Cyber Way

by Alan Dean Foster

  Moody had no comment. He was trying to catch up. “What is most interesting to me, my friend, what is most interesting to consider is this: if Grandfather Laughter, a real hatathli, was only reproducing a design which had been taught to him by his own father, then where and when did this fascinating little pattern originate?”

  Moody glanced up from the monitor. “Accident.”

  “An accident in radioactive yellow that is not repeated with any other color. How accidental indeed. The proportions are astonishing, as are the relationships between the sets. Even a non-mathematician like me can see that, because the molly sphere says it is so.

  “Before you got here I was programming the molly to run some relationships to see how they interrelate.”

  The detective was still trying to grasp what he’d been told, what he was seeing. “What do you expect to get from that? More sandpaintings?”

  “I do not expect to get anything. But since we are dealing with impossible coincidences, I thought it only sensible to go ahead and see if we can find any more. I won’t let it run all night. This is a metropolitan municipal-level molly.

  It ought to be able to run through several billion resolution levels for us. If nothing else, we’ll get to see some pretty pictures.”

  “Go ahead and run it, then.” Moody was feeling simultaneously excited by the discovery of something wonderful that made absolutely no sense and exhausted from his nocturnal sojourn. “And then, for God’s sake, call your wife and tell her you’re okay.”

  “Just five or ten minutes.” Ooljee was reassuring. “If all we get are changes in the basic schematic, I’ll pack it in and we can go home.”

  Moody looked on as the sergeant’s fingers worked the spinner and ratpad. Figures flooded the two monitors to his immediate left, digital dopplegangers of the rapidly sequencing succession of fractal images that filled the main screen. He stood staring until the schematic blur made him turn away, slightly dizzy.

  He had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. The mollysphere would obediently try to reduce the fractal pattern to a finite level, which was impossible. Ooljee would eventually get bored and shut it off. Which was fine with Moody. How an old Indian had managed to install a hidden fractal pattern in a hundred-year-old sandpainting was sufficient mystery for one night.

  “Y’all had enough?” he finally asked his colleague half an hour later, “or you gonna wait until you run out of storage?”

  “If things get too hot, it will shut itself off.” Ooljee was staring at the blur of images on the monitor. “Something here is not right.”

  “Y’all are right about that, and it’s got nothing to do with what the molly says,” the detective muttered.

  “It should be running sequential patterns. It is not. It’s bouncing all over the place.” Ooljee worked his spinner. “This does not look right. It is not just searching to expand resolution: it’s lining up specific Julia Sets from the Mandlebrot.” He glanced back and up at his colleague. “I did not tell it to do that.”

  “How do y’all know for sure it’s not just processing your request in its own way?”

  Ooljee gestured at one of the smaller screens off to the side. “Because the corollary figures are not emerging sequentially. Numbers are lining up, but in what looks like random order.”

  “Nothing’s random in a Mandlebrot. ” Moody stared hard at the monitor. “Damn if it don’t look like it’s building something. Pulling a whole new pattern out of the existing series.” He was having a hard time believing what his eyes and mind were telling him. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that the yellow schematic from the Kettrick painting was acting like a template.”

  Ooljee stared unblinkingly at the monitor. “The deeper the resolution goes into the basal pattern, the more extensive the simulation becomes. One is like a distorted mirror image of the other.” He sat back. “Well, this is all very fascinating, but not what I had hoped to find. And if we keep letting it expand and eat up mollystorage like this, pretty soon we will start triggering alarms in the departmental database.” He tapped a sequence of keys on his Scorpion.

  Nothing happened. Numbers continued to speed across the two subsidiary screens. The blur of images on the central monitor continued their rush toward infinity.

  “Must have entered the wrong sequence.” Ooljee repeated the spinner entry, slowly this time, only to be rewarded with an identical lack of results. He leaned forward in the chair.

  “This is very interesting.” He spoke calmly, quietly. “I don’t seem to be able to interrupt the sequence.”

  “Shut down the input.”

  “What do you think I just tried to do?”

  “All right then, shut down your sphere reader.”

  “I tried that too.” He indicated a readout. “It shut off just the way it is supposed to.”

  The detective studied the console. There was nothing exotic about it, nothing radical in the design or setup. It was much the same as the molly he was used to working with every day in Tampa. But if Ooljee had ceased inputting and had also shut down the read-enter laser which read the concentric molecular layers of the mollysphere the way a good paring knife peels an onion, then why was the resolution-search sequence still running?

  “Procedural error,” he finally suggested.

  Ooljee made a face. “Shutting down is not a very complicated procedure. It’s not one any fool is likely to mess up.”

  “Okay, granted. Then the problem’s got to be mechanical.”

  “That is what I was thinking.” He sighed, straightening in the chair. “I will have to bring maintenance into this. There will be harsh words.”

  As he reached for the phone, two screens on the far side of the room sprang to life. Each was attached to a spinner. But no one was seated before them.

  “I did not turn those on.” Ooljee was staring stupidly at the precessing images.

  Moody was no longer tired, no longer bored. “I think we’d better find a way to shut this thing down. Fast.” As he finished, another pair of screens high up on a wall became active. Ooljee grimly worked his spinner, the ratpad, and nearby input keys, until he was literally stabbing at them.

  “No good. No damn good. Y adil."

  “I can see that.” Moody was trying to make some sense, any kind of sense, out of the millions of images and figures that were avalanching across the multiple screens.

  “It’s still resolving and still expanding.” Ooljee was just sitting now, his gaze flicking in dumbfounded amazement from one monitor to the next. “And whatever it is doing is affecting the hardware. We are getting active response as well as analysis. What is that damn sandpainting a template for?” He gestured at the no longer quite so innocent-appearing fax of the Kettrick painting where it lay on the console next to his Scorpion. “If this is some kind of virus, we may be causing a lot of damage.”

  “C’mon, man,” said Moody. “From what the Laughters told us, that design is at least a couple of hundred years old. They didn’t have computers then, or viruses to affect them, much less mollysphere storage.”

  Ooljee was rising. “I am going to have to ask the building engineer to cut the power. For all I know, we are already on course to crash every opdisk and molly in the department.” He eyed the detective resignedly. “You had no part in this. I will bear the consequences. It is now unavoidable that there will be consequences. And all I thought to do was to play a few picture games with the painting.”

  The lights went out, flickering once before silently expiring. Not the screens. Every monitor glowed with diagrams or numbers as the mutating program continued to build upon itself, utilizing more and more of the station’s mollystorage. A wall phone began to jangle insistently. Without taking his eyes from the first monitor he’d activated, Ooljee lifted the receiver. The voice on the other end was loud and frantic enough for Moody to make out some of the words.

  “Who’s down there? Everything’s going nuts upstairs! Who are you people? What’s you
r authorization? I demand to know your—!”

  The sergeant calmly replaced the receiver on its hook, effectively silencing the unidentified interrogator. “Someone is very upset. I think we should try to think of an explanation.”

  “How’re y’all gonna do that when you don’t even know what’s happening?” Moody spoke without looking at his colleague. He could not help but ignore him in favor of the dazzling displays that now filled every comer of the room.

  Every screen, every telltale, every readout and monitor, was alive and glowing, bombarding them with information they could make no sense of, and chromatic schematics as bright and ever-changing as an exhibition of kinetic art. All that was missing was deafening popular music, Moody thought, preferably by a group like Molten Scalpel or the Raucoids, and they could sell admission.

  In place of music there was a persistent, electronic hum that rose and fell in a pattern that, while not recognizable, was self-evidently anything but random. An eerie, fuzzy whisper that tittered in the background, emanating from an unidentified source like rats running the conduits.

  Ooljee disconnected his spinner. It had no effect whatsoever on the now self-sustaining program. Both men began backwalking toward the door. Moody’s imagination was beginning to run away with him. While whatever was happening here might not be easily or readily explained, he reminded himself, it wasn’t an excerpt from a horrorvid either. Ooljee’s fiddling with a Mandlebrot Set derived from the Kettrick sandpainting had inexplicably generated some kind of reproduction program within the police mollysphere. That was physics, not phantasy.

  Still, he was measurably relieved when the door did not resist Ooljee’s touch. Behind them the room was filled with a booming whu-whu-whu sound, a deep-throated electronic pounding. It was interrupted frequently by the first sharp cracklings and snapping noises of overloaded circuits. Above it all echoed the plaintive wail of the wall phone.

  Suddenly Ooljee pointed to the original monitor. While the rest of the screens were awash in incomprehensible psychedelic babble, it had turned a calm cool green, a verdant field on which throbbed a single flickering

  word:

  WORKING

  Working, Moody mused wonderingly. Working at what? He would not be spooked. There was a reasonable explanation for whatever was happening. As soon as they could shut everything down, recovery specialists would run a trawl on the mollysphere web and figure out exactly what had occurred.

  The whu-whu-whu sound in the room was now accompanied by a faint rush of air that sounded like hahowa hahowa. It was a most peculiar electronic counterpoint.

  Ooljee thought so too. “You hear that?” The detective nodded. “That is really strange.”

  “Why? We’ve got a room full of visual garbage. Why not aural as well?”

  “It is strange because I do not think it is garbage. I think I know what it is. At least, I remember hearing something like it when I was a kid.”

  Moody turned on him, more uneasy than he would have cared to admit. The pounding, pulsing sounds that filled the room meant nothing to him. He began to wonder if his colleague was starting to extrapolate upon reality, or to put it another way, crack under the strain of what he’d inadvertently committed.

  “We’ve been in this hole long enough. The weavers will work it out. That’s what they’re paid for.” He put a big hand on the sergeant’s shoulder, pushing him toward the elevator. “Let’s get some air.”

  Explosive cracklings drowned out Ooljee’s mysterious electronic mumbling. Moody glanced back over his shoulder. Wisps of smoke were beginning to appear in the room. “Shit. That’s all we need.”

  They reached the elevator, had to wait impatiently for it to descend from the main floor. A small screen set in the wall to one side of the lift-controls was flashing figures and diagrams at them. Abruptly and without any warning they were replaced by words. Ooljee stared dumbly at the screen on his spinner. The words were repeated there, and for all they knew, on every screen and monitor back in the room. All around them the first smoke alarms were beginning to howl.

  With the far darkness made of the He-rain over your head Come to us Soaring

  With the far darkness made of the She-rain over your head Come to us Soaring

  With the zig-zag lightning flung out on high over your head Come to us Soaring

  With the rainbow hanging high over your head Come to us Soaring.

  It flickered on the wall monitor, blinked back at him from Ooljee’s screen. It made sense in and of itself, but not to him. As they entered the elevator their ears were assaulted by a rising electronic thunder, rumbling and spitting ominously. It pursued them up the shaft.

  The doors parted, letting them out on the main floor. Smoke alarms were wailing everywhere. People were gathering up mollysphere backup cubes and printouts and personal effects as they raced for the exits.

  Ooljee allowed himself to be led, his expression dazed. Moody got directions from an officer hurrying past them. His arms were piled high with cubes and boxes of holo-mages.

  The sergeant finally looked at the man dragging him along. “You read it too, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I read it. What is it? Something from the local Top Forty?”

  “It’s from the Nightway. Part of a long chant addressed to the Thunderbird. You have heard of the Thunderbird?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Moody plunged into a crowded corridor. There was a lot of smoke in the air now, acrid and eye-stinging. People were starting to cough. Down below, something was burning.

  The external security doors had been flung aside. No one was checking idents now. Moody stumbled down the stairs leading to the street, nearly fell as a percussive blast rocked the station behind them. A thin tongue of orange flame licked through a window flanking the doorway. Sweat poured down his back. For an instant he thought he heard that strange electronic pulsing, whu-whu-whu, hammering away in counterpoint to hahowa hahowa. Then he realized they were only echoes of what he heard earlier, down below.

  Except for the flames vomiting from the station windows and the indifferently drifting advertising holasers shrieking the virtues of cigarettes, deodorants, autos and vidshows, restaurants and hotels, it was pitch dark outside. Night-shift personnel and a few late-roaming curious civilians were gathering in groups, trying to assist each other, trying to help, trying to make sense of what was happening. A few stood alone or in twos, gawping dumbly at the building.

  Moody pushed through the swelling crowd. He was not in the mood to talk to anyone, in any language. Right now he was more concerned with protecting his partner and assessing his mental state. No one confronted them. Probably no more than one or two people knew that Ooljee had been direct-accessing the system’s mollyweb. No one shouted at them to stop.

  He did not see the bolt strike the uplink dish atop the precinct house, but was sure that he heard it above the screams of those who did. It melted the upper two-thirds of the big antenna and left the remainder smoking like fried fish bones. The thunder of its passing was replaced by the mournful song of approaching fire engines as one city department raced to the aid of another. Later, much later, a few witnesses would insist that the lightning had been full of color, like a shard of jagged rainbow, instead of simply a normal bright white.

  Ooljee had been staring past his friend and had seen it hit. The color of it lingered on his retinas. Thunder and lightning continued to torment the night sky, but the building was not struck again.

  CHAPTER 11

  The fire department arrived just as the rain began; steady, hard, and cold as an iceman’s tattoo. An exhausted Moody slumped to the sidewalk. The droplets chilled his neck and back. He pulled his jacket up to protect his head.

  His partner sat beside him; legs crossed, hands resting on his thighs. Together they observed the flaming, smoking scene as men in uniforms very different from those of the late-night refugees scattered to their work.

  Aware he was breathing too fast and that his heart was working too hard, Moody
struggled to slow both by concentrating on something else. He glanced uncertainly at his colleague.

  “I don’t suppose you can explain this?”

  It took the sergeant a moment to react. Only then did he regard his paler, larger companion through the falling rain.

  “If it is a step-by-step reconstruction of events that you want, I can’t help you. I cannot help myself. We know that the departmental web built some kind of program based on a fractal template derived from a portion of the Kettrick painting. We know that after it reached a certain point, it began running itself, because we were unable to shut it down. Some kind of mutation took place within the mol-lysphere. It went on autoplait, or whatever you want to call it.”

  Moody nodded slowly. “All of which is patently impossible, because the work Grandpa Laughter created dates from a time when nobody knew about such things.”

  “Quite so.” Ooljee continued to stare at the burning building. “Then there is the matter of the sounds we heard. ”

  “Yeah. You said you recognized some of it. It was just noise to me.”

  The sergeant nodded. “Noise like this.” He repeated what they’d heard as they’d fled the room. The hair on the back of Moody’s neck stiffened slightly.

  Sheets of water and suppressant poured into the precinct house as the men in yellow slickers beat the flames down.

  “I have not seen many ceremonies,” Ooljee was saying, “but those few I remember. When I was ten, eleven, my father took me to see one that was being performed over in Tuba City. There is a spirit called Talking God. He is, they say, in charge of the eastern dawn and also of the chase. That is of course no more than coincidence.” Ooljee mustered a tired, soaked smile.

  “He is said to function as a spiritual deus ex machina, materializing with useful suggestions whenever a hero is at an impasse.” He stared at the station. “If a suggestion was given, I missed it.”

  “So what’s the connection?”

  Ooljee looked back at him, water dripping down his face, his black hair slicked tight against his forehead. “The whu-whu noise we heard? That is the sound the hatathli makes. It is supposed to be the voice of Talking God.”