Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

  “What was that about?” Magpie said.

  “I have no idea,” Thea said. “And I strongly suspect they don’t either. Did I miss the class where memorizing the dictionary was handed out as homework?”

  The two of them barely made it to their next class on time. It was math, with Mr. Siffer in a particularly unlovely mood.

  “Can you explain to me,” Mr. Siffer thundered at a cowed student, “just why it is that I have to repeat everything five times before your brain will retain even a quarter of anything I say?”

  “It is probably overnervousness, and a disproportionate apprehension of what you are likely to dispense as punishment,” the hapless boy blurted, and then sat there with such genuinely slack-jawed astonishment at what had just come out of his mouth that Thea suddenly felt a cold shiver run down her spine.

  “Are you trying to be smart with me, boy?” Mr. Siffer said in a dangerously calm voice.

  “It isn’t my fault! I am just osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary1,” squeaked the boy, miraculously without even a stutter, and then winced, waiting for Mr. Siffer’s inevitable retaliation.

  A murmur of voices exploded helplessly in the class as other students stared at one another in complete bewilderment.

  “What in blazes does that mean? If anything?” Thea hissed at Magpie. “Is it even a word?”

  “It’s Latin, I think,” Magpie whispered back.

  “You think? You take Latin, you’re supposed to know—what does it mean?”

  But Mr. Siffer was speaking again.

  “You will,” Mr. Siffer said, still calmly, speaking to the original student and ignoring everyone else, “report to the principal’s office immediately after this class, Mr. Williams. I will not be mocked.”

  But Thea was suddenly sitting up, cold shivers running down her spine.

  “It’s spellspam,” she whispered to Magpie. “It’s got to be. Those other kids, too, back in the corridor—”

  Mr. Siffer began to turn around, to sweep the classroom with a gimlet eye. “I will have silence in this class!” he bellowed. “Or there will be—”

  “I apologize, sir, I most profoundly apologize—I have no idea why I am so discombobulated.”

  Something blinked, passed almost too fast to notice. The classroom settled back into ordinariness, but there was something…different. A glitter in the air. A sense of strangeness, and change.

  Someone sneezed explosively.

  “Cease treating the matter with such floccinaucinihilipilification!2” Mr. Siffer shouted, and then stopped, startled at what had just come out of his own mouth. “These are incomprehensibilities!” he roared. “Something is starting to transpire here that I do not comprehend!”

  “And isn’t that a verisimilitude,” Magpie said, and looked just as startled as Mr. Siffer had a moment before.

  “It’s certainly disconcerting…,” Thea began, and then slapped herself on the side of the head with an open palm. “Aaargh! Now I am committing the same ridiculousness! And I haven’t even seen the pestilential spellspam! How did I get afflicted with it?”

  Ben, his eyes still watering from his sneeze, bent forward across his desk, catercorner to the two girls. “We all are,” he said. “Everyone is using hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian3 words. Right after he said…‘discombobulated.’”

  It took Thea a moment or two, and then she put her face in her hands, shaking her head.

  “Oh, for the love of everything sacred. Those original spellspams…the thing that got LaTasha…they never seemed to affect more than just the one person, the first person who saw it. But this one—this one is like the old ones, like the ones Dad cleaned up in the feral libraries. It’s spread by the spoken word…it’s airborne.”

  To: Learn_a_new_language@babel.com

  From: Polly Glott < Learn_a_new_language@babel.com>

  Subject: Total immersion—speak a new language as though you learned it in the cradle!

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  1.

  TELL PRINCIPAL HARRIS THAT I will send…Paul Winthrop’s last words after Thea had taken the spellspam problem to her father had seemed to indicate he would send help.

  She didn’t know what kind of help she should be expecting—but when someone did come, it was not what anyone had expected.

  The three visitors arrived almost unnoticed, as the school was frantically trying to cope with the aftermath of the polysyllabic epidemic. Classes had been suspended to avoid further spread of the ‘infection’; the library and the cafeteria were declared out of bounds, and students were asked to remain in their rooms until everyone had been cleared. The teachers, with Mrs. Chen at the head of the team, tried to deal with the most affected cases first—a couple of students, including Ben, had had to be removed to the infirmary because exposure to the spellspam had triggered actual physical symptoms. The whole school was in an uproar, but it was the infirmary that was the most urgent center of concern, and it was there that the three visitors presented themselves to the nurse.

  “What seems to be the problem?” said one of the trio, a young woman with skin the color of milky coffee and her hair in long dreadlocks down her back.

  The nurse, who had been surprised in the act of removing a plastic bucket into which someone had just been sick, looked up in astonishment.

  “I’ve got sick kids,” she said. “That would seem to be the problem. Can I help you?”

  “Luana,” said one of the young woman’s companions in a tone of mild rebuke. He was much older than she, a veteran with deep lines on his face and grizzled salt-and-pepper hair. “My name is Keir Adama,” he said, looking as though he would have stepped forward to shake the nurse’s hand by way of introduction, but thinking better of it. “We’re from the Federal Bureau of Magic. We’ve been sent to help with the situation. May we speak to someone in charge?”

  The nurse glanced down into the bucket in her hands and pressed her lips together in disapproval.

  “You are. In here, that person would be me. But you probably want Margaret Chen. I,” said the nurse firmly, putting out the hand bearing the bucket of vomit to prevent a determined move by Luana, “will go and get her. She is with a sick child right now.” Luana raised a hand to remonstrate, and the nurse promptly thrust the bucket into it. Luana accepted the bucket with an instinctive gesture that was already at war with the expression of outraged disgust that was creeping across her face. “If you want to be helpful in the meantime, empty that. The bathroom is just to your right, there. Remember to flush. I’ll be right back with Margaret. Please wait here.”

  Luana stood there for a moment with her hands gingerly folded around the bucket, her face tight-lipped and rebellious, before she uttered a smothered curse and turned to the bathroom. There was a slightly delayed sound of a toilet flushing, then the rush of running water, and then Luana re-emerged, her face thunderous, drying her hands with a paper towel.

  “Just who does she think she is?” Luana growled, glaring at the nurse’s retreating back.

  After another moment, Mrs. Chen emerged and walked over to the waiting trio.

  “I am Margaret Chen,” she said. “The nurse tells me you wish to speak with me?”

  “We were sent to aid Principal Harris,” Luana said. Keir quickly stepped forward, courteously offering his hand.

  “Keir Adama, Mage First Class,” he said. “These are my colleagues, Luana Lilley and Humphrey May. Paul Winthrop called us in from the Federal Bureau. Apparently you have a situation brewing here.”

  Mrs. Chen turned her head marginally as a cough from one of the cubicles behind her morphed into a soft moan. “A situation,” she echoed, shaking her head and looking faintly dismayed. “If you’ll give me a moment, I’ll take you to see the principal.”

  Mrs. Chen escorted the trio to the administration building, directing them up the stair
s to the principal’s office, and then detouring to the residence hall to snatch up a startled Thea from where she and Magpie were playing Scrabble in their room.

  “Your father’s cavalry has arrived,” Mrs. Chen said. “You’d better come with me.”

  When Thea and Mrs. Chen walked into the principal’s office, a heated discussion was already taking place.

  “I saw your methods,” Luana was saying to Terry. “Quite aside from being old-fashioned and obsolete, you’re doing it piecemeal. It’s taking up far too much room, energy, and manpower. We need a wider net.”

  “That would be…what?” Mrs. Chen snapped.

  “Figure out exactly what the spell was. Figure out a counterspell. Lay it on the entire Academy.”

  “Thereby breaking every law we have made about the use of magic on this campus,” the principal said. “We can’t sanction that. We have actually done the first part of what you suggest—the spell has been identified, and there is already a counterspell in place—but yes, we are dealing with it piecemeal right now.”

  “You are fighting symptoms,” Luana said. “Not the disease.”

  “What about the students, the ones who are in real danger from this?” Mrs. Chen said obstinately. “We have quite a few of them, Luana. You’ve seen the infirmary. Ben Broome had to be sedated; he was sneezing so much he developed a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. Sarah McMurtry keeps threatening to slip into some sort of a coma. These are real kids with real problems—some of them are directly and sometimes radically affected by the backlash of a spell. Some of them, indeed, were sent here to protect them against magic and its effects.”

  “It’s a bushfire,” said Luana trenchantly. “We need to stamp it out. Now. We can worry about the details later.”

  Mrs. Chen roused. “Those details in this instance are somebody’s children,” she snapped. “This isn’t some political game, Luana.”

  “It’s fighting fire with fire,” supplied Keir with a peacemaking smile.

  Luana rolled her eyes at that, just a little. “Platitudes won’t help, Keir.”

  “This school was supposed to be a firebreak,” Mrs. Chen said. “The whole reason behind this being neutral ground, non-magic territory—”

  “Perhaps, when the whole thing was first mooted,” said Luana. “Right now, we don’t have an option—we didn’t introduce the magic to this place, but we have the responsibility to stop whatever’s happening. I’m sorry, Principal Harris, but I think drastic action now is far more likely to stop this thing in its tracks than mollycoddling the situation and then trying to fight the aftershocks.”

  “But the ones who can’t handle the direct magic…,” Mrs. Chen began again.

  “Like Terry Dane,” Luana said, turning her dreadlocked head slightly to skewer Terry with a sharp look. “Yes, I am aware of special circumstances. Kevin McAllister is my boss, as well as Terry’s uncle. And Terry’s condition does technically fall under our jurisdiction. What I want to know now is how this stuff got loose here at the Academy in the first place. Terry, I’m told that you are in charge of the Nexus here. Are you absolutely sure that you are up to the job?”

  “Patrick Wittering thought he was,” the principal said. “I have found no reason so far to suspect otherwise.”

  “Who decided you were up for yours?” Mrs. Chen muttered darkly, glancing at Luana with an angry dislike.

  “All right,” said Keir soothingly. “What did happen, Terry? Any ideas on that score?”

  “You aren’t going to like it,” Terry said, and then hesitated, glancing helplessly at the principal.

  “And he can’t…actually…tell you. Not here. Not without endangering himself,” Mrs. Chen snapped.

  “Not…here?” Luana said, her eyes sharp with suspicion. “If not here, where?”

  “Thea,” the principal said abruptly, “can you take us all through?”

  Thea pushed her hair back behind her ears in a nervous gesture. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never done it that way. When it’s been other people…it’s, well, they have to be holding on to me.”

  Terry opened his mouth, thought better of it, snatched up a loose pen off the principal’s desk, ripped a page from a dog-eared notebook that he fished out of his pocket, and handed the piece of paper to Thea.

  I’m not sure if I can actually utter this or not without choking on it—that’s not true—we all went the first time, and nobody was physically touching you then.

  “You can do it,” he said, out loud. “You want the laptop?”

  “Do what?” Luana said sharply, her gaze flickering from Terry to Thea.

  “I can try,” Thea said. “Pass it here.”

  “What is she doing?” Luana demanded as Thea’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

  Then the room blinked out, and blinked back in.

  “What was that?” Luana barked, her hands coming forward instinctively into a position of casting a spell, staring up at the light fixture.

  “Power surge?” said Humphrey hopefully.

  “No,” the principal said. “And no defense is necessary, Luana.”

  “Does this have anything to do with what’s been going on here?” Luana said sharply. “You can’t expect us to help if you withhold things—I think you owe me…you owe us…an explanation!”

  Thea shot a desperate look at the principal, and then at Terry. “You can talk now,” she said directly to Terry.

  Terry drew a deep breath and nodded. “If you say so,” he said. He turned back to the adults. “This whole situation shouldn’t be possible,” he began. “Technically it can’t be done, not with computers—not through cyberspace. And then it was done, and e-mail took on a whole new dimension, and we just had to accept that we were wrong. This is something that can’t be done on a simple level. Not by just anyone, and not from just any computer. Certainly not something that could affect the Nexus. A lot of this…spellspam…” He hesitated. “A lot of it is increasingly copycatted,” he continued. “People who see what’s floating around out there and like the idea of it then try it. Some of it is quite original, but none of the copycat stuff is good enough to pass through the filters that I’ve set up. It’s all just…like…shadows of the originals. And I can always tell an original spellspam.”

  “In what way?” Luana said, frowning.

  “They’re the only thing that can consistently bypass any countermeasures,” Terry said. “They…evolve. The first ones were really simplistic, but we’ve had a couple of generations since that and they’re getting better, smarter—all the time.”

  “So are you telling me that the only thing that gets through is the stuff that really can hurt us?” Humphrey May asked.

  “The bad stuff, or the really good stuff, depending on how you want to look at it.” Terry looked back at the principal. “You told me there were two supercomputers.”

  “Two…?” the principal began, and then sat up, his expression stricken. “No. Oh, no, not that. Are you saying that Nexus 2 is the source of the spellspam?”

  “Either that, or it’s being channeled through it,” Terry said.

  “There are, or were, in point of fact, three,” said Humphrey, almost too quietly to be heard, but the very softness of his voice served to focus everyone’s attention. “The very first one…was lost. A long time ago.”

  “Lost how?” the principal said. “Please tell me you mean that it was destroyed and not just mislaid.”

  “That’s ancient history,” said Luana. “We have quite enough on our plate as it is. Perhaps I should see this latest spellspam, the one that caused your epidemic.”

  “Perhaps we all should,” murmured Humphrey. “Not that this particular one stands out as special.”

  “It seemed to be…airborne,” Thea said, remembering the incident in Mr. Siffer’s classroom. “That’s something none of them have ever been before. With this one…if someone said something that had been triggered by the original spellspam, it just seemed to—I don’t know—spread
, somehow. All you had to do was just hear it.”

  “It was in all the classes before lunchtime,” Terry said quietly. “And that one came in only that morning. And it wasn’t just that it was airborne, it was also the first one that required active intervention—an antidote, as it were. The early ones would just wear off after a day or two.”

  “You said you had filters…?” Humphrey prodded gently.

  Terry glanced back at Thea again. “Some of them are a little…unorthodox,” he said. “We’d need to go down to the Nexus. That’s where the backbone setup is.”

  “We can’t all go,” said the principal firmly, opening his eyes and sitting up. “That room isn’t set up as an auditorium. It will take three people, four maximum, but that’s pushing it. Terry, you and I…and one of you three. At a time.”

  Luana stood up without waiting for discussion or consensus. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  Keir was exuding dignified disapproval. “Perhaps I should go first,” he said.

  “You both go,” Humphrey said mildly. “I can go with the second wave. You said four is okay, Principal Harris, so take Keir and Luana, and I’ll wait. I have a few ideas of my own, but I think we ought to learn more about the problem before we plan how to fight it.”

  Thea bent her head, allowing her hair to fall over her face. If it had been up to her, she would have taken Humphrey and left the other two up in the office to continue bickering. Humphrey didn’t seem interested in jockeying for position with Luana, or with anyone. His eyes were mild, but sharp with interest and intelligence; as the others disappeared down the stairs, he crossed the room to fold his long, lanky frame into the seat next to Thea’s.

  “I may be wrong,” he murmured in his usual quiet voice, “but I think that something else is going on here, something quite separate from the spellspam issue. What do I need to know?”

  For a moment Thea saw Cheveyo’s dark eyes staring back at her instead of Humphrey’s washed-out blue gaze. Questions. Always questions with you, Catori.

  But when she had asked the question that Humphrey had just asked of her, or something very like it, Cheveyo had judged it a good question. Except now she had been cornered into answering, not asking. She shot a small, panicked look at Margaret Chen, who got up from her own chair and came over to pull up another so that she could join the huddle over the laptop computer Thea still balanced on her knees.