Codespell, p.32
Codespell, page 32
part #3 of Ravirn Series
“You didn’t happen to install Windows when you upgraded me, did you?” whispered Melchior when nothing more happened. “This isn’t just some kind of really spectacular crash?”
“Nope.”
I switched the hilt back to my right hand. When it touched the chaos there, I felt a shock of connection, as though I were momentarily one with the blade. Darkness edged my vision—the Raven’s shadow. I could feel that the sword and its grip were a single continuous piece of organic crystal in that brief moment while both were a part of me.
Quickly, before that connection could fade, I made a vertical slice in the air. Shocking heat traced the slice in my hand, like a hot iron cauterizing a wound. I dropped the sword in surprise, looking at my palm. The line of chaos was gone, replaced by a much bigger one hanging in the air beyond. The shadow faded.
A pair of hands reached out of chaos and pulled the rip wider, allowing the spinnerette’s broad spider-centaur body to pass through.
"******!” it said. "**’* ***** **** ****.”
“Hello to you, too.” I bent and retrieved the sword, slipping it back into its cane-sheath. “You realize I can’t understand a word you’re saying, right?”
“***!” It nodded vigorously.
“You’ve been trying to communicate with me all this time, and I’ve just been too stupid to figure it out.”
Again the nod, though less emphatic.
“Uh, Boss, would you care to let me in on this?”
“Certainly. Melchior, this is . . . call it The Left Hand of Necessity. Necessity’s hand, Melchior.”
“What!” squawked Mel, as the spinnerette bowed a greeting at him. “Wait, I thought this thing came from the Fate Core.”
The spinnerette nodded, though it looked impatient.
“I’m confused,” said Melchior. “How can it be both from Fate and Necessity? And if it really is an agent of Necessity, how come Shara didn’t warn us?”
“I only just figured it out myself. You remember Cerice saying that the Fate Core was doing things on its own, possibly even becoming self-aware?”
“Yes, and . . . ?” asked Melchior.
I continued despite the spinnerette’s increasing fidgets. “Shara said she had trouble communicating with Necessity proper, that it seemed almost like Necessity’d had a stroke? Well, depending on which parts of the brain are hit by a stroke, things can get very strange. There’s something called . . .” I snapped my fingers a couple of times trying to jar the memory loose. “Damn, Alien Hand or something like that? You’ve got an encyclopedia in there somewhere, don’t you?”
“Hang on.” Melchior’s expression went slack, and his eyes flicked back and forth as though he were reading from an invisible page. “Strokes . . . Alien . . . Got it. Apraxia and Alien Hand Syndrome. Let’s see. The phenomenon is usually brought on by damage to the corpus callosum . . . disconnecting the two hemispheres of the brain . . . so that one hand literally doesn’t know what the other is doing.”
“That’s the one,” I said. “I think Necessity’s been trying to work around the damage done by the Persephone virus by annexing space in the Fate Core, but the disconnect has kept Shara from finding out.”
“That, or Necessity just didn’t want to tell her,” said Melchior.
Just as I opened my mouth to respond, the spinnerette reached out and picked up both Melchior and me. It was gentle but firm as it tucked us under its arms and started running. It ducked through the hole in the wall, turning away from the path followed by Nemesis.
“Do you think we should argue with it?” asked Melchior.
“No. We don’t know where Nemesis went. There’s a good chance the spinnerette does, and that’s where it’s taking us.”
At the end of the hall, we passed through a door into a smallish room with a big hexagram built right into its concrete floor. As soon as we hit the center of the diagram, the spinnerette whistled a spell for activating permanent, hardwired gates, and we went zipping along a communications cable to somewhere else.
We emerged through another spellgate into a nearly identical room, but the spinnerette didn’t even slow down there, nor for several minutes and many twists after. Only when we passed through a pressure hatch to arrive in a stadium-size space filled with what looked like a complete replica of a living coral reef did it come to a halt. There, in front of a yellow trunk of pseudocoral with a big glass cat’s eye protruding from it at about chest height, it set us down.
“Now what?” I asked the spinnerette.
“******** ** * ******,” it said.
“Thanks.”
It ignored me and turned to the eye. “**** **, **** ** **** ****.” That was the last thing it said that even resembled language before speeding its syntax up into a range where it sounded like gigabyte data bursts sent over a voice line.
The eye lit up, looked at the spinnerette, turned to me, rolled down to stare at Melchior, blinked once, then shot an intense beam of white light into the air in front of us. The beam stopped about three feet from the source and formed a glowing globe with an image of Shara in the center.
“It’s about damned time,” she said.
“Good to see you, too,” replied Melchior.
“Sorry, lover, but Nemesis is on her way, and you need to do a bunch of work before she arrives. Besides, I’ve got no body to give you a proper greeting, and that makes me snippy.”
“This is all some kind of computer?” I swung my arm to take in the coral.
“Quantum organics and specially grown,” said Shara. “It’s supposed to be the successor system for the pantheo-management system—Necessity’s been moving all of her systems over from the more traditional legacy hardware. This block was going to be replacing the machines Persephone gorked. It’s got a whole new type of architecture, and if Necessity’d had it in place at that time, the virus probably would have failed. Unfortunately, it hadn’t finished growing. Your job is to set up a software port from there to here once I’ve got this place flooded again and the weednet in place.”
“Weednet?” asked Melchior.
“Seaweed as multipath network cable,” said Shara. “I’ll tell you more later if we all survive the experience. For now, memorize this.”
A series of computer and network schematics flashed in the air too fast for me to do more than get a rough gestalt of a really complex intranet work-around at the hardware level combined with some sort of insanely hacked software bug fix.
“Got it?” She looked at Melchior.
“Uh-huh.”
“Then good-bye for now.”
“Wait a second, why good-bye?” I asked.
“Because I can’t go where you need to be. If the pantheo-management servers weren’t cut off from the main system, you wouldn’t need to go to them. The Persephone virus destroyed the weednet interface, and the old-style copper connections had been long since disconnected.”
“What about Tisiphone . . . and Megaera?” I asked.
“They can take care of themselves. Now that they’re here, Necessity is communicating with them directly. I can hear echoes of it, though it’s not in a form I can understand.”
“I thought Nemesis trashed the ELF system?” I’d assumed that was why the signal went dead.
“She did, but there are in-DecLocus work-arounds.”
“******* ****.”
Shara’s projection nodded. “The spinnerette tells me Necessity’s got the Furies playing a distraction game, sort of like human targets and . . .” Her expression went abstract for a moment, indicating an inflow of data. “Sorry, but that’s all the time we have, kids.” Her eyes flicked to the spinnerette. “You, ***!”
It picked us up and bolted for the door as a gurgling noise started. By the time we reached the exit, the floor was already ankle deep in water. The spinnerette splashed as it ran. It paused only long enough to close the hatch and dog it shut. Since it had eight limbs in addition to the human ones, it didn’t even have to put us down to do it. Then, back to the gate, and poof.
This time we appeared in an area heavy with dust and lit only by dim emergency lights. The spinnerette carried us through perhaps a mile of steadily rising corridors and stairs, passing numerous closed pressure doors, eventually emerging onto the top of another island, this one dotted with olive trees. The weather was wild, with huge storm clouds chasing a gale-force wind in from our left. The spinnerette set us down and began drawing silk out and making big balls that it attached to its feet.
“Why do I think I’m going to hate the reason for that?” asked Melchior.
I looked out over the mad chop and sighed. “Because we’re going over there.” I pointed toward an island halfway to the horizon.
“Why do you . . . Oh.”
He’d seen the island and the thick mat of dead weeds surrounding it. It was a perfect black hexagon as shiny and slick as tile, a lovely terrazzo actually. I’d visited the virtual version of that island twice before while dealing with the Persephone virus. Underneath its surface lay the computing center devoted to the fates of the gods.
He nodded. “You’re right, I’m going to hate this.” He paused for a moment and scratched his cheek. “Somehow it looks wrong without the Shara-gorgon.”
I thought so, too, despite the fact that the hundred-foot-tall, mirror-shade-wearing, animate statue had only existed in the virtual world. It was hard to forget.
Moments later, the spinnerette had once again picked us up. “*****?”
“Sure, whatever you say.”
It nodded and leaped over the edge. We dropped fifty feet in a few seconds, stopping only inches above the water. Reaching back with one foot, the creature snipped off the dragline and dropped us onto the waves. The water bowed under each of the eight web-wrapped feet, and the spinnerette started to sink. But before the surface tension could break, the thing started running again, this time skipping along the wave tops.
Between the storm and the lack of anything remotely resembling traction, we spent a lot of time moving in directions other than forward—most notably up and down, with seriously ugly consequences for the contents of my stomach—but somehow we got steadily closer to our goal. That might have been the strangest thing of all. Despite the fact that the island stood barely a yard above the surrounding water, no waves broke over its surface, leaving it bone-dry. Eventually, we arrived.
“**** ******!” Nothing happened. It started dancing in place to keep from sinking. “******* ********* ******** *******.”
“I’m not sure what it just said, but if that wasn’t swearing, I’ll eat my slipcover,” said Melchior.
“*****?”
With a creak, the top of the island opened, exposing a flight of stairs. Down we went. At the bottom, we had to pass through another watertight pressure door. I couldn’t help but notice an increase in the ruffled-plumage factor as we did so.
Beyond lay a big tomblike room filled with racks and racks of slick-looking black multiprocessor servers, each with its own bank of blinking red LEDs. Imagine Giorgio Armani designing the interior of the great pyramid of Cheops as data center—sober and clean-lined, and this was the old hardware. It read as professional but also shockingly cool right up to the point where I realized that all that red was alert lights. The whole damn server farm needed a reboot.
I walked to the nearest box and held down the power button. For several seconds nothing happened. Then, with a swooshing-boooong sort of noise, the computer reset itself. The red light went out, replaced by a lambent purple one.
“I love that,” said Mel. “Very power geek.”
I imagined all the red replaced by that deep vivid purple. OK, it was still a pretty cool design statement. Much more so than the coral-reef thing that was replacing it, but hey, in the IT biz, if you don’t move with the times, they bury you.
“So now what?” I asked.
“You look for any live machines while the Left Hand of Necessity here puts all those limbs to use doing manual re-boots. ”
“*** **, **** ********?”
Either the spinnerette was getting better at tone, or I was starting to get used to its subtleties, because that almost made sense.
“Because somebody’s got to do it, and Ravirn and I both have other jobs,” said Melchior. Apparently it was starting to make sense to him, too.
The spinnerette sighed but walked to the nearest server bank and started pushing buttons. By balancing on four legs and stretching, it was able to hold down six at once. As the boooong noise sounded in chorus, Melchior turned back to me.
“The live boxes are running all that’s left of the master control program. Shara didn’t know much about it, so you get to try to parse it on the fly, then package it for porting.”
“Doesn’t that just sound like fun?” I suppressed an urge to make raspberry noises. “From the way you say that, I have to assume you won’t be looking over my shoulder and helping me make sense of the thing.”
“No, because someone also has to reconnect the old copper trunk lines so that once you’ve figured out the ways, there’s also a means. According to the schematics Shara showed me, I go this way.” He pointed along the wall to left.
“Write if you find work,” I called after him, “especially if it’s got happy little purple running lights.” Then I turned the other way.
“Mail’s dead,” replied Melchior, his voice receding, “but I’ll keep an eye out.”
“So e-mail me,” I tossed over my shoulder.
“Will do.”
The first couple of dozen rows of racks were a solid mass of winking red eyes. I finally saw my very first spot of purple way down at the end of row thirty or thereabouts. I made a mental note of it and moved on. I’d work off a single box if I had to, but a cluster would be much better. I passed a couple more singletons and one triplet before I hit the jackpot, a row where about half the computers looked to be in working order. Now I just needed an interface device. Unfortunately, there was a distinct lack of keyboards and monitors, though there was an abundance of networking cable.
I checked the far end of the row but didn’t find anything there either. That didn’t leave me a lot of options—one really, and I didn’t like it at all. Jacking my one and only soul into a badly virus-thrashed multibox supercomputer system designed to control the destiny of the gods seemed like the worst idea I’d had in years. Not that that kind of thing had ever stopped me in the past.
I pulled out my athame and collected a length of cable. I plugged one end into the closest active machine and the other into the athame. Then I sat down on the floor, my back braced against the nearest rack, my new sword cane lying across my knees. As I set the narrow blade of the athame against my palm, my stomach replayed a sort of highlights reel of the way it had felt during our recent spider-dance across the waves.
“I don’t like it either,” I said to my stomach. Melchior wasn’t there; who else was I going to talk to?”
I pressed the blade into my skin. Blood welled . . . and I screamed, yanking the athame free and throwing it away. Tethered to the cable as it was, it didn’t go far.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered.
As the point entered my flesh, I’d felt as though the universe had split in two, with me straddling the divide. In one version, I’d sunk the athame in quickly, catapulting myself into . . . madness! There was nothing sane in the virtual environment I’d entered, no hint of normal structure, and I’d felt it pulling me under, devouring me. At the very same time, looking out through my other eye, I saw myself doing what I had just done, pulling the blade free before the irretrievably cracked system could swallow me.
