Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

  “‘Surprise, AZ,’” she read out loud, scanning the return address. “There’s a place called Surprise in Arizona? Somebody made that up!”

  “No,” Thea said with a slight smile, “Grandmother Spider doesn’t make things up. She makes them real. Even if there wasn’t ever a place called Surprise in Arizona, there is now. You could find it in any atlas. I’d bet money on it.”

  “Grandmother Spider sent you mail?” Magpie squeaked. “What’s in there?”

  “A spellchecker,” Thea said, and burst out laughing at the expression on Magpie’s face. “Come on, we need to find Terry, and then the principal—it’s complicated enough without me having to explain it more than once….”

  They ran out into the deluge, pulling hoods over their hair. They found and cornered Terry in the library entranceway, pausing to shake excess water off himself.

  “Terry,” Thea called out as she ran toward him, “have you figured out what you’re going to say yet? To the principal?”

  Terry looked at her a little strangely. “Well, good morning to you, too…. If you’re thinking about the job…it’s a no-brainer,” he said. “The big picture is pretty easy to see. It’s the details that are going to be messy.”

  “Not necessarily,” Thea said triumphantly, brandishing her envelope. “When do you start? Can you do it this weekend? We can test it out!”

  “Thea!” Magpie wailed. “You said you were going to explain it!”

  “I will. But it will be easiest to show it. It doesn’t have to be on the Ne…on the you-know-what….” She glanced around a little furtively before ripping open the envelope. “Oh! She sent five! You get your own, Magpie!”

  “My own what?” Magpie demanded testily.

  “One of these,” Thea said, brandishing a small but exquisite dreamcatcher, which appeared to be attached to a keyring. Nice camouflage, Thea thought.

  Terry, to whom she had handed the first dreamcatcher, was looking at it skeptically. “Okay,” he said, squinting through the web at Thea. “I’ll bite. What is it supposed to do?”

  “Let’s go inside,” Thea said, closing the envelope and running inside. Magpie and Terry, exchanging thoroughly baffled glances, followed.

  Thea found an empty set of cubicles wedged in a dark corner of the library and posted Magpie as sentry in the nearest aisle, where she could keep an eye out for people who might be paying too much attention to what was going on. It was just as well that nobody was, because Magpie was a terrible perimeter guard—she was far more interested in trying to figure out what Thea and Terry were up to than protecting them from intrusion.

  Thea instructed Terry to fire up the laptop.

  “I can’t get on Terranet anymore, if that’s what you’re after,” Terry warned as the machine hummed into life. “Not until I figure out how to start up the Ne…the…other thing again. That’s the gateway. All of the ’net is down at the Academy right now.”

  “Just as well, but I can still show you how it’s supposed to work,” Thea said. “And you can try it for real, after. Maybe you can talk to the principal about starting…your project…this weekend.”

  “There, it’s up,” Terry said, grinning in spite of himself. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Open up an e-mail,” Thea said.

  “But I just told you I can’t…”

  “It doesn’t have to be live,” Thea said impatiently. “Just open up the software, and open up an e-mail. Have you still got the one, you know, that got you into trouble last night?”

  “The 3-W one? Not on your life. Some things it’s better not to keep as mementos,” Terry said, tapping at his keyboard. “There. Now what?”

  Thea picked up the dreamcatcher. “You had the right idea before,” she said. “Next time you get an e-mail, look at it only through this. If it’s…problematic…you can see that it is without the…problem…affecting you in any way, and you can kill the thing. Before it gets you.” She closed one eye and peered at the sample e-mail Terry had opened through the dreamcatcher web. “Just like that. So that’s the first thing. There’s something else, but that…had better wait until you get into the…other place. It’s hard to have a conversation when you have to talk in circles around things all the time!”

  “Tell me about it,” Terry said, with feeling, reaching for the dreamcatcher. “I’ve had that particular problem all my life. Things I can’t talk about, without…talking in circles. Don’t worry, you’ve found an expert at it.” He squinted at his laptop screen through the circle of the dreamcatcher, and then past it with his naked eye. “I can’t see anything different,” he said.

  “That’s because it isn’t a you-know-what,” Thea said impatiently. “When it matters, you’ll see.”

  “Where did you say you got these?” Terry said, turning the dreamcatcher over in his hand.

  “From someone who knows what they’re doing,” Thea said. “Are you going to talk to the principal? Tell him that I should be there, too. That first time, anyway. There’s something we need to do, together.”

  Terry raised an eyebrow at her. “Just tell him that, eh,” he said. “Maybe I should send you to talk to him.”

  “He’ll listen,” Thea said, grinning. It was all suddenly solvable, exciting, even exhilarating. “Just go, already.”

  Terry shut down the laptop, slipped it into its carrying case, and glanced over at where Magpie stood, riveted, with a book half pulled out of its place on the shelf.

  “Watch out,” he said conversationally. “Mr. Siffer’s right behind you.”

  Magpie jumped, whipping her head around, and dropped the book, which bounced off her foot and against the stack on the shelf.

  “Ow,” Magpie said. “You can be such a dork, Terry.”

  But he was already gone, only an echo of his laughter left in between the tall stacks. Magpie bent to pick up the book she had dropped.

  “Come on,” Thea said, “we’d better follow him.”

  “What is this we you speak of?” Magpie muttered mutinously, her face hidden in the fall of her dark hair. “You haven’t told me anything about anything—you’ve been on some secret personal crusade all morning!”

  “Next time you get an e-mail, you’ll see,” Thea said. “Just hang onto your little dreamcatcher.”

  “Nobody sends me e-mail,” Magpie complained. “I get letters. I get phone calls. You computer people. You think you know everything.”

  Thea turned around to stare at her friend. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just…I get kind of carried away with it all.”

  “Yeah. I know. It’s your own sick skunk,” Magpie said, with a helplessly wicked grin. “Lead on, I follow!”

  They loitered in the entrance hall of the administration building long enough for the principal to send for them.

  Terry, Tess, and Mrs. Chen were waiting in the principal’s office. Principal Harris rose from behind his desk as Magpie and Thea came in.

  “These…gadgets,” the principal said, gesturing to the dreamcatcher dangling from Terry’s fingers. “I had half a dozen unwanted messages that arrived before I shut down the system, and which I hadn’t even looked at—Terry tells me these things can identify them, so we tried it out on my quarantined stash—and it works like a charm.” He rolled his eyes at his own choice of words. “Like a charm. Of course it does. The point is, it’s a good monitoring system. If I can have one up here to…”

  “Sorry, sir,” Thea said. “She sent me five. One for each of the five of us—Terry and Tess, Magpie, Ben, me. I don’t have any more to give away.”

  “Who sent them?” Mrs. Chen said, with an edge to her voice.

  “Arachne Yiayia means Grandmother Spider,” Thea said.

  Mrs. Chen stared at her. “Grandmother Spider,” she repeated.

  “Grandmother Spider. The Grandmother Spider,” Thea said helpfully. “According to legend, she helped create the world.”

  Mrs. Chen looked even more puzzled.

  “Thea was sent
back to the Anasazi,” the principal said, but did not elaborate. “Frankly, Margaret, nothing has the power to surprise me anymore. The point is, these things aren’t very useful if only the five of you have access to them.”

  “Oh, but they are,” Thea said. “Only one is really ever needed here—the one used by Terry, on your Nexus. He can channel e-mail through that, kill anything that is dangerous.”

  “But the spell,” began Mrs. Chen stubbornly. “I cannot condone leaving a student alone with the Nexus under the circumstances, particularly Terry, knowing what the side effects could be if he so much as mouthed something with a particle of magic in it. And that would mean round-the-clock surveillance…”

  “No,” Thea said. “I have an idea.”

  Sometimes you just need to open a window into another room in your mind.

  They were all looking at her; the weight of all those eyes sank into Grandmother Spider’s gentle words.

  “I’d like to show you,” Thea said. “I need a computer—any computer—to stand in for your Nexus.”

  “Be my guest,” Terry said, offering his laptop. “What do you need? Just word processing?”

  “That will do.”

  He pulled the computer out of its case, switched it on, tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and pushed it toward Thea on the principal’s desk. “Go for it.”

  “Look,” Thea said, and began typing.

  Everything stays the same, except Terry can speak freely. What is done here is done in the real world outside this bubble.

  She typed the period at the end of the sentence with a small flourish, and then glanced up at her audience. “Hold on to me,” she said. “Just a hand on a shoulder. Anything. Okay?” She felt the weight of two hands—Terry’s light touch with an encouraging squeeze on her upper arm, Principal Harris’s heavier hand on her shoulder—and hit ENTER.

  The other two waited a beat.

  “Nothing happened,” the principal said after a moment.

  Thea looked up. “Terry, say ‘spellspam.’”

  “Thea,” the principal began, an urgent warning in his voice, “he could—”

  “You know I can’t!” Terry said at the same instant.

  “Trust me,” Thea said. “Just say it.”

  “Sp…spellspam,” Terry said, stammering, clutching the edge of the desk with a white-knuckled grip. He swallowed hard as the word left his lips, and then drew a deep breath. Without any trouble at all.

  It hit them both, at the same moment. Terry’s mouth dropped open, and the principal drew in a sharp breath.

  “I said it,” Terry said, astonished. “I actually said it…and I’m still breathing…. Thea, what did you do?”

  Thea’s smile was luminous.

  “Someone told me that it is sometimes enough just to open a window into another room,” she said. “We’re in the same world, Terry. Our world. Whatever you do here will be echoed precisely back into the room that we just left—you can ‘switch on’ this world, the world in which you are safe, and you can do whatever needs to be done with the Nexus. I’m not sure how long you can stay safely without returning to claim your place in the other world, but it doesn’t have to be long; you can do it in short snatches. But you’re safe, and you can do anything here. Anything. It doesn’t matter if it has magic in it; its taste will not kill you. You have the dreamcatcher, and you can deal with things that need to be dealt with here instead of back there, where you can be hurt by them. And when you’re done, you go back.”

  “But how do I get back?” Terry said.

  “Like this,” Thea said, and added another word to the sentences she had typed on the laptop screen.

  “We’re back,” Terry said.

  Mrs. Chen was standing by the principal’s desk, clutching at it with both hands. The principal glanced at her and gave her a reassuring nod.

  “It’s all right, Margaret,” he said. “This might actually work.”

  “John…”

  “Margaret, it will be all right, really. Next time, you go—you’ll understand. Terry, are you officially accepting this responsibility? It’s a lot for a young man to take on, but I think Mr. Wittering was not wrong when he told me that the Nexus would be in safe hands if we entrusted it to you.”

  “I will, sir,” Terry said, standing with his back straight and his eyes glowing.

  “Then it’s time you met the Nexus,” the principal said.

  He crossed to a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on one of the walls of his study, and pulled a pair of books, apparently at random, out at a forty-five-degree angle. The bookcase clicked, detached from the wall, and then moved slowly, very slowly, on silent runners to reveal a dark doorway beyond.

  “Follow me,” the principal said, flicking on a light switch on the inside wall of the hidden passage, revealing a set of spiraling stairs leading toward a faint glow that came from somewhere out of sight down below.

  Terry went first, followed by Tess, then Thea, and then Magpie, with Mrs. Chen bringing up the rear, still mumbling about how all of this was a bad idea.

  It didn’t look like much at first sight. The Nexus apparently consisted of little else besides a couple of large monitors on a rather ordinary wooden desk, which also held a headphone set, a keyboard, and a trackball mouse. The monitors were switched off. Everything was dark, except for a single red pilot light on each monitor and a faint opalescent glow coming out of walls that looked half-translucent, barely solid enough to mute a bright light blazing underneath.

  “Like an iceberg,” the principal said. “You only see the essentials, the things above the waterline. The Nexus is in the walls, in the ceiling, all around you.”

  “Wow,” breathed Terry, the only one who knew enough to be impressed.

  “It’s been switched off for days,” the principal said. “We need this thing back online. Terry, do you think you’re up to this?”

  “I can do it, sir,” Terry said.

  The principal exchanged glances with Mrs. Chen, who stepped back, crossing her arms in front of her in an eloquent gesture of disapproval.

  The principal sighed deeply. “The switch on the left monitor. That’s the master. It’ll turn the whole system on.”

  Terry reached for the switch, and the principal closed his eyes. Nothing seemed to happen for a moment, and then a series of seemingly less-than-extraordinary things occurred. A familiar hum of a computer, albeit deeper and more resonant than what anybody there was used to, filled the room; first one monitor and then the other woke out of a deep slumber and began going through power-up screens. Then the first monitor blinked, resolved into a complicated array of icons and menu bars; the second one opened several different windows, some showing complex and moving graphs as though on a hospital monitor, others with actual images, or indicating that they were a visual representation of audio or other kinds of signals.

  Then the apparently featureless wall suddenly split open to reveal a hidden panel—more monitors, a luminous keypad, what looked like a built-in speaker.

  “I’ll show you the ropes,” the principal said, watching Terry’s eyes flick rapidly from one thing to another. “All of these things have meaning, and even a few days’ shutdown will have caused a fair amount of chaos—it seems particularly unfair to fling you into that when such turmoil is brewing out there. But I didn’t have a choice—I did not know enough about keeping this safe, how to protect it. I only hope I didn’t do more harm than good.”

  “How essential is the Terranet connection?” Terry said. “Perhaps we can see what else needs to be done first, before we…”

  “Terry,” the principal said gently, “this is a gateway. You’re already on the ’net, just by virtue of being powered up. We have good filters, but at least one…well, but we aren’t in the safe place yet, so let us not speak of that in those terms. But one of the first things that you will have to do is check on the filters, protect the gateway, screen out malicious mail.”

  “Then it looks like I have a lot to do,
” Terry said, folding himself into the computer chair before the desk and reaching for the keyboard. “Thea, you’d better show me what you did upstairs. I might as well start dealing with things…from…otherwhere.”

  Thea stepped up to the desk. Tess, chewing her lip, trailed in her wake. Magpie hung back, standing beside Mrs. Chen, her hand folded tightly around her own dreamcatcher as though it were a talisman against everything. Magpie saw one of Mrs. Chen’s hands clench tightly as Thea leaned over Terry’s shoulder to type something and he, leaning forward eagerly, began scanning the monitors. Mrs. Chen appeared to have stopped herself from saying something by an act of heroic will, and Magpie glanced up just in time to see Principal Harris lay a reassuring hand on her arm and say, very softly, “It’s all right, Margaret. The future has always been theirs.”

  They had a week of grace, while Terry attended classes during the day and wrestled with the Nexus almost every other waking hour. He caught and destroyed four different spellspams on the first afternoon of his acquaintance with the supercomputer, running on very little sleep and pure adrenaline. The principal spent a lot of time with Terry in the Nexus room and caught the early errors before they got out of hand—and Terry rarely made the same mistake twice. But the spellspam onslaught didn’t appear to be letting up, and finally even this doubled vigilance proved not to be enough.

  On the following Monday morning, the firestorm broke.

  It started out innocently enough. Thea and Magpie passed a group of students in a corridor and happened to overhear a disgruntled-looking senior, someone whose athletic prowess had always exceeded his academic abilities, utter a mouthful of words Thea wouldn’t have thought he was even aware of, let alone knew how to use correctly.

  “This cessation of telecommunication is especially vexing,” he was complaining.

  “It is pretty inconsequential,” someone replied. “It is an annoyance, not a calamity. I would think that the systems would have needed an upgrade long before their primitivistic nature was overwhelmed by circumstances…”

  Thea exchanged a baffled look with Magpie as they passed out of earshot.