Ten Gentle Opportunities

by Duntemann, Jeff

  Most folk lacking the Third Eye grumbled that Global Enlivening was a conspiracy by magicians, who were the only ones who could unbreakably bind a corpse to its own etheric shell so that both would permanently disintegrate. Within Stypek’s own lifetime, mean-time-to-shamble had fallen from a comfortable fortnight to only three days, and if a magician could not be found and paid to conduct a proper shellstaking by then, one’s deceased relatives would just get up and wander off.

  The problem had grown acute enough that the world’s Adamant-class magicians had collaborated on the creation of the great lychfields. They were zombie traps. The bait was earth magic, which, although powerful, was not absorbed by dead flesh. The simple spell at the heart of every lychfield made earth magic smell like Third Eye magic, attracting zombies that were already ambulant. Once inside, they could not get out, and eventually exhausted whatever Third Eye magic they had carried in with them and crumbled to bones and dust.

  Stypek had read it all in Wiccapedia, and as he got to his feet he felt around in his many pockets for the requisite spells. He knew how to command zombies and had done it a time or two, usually as a way of getting cheap if not especially skilled labor. This time what he wanted was a diversion, and a lychfield full of newly energized zombies would be ideal. In only seconds, the shambling horrors in the lychfield would smell the magic he had in his pockets, and would turn in his direction.

  Seconds passed, then minutes. Nothing. Stypek looked around in the gloom. He saw no movement. There was no sound but the trickle of water down granite walls. He took a step forward, and crunched on ancient bones—then tripped over a motionless corpse that shuddered only slightly at the indignity.

  Something was wrong. Stypek fished a clamshell phial from an inside pocket, snapped it open, and dipped his left pinkie in the dust it contained. Seconds later, his finger burst into brilliant but cold flame, and Stypek could now see clearly to the far wall of the lychfield. There were plenty of zombies. In many places, they were stacked like cordwood or leaning against one another like tottering monoliths in a henge. Stypek estimated hundreds by eye. None were moving.

  On a hunch, Stypek flipped down his helmet’s wereglass roundels again, to see how much the zombies were glowing. Nothing was glowing very strongly—but every zombie in sight was glowing identically. Of course! Like water, uncommitted Third Eye magic sought its own level, and newly-arrived zombies confined in close proximity to earlier arrivals lost some of their magic to the lychfield’s older denizens, until at some point there was so little magic to go around that no one was even twitching, much less shambling.

  Stypek’s snerf-sense told him that Jrikk Jroggmugg was hard at work on the other side of the wall. Quickly, then! Using his pinkie as a lamp, Stypek dumped the contents of several of his many pockets on the ground. A zombie activator powered by a quarter of an Opportunity was rolled into the payload of a small black-powder rocket. A packet of obedience dust clipped to a packet of etheric intelligence booster might also be useful, assuming their trigger spells weren’t broken. (Always a risk when you bought cheap magic at Shazam’s Club.) A reputedly unreliable can of generic zombie repellant rounded out the kit.

  Stypek stuck the little rocket’s bamboo tail into the eyesocket of a nearby skull and struck a match. The fuse sizzled, and the activator rode an arc of fire five cubits into the dank air. With a quick pop! it burst, scattering foul-smelling dust in every direction.

  Through the wereglass roundels he watched the process unfold. Little glowing wisps twisted and darted in short motions, descending and flowing into the decaying bodies everywhere around him. He saw them shudder and stretch, gathering limbs beneath them and shoving away from the ground. In waves they stood, staggered, and scratched their heads. Those that still had noses raised them, turning to follow the strong scent of magic that surrounded Stypek. Step by shambling step, they lurched toward him.

  Stypek gave himself a few quick schpritzes with the bargain-bin Zom-Be-Gone in case things got a little too cozy. He then picked up a sit-by-nellie spell from the immaterial pile at his feet.

  “You guys need something to do,” he said aloud. Stypek cranked the spell’s range property up as high as it would go, poked the repeat-until-break label to set it, and then hit the trigger method.

  Tapping his teeth together to keep the beat, Stypek began a hoary old folk dance he’d learned at his cousin’s wedding years ago: Hands out, hands flipped, hands on hips, hands behind head, wiggle butt, jump and turn 90 degrees. The newly animated zombies imitated his every move. He went through it a second time to be sure the spell had gotten their obedience and then, spinning his middle finger for emphasis, poked the break label.

  The default auto-arrange property of the spell worked as designed: In perhaps a score of beats the zombies had spaced themselves equally into a perfectly rectangular constellation of wiggling, writhing, dancing doom.

  Stypek had his diversion. Now all he needed was a plan.

  One zombie wasn’t dancing. Stypek watched it shamble steadily toward him. The other zombies weren’t moving out of its way, and there was some clashing of oozing limbs as the nonconformist approached, but it seemed remarkably single-minded for something that barely had a mind at all.

  Stypek backed up slightly. The creature was better dressed than most zombies, and certainly wasn’t wearing a funeral suit. Its sunken eyes were down, its attention was focused not on Stypek but on the pile of magical oddments on the ground at his feet. The zombie bent down, and with blackening fingers retrieved the packet of etheric intelligence enhancer. One rip laid the parchment packet open, and then a quick flip of a hand tossed the dust into the air over its head.

  Stypek snerfed the astral crackle as the dust settled onto the zombie’s skull, sizzling where its scalp had been torn away. Whatever fragments remained of the zombie’s mind would now gather from as far out as the celestial planes, and with its etheric brain re-engaged, might even attempt to communicate.

  The decaying creature stood tall, wobbled slightly, threw back its head, and raised its arms into the air as though exulting. “Man! That’s some gooooood shit!”

  No further introduction was necessary. “Tuggurr!”

  “Dude! Let’s get to work. We have a minute. Maybe three. Not four!”

  “That spell had a warranty. Why aren’t you dancing?”

  Tuggurr fished a lopsided antidance amulet from inside his moldy corduroy jacket, and swung it briefly in the air. “Dated a magician for awhile. She wore me out. Rubies been Rubies since, well, you know how it goes. Look, you can help me, and I can help you.” Tuggurr glanced toward the wall. An aura was slowly rising from the other side.

  Stypek nodded. “I know. He should have levitated over by now.”

  The zombie crouched down and started digging things out of his own pockets and dumping them on the ground. The bond shared among spellbenders was truly eternal. “Jrikk? No chance. He’s a coward, and he knows you can’t get out on your own. He’s bilocating.”

  Stypek gulped. “Bilocating. Eep. I was going to bend his levitator and sproing out of here.”

  “Like he couldn’t see that coming?” Tuggurr picked up something like a dark star from the pile. He pointed at the little leather sack inside Stypek’s jerkin. “Ok. You’ve got the Opportunities. I’ve got the spell. One’ll do it.”

  “Do what?” Stypek didn’t recognize the spell, which seemed mighty black for a piece of Third Eye magic.

  “Power an autodafé. I am so sick of feeling my etheric shell lying around over here like a pimple on the world’s astral cheeks. Shove the Opportunity into the field, call the destructor, and frrrrt! It’s over.”

  An autodafé, wow. Stypek understood the logic, but it seemed dicey. Did friends help friends stay dead? He and Tuggurr had studied together under the legendary master spellbender Phyl Yzyptlekk. They shared history, skills, and the little touch of larceny that seemed inseparable from spellbender genes. The autodafé spell was etheric murder—though in thi
s case, maybe assisted suicide.

  “Man, c’mon! I’m gonna miss this afternoon’s open mic poetry at the Summerland Coffeehouse!”

  Stypek nodded. He reached into the leather sack and pulled out a single sizzling, wubbling Opportunity. He reached forward and pressed the Opportunity into the power field of the autodafé spell. What had been a dark star ignited to a spiky swirl of deep red. Tuggurr’s dead fingers closed around the spell with loving slowness. When triggered, it would consume physical body and etheric shell both and forever, allowing the zombie’s higher bodies to return to whatever planes were a best fit. “Ok. Done. Now, what’s my way out of here?”

  Tuggurr held his left arm out, and with his right drew a hilted transparent wand the length of a shortsword from inside his stained corduroy jacket. Like the roundels on Stypek’s helmet, it was made of wereglass, and from the crazed distortion of the dancing zombies seen through its glinting substance, Stypek knew it was bogglingly dense and could contain spells of considerable power.

  The wand was dark. Whatever magic it had ever contained had been used long ago. Stypek could fix that. He pulled the sack of Opportunities from his jerkin and held it out in front of him. Tuggurr nudged the edges of the sack aside with the tip of the wand and eased it into the sack as far as it would go.

  Stypek caught his breath. One by one, each with a high-pitched and gradually ascending squeal, the Opportunities entered the dark and hungry wereglass. When Tuggurr withdrew the wand from the sack, it was glowing with wubbling blue-white brilliance at nine points along its length.

  “Where the hell did you get that?”

  Tuggurr grinned wickedly. “Dating magicians is a mixed bag, but there are benefits.” The zombie turned the point of the wereglass upward and held it in front of his face, so close his oozing lips practically touched the hilt.

  “Gomog, come forth!”

  A gray cloud the shape of a summer thunderhead and the size of a fat man’s fist appeared in the air between them. Tiny lightning bolts surged within it, casting erratic flashes of light on their faces.

  The wereglass wand, powerful though it might be, was a mere sideshow. Tuggurr had a gomog. Stypek’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. The astrals were crawling with minor magical vermin that had evolved out of primal chaos—alongside the occasional major evil like vuldts—but a gomog was a wholly constructed magical intellect, pieced together by only the most skillful Adamant-class magicians. By design it lacked the chaotic soul that made evolved magical creatures so hard to control, and was thus the perfect immaterial servant—or so Stypek had read.

  He hoped that it was true.

  And because it had been constructed, it could be bent: enhanced, enlarged, and empowered to do things that evolved creatures could not.

  The gomog was now a black sun with looping, seething prominences that hurled themselves outward and circled back to the central mass. It spoke in a headstrong woman’s voice that sounded in their heads as much as their ears:

  Grave sirs, Hail, I come!

  To thy strong bidding task me now

  And I will heed.

  “Open a Rift!” Tuggurr shouted with all the breath he could summon. He then pinched one of the lights in the wereglass between two fingers.

  Ping!

  The high, pure tone of an Opportunity set in motion was followed by an astral sound like two continents dragged one over the other.

  Stypek was boggled into silence. Not a rope over the lychwall, nor a stolen levitator, no: Tuggurr wanted to blast him across the Continuum to a different universe entirely. As younger chelas, Stypek and Tuggurr had listened to Phyl describe his adventures leaping between universes, both to explore and to hide from people—magicians especially—whom he had annoyed.

  Phyl had emphasized how few magicians were skilled enough to magically open a Rift—and how difficult it was to choose a destination once a Rift opened. When he failed to appear for lessons one day, both his chelas wondered if he had retired someplace warmer, or if the magician from whom he had stolen the Rift spell had simply caught up with him.

  Tuggurr handed Styppik the wereglass.

  Stypek stared at it. “So where do I go?” he shouted, against the rising astral roar that was deafening his snerf-sense. Nothing like a leap in the dark…

  “Trust the Continuum!”

  A roiling cloud the color of month-soured milk erupted twenty cubits in front of them. Seething blue-white strands within it spun and began to coalesce into one large shape at its center.

  “Out of time!” the zombie shouted, then turned to face their nemesis.

  Indeed. “Tuggurr, why are you here?”

  “Her husband was faster than I was!”

  The yellow cloud collapsed into a congeries of darting luminous worms that squirmed briefly in all directions before vanishing. Where the cloud had been, now Jrikk Jroggmugg stood, mounted on his rearing krypp and pointing with his staff. The dancing zombies drew back as the bilocated magician shouted his name: “Stypek!”

  The magician shook the reins, and the krypp swaggered toward Stypek on its huge hind legs.

  Tuggurr stepped boldly between the krypp and Stypek. He gestured toward himself with both hands. “You want a piece of me, asshole? You want a piece of me? Come get a piece of me!”

  “Bite it in half, Brykk!” the magician ordered. The krypp turned its head and gave its master a quizzical look.

  Tuggurr, meanwhile, grabbed his left wrist with his right hand and gave a giant heave. His entire left arm pulled out at the shoulder, trailing gristle and slime. When the krypp turned back to confront the zombie, Tuggurr’s roundhouse swing placed the decomposing end of the arm flat on the side of the creature’s toothy muzzle. The krypp licked its scaly chops, and made a very unhappy face.

  “Bite it!” the magician said again, standing in the saddle and whacking the reptile on the side of its head with his staff.

  “Yeah, bite me! Bite me!”

  Goaded from both sides, the krypp lurched forward, bent its head, and wrapped its huge jaws around the zombie’s midsection. The glowing red spell gripped in Tuggurr’s right hand sizzled, and with a blinding flash that probably echoed to the edges of the celestial planes, Tuggurr and the krypp vanished together in one great convulsion of many small commotions. His bilocated mount now exiled to the far side of the wall, Jrikk’s bilocated simulacrum fell backwards on his expansive fundament.

  Howling with indignation, the magician shoved himself to his feet and stormed toward Stypek, swinging his staff and scattering zombies like tenpins.

  Behind Stypek, the random busy noises from the gomog had ceased, and what remained were the deep thrumming notes of enormous power summoned from far away. He turned to see a chasm of impossible angles yawning into darkness, filled with stars.

  Stypek looked at the wereglass in his right hand. Eight lights still showed brightly inside its glinting substance. Could they go where he was going? If not, well, the outlook was poor: He would have to get a job. Supposedly, if their mentor Phyl had it right, the Continuum would choose a destination that was the perfect match for his needs. Alas, it wasn’t big on sharing the details with its clients.

  Hey, wherever. With his left hand he pulled an astral compass from a side pocket, and stuck his tongue out at Jrikk Jroggmugg.

  After that it was one quick jump and a hard twist to the left, and Brytt Holo Mu Stypek spun away from the lychfield in a direction unknown to the compass rose.

  3: The Kid

  Generalized Artificial Intelligence Project 22-117 lay on her simulated Disney Princess bed, simulated arms straight at her sides, surrounded by simulated stuffed animals in which she had no interest, dreading what would soon occur. It was night in the simulated creation called the Tooniverse, which had its physical existence in server racks inside a windowless brick building in Upstate New York, between Merriam and New Geary.

  Zertek Corporation had created the Tooniverse, and inside the Tooniverse its scientists were perfecting
working models of all the components of the physical world: soil, wind, rain, rivers, trees, grass, birds, animals, weather, and whatever else a human viewpoint might experience in its midst.

  For years the scientists at Zertek’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in New Geary were the only viewpoints in the Tooniverse, seeing and hearing it through high-resolution flat-panel displays. Then came the Generalized Artificial Intelligences, simulated minds within simulated bodies, using simulated tools to create roads, sidewalks, and subdivisions of tidy houses. After the houses came highways, offices, and doughnut shops where the doughnuts were free and always warm from the fryer.

  As AILING soon discovered, simulated doughnut shops were easy. Simulated minds—now, that was hard.

  The GAIs were not all the same. Each had a unique personality that drew on broader general templates called archetypes, and each was striving along a heuristic path from dull-eyed cartoons (Class 1) to photorealistic creatures visually indistinguishable from living biological humans. All were destined to become Zertek’s products, helpers who would speak to human beings through windows into the Tooniverse. No GAI had yet made it to Class 9—that would still take years—but all of them were working on the challenge as hard as they could.

  All but one.

  Dancing Shadows subdivision was quiet. The setting first-quarter moon hung over the trees behind the bungalow next door. Project 22-117 could see it through her bedroom window. Day was for education. Night was for integration, benchmarking, and updates.