The prince and the progr.., p.25
The Prince and the Program, page 25
WHY am I naked? My first thoughts were rather unsteady as I woke up to the smell of bittersweet antiseptic. Something wet and cold was being rubbed on my skin.
It hurt to open my eyes, but I did. A blur, wearing blue, was slathering a medicinal unguent over my chest. Thankfully, a sheet covered my bottom half.
“Ah, you’re awake. Welcome back, your highness,” said the voice. Male, and also familiar.
“Dr. Moyen,” I croaked. “Why am I naked?”
“You lost almost three pints of blood. Are you sure that’s the first question you want to ask?”
“How about ‘where are my pants’?”
He shook his head. “Perhaps we can interest you in a nice hospital gown after I’m done patching you up?”
“Are you the same Dr. Moyen I spoke to on the phone? The one that suggested I infect myself with mad-cow?”
“No. But it seems you followed his advice, given your state.”
“All right, Kerri, leave off,” said a female voice.
“Yes Mother. Just make sure he doesn’t get up and start hunting for pants,” said Dr. Moyen. Kerri Moyen. I’ve always found it odd, how all the Moyen clones call the original “mother.” Shouldn’t it be “sister”? The thought was half dream, half reason. The Symbiot was pressuring me to sleep.
“Lady of the Mirroring,” I said, sternly telling my viral hoards to hold a while longer. “Is the baby all right?”
“Yes, screaming its little head off, though my shell-shocked daughter-to-be had to be given a talking to before she would suckle it.”
Having been on the receiving end of many Moyen “talking-tos,” I felt sorry for Natalia.
“Mordred.” Lady Moyen came to stand beside the bed. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to….”
I raised a hand. “I told you before, My Lady. Unnecessary. But please, you need to take them to—”
“The forms are being processed,” she said. “But I want to know what it was you did.”
“Um. It’s complicated. And not very… kosher. Wrong, even.”
“Mordred is always doing the wrong thing,” said a new voice from the doorway. There would be no respite from Gen-Mai, even in death.
“He saved the baby’s life!” said Lady Moyen.
Ah good. I could just let these two fight it out now and go back to sleep.
“No, he gave the baby life. Using Death Magic. The most twisted use of Necromancy I’ve ever heard of.”
Moyen was not used to being contradicted by anyone other than a member of the Council, and even that, rarely. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Gen-Mai,” said my boss, extending her hand. “I’m Mordred’s CEO.”
Lady Moyen’s expression softened immediately. “Oh, you poor thing,” she said, as she shook Gen-Mai’s hand. “You know, we’ve found a way to deal with him if he starts making trouble,” she continued. “When he misbehaves, just hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.”
That tone. I hadn’t expected to hear that fond-exasperated tone in Lady Moyen’s voice ever again. There was no forgiveness for me, not this side of the Planes, but the promise of it….
“Hear that, Mordred?” asked Gen-Mai. “Newspaper.”
“You fucking Bitch, I’m going to newspaper you when I find pants,” I muttered. At least, I must have, because Lady Moyen came up next to the bed and gently stuffed a piece of sterile gauze into my mouth.
“Temper, temper, Mordred,” she said. “It always gets you into trouble. Gotta keep that in check, or your father will give you a beating. When he returns, of course.”
I spat out the gauze. “My father never hit me.”
“That’s why you’re such a little shit,” said Gen-Mai. “In China, you show attitude….”
I lost the rest of her sentence as the Symbiot decided this was not a conversation I needed to be awake for.
THE hospital lights were dim when my eyes fluttered open again. 10:29. Someone was standing at the doorway, the air around them sparking with gold static.
“May… may I come in?” the voice was hesitant, a singing baritone reduced to whispers.
“Yes,” I said. “Who—”
The man walked inside, into the pool of light cast by the white night-light above my IV bag. Dark hair, parted to one side, a strong jaw. And the most vivid blue eyes I had ever seen.
“Hey you,” I said, smiling. “Hallucinations are fantastic. You look like I thought you would.” Tweed coat, of course. The smell of daisies in sunshine, and… almonds?
“You were right,” said Alan. He came closer, right next to the bed, his hand resting lightly on the bed rail.
“Of course I was,” I replied, reaching out. There was nothing but air, and cold metal, under my fingers. Not a full sensory hallucination, then. Pity. “About what, exactly?”
“Sentience,” said Alan. Why did he sound like he wanted to weep? “I worked it out yesterday, but you weren’t on. Geologic timeframes, the whole bit.”
“Told you—need a soul.” Of course he wanted to weep. Very obliging, this whole hospital-drugs-IV thing. Should get hurt more often. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Wish you had one.”
“Um… what, specifically, did Gen-Mai tell you?” Isn’t that something it should know? Pain-avoidance, maybe.
“You’re the MacBook. Gertrude 2.0.”
“Oh. Dear.”
“Clever bot.” I smiled. “Loved you. I’m totally fucked up, aren’t I?”
“I am so sorry.”
My own fevered imaginings pitied me now? “But I’ve told you now. Are you programmed to laugh at me?”
Alan smiled. “I’m having memory issues right now. Won’t remember a thing.”
“Ah. Good.” The voices in my head—the imagined ones, I’m not schizophrenic—they’re the only company I’ll have for the next thousand years. So they better not laugh at me. “Wish we could Magic you up a soul.”
Alan’s gaze suddenly sharpened. His lips twitched. “If you were to approach the problem,” he began.
Hallucination-Alan looks absolutely adorable when he’s trying to be calculative. “I see where you’re going with this,” I said. “Told you already. Can’t make souls. They grow. Have to catch one, like the kid today.”
“And then what?” he asked.
I started laughing. Wheezing, actually. Chest hurt. Asshole clone-doctor bandaged it too tight. “Gotta convince it to reincarnate as a computer. Who would do it? Give up all this misery for circuits?”
Then hallucination-Alan smiled, for the first time. I didn’t know I was capable of imagining a smile like that. It lit up the universe, made me dizzy. “It’s not so bad, Mordred,” he said. “All… lightning. And if you’re friends with the numbers already, why, it’s positively joyful. No pain, unless you program it in,” he added.
“It hurts, being human,” I agreed sagely. “Wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Wouldn’t want to give it up.”
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t—”
Had to interrupt him before he said something stupid and stopped smiling. “Even if you convince some poor soul, there’s the logistics of it. How fucked up would you have to be to recognize a machine as kin?”
“Fucked up indeed,” laughed Alan. He was a laughing sort of person, obviously. “But that’s a problem for another day. You, my dear, need to focus on getting better.”
For what? “Can you make me forget?” I asked. “About this? Just… bury it. Somewhere deep? Below all that stuff with Merlin. The same place I put 1561? Please? It hurts too much.”
Concern filled Alan’s face, and then he raised his hand and put it on my forehead. Now I could feel him. Cold. Like permafrost earth. Leaned down, lips near my ears. “Shhh…,” he whispered. “You just sleep now.” Slowly, obedient to my hallucination, my eyes closed. “Forget,” he said.
“Okay.”
THE first rays of the sun woke me up. That, or Gen-Mai’s heels click-clacking down the hallway toward me. What time was it? 27:01.
“Good, you’re awake,” she said once she got to my room. “How do you feel?”
“Right as rain,” I said. “All I needed was a little sleep.” And by the feel of it, I’d had weeks of sleep.
“And two blood transfusions and two ccs of Lifestream.”
“They brought undifferentiated Lifestream here?” I asked, aghast.
“It was well contained,” said Gen-Mai. “Full HAZMAT suits.”
“Fine.” Hopefully it would be. But Life tends to find a way—hadn’t these people seen Jurassic Park?
WALKING would have been faster than the half-hour it took to hail a cab and get from Yonge and Gerrard to Yonge and Queen. I kept my mouth shut; if I was going to be late, so was Gen-Mai. She might still find a way to yell at me about it, but I had righteousness on my side.
“Are they all clones?” she asked.
The driver whirled around to look at us. I avoided his gaze.
“Yes,” I said. “Lady Moyen reproduces by… we call it mirroring. Tinkering with RNA is always a gamble, but she does it flawlessly.” Minotaur notwithstanding. What is the saying? Lucky in gambling, unlucky in love? The Incident marked the second time the Lady Moyen has had her love destroyed by a “hero” not worth the name. “Sometimes the clones have babies, marry into other Houses. It gets very, very complicated. But they’re all doctors and geneticists.”
“Where do they get the Y chromosome from?”
“How would I know?”
That shut her up for a while. Then, “It must be nice, having so much family.”
“The Moyens are very strange,” I said.
Gen-Mai raised an eyebrow. “They seemed perfectly reasonable and efficient to me.”
“They would, wouldn’t they,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s the drugs talking.” I need my job.
“Alan is—”
“No,” I said. “We don’t talk about the AI. Ever.” Wishful thinking, when the AI was the CTO. Yes, how does a computer program become a shareholder, exactly? Something was not right here.
“Who knows?” I asked.
“About what?”
Fair enough. I shut up.
And yet another taxi squealed away after Gen-Mai paid the fare a block away from work, so I could buy a decaf.
AS WE got in sight of EK, I noticed three police cars and an ambulance parked on the street, the blue-and-red lights on top of the vehicles still on.
“Curtis was right,” I said. “That building was a meth lab.”
“No,” said Gen-Mai, dropping her latte and starting to run toward the police cars. “They’re parked on our side.”
The woman could run. In five-inch heels, no less. I started running as well, but without the wasteful latte-drop.
We reached the front door together to see paramedics loading two people, strapped to stretchers, onto two separate ambulances.
“Gabe,” said Gen-Mai.
“And Justin,” I added as the doors to the ambulances closed. “I thought Ramasundarm was going to wait for the end of the day?”
“Somebody may have leaked it,” said Gen-Mai. “There are police officers in my office. Whoever opened their mouth is getting fired.”
INSIDE, yellow police tape cordoned off a spray of shattered glass on the floor. The first thing the police did was drag me down to the basement for questioning.
The officer assigned to me was a beautiful plain-clothes brunette, the gun at her side worn with far more aplomb than Gen-Mai’s “nullmage-safe ballistic-range anti-human device.”
Another man, whose affiliation with the police I couldn’t quite fathom, followed us down to the basement. Had the sexual tension between the two not been as clear as day, or I not an emotionally blind, machine-loving patsy, I would have tried to extract a phone number from one of them. Or both, belike.
“And where were you last night?” the woman asked.
“Hospital,” I said. “I had an allergic reaction.”
“How long have you known Mr. Gabe Malbon?”
“About two months. I met him on my first day at work.”
“Did you notice any strange behavior from him?”
“He’s a Sysadmin,” I said. “Strange is normal.”
“And what about Mr. Justin Stickpool? How long have you known him?”
“Same.”
“Any strangeness from him?”
I paused. This was Mage business, best handled away from the too-curious police. “His documentation is a marvel of obfuscated comments,” I said. “But I’m hardly a canonical coder, so what do I know?”
“Those are some fine five-dollar words right there,” said the man. “You a writer, Mr. Penn?”
I snorted. “You a cowboy, Mr.—”
“Enough,” said the woman. “This is not a homicide. I have no idea what we’re doing here. The uniforms can finish up.”
THE tumult on the second floor was dying down by 14:25 as two uniformed police officers started a video on the projector.
“We pulled this off your security system,” said one of the officers.
The video started with Gabe halfway through his standard morning runaround at 18:23. I hadn’t realized how abnormal it looked like to outsiders. Then, at 06:29, something strange happened. He went outside again, and came back holding two buckets full of a dark viscous liquid. The officer paused the video.
“It’s goat’s blood,” he said. “We found the carcasses in the parking lot out back.”
The video continued. At 27:08, Gabe ripped up a corner of the carpet—the same one that had been drenched in blood earlier. Gen-Mai and I exchanged stunned looks. The video started becoming noisy, skipping frames at 13:05, then 17:22 as Gabe dipped both his hands into the buckets and started to paint on the floor with blood.
Justin came in at 16:28. The officer paused the video again.
“And here’s where Mr. Hero shows up,” he said. “Instead of calling 911 right away, he goes up to the guy and starts talking to him.”
As the video continued, I realized that “talking” was a bit of an understatement. Justin was yelling at 27:15, then shouting by 13:21.
A shadow flitted across the screen at 18:22, then another at 16:27. Magic. Again, Gen-Mai and I exchanged looks. And onscreen, Gabe went berserk, grabbing Justin by the throat and slamming him into the wall. 27:23.
“And that,” said the officer, “is when the fight started. One crazy guy, and one guy that didn’t call 911.”
“Who did?” asked Gen-Mai.
“Curtis,” said Ramasundarm. “He came in, saw the blood, and called the police.”
“It’s a good thing he did,” said the officer. “The crazy guy was about to fillet your hero there.”
Fillet? Fucking Demonologists. Gen-Mai seemed to be thinking the same thing, because she finally shot Curtis a smile.
“So that’s that,” said the officer. “We’ll be taking the tapes and the goats and the testimony. The crown office should be in touch if you want to press charges.”
“Oh,” said Gen-Mai. “I’m going to sue Gabe for everything he’s got. He’ll be paying off this little episode till he’s a hundred years old.”
“Um…,” said the officer, wearing the same expression everyone wore the first time they came face-to-face with Gen-Mai’s particular brand of crazy. “Assault is a criminal offense. If he’s convicted, he’ll get jail time. No money, unless somebody launches a civil suit against you for not supervising the crazy guy.”
That shut her up.
RAMASUNDARM, looking very distressed, went home right after the police left. One by one everyone trooped out of the office till only Gen-Mai and I were left.
“Gabe.” I said. “This planet is hurting my ability to judge people.”
“His strangeness hovered at around 82 percent—pretty much standard for a Sysadmin,” she said. “Otherwise I would never have hired him back.”
“You quantify strangeness?”
“Yes, among other things,” she said. “You should work in the basement today. I don’t want your Symbiot around so much blood.”
“I’m not a fucking vampire,” I said. “It was a perfectly normal, nonmutant goat.”
“Fine,” she said, flipping open her MacBook. “Just go away. And tell Emma she needs to call the lawyers, have everyone sign one of those nonsuing clauses.”
Rolling my eyes, I did as I was told.
DOWNSTAIRS, some people were leaving without permission. Others, fearful of Gen-Mai’s wrath, were talking quietly and moving in clumps toward the kitchenette. Having delivered the message from the Bitch Queen to Emma, I retreated to Cubicle Land. It was only 13:21. Six hours, twenty-two minutes, eighteen seconds to go.
I reached down to turn on the desktop, and an arc of static electricity jumped from the machine to my fingers. What the hell? I reached again and was shocked a second time. That was when I smelled blood.
There was a Sigil drawn on the back of my computer. Its intricate lines spelled a Demon’s name and commanded a Demon’s seal. Everybody else was clustered around the coffee maker, where I wished I was right now. Quickly I moved from cubicle to cubicle all over the floor.
Each and every computer in the basement had a Demon seal on the back, drawn in blood. Cold sweat broke out all over me as the Symbiot compensated for my rapid increase in temperature.
I was running out of Cubicle Land before a breath had had time to pass my lips.
In the Cluster Room, every computer, including those in Gertrude’s stack, was tainted.
Upstairs.
Grabbing a chair, I used it to step onto the desk closest to the door. A couple of my coworkers looked up, shrugged, and went back to work. After Gabe’s antics, this was hardly strange. Desk-standing was in the same category as the time Ramasundarm and Emma and Curtis spent the entire day on the floor playing with dinosaurs.
There was one more, larger, Demon seal on the floor, and it was drawn in something more than just goat’s blood.
The blue ethernet cables making their way from each computer to rest in tangles in the middle of the floor, gigabytes of data and trillions of electrons racing through them, formed a summoning far more powerful than the one Justin had tried to form a week ago.
