John Golden: Freelance Debugger

by Django Wexler

  I held out a hand. A moment later, my palm was suffused with a golden glow, which gradually spread down my arm and outlined my body in a gentle, radiant halo.

  It isn't magic, exactly. As I'd told Delphi, a fairy burrow is a kind of extended metaphor, a story telling and retelling itself through the medium of bits and pieces of computing time. From the outside, with a connection to the underlying system, Sarah can push or pull it in certain ways. Not too hard, because the burrow had a lot of ontological inertia—that's what makes it so difficult to get rid of in the first place—but enough to help me out. Some debuggers run elaborate set-up routines through their external systems, wrapping themselves up like a knight in plate armor. With Sarah's speed and expertise, I can use a more ad-hoc approach[33].

  —[33] Translation: I can work sloppy, because she'll always pull my bacon out of the fire when I need her.—

  With a little more light, I could see that I was in a cramped, enclosed space. The ceiling was only a few inches above my head, and it seemed to be made of packed earth, with thousands of tiny root-tendrils poking through and dangling cilia-like where they brushed against my scalp whenever I moved. Larger roots hung down here and there like organic stalactites, or made it all the way to the floor in thick brown columns. More roots erupted from the walls, gnarled loops and knobby protrusions, and the ground was bumpy and treacherous with them.

  The burrow seemed to extend for some distance horizontally, broken by occasional enormous rocks protruding through the earth and places where the roots grew so thickly they formed a barrier. I moved cautiously in the most open direction, hunched over to give myself a little more clearance.

  There's no point in trying to be stealthy in a burrow. The act of entering it sends a ripple through its fabric that the inhabitants can't help but notice. I cupped my hands to my mouth and said, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  For a moment, there was no response, though I fancied I could see something moving at the edge of my circle of light. Small figures scuttled here and there, hiding in the shifting shadows. I frowned.

  “Come on.” This wasn't normal behavior. Most fairies are, above all else, insatiably curious. “I don't want to play hide and seek.”

  Three red lights came on in the shadow of a boulder, just ahead of me. I stopped, and became aware of a low growl that echoed throughout the cavern and resonated unpleasantly in the pit of my stomach. Small clumps of earth fell from the ceiling in a soft rain.

  “Uh,” I managed, backing up a step. “Right[34].”

  —[34] Ever the action hero.—

  The thing took a long stride forward, into the light. It was about the size of a large dog, but looked more feline than anything else, although in any case the resemblance was only passing. It had three multi-jointed legs on either flank, and its big, heavy paws sprouted inch-long claws that looked more like an eagle's talons. Its face was nightmarish, a pug-snouted consisting mainly of a wide mouth with entirely too many dagger-sized fangs.

  Three eyes, glowing a dull red, made a triangle on its brow. It was covered in dark brown fur, with white stripes slashing its side, and I could see something gleaming on the end of its tail as it slashed back and forth.

  “Sarah, a shield, please,” I said, not making any sudden movements. The thing flowed closer, six legs working together with uncanny grace. “Hurry.”

  I felt the burrow twist, and then there was a shield strapped to my left arm. It was a classic kite shield, shaped like a teardrop and nearly as tall as I was, a bit unwieldy but welcome nonetheless.

  The precise shape and function of the things Sarah sends to me is always a bit of a surprise, because she has to shape them to fit into the overarching structure of the burrow.

  Most of the time it ends up being spears, shields, armor, and the like, because a lot of the older fairies prefer to operate in a swords-and-sorcery context[35].

  —[35] Though this is changing, slowly but surely. In a couple of decades you may be more likely to pop inside a burrow and find urban sprawl instead of Ye Olde Knights and Castles.—

  Three-Eyes halted its advance at the unexpected intrusion, but only briefly. It tensed, and I brought the shield up in front of me just before it sprang. Its six legs sent it into me like a defensive lineman slamming into an offending quarterback, and the force of it bowled me over. I ended up on my back, with the shield supporting the spitting, snarling weight of the thing. I pushed up with both hands, lifting the shield and the monster away from me as it tried for my face with its claws, and felt a burning pain in my thigh where one of its hind paws found purchase. It bit the edge of the shield, sending wood chips flying.

  “Weapon!” I gasped. “Sarah, weapon! Now, please!”

  “Working on it,” Sarah snapped. “Sword in the dirt on your right.”

  Some kind of laser blaster had probably been too much to hope for[36].

  —[36] You try coding up a disintegrator ray and pushing it into a completely foreign metaphorical environment on a moment's notice, smart guy.—

  I tucked my legs under the shield and shoved, tossing Three-Eyes a couple of yards. It slammed up against a protruding rock, but righted itself almost immediately. I pawed in the dirt beside me, found the hilt of a heavy longsword, and just managed to regain my feet as the creature jumped again.

  This time I was better braced, and met it halfway with the shield. I'd intended to bounce it to the floor, but it grabbed hold of the shield and clung to the wood with its four lower limbs while trying to take my head off with its forepaws.

  I ducked, jerking the shield up, and stabbed blindly around the side of it with the sword.

  The point met flesh, and Three-Eyes let go, dropping to the ground at my feet. It was still scrabbling, so I brought the sword around in an awkward arc and delivered a solid chop to its midsection.

  There was no blood. Fairies don't bleed, as a rule, and they don't feel pain. They don't even die in the same sense that humans do. You can cut one to pieces, and it'll vanish, but the odds are that it will turn up again somewhere else eventually. Some debuggers like to say that we're only banishing them back to their home dimension, or into our collective unconscious, depending on which theory you believe.

  All I know is that it makes it easier to put a sword through something that looks like a four year-old's drawing of a neon-colored pony if you're pretty sure the thing doesn't mind[37].

  —[37] That was a really weird case. See John Golden and the Hundred Duck-Sized Horses (And One Horse-Sized Duck) —

  In this case, a thick black smoke gushed from Three-Eyes' wounds, and after a little bit more scrabbling it burst apart into an evil-smelling cloud and a handful of black ash. I dropped the shield, keeping the sword in one hand in case anything else wanted to leap out at me, and checked my leg. It was bleeding, but not too badly, so I left it alone for the moment.

  During my brief self-diagnosis, the shadowy figures I'd seen milling about beyond the reach of the light began to creep closer.

  They turned out to be pixies[38], about as high as my knee, with skin tones ranging from blue to reddish-purple.

  —[38] Pixie refers to a generally humanoid fairy that is considerably smaller than human-sized. One of the problems with the common descriptions of fairies is that there is one set of categories to classify them based on behavior (grazer, gremlin, genie, puppeteer, etc) and another set based on their appearance (pixie, elf, ogre, and so on) so that any individual may fall into more than one overlapping classification. I have proposed a scheme to remedy this, using twenty-nine easily quantifiable variables, which takes both physical form and behavior into account and assigns each species a unique identifier to prevent the possibility of confusion. Unfortunately, the resulting GUIDs are somewhat cumbersome to pronounce (these 'pixies', for example, would be labeled 34B67A55) and so my system has not seen widespread adoption.—

  They had green hair, which spread out from their heads like dandelion puffs. They wore baggy dark green robes that came down to t
heir knees. Their wide, curious eyes were focused on the smear of ash where Three-Eyes had been.

  “Cat gone,” one of them said, pointing. The others all nodded solemnly and repeated his assessment. “Cat gone. Cat gone black dust human sharp.” The leader looked up at me. His teeth were tiny and pointed. “Human sharp I?”

  “Not yet,” I said. Talking to fairies takes practice, patience, and a fair bit of guesswork. Some of the more powerful breeds can fake a human mentality long enough to hold a conversation, but these were obviously not such advanced specimens. “I need you to answer some questions.”

  “Questions,” the leader said, and the others repeated it like a chorus. “Questions.”

  “How did you get here? How did you get inside this burrow?”

  For it was increasingly obvious that this was the crucial question. Three-Eyes had been dangerous, but hadn't looked very intelligent. It was the sort of thing you'd expect to find wandering the Wildernet, not infesting a highly secure system. And pixies like this, in my experience, didn't have either the desire or the wherewithal to drill through direwalls and dodge antifae just to get a chance to gnaw on a few processors.

  “Walked,” the pixie said, looking at his companions for confirmation. He pointed across the chamber. “There here walked.”

  “I know you walked over here,” I said[39]. “But how did you get into the burrow?” I waved my arm to encompass the whole cave.

  —[39] This is one part of John's job I could never do. I would be strangling the pestilential things within thirty seconds, but he seems to have a knack for getting useful information out of them. Perhaps they operate on similar mental levels.—

  The pixie pondered that. Now that I had a moment to look around, I could see that the root system that permeated the place was not in very good shape. Big chunks of it had been torn out and smashed to a pulp, and the knotted roots protruding from the walls looked very much like they'd been gnawed on. Indeed, as I watched, a couple of pixies drifted away from the crowd of about a dozen that had gathered around me and settled in to have a good chew on the nearest barky extrusion.

  Since the burrow was a metaphorical space, the roots obviously represented the inner workings of Delphi's machines and the network that connected them. The pixies trying their best to destroy it. Indeed, the reason the burrow had come into being in this particular configuration was so that they could engage in this sabotage. A fairy's burrow grows around it as it settles into a system, and its dominant metaphor adapts to the creature's needs.

  What I couldn't figure out was why they were doing it. Some fairies can certainly be mindlessly destructive, but pixies usually have a rudimentary sense of cause and effect. And yet here they were busily attempting to bring down the very system they were living in.

  “Leave darkroom,” the pixie leader/spokesperson said, finally. “Came egg darkroom. Many I. Eater cat threads. Leave darkroom eater anger.”

  “You came to this 'darkroom' as eggs?” I said. I wasn't really expecting a response, but the pixie nodded. I hoped we were actually communicating; pixies love to copy human behavior, even when they don't understand it, which has caused many an overoptimistic debugger to assume he was getting his point across. “Someone brought you there? A human?”

  That was a long shot. A human wouldn't have been able to enter the burrow, so they probably wouldn't have noticed him.

  “Eater,” the pixie said. “Eater egg darkroom. Leave darkroom. Many I. Makeplace here.”

  'Makeplace' meant the burrow, the growth of which was a kind of natural construction or secretion of the pixies, like termites burrowing into a house. I pursed my lips for a moment then said, “Why are you trying to destroy it?”

  “Smash makeplace smash darkroom. Smash eater.” The pixie smiled. With his sharp teeth, it was not a reassuring expression. “Smash, smash, smash.”

  “I...see.” I didn't, but I thought I was getting there.

  “Human sharp cat. Human sharp many I?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I need to think about this.”

  ~

  Falmer sat at his desk, one index finger slowly tapping out a rhythm on the other hand. He shook his head.

  “Mr. Golden”—it wasn't John anymore, I noticed—“I'm not sure I understand.”

  Delphi and I stood in front of his desk—no chairs had been offered—like guilty schoolchildren called before the headmaster. I had Sarah's bag over my shoulder.

  “What can I clarify, Mr. Falmer?” I said.

  “You found the fairy burrow,” he said. “You went inside and defeated some sort of monster.”

  I nodded, idly stretching my leg where Three-Eyes had clawed me. The wounds were gone, of course—when you pop out of a burrow, you're always in the same state you went into it, but there's a phantom pain that lingers for a few hours. And, of course, if you get killed, you don't pop out at all, as the roll of my colleagues who have fallen in the line of duty will attest. But with no evidence, it can sometimes be hard to convince people that you've been in a scrap.

  “The burrow was also infested with”—Falmer glanced at his monitor—”pixies, who I gather are not terribly ferocious. But at this point you elected to leave without evicting them or destroying the burrow.”

  “Because there may be more to the problem,” Delphi said, unable to contain herself. “We think that someone—”

  Falmer held up a hand to silence her. “Deli, I'm sorry, but could you give me and Mr. Golden a few moments? In fact, why don't you go home and get some rest. You look like you could use it.”

  “But—” Delphi looked from me to Falmer and back again. “I don't understand.”

  “We'll talk in the morning,” Falmer said, and made a shooing gesture. “Go on.”

  “Yes, Mr. Falmer,” Delphi said. As she turned to leave, I heard her mutter, “If there's anything left of the system by morning.”

  “She has it right,” I said, after she'd closed the glass door behind her. “The problem is that we haven't figured out how these things got in here in the first place. There's no way those pixies just breezed past your outer security. And when I talked to them—”

  “Fairies aren't known for talking sense,” Falmer interrupted.

  “That's true,” I admitted. “But they said they came to this burrow from another one, and I think it has to be somewhere inside your perimeter. There must be another burrow somewhere on the system.”

  “But you haven't been able to find it?”

  “We've mapped everything we have access to,” I said. “It's not there. But there's a connection to another network that we don't have access to, and that's the only place left to look.”

  “So you want to poke around in my research labs.” Falmer's smile was entirely gone now, replaced by a thin-lipped grimace.

  “I'd hardly be poking around, and I won't look at any of your data. But if there is a burrow there, it sounds like it's the more dangerous of the two. We'll need to close them both out.”

  There was a long pause. Falmer shook his head.

  “I'm sorry, Mr. Golden, but I can't allow it. We're at a critical stage right now, and if I allowed an outsider into the lab my investors would crucify me. Please destroy the burrow you discovered, and I'll handle the rest myself.”

  “With all due respect, I don't think you understand the severity of the problem. You can't handle it. If there's a burrow there, then your labs are more in danger from the faeries than they could possibly be from me. How will that look to your investors?”

  “It's not your decision to make.”

  “As a matter of fact, it is,” I said. “I don't want to get legal with you, Mr. Falmer, but you'll find that my contract stipulates I have total freedom of action to deal with the infestation as I see fit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It's a matter of reputation. If I do an extermination at a site that is destroyed by fairies a few weeks later, finding future work could prove troublesome. I have my record to think about. So I
have to insist that I be allowed to investigate for a second burrow.”

  Falmer was quiet for a few moments, reading the contract off his monitor. Finally, he looked up.

  “You're quite certain I can't change your mind?” he said.

  “I'm afraid not.”

  “Then I am afraid I'm forced to terminate your employment.” He tapped at his keyboard. “The appropriate forms are on the way.”

  “You'll still owe me the balance of my fee.”

  “Of course.” The smile reappeared, but thin as glass. “And I remind you that you are still bound by our confidentiality agreements.”

  I nodded. Falmer glared at me for a moment, then shook his head.

  “As you like. It's been a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Golden.”

  He did not, I noticed, offer to shake my hand.

  ~

  A taxi took me to a nearby Sheraton, with a stop at a take-out Chinese place to pick up several pounds of carbohydrates soaking in grease[40].

  —[40] The longer I spend as a laptop, the more I am disgusted by ingestion and its associated processes. I don't know how I ever stood it. It doesn't help that John slurps his noodles.—

  I took the steaming white containers up to the hotel room and arranged them on the desk, then jacked Sarah into a wall socket and the too-expensive broadband network.

  “It doesn't smell right,” I said.

  “The noodles?” Sarah said. “I can't confirm that, obviously, but that place didn't look like it was up to code—”

  “Falmer.” I rubbed my shin again, trying to convince the nerves that the damage they'd suffered was only in my imagination. “It doesn't make any sense. What is he working on in there that's so secret he'd rather let some fairy take his lab apart than show me?”

  “Probably the next version of SS AntiFae,” Sarah said. “According to their website, it launches next month. 'With new UltraBlock technology,' it says.”

  I grunted, glanced at the food, and decided I needed a shower before anything else. I always think better in the shower, and there was something nagging at me I couldn't quite put my finger on. For a moment I nearly had it, but as I broke open the single-use soap and single-use shampoo, I started wondering if Delphi was at that moment climbing into a well-deserved shower herself, and I lost my train of thought[41].