“The burrow's still growing,” Sarah reported, when she'd had a few moments to look around. Delphi growled.
“Where's the research lab?” I said.
"Second floor, next to the boss' office." Delphi tapped a few more keys. "I've got our security in diagnostic mode. Nothing we do should set off the alarm."
“Unless there's an alarm she doesn't know about,” Sarah said in my ear. “Be careful, John. This isn't like being under contract. If we get caught in here...”
“I know,” I growled. “So keep an eye out[51].”
—[51] I'm sure he was nervous, but there was hardly a need to snap at me.—
Delphi led the way upstairs, past the blinded plastic eyes of the motion sensors. We picked our way around empty desks, covered with pinned-up family photos and photocopied cartoons. I had to suppress an automatic fight-or-flight reflex. If there is a special circle of Hell for programmers[52], it's furnished with 'clever' coffee mugs and yellowing Dilberts. (And a broken coffee maker and a vending machine that dispenses Diet Caffeine-Free Cherry Coke no matter what button you push.)
—[52] Given their behavior, I have no doubt that there is.—
Falmer's glass-walled office was reassuringly empty. Beside it was a closed door I had taken for some kind of supply closet. Delphi walked up to it, grabbed the handle, and frowned.
“Locked.” She rattled it. “What the hell? It was never locked when I was working on it.”
“We're here on the theory that your boss has made some improvements,” I said.
“What now?”
“Let me take a look.”
The door was solid blonde wood, set into a metal frame. The lock looked new, and was of the old-fashioned key-and-tumbler variety rather than anything electronic we might have had a chance of getting into.
“Can you pick locks?” Delphi said, over my shoulder.
“No. Can you?”
“What? Of course not.” I glanced back at her, and she looked a little embarrassed. “I just thought it might be a debugger thing.”
“I can't say it's something that's come up very often[53]. Stand back a bit, I have an idea.”
—[53] Frankly, I'm surprised John didn't give it a try. He rarely lets a lack of a skill—programming in KOBOLD, driving a tank, playing the violin (that was a bad one)—get in the way of attempting a hare-brained scheme.—
“You can get the door open?”
“Not exactly.”
Delphi backed off. I took a few steps backward, got a good run-up, and hit the wall beside the doorframe shoulder-first[54].
—[54] On second thought, I'm not surprised. He's even less likely to pass up a chance to break something.—
This was the kind of building that was usually billed as 'flexible office space', which meant that most of the internal walls were built quick and cheap and designed to be easy to take down when the next client moved in. There wasn't much to this one but a couple of layers of plaster and a soundproof plastic panel in a metal frame, all of which cracked at the first impact. A couple of kicks finished the job and left a hole big enough to squirm through.
“Oh,” Delphi said, disappointed. “I thought you were going to do something clever[55].”
— [55] A delusion many of us have cherished at one time or another.—
“Usually simple is better than clever.” I peered through the hole. “I thought you said there were only a couple of workstations in here.”
“There are. Or were, the last time I was in here.”
“I think that may no longer be the case.” I ducked my head and pushed through, scraping some plaster dust into my hair. “Take a look.”
Delphi followed me into a dark room about the size of Falmer's office next door. The workstations and fancy monitors she had mentioned were still there, shoved out of the way near the door, but the rest of the room was full of computers.
They stood in rows, not the organized racks of Delphi's machine room downstairs but just squeezed in wherever there was space, perched one on top of the other or lying sideways in stacks. Each one seemed to be different, but most of them looked old, as though whoever had set the place up had grabbed whatever cheap hardware he could get his hands on and tossed it all together in a heap.
A rat's-nest of cords ran through the gaps to the center of the room, where two-dozen power strips were daisy-chained in a circle and a small stack of blue-and-black network hardware sprouted a monstrous spaghetti tangle of ethernet cables. The air was hot, as though we'd stepped under a blow dryer, and smelled slightly of scorched metal. The click-click-whirr sound of hard drives seeking was a constant susurrus, underlying the buzz of dozens of fans.
I had an urge to cover Delphi's eyes, as though we'd walked in on some scene of gruesome torture. Just the thought of trying to keep a pile like this running made my palms itch.
“How could he have kept this secret?” she said, stepping clear of the hole. The temperature difference created a steady inflow of fresh, cooler air, for which I was grateful. “Wouldn't it show up somewhere?”
“He must have a separate power line for it,” I said. “And it's not connected to the outside, or to your network. At least, it isn't supposed to be. Is there a light switch?”
She found one beside the door. The fluorescent lights clicked on, their pedestrian glare taking a lot of the eerie weirdness out of the scene. It looked like a supply closet, albeit one where all the machines were powered on. I started poking around along the outer wall, looking behind the whirring computers.
“What are you looking for?” Delphi said, following me curiously.
“A bypass.” I bent over and pushed a stack of mini-towers gently aside. “Gotcha.”
Delphi knelt beside me. With one finger I lifted part of the ethernet tangle. Attached to one of the off-white cables was a long, thin strand of something that resembled translucent Silly Putty, or snot. I could see where it fed into the network cable, a small bare patch in the insulation. The end of the strand snaked into a small hole in the plaster wall and out of sight.
“Ew.” Delphi looked at it, fascinated. “What is that stuff?”
“Ectoplasm.”
“Is it dangerous to touch?”
“No, but don't break it. Not yet, anyway.”
She put a finger on the springy strand and tested its strength. “What's it for?”
“It's functioning as a kind of crude network link.” I tapped the wall. “Somewhere in there is another cable that's plugged into your primary network.”
“You're not serious. This goop is network cable?”
“For fairies, anyway. I don't know if you could use it for regular traffic.”
“You think Falmer planted it here?”
“No, actually,” I said. “I think he wants to keep this room completely isolated. But a fairy burrow can grow this stuff if it gets strong enough. That's why they can get past air-gaps when you don't pay attention. Oberon's Law, and all that. I think the burrow in here grew this strand and finally hooked it in to your network three days ago, when you first noticed the infestation. Whatever he was keeping in here escaped.”
“Jesus. I thought all you had to do to keep fairies out was to maintain your direwalls and keep your antifae up to date.”
“It is, under normal circumstances.” I looked over the heap of machines. “This is...not exactly normal.”
I hunted around in the cable tangle until I found a network switch with an open port, and set Sarah's bag down beside it and patched her in.
“Yuck,” she said. “This topology is awful. And it's practically jammed with fairy garbage[56].”
—[56] Disgusting just being plugged into it. Imagine stepping slowly into a stream of sewage.—
“Can you map the burrow?”
“Easily. I think this place is nothing but burrow. Any of these machines should have plenty of space for an entrance.”
“All right. Then I'm going in.”
I took out the earpiece and handed
it to Delphi. She frowned.
“What can I do from here?”
Not much, unfortunately. One reason why debuggers tend to be loners—it's hard for anyone to help out. “Keep watch. If anyone turns up, you can tell Sarah, and she'll tell me.”
She looked unhappy, but put the earpiece on. I laid my hand against the front of one of the humming towers and twisted myself inside its world.
~
At first I thought I was out under the night sky, or some fairy simulacrum thereof. I blinked, trying to adjust to the darkness, and noticed that the tiny lights I'd taken for stars were scattered all around me as well as above, and that they glowed the firefly-green of power LEDs. They were arranged in irregular strands, like rivers.
“Sarah?” I said. “Light, please.”
The familiar glow blossomed over me.
I was standing on a hard metal grating, which was heaped high with corrugated black cables as thick as my arm. These cables were gathered in bunches, like a pack of snakes fighting and mating at the same time, and it was from inside them that the green lights glowed. Similar tangles of cables wound across the ceiling, twisting over and under one another and occasionally hanging down in loops.
All the cables converged on a central hillock, an extrusion of the floor made of smooth black glass. Cables plunged into it; green lights dimly visible inside, so that it looked like an enormous, faintly glowing blister. From where I was standing I could see there was a depression or pit in the middle, but not what was inside.
What really caught my attention, were the gunmetal-gray blocks arranged in a ring around the central—mechanism? Altar? These were made of what looked like chicken wire wrapped around metal struts, and inside I could dimly see a large number of small, humanoid shapes. Pixies, I guessed, like the ones I'd met in the other burrow, though there were a few larger and smaller creatures mixed in. A grab bag of fairies, packed into the pens like chickens waiting to be slaughtered.
My mouth was dry. In most situations, it's hard to feel much sympathy for fairies. They don't bleed or feel pain, and they can't really die, so you can't torture them, exploit them, or even threaten them, because they're not afraid. There is, however, one important exception, and that is captivity.
Fairies are creatures of chaos, of the whirling sea of meaning and metaphor. It is in their nature to jump from person to person, from network to network, to push the edges of their burrows deeper into their host system and try to spread. The worst thing you can do to a fairy is confine it, lock it up, take away its freedom to move and grow.
The pain they feel is worse than anything a human can imagine. Imprisoning a fairy isn't like putting a human in prison—it's more like pulling a fish out of the water, except that the fish can't die, only go on suffering forever.
Fortunately for the fairies, confinement is the one punishment most humans can't inflict on them. Merely cutting off their burrows doesn't do it—inside, they're still free, and they're patient enough to wait for the burrow to grow an ectoplasmic lifeline. The only thing that can imprison a fairy inside its burrow is another, more powerful fairy. Or one of us, a debugger, though our informal society has a ban on such treatment[57].
—[57] This may surprise you, if you're familiar with the irresponsible and generally amoral behavior typical of most debuggers. Truthfully, it's less out of compassion and more from a sense of realpolitik. Debuggers fight the fairies when they infest our systems, but from the fairy's point of view their human opponents aren't doing any real harm. The last thing the debuggers want is to make fairy-kind as a whole angry with them—the incidental infestations and damage from the dregs of the Wildernet are nothing compared to what Oberon and the Court could accomplish if they ever got really angry.—
Whoever had done this was either a debugger gone very, very bad, or a fairy purposefully putting its own kin through untold torment. Neither possibility was a pleasant one. I swallowed.
“Sarah,” I said. “Some kind of weapon. Now.”
“Got it. Right hand.”
I opened my hand, and a sleek black pistol dropped into it. That surprised me for a moment, but it shouldn't have—the metaphor of this burrow was obviously more in a science-fiction mode, and my tools would be shaped according. I curled my fingers around the grip and crept forward, toward the first of the cages.
Something on the ceiling moved with a hydraulic whirr. I jumped backward. At the confluence of the cables, what I'd taken for a lighting fixture began to unfold itself into a pair of multiple-articulated arms tipped with thick, grasping pads.
The top of a cage across the way from me flipped open, and the arms shot out to grab the first pathetic creature that managed to struggle through the opening, jamming the rest of the prisoners back inside. They carried the thing, a blue-skinned pixie, over the central pit, and I heard a deep, sinister buzz.
I edged closer and saw my light reflected in row after row of rotating knives, like the world's most dangerous salad prep device. The arms dropped the fairy, and I managed to turn away just in time. Blood or no blood, some things are not pleasant to watch.
“Sarah,” I said. “I know how he's doing it. The fairy code in SS AntiFae.”
“How?”
“He's feeding fairies into some kind of blender and using the bits that come out the other side.” Like any burrow, this one was a metaphor, and its direction was clear. “No wonder Jiiya couldn't figure out how it was put together. What kind of a nut job would think of—[58]”
—[58] The coming of the fairies has brought mankind a certain measure of humility. No matter how deranged and twisted our psychopaths, the worst of the fairies leave humanity in their dust.—
“John?” It was Delphi's voice, coming through the earpiece I'd lent her. “Are you there?”
“This is worse than we thought,” I said grimly.
“John, someone's at the door.” She sounded worried, but under control. “I think it's Mr. Falmer.”
~
I popped myself out of the burrow, materializing amid the tangle of wires and buzzing machines. Delphi was on the other side of the room, out of sight from the hole I'd kicked in the wall. She caught my eye and tapped her ear urgently.
Right—Sarah's earpiece. Delphi still had it, but fortunately I keep an emergency backup in my back pocket, a flimsy little thing with a crummy extendable mic[59]. I dug it out and jammed it into my ear as the key clicked in the door lock.
—[59] It just goes to show even John knows he can't function without me.—
“John,” Sarah said, her voice scratchy, “I'm getting a ton of wireless traffic from a new source. I think something in the burrow is talking to Falmer.”
“I'm sure it is,” I muttered. A suspicion that had been lurking at the back of my mind for some time rapidly crystallized. “Tell me if it spikes.”
The door opened. Falmer stood framed in the doorway, the fluorescent lights throwing a long shadow across the darkened office beyond. He was alone — no cops, no security guards. That would have surprised me if I hadn't just gotten a look inside the burrow. As it was, it confirmed my suspicions.
“Mr. Golden,” he said with a sigh, running one hand through his hair. “I was under the impression we'd concluded our business.”
“There were a few loose ends I wanted to clear up[60].”
—[60] If John has a fault—and let's not kid ourselves, he has plenty of faults—it is a tendency, in tense situations, to think that he's James Bond. I think the exchange of pretend-casual banter is an alpha male cool-vs-cool sort of thing.—
He glanced at the corner and spotted Delphi. The corner of his lip twitched.
“And you seem to have convinced my head of IT to help you. Hello, Deli. You're fired, by the way.”
“You're going to be worse than fired when everyone finds out about this,” Delphi said. “This is a crime.”
“As opposed to breaking and entering? Though if you want to claim Mr. Golden coerced you, I'd be sympathetic. Anything tha
t gets him a few more years behind bars.”
“Nobody's going to prison,” I said. “And he can't fire you, Delphi. The thing is—”
I'd pulled the keys to the rental car out of my pocket, slowly and quietly, underhanding them at Falmer.
His hand automatically came up to catch them, but he offered no more resistance than a fogbank. The keys vanished into his chest, and a moment later I heard them clatter to the floor behind him.
“—that's not Mr. Falmer. Walter Falmer is dead, isn't he?”
The Falmer-thing stood quietly, staring at me. I smiled.
“Network traffic spiking,” Sarah said. “I think you surprised him.”
“I have to say I'm impressed,” I said. “It must have cost you a lot to gather enough corporeality for that handshake. A lot of fairies would have made some excuse and skipped it, but that might have raised suspicions. And a little bit more for the chair, the door, the keyboard, and all the rest. No wonder you were eager to fob me off on Delphi. You must have been exhausted.”
“Y-y-you have no idea.” There was a strange hitch in his voice—not a human stutter, more like a glitching audio track. “I n-n-never wanted to get you involved, Mr. Gol-Gol-Golden.”
“I imagine you didn't. But some of your inmates got loose, and Delphi figured it out before you could clean them up yourself. So you couldn't very well do nothing, could you?”
“He's a fairy?” Delphi said. “Out here?”
“He's got a lot of power behind him.” I gestured at the machines. “I don't know the whole story, but I can guess. Falmer—the real Falmer—found you somewhere on the Wildernet, and you offered him a deal.”
“Y-Y-Y-Yes,” the fairy said. Perhaps because it was no longer bothering to maintain the illusion, it looked suddenly much less than human. Its facial expression twitched, from blank to smiling to rage and back again, like an animatronic robot on the fritz. Through it all, its eyes remained cold and dead.
“You got him to build you a burrow, and in return you helped him with his programming. You were his genie in a bottle. Except you got out of the bottle in the end. Were you always planning to get rid of Falmer?”
John Golden: Freelance Debugger Page 5