted asphalt.
Ditches full of . . .
She looks away. Then she takes a running jump
Nen lands on the other side.
In the distance, platforms rise out if the sea. Waves beat against cultured stone and grown metal.
Trains like the one she rode —
Except they're purple. Purple.
The renderer was still glitched.
Every part of every thing in the world was its own actor, but they were sometimes calling the wrong addresses for their textures. That meant the encryption and decryption to convert addresses between systems was fucked. Which mean the team was fucked.
Each thing in the work consisted of parts running on their own computers. Different fibers. If they pushed on the wrong addresses, they got back exceptions.
The team would not be able to finish in time.
She takes off of the vest, which unwraps its spines from her back.
The scene fades from her vision.
The team was fucked. (It was fucked from day one, when the manager hired them all based on how they looked in the uniforms, compliance with the transparent workplace directive.)
The people on the streets of the island city could walk by and watch the team work on their projects. Why anybody should like to see people sitting pretty at desks clearly never crossed the minds of the managers. The managers were busy managing each other.
She'd never studied encryption. There was nothing she could do to help.
The chairs were comfy here. It was one reason why she agreed to the uniforms — agreed to work here.
She sits down, knowing millions of stranger going to lunch might see her face, the bored yet tense face of a wage slave, and let the others argue.
Her cup is empty. She looks at it. No need to rise. She frowns. The cup fills.
Brandy is excellent in the morning. Her breath didn't smell.
She did what she could. No less, no more. Funny story.
Nen has controlled reality for seven thousand years — although in minor aspects.
Yet in the same way that an unorganized mass of men are not an army, while the chaos of creation creates the building blocks out of which others build, it is the others that build. It those others that decide what shall exist.
Nen was not one of those others. Even among the Gods of the past she was a commoner. Everything is created by the commoner. Yet the one who tells the commoner what to do decides what shall happen, and receives most of the credit for things. History has always been like that. Bureaucracy has always been like that. The same for the celestial bureaucracy.
She was the source of things, little by little, but it's not the cow that gets accolades for its meat. It's the chef, and the restaurant.
The information economy didn't improve her social position. What value has the will that may control the real when all that is worth the favors of others is the virtual?
``Write a story about a deity doing something mundane and preferably struggling with it. In other words: write a story about the daily struggles of deities in the modern world.''(@eriesunkite , @svashta)
〈 Constrainedwriting Challenge〉
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I usually write stories which are 10,000–25,000 words ... 40–100 pages.
ABOUT ME
I'm a scientist who writes fantasy and science fiction under various names.
The magazines which I most recommend are: Compelling Science Fiction, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the Writers of the Future.
WISE GUYS — practical thinking
FISHING — thinking about tools and technology
TEA TIME — philosophy
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©2017 tibra. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This is a work of fiction. Events, names, places, characters are either imagined or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real events or persons or places is coincidental . . . . Illustrations, Images: tibra.