Ten Gentle Opportunities

by Duntemann, Jeff

  The elderly man’s smile only widened. “He turned up almost nine hours after the line crashed. If I had successfully launched a core bomb, I’d be halfway home by then, not standing beside the machine I’d hacked into.”

  Brandon’s shoulders slumped. Rationally insane was the very worst kind of insane. “Then who launched it?”

  Cosmo shook his head. “We may never know. Ever! Malware can wait inside a machine for months or even years, watching the clock or looking for cues.”

  Brandon stood, wove his fingers together, and cracked his knuckles. He would have to reread the package about Zertek’s Retirement Incentive Program. If Line Start Eight failed, it was RIP for Brandon Romero. “I guess we’re done, then. There’s simply nothing more I can try.”

  The two men stared at one another. Cosmo’s expression didn’t change. “Nonsense! There are two things you can try. First of all, stop looking for the intruder.”

  “In other words, give up.”

  “Yes! Give up any line of research that doesn’t bear fruit. I do it all the time.” Cosmo nodded toward the colored bricks drawn on his whiteboard. “If PMS doesn’t pan out, I’ll walk away from it without regret.”

  “I am not a quitter!”

  “No. And I wouldn’t have hired you if you were!” He leaned forward. “Brandon, listen to me: You need to try something else. Airgap the building.”

  More geek talk. “Airgap?”

  “Disconnect it completely from the rest of the world. I don’t mean firewalls. Pull physical cables out of physical sockets. Do it first with the rack containing the AI sandbox. After that Dijana can’t get out of the sandbox, whether she’s compromised or not, because there’s literally no data path to the sandbox from anywhere. Neither can she take or give orders. If you’re still nervous about her, I’ll have one of my people swap a chunk of her archetype into memory outside the sandbox. Poofs can’t cross a sandbox boundary, so that way no one can poof her out of the sandbox.

  “Then broaden that to the plant as a whole. Yank the plugs! Don’t leave a single comm line of any kind in place. Even landline phones. Turn on the cell jammers. ARFF doesn’t depend on comm off the premises. It can’t! Latency is an issue once Simon starts throwing drive motors at himself. Microseconds count; milliseconds are deadly!

  “Only let essential people in the building. Scan the whole thing one last time. Then do the line start. If it runs fine, we have to ask ourselves why we need all those connections. If we get another core bomb, we’ve met the enemy…and he is us.”

  23. Stypek

  Stypek awoke writhing on his bed with a toppled pile of shirts on his face, groaning and chewing on a collar button. His dreams of slithering, searching horrors had grown more intense for three nights. Then it changed: In the midst of this night’s sleep a curtain of roiling black clouds parted, and beyond them he saw Jrikk Jroggmugg standing amidst the battlements of his high tower, laughing maniacally and pointing at him. The magician had discovered his hiding place. Precisely how it had been done was unclear, but the fact that Stypek was still alive suggested that a magic-free universe was beyond the reach of even the stoutest Adamant-class adept.

  Was it?

  Stypek spat blue threads and swung his feet onto the floor. Bright sunlight made it clear that he had been fighting his wardrobe most of the night, his trousers tangled on the bed and the floor as though struggling among themselves. He glanced at the digits on the glyph clock. The morning was half-spent, and he hungered for an omelette dripping coffee, concocted by Carolyn’s faithful familiars. That might not be the right word; could they be hemorrhoids too?

  One should not keep a sorceress waiting. He stumbled into the bathroom and stood under the raincaster, trying to sort out his impressions of the previous night.

  The peril of being discovered obscured the triumph that had come before: He had learned that at the highest level, software was no different from magic—he simply needed to learn the properties, methods, and gestures that governed its operation. Cosmo’s simulacrum had by no means finished its lesson. When the large slab came back to life with one touch to Cosmo’s tapper, the elderly adept was still there, frozen in mid-word with a diagram hanging over his head. If Stypek could learn the rest, he could become a software-bender…hacker…and perhaps earn enough in Cosmo’s employ to live in something warmer than a cave, or at least drier than a drain pipe.

  And, with any luck at all, forever beyond the reach of aggrieved magicians.

  Stypek dried himself and drew on one of his shirts, spun of the finest polo, and trousers woven of stoutest khaki. He bumbled down the stairs and commanded the great door to draw back. The day was clear but cold, and his breath become a tortured cloud when he exhaled. It was not a fragment of his soul, as the old gossips warned, but water droplets—physics!—as old Byggryn had revealed to him.

  Knowledge was empowering, in this universe as well as his own.

  He swung the door wide and almost ran into the kitchen. Carolyn was there, already seated at the table. His own chair had been pulled back in welcome.

  Something was wrong. Carolyn was wrapped in a robe of frizzled cloth, her potent black hair bound up in a scarf, her feet in thick-furred slippers. Her arms were crossed in front of her. She frowned, her face and lips lacking their usual color.

  There was no steaming omelette on his plate, nor clay mug of coffee to dip it in. Carolyn pointed at his chair. “Sit down, Buster.”

  Stypek, apprehensive, sat. Buster. Varlet? Breaker-of-things? He had been both in his life, often at the same time. How could she know? Despite her protestations (witch? Merely a witch?) she was indeed a sorceress.

  Her words were stern. “We need to talk.”

  Stypek waited patiently for Carolyn to begin. He knew she was upset about Lord Romero’s behavior, and he was willing to admit that he may have had a hand in provoking him. He would have gladly explained the wereglass, if Lord Romero had simply given him a few additional seconds before knocking him to the floor.

  “I can see in the dark.”

  Of course she could. All sorceresses could. “That is a useful skill.”

  Her frown deepened. “Mr. Stypek. I can see in the dark.”

  Stypek nodded. Long seconds passed. He wondered if it were some sort of incantation.

  She leaned forward, holding her robe closed with one hand. “Dammit, listen to me! Last night, after you zapped us with your, your, thingamajigger, I turned off the lights to go to bed and I could still see!”

  “Zombies cannot attack you under cover of night.”

  “Stypek!” Carolyn rose from her chair, breathing quickly. “Quit dodging. Take it out. Put it on the table.” She was staring at the bulge of his wereglass. Shirts made of polo fit far too closely to conceal it well.

  “As you command, Chatelaine.” He drew out the wereglass and laid it between them, among soft clay turtles and fragments of doughnuts. Four Opportunities whirled in its depths.

  Carolyn sat again and crossed her arms. “Don’t touch it. I want to know who you are, where you came from, and what kind of technology that is.”

  Stypek gulped. If Jrikk Jroggmugg had somehow contacted her via second sight, she might be trying to verify his identity. And although she did not seem familiar with the wereglass, she had seen it used twice. Given the will to wield it (or some coaching from an adamant-class magician!) sending him back into Jrikk’s clutches would be trivial.

  He lowered his eyes. “I am Bartholomew Stypek, a spellbender of… Trynng…brokk…lyn..ny..gyg..gug.” He could barely pronounce the name of his homeland, and realized that he was spitting into the air in the attempt. And—egad!—he could no longer pronounce his own name in his own language. He could hear it somewhere in the far corners of his skull, but Queen Neuitha’s kiss had put it so far out of reach that his tongue could not retrieve it. “My name is a metaphor. A figure of speech. A…jest. As my mother observed, I am faster than a vermin hunter in a carrion-eating contest arranged by…br..brit
...vermin. My legs are long—though not long enough to flee from my misdeeds.”

  Carolyn put her left elbow on the table, and placed her face in her hand. Yes, such a gesture could only mean that she was in mental contact with Jrikk Jroggmugg. There was nothing left beyond throwing himself on her mercy. “If you send me back to the magician who seeks me, the punishment will be severe.”

  Carolyn looked up, and her expression was difficult to read. Stypek hoped it indicated pity. She shook her head. “I’m not going to send you back. Keep in mind that if you get in too much trouble, it may not be up to me.” She pointed at the wereglass. “That thing got you into a crapload of trouble last night. It got me into trouble too. I want you to tell me how it works.”

  Stypek heaved a sigh of relief. He was not, then, about to join Jrikk Jroggmugg’s undead minions. “The wereglass is a rare thing, a container for potential, uncommitted magic.”

  She did not seem pleased. “No. It’s not magic. Don’t talk down to me. My degree is in marketing, but I took SUNY’s ‘physics for poets’ courses. I know an LED from a laser. I can tell it’s something really advanced. My brother read Star Wars books by the pile when we were kids. He used to say something like, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ So how does it work? Do the best you can.”

  “Chatelaine, it is indistinguishable from magic because it is magic.”

  Carolyn did not reply immediately. Her mouth opened, then shut. Her face shifted from scolding to pleading. “Come on. Work with me here. When I got into bed last night and hit the lights, I thought the switch was bad. Things changed colors a little, but I could see the room bright as day. It scared the crap out of me. I sat up half the night trying to decide if I was crazy. I went around and pulled the plug on everything in the house that had any kind of light in it. It didn’t matter. I could see everything, including a lot of things I didn’t want to see.”

  “Zombies?”

  “No! Stop that!” She was practically shouting. “Bugs! I have roaches! And mice! They came out of the woodwork, and they thought I couldn’t see them because it was dark. Oh, but I saw them. Bigtime.

  “Ok. I know I’m a slob. I know there are Fruit Loops and Doritos and Nilla Wafer crumbs allthehell over the place. I know I’ve got mice. And bugs. I’m working on that. Now I feel like I’m getting my nose rubbed in it.”

  Stypek granted that Carolyn was peculiar for a sorceress. Now, suppose she were not a sorceress at all. That would change a great many things. Perhaps everything. “Chatelaine, I’m unsure what I can do here.”

  “Tell me what you did to me last night, with that thing.” She pointed again at the wereglass. “Tell me how it works. Oh…and don’t use the word ‘magic.’”

  Stypek gulped. So be it. “Last night, while you struggled with Lord Romero, I released two Opportunities from the wereglass. My hope was that you and he would come to understand one another well enough to cease fighting and coexist.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Good luck with that. I appreciate the gesture, but we tried to do the same thing with gurus and psychiatrists last spring and just drew more blood.”

  His worst fears were true, then: They had battled one another before, with far deadlier weapons than their fists. Mapping provided him nothing but a shadowed impression of giant leeches and blades that cut into the mind itself… Stypek could feel the blood draining from own his face at the image.

  “Don’t zone out on me here. Geez, I haven’t fed you yet! Sorry. So this Opportunities thing—is it like making a wish?

  “It is less a wish than throwing yourself on the mercy of the Continuum, and asking it to do what’s best with the power that you offer it. I released the Opportunities. The Opportunities entered into you and Lord Romero…and did nothing.”

  Stypek saw a hint of a smile rise on her face. “Hmmph. Figures. They said, ‘No deal.’”

  “No. They said, ‘Not yet.’”

  “Not yet? What are they waiting for?”

  Stypek wracked his brain. It was not an easy thing to explain in a world that lacked magic utterly. “Not all moments are equally…auspicious. The Continuum does not like to fail. Sometimes it waits for other…energies to align.”

  Carolyn touched the crown of her head with her fingertips. “It may wait for awhile. Do they always do that?”

  He shook his head. “They almost always act instantaneously. When I needed a place to hide, I released an Opportunity, and the Continuum chose a hiding place that best matched my needs at that moment—most urgently, a hiding place that did not itself contain magic. There are infinitely many universes to choose from. It sent me here. When there are fewer possibilities, yes, the choice may take longer.”

  Carolyn did not speak for some time. She looked incredulous, which would be odd in a true sorceress. “I don’t know. You’re the weirdest person I think I’ve ever met. Do I seem weird to you?”

  “Yes, Chatelaine, but less so every day, as my mind reshapes itself. And although your universe still seems strange to me, the people I’ve met here have treated me with nothing but generosity; you and Cosmo and Queen Neuitha especially. Granted, Lord Romero saw me as an attacker…”

  “You don’t pull a magic wand on an officer of the U.S. Army!”

  “So I have learned. It was not his fault. He is innocent of any knowledge of magic.”

  “I’ll say.” She put her face in her hand again. “Ok. Now suppose, just suppose, that for the purpose of this discussion I grant all this stuff about magic wands and magicians and spells and things. Can you…reverse the spell?” She looked up. “I don’t want to see in the dark.”

  “It is a useful skill.”

  “Not when you’ve got a house full of bugs!”

  Stypek pointed at the wereglass. “With your permission, Chatelaine, I will do what I can.”

  Carolyn nodded. Stypek took the wereglass from the table with both hands, and swung the glass upward. His desire was obvious. What the Continuum might do was not. He stared at the highest of the four remaining Opportunities for long seconds. A moment of fear crossed his mind. He was making his way in this world using the ten Opportunities he had won in the crooked card game. When his Opportunities were gone…

  But they were not his Opportunities.

  Stypek raised his right hand, and pinched the wereglass where the highest Opportunity danced.

  Ping!

  The pitch was very high this time, almost too high to hear, yet far too piercingly loud to ignore. The sound faded in repeating echoes that grew longer at each pulse until they vanished.

  Stypek scratched one ear. No wonder so many magicians were deaf. Carolyn’s right hand lay flat atop her head, her fingers splayed, eyes raised in concentration.

  “Um…did it work?” Her smile was weak but hopeful.

  “I cannot tell.”

  “I guess to see if I can still see in the dark, there has to be some dark to see in.” She laughed. “Thank you for trying. This is all so silly…” Her eyes widened. “Yikes!”

  Stypek spun around in his chair to look where Carolyn was looking. Three mice were marching into the kitchen from the slightly ajar door to the basement stairs. They were marching on their hind legs. Two of them held long, thin objects in their mouths, objects that Stypek soon recognized as rolled golden pretzel sticks, just like those in the sack he had finished with relish the previous day.

  Carolyn’s mouth was gaping. Following the mice was a line of centipedes, a dozen or more, their long legs flowing in waves beside them.

  Motion from the hall caught Stypek’s attention. Three dark marching lines resolved into a species of insect that he knew too well: roaches. Across the table, he saw Carolyn raise herself on the arms of her chair and tuck her feet beneath her.

  Spiders and smaller things were dropping to the floor from the lower edge of the doors under the sink. Still more emerged from behind the overflowing kitchen trash can. They marched in straight lines toward the center of the k
itchen. From the hall flew a dozen or more moths in tight formation, heading for the same spot just a few feet from the table. The moths fluttered in a circle perhaps a foot above the floor while the several columns of vermin converged beneath them.

  Where the lines met, the small creatures split into several interspersed columns, marching alternately right and left in opposite directions. Stypek thought it looked a great deal like the changing of the guard at Tryngg Palace, with all the special pomp enacted at the solstices and the Royal Birthdays.

  For several minutes more the vermin marched. In many small motions that were almost a dance, they arranged themselves in a single larger formation, the roaches at the center, the mice at the head, and the centipedes in flowing columns at the edges. All at once, they halted.

  “Holy Moses!” Stypek heard Carolyn say. Surrounded by spiders and silverfish and many other common kitchen pests, the roaches had arranged themselves into the shape of a single emphatic word:

  BYE!

  After pausing for a few seconds, the formation stepped off again, with complete precision so that the word remained unchanged even as the unlikely assemblage walked away on countless legs. The mice took the pretzel sticks from their mouths and held them in both front paws as they marched, waving them like batons.

  They were headed arrow-straight toward the kitchen door. Stypek rose from his chair, edged around the marching vermin, and opened both the main door and the screen door. He held the screen door open until the column dropped over the threshold and onto the stoop, where it reformed and continued marching, over the edge of the stoop and onto the gravel of the driveway.

  Stypek closed the doors and returned to his chair. The Continuum had granted Carolyn’s desire. “You will no longer see them in the dark. Nor in the light.”

  Carolyn stared at the kitchen door for a long time. At last she turned to him, her face the picture of astonishment. “You’re real,” she whispered. She pointed at the wereglass, now tucked into his trousers but not covered by his shirt. “That’s real. Magic is real. Ye gods and little fishes! This whole freaky business is real.”