At the landing she turned and looked up at him, “These are all duds, by the way.”
“Duds can still explode,” Peter said.
“Oh no, these are empty. We’re still in the proof of concept stage, you see.”
A clanging of metal reached Peters ears, and scuba elf opened a heavy door into a workshop of molten iron and raining sparks. An intense heat breathed from the room and immediately set Peter’s pores asweat. Grimy female elves with six pack abs and sooty faces hammered away on anvils and quelched orange-hot metal into sizzling oil baths. Peter got an eyefull of girls with muscular biceps and toned back muscles. Swords and plate armor piled up in great heaps. Pieces were riveted together and embossed and inlaid with decorations by elves squinting into loups and sticking their tongues out in concentration.
“This is the armory,” scuba elf said. “If you ever need a sword or a shield or a bowie knife just come in here and take one.”
“No!” shouted a elven girl in a welding mask. “You can’t just take whatever you want! These are gifts for good girls and boys!”
Peter held up a medieval flail, twenty pounds of spiked metal balls swinging off a chain, ready to crush a skull in like it was made of tinfoil. “This is for a child?”
“You can always make another,” scuba elf said to welding mask elf.
“Easy for you to say! You’re not the one at the forges all day and night!”
“Yeah! I’m in freezing arctic waters all day trying to figure out why you can’t weld together a working penguin harness!”
“Maybe it’s not the harness that are the problem. Maybe your jihadi penguin idea is stupid!”
Another elf came out from the workshop, a great hulking and muscular feminine beast, waving a blowtorch in the air and shouting in an elven language, and Peter decided that he had enough of this place, and bid them all an Irish goodbye, silently slipping away into a different, less noisy and less fiercesome room.
There a conveyerbelt ran skeletonized iPhones and iPads in various stages of completion, with all their semiconductors and ribbon cables exposed as they were stamped together bit by bit, vanishing into the strange magical machines and coming out a little more finished. At the end of the line a dead-eyed elven girl assembled white boxes with inhuman precision, packing them with counterfeit cell phones at a rate of hundreds by the minute.
“iPhones are the most popular Christmas gift each year,” she said in a deadpan voice.
“That’s kind of sad,” Peter said.
“At least it’s not live tigers. Can you imagine if that was the most requested Christmas gift each year?”
“You don’t give live tigers to kids, do you?”
“Sometimes.”
Peter looked at the faceless iPhones as they had their screens stamped into place one by one. He recognized them as the latest design, which had the charging port removed from the underside of the frame, and twenty camera lenses on the back side.
“These machines make all the hardware?”
“Uh huh.”
“How do you get the software?”
“That’s Yuina’s department.”
The box elf tilted her head to the left, and Peter followed the motion over to a great iron door bedecked with lightning bolts and exclamation points. ‘Danger! Battery Equipment Storage,’ ‘No Open Flame,’ ‘Caution: Gas fire extinguishing systems are installed here. Do not enter room while discharging indicator lamp is on,’ ‘Dangerous Goods Storage: Lithium Ion Battery Electrolyte. Maximum Quantity: 99,999 L.’ All the warnings of arc flashes, fires, and horrible deaths were not very festive at all.
“She does the software for everything.”
“Everything?”
“Phones, game consoles, computers, electric vehicles, smart toothbrushes, you get the idea.”
Beyond the door emblazoned with signs screaming of data center dangers was a blacklit server hall stretching off and away forever. Everything inside took on an eerie purplish hue— even Peter’s flesh. Neon colors highlighted with an otherworldly glow. Within the jungle of refrigerator sized computers, fiber-optic cables dripped like cyberpunk pythons. The air felt oddly ionized and smelled like a shoe store. There were betelgeuses and ghostlites, hypergate coppers and power distribution boards. 6th generation tensor processing units, network switch superchassies with flexible internal connectivity options, and supergates with an external capacity of 200 terabytes per second, all whining like overclocked turbine engines, computing things Peter couldn’t even begin to understand.
Peter climbed through a hellish web of cable mismanagement to a battle station with enough computer monitors to make Batman envious. There in a Pewdiepie chair sat a French bob-haired elf, looking like an honors student, veiled in shadow and clacking away at a customized mechanical keyboard. In this madhouse of girls she seemed the most reasonable and sober.
Everywhere Yuina went nerd alerts followed— but not the bad kind. Yuina could answer any esoteric question, solve any puzzle, fix any electronic. There was no homework at the North Pole, but if there were, Yuina would be who everyone copied off of. She would walk through Santa’s workshop, nose in a cyberdeck, typing away with one hand, and one of her many elf coworkers would flag her down and say, “Yuina! Solve my puzzle cube!” or “Yuina! What food contains potassium?” or “Yuina! Teach me how to make napalm!” And she would twist the cube back into six pristine colors, or tell them, “Broccoli,” or “Mix equal parts kitty litter and gasoline.”
Peter turned on a desk lamp and flooded her throne with light. She jumped. Confused and half blind, she looked at Peter.
“Are you Yuina?”
“Yes…?” She fixed her glasses. Her eyes were incandescent and neon in the black light.
“It’s me. We talked at dinner last night.”
“Peter?! Here?! Now?! Uh…!”
Yuina’s fingers danced on the keyboard at inhuman speed. Her eyes were wide with fear and embarrassment. Windows minimized and flipped to vacant search engines. Then she rested an elbow on the desk and leaned nonchalantly into her hand.
“Hi Peter. What brings you here?”
“You do all the programming? For every electronic?”
“Yes…” Yuina brushed some crumbs off her desk and stuffed some empty wrappers into a trashcan. “I’ve automated some of the work, but that’s what I do. Day in, day out. Program, program, program. And uh… server upkeep. Racking, stacking, cabling, and labeling. Every wire in this place has a name.”
[Scribble Hub Scribble Hub Scribble Hub Whypstopher Pippinsticks Scribble Hub Scribble Hub Scribble Hub Whypstopher Pippinsticks Scribble Hub Scribble Hub Scribble Hub]
“That must get boring after a couple hours.”
“Oh no. I love it. New languages, debugging, et cetera. Plus, I get to work alone. I’m my own boss.”
“Is that a gaming headset?”
Around Yuina’s neck rested cat ear headphones, and from the large earcups came a faint noise of gunfire and explosions.
“I like to listen to music while I work,” she said. “It makes me more productive.”
“And is that a drawing tablet?” Peter pointed to one resting beside the keyboard.
“It’s more efficient than a mouse,” she said.
A Yeti microphone dangled from armature, and a monitor displayed Peter and Yuina together like a digital mirror.
“Are you streaming?”
Yuina laughed. “Streaming? Who has time for streaming? Not me. With my busy, busy schedule.”
Peter slowly lowered his finger to Yuina’s keyboard. She watched him intently, and when he triangulated the keys to bring up the terminal she jumped forward and swatted his hand away. Peter brought his hand back to the keyboard to unveil her secret activities, feigning disinterest, and she once again brushed his hand away, feigning calmness.
“What?” Peter asked.
“What?” Yuina answered.
“I just wanted to see your setup.”
“Well, here it is,” she smiled. “Twelve monitors, liquid nitrogen cooled, top of the line graphics cards— for compiling. Shouldn’t you be training, by the way? I bet the others are looking for you right now.”
“Well it’s very impressive,” Peter said.
Yuina smiled smugly and twirled a stylus with ease between her fingers. “You flatter me too much. It’s a difficult job, you see, programming more than two billion devices every year, but it’s necessary. Without my coding expertise, all these gadgets would just be expensive paper-weights. You see—”
The stylus skipped away from Yuina’s hand and flew across Peter’s face. It clattered onto the keyboard, and whatever button it hit, Yuina’s workstation went from corporate drone mode to gaming addict mode. DeathBlood appeared in all its rated M glory on the main monitor— ninja girls in wildly inaccurate lingerie dresses ripped out people’s spines and hijacked their Lamborghinis while airstrikes rained down a fiery blaze of napalm large enough to make Richard Nixon blush. From her headphones Peter heard a radio DJ voice screaming, “M-m-m-monster kill!”
“Uhhhhh…!”
Yuina set to work covering up the game, but when it closed, it revealed an open copy of CanvasShop. There in 4K was an elaborate digital drawing of Peter, looking very bishi with glittering anime eyes and glossy blonde hair that was much longer than his real hair. His shirt fluttering open and revealing moist sixpack abs. A speech bubble from his plump lips read, ‘Yuina, will you suck my peppermint stick?’
“Don’t look! Don’t look!” Her fingers furiously clattered away at the keyboard.
And beneath the embarrassingly ecchi CanvasShop fanart sat a BitTorrent client, downloading and uploading thousands of bootlegged games and movies and software in every conceivable language.
“Aaaaahhhh! No, no, no, no, no, no, nooooooo!”
Yuina ripped the keyboard out from the case and flung it across the room. Then she hurled herself face first across the desk and furiously ripped a surge protector out from a wall. Peter caught the dead monitors before they could smashagainst the floor. As he watched the elven girl pick herself up off the desk he thought to himself ‘so she’s the smart one.’
"Haha... wow! S-stupid virus!" Yuina nervously smiled. "Don't you just hate them? Putting all sorts of... weird stuff on your computer. I mean— what even was that? I don't know!"
"Yeah. Viruses are the worst."
Peter stood there and wondered silently what would be the best way to tell her he was sort of flattered by that hentai illustration. But it seemed like it was one of those situations where it would be better for everyone to just pretend as though nothing happened, so he turned to walk away. Yuina suddenly arrested him, her fingers clawing into his arm and desperate eyes locking onto his.
"Please don't tell anyone that I spend all day pirating software and playing video games! They all think I'm the busiest elf in the North Pole! If they knew I automated the whole process they'd just—"
"Do you have the new DeathBlood?"
"Yeah..."
"Can we do co-op later tonight?"
"Co-op?" Yuina's brain defragged the situation and slowly she realized that she wasn't in trouble after all. "Yeah, we can play some co-op. Just... don't tell anyone. Ok?"
The door burst open and from the flash of blinding light came the elf in the French maid uniform.
"Peter! There you are! You're going to be late!"
"Late for what?"
She climbed over the stuff on the ground and thrust a heavy red jacket into Peter's arms.
"Weapons training. We've got to teach you how to kill a god."