I’m a Genie in a Bottle

For the first time in recent memory, I was grateful that I had worked a technology job before I died. There were many lessons that I couldn’t transfer to this new world, but at that moment, I felt no limit to the gratitude towards the forty year old salaryman who taught me the importance of version control.

Within moments of seeing my horrific mistake laid before me, the user interface swarming with illegible swerves and hieroglyphics, I took the design offline and repopulated Vivian’s interface with the old version that I had documented and archived for this specific purpose.

“Oh,” Vivian said aloud, “It looks like it’s back to normal again? I wonder what that was all about.”

I wondered the exact same question. Luckily, before Vivian could reflect on what she had seen, her father returned with their butler in tow.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” John said, “I wanted Cyrus to be around for this.”

I retreated from their conversation to investigate the bug. I pulled open the test interface that I had built and found that it looked exactly as I wanted it to look, with words and sentences that I could actually read. The problem was, this wasn’t what Vivian and I had seen in the live version of the interface.

In the depths of my digital cavern, I stared long and hard at the edits I had designed. I proofread the words I had written and reviewed the programming behind every widget and line. But I knew before I even began that this investigation would prove useless. None of these items could possibly explain the existence of those haphazard symbols.

Moments later, I returned to John Greymoor’s private office clueless and defeated.

“You think it’s weapons then?” Vivian’s father directed that question at Cyrus, “To who?”

“I don’t know,” Cyrus shook his head, “But the Astral Viscount has had military contacts for years. Siding with the hawks now seems unexpected, but really it’s a profitable enterprise for him.”

“If we go to war with the rebels, Morovia will be one of the few ports along the coast with an imperial fleet stationed in the harbor,” Vivian explained, “Who would expect a profiteer to smuggle weapons through an imperial port?”

“People can expect the unexpected, but if the Viscount is depositing gold into the town, maybe he already has his mind set on which officials he intends to bribe into silence.”

“I concur with Cyrus, father.”

“Thank you, both of you,” John nodded, “Let me take in the implications of this, but surely this is another point that needs to be brought up to the imperial court before the votes are cast. Let’s touch upon this later.”

“Father, if you don’t mind,” Vivian snatched yet another book off the shelves, “I’ll be returning this to you in a week.”

“Yes, yes, of course, Vivian,” John waved her away.

Vivian left John and Cyrus behind with her new book clutched between her arms. I listened to her hum a pleasant tune as she strode down the halls.

It was getting late that evening. The twilight skies were downcast with gray melancholic clouds covering the sundown on the horizon. A light rain began tapping against the windows in a rhythm that seemed harmonious with Vivian’s song.

“Perfect reading weather,” Vivian murmured on her way back to her room.

Emily greeted her at the entrance to her bedroom with a pair of lavender scented candles and a decaffeinated latte. The maid’s cheerful demeanor had returned to her and she hurried about the bedroom as Vivian entered, setting down the candles and shuffling the window curtains as evening turned to night.

“Take care, my lady,” Emily bowed and shut the door behind her.

Vivian undressed into a black nightgown and donned her reading glasses. For the record, my display and vision shut off whenever Vivian was changing clothes or needed to take a bath. I guess the goddess possessed at least some semblance of decency.

But the nightgown suited her well. The black silk complemented her pale skin and under the flickering ember candle lights, her scarlet hair burned with greater brilliance. Her reading posture and nimble fingers held her father’s book with an academic poise, yet the stuffed mushroom plushie that she wrapped her legs around reminded me that beneath her intellectual veneer there remained an innocence unfazed by adulthood.

I had never paid close attention to what Vivian Greymoor read before, but between the mood lighting of her bedroom and her captivated gaze fixated on every page, I surprised myself by deciding to participate.

As usual, she was reading some kind of nonfiction historical text. This one in particular featured long-winded passages about royal and social etiquette as well as editorial pieces on outdated aristocratic traditions.

I found myself satisfied by Vivian’s choice of reading since it theoretically killed two birds with one stone. On one hand, she was bolstering her actual knowledge of royal practice to gain an upper hand at the Royal Ball. On the other, simply by virtue of reading, Vivian Greymoor was gaining experience and levels.

I was just about to look away and sign off when Vivian turned the page.

As she did, the letters on the page distorted themselves ever so slightly that I realized the words that I was reading were not the letters and scrawls printed onto the page of Vivian’s book. Instead, the words that I saw appeared as if I was reading them through paper 3-D glasses, hovering just above the paper page, and that’s when I put two and two together.

When I first arrived in this world, I figured that the goddess had simply granted me an intuitive knowledge of the language of this universe. That’s why everyone spoke in the same tongue as the ones in my old world and why I could read the words in manuscripts and journals.

But that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.

All this time, I jested that I was some genie lost in a digital lamp, when in fact, that was much closer to the truth than I had previously suspected. It was my new digital body that must have acted as an auto-translator, interpreting the language of the outside world into a form and sound that I could understand.

So it made sense that when I tried to write a message to Vivian in the language of my former home, it appeared to her as utter gibberish.

And it also made sense that it appeared nonsensical to me; after all, the languages of my former world didn’t exist in this one. Perhaps the goddess had even expressly forbidden them.

A part of me knew from the beginning that my newfound abilities were too good to be true. Writing a resource called “Vivipedia” and showing it to Lady Greymoor was much too easy if the goddess’s aims were to punish me. She must have only intended to play this trick on me, granting me the illusion that a breakthrough was on the horizon only to utterly crush me at the right moment with how futile my efforts really were.

And it worked. I was once again back at square one.

Vivian Greymoor yawned and set down her book for the night. A notification on her bracelet signaled that she had gained another attribute point, which she proudly placed into luck, an attribute that based on my research, was devoid of any merit or use.

Afterwards, she blew out each candle besides her bed, softly smiling at the faint scent of lavender perforating her bedroom. As she dozed off to sleep, ignorant of her own ignorance, I was left to ponder in the darkest of nights. I wondered, deeply and truly wondered, whether I would spend the rest of my life watching Vivian ruin her life.