Anything but Ordinary

by Nicola Rhodes

  But while she could admire, in the abstract, the genius of the plot against them, it did not mean she was going to put up with it.

  But what could she do?

  She was part of the file now; she had no control over events from the outside. Asgard was no longer real, the events taking place before her very eyes had no relevance, no meaning, they were no longer real. Fenrir could eat the sun if he liked, there was no point in stopping it. It was not the real sun anyway. Outside, the world was going on as normal.

  But what if she did stop it?

  Tamar stood in the empty file looking at on at the battle taking place within, as if she were watching an old newsreel of something that had happened long ago, and could no longer be changed. She was there, and also here, watching herself. She wondered idly what that other self was thinking. She felt as if she ought to be able to remember, as if she were watching events that she had taken part in long ago from a distance of many years. But that other self was not real now, any more than any of this was real. It had never happened. That was the point.

  If she closed her eyes, she would find herself in an empty file, alone? And then she could leave, because she was real; she could close the file and return to mainframe, leaving her unreal self behind. Or she could remain, wandering through the battle like a ghost for the rest of eternity. Some choice!’

  She saw Stiles and Denny fighting back to back, they looked grimly happy – the joy of battle. Were they still real? Or were they a part of the unreal world now? Could she get them back? Or were they, like her, watching the battle from some unknown vantage point, as well as participating? Was this happening to all of them? For the first time in her long life, Tamar was tormented by an agony of indecision. Tears of frustration formed in her eyes.

  She did not know what to do!

  ‘If you want to, I can save you,’ Denny had sung that to her. Startled by the clarity of the memory, she blinked the tears from her eyes. ‘I can take you away from here,’

  ‘Denny?’ she whispered.

  Denny was real. They were all real, of course they were, how stupid! ‘It’s not over yet!’ she told herself. At least, she counted on her fingers, six people – seven if she included herself, were still real, and the others … well, it was not too late for them either. Ragnoroc was about to be cancelled all over again.

  ‘Sorry guys,’ she said silently to the clerks in mainframe. ‘I’m the fly in your ointment – again.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Close file,’ she said firmly.

  ~ Chapter Seventeen ~

  The noise was incredible. Thor’s hammer crashed with a thunder that shook the surrounding mountains causing great tracts of ice to shatter and slide down the mountainsides, the sound of their falling lost in the tumult. The darkened skies were filled with flashes of lightning, so bright they seemed more like exploding suns.

  Battle cries and the screams of the dying, the clash of sword, spear and battle axe fused together in a single deafening wall of sound.

  It was like being in the middle of an earthquake in a thunderstorm after a meteor strike during a nuclear war. And that was just the background noise – the special effects so to speak going on behind the action.

  It was impossible to stand. The ground was continually moving under the feet, splitting and tilting the unwary into great crevasses that opened as the ground fell away from under them.

  Denny, although fighting like a maniac, yet felt strangely detached. His presence here, he knew, was totally irrelevant. He would fight, but he could not win, could not change the outcome. One lonely warrior, however valiant, however good, could not single-handedly win a war between hundreds of opposing combatants. Nor could seven, he added to himself, acknowledging the others, they were simply too few. And even had they been a hundred – or a thousand, there was an inevitability about the conclusion that could not be avoided. The time for Ragnoroc had come, had been decided upon elsewhere and there was no stopping it. They would die here, victims of their own hubris, lost in a mythology that they had no part in, and Ragnoroc would be an established fact. Something that had happened, that could not be changed. It felt as if it already was.

  ‘The only way to win a war is not to hold it.’ these words dropped into Denny’s head from a place of silence, sharp and clear against the tremendous clamour all around him. And yet he heard them through his ears in the ordinary way, which should have been impossible given the decibel level assaulting his senses.

  ‘Finally losing my mind,’ he muttered, deftly decapitating a giant that had incautiously come too close to his swinging broadsword, which was actually the Athame wearing a cunning disguise. ‘Bloody hearing things now.’

  Stiles was in trouble, and despite his conviction that they were all going to die anyway, Denny’s instincts took over, and he leapt into the fray to help him out. They were fighting back to back when Denny felt a sudden vacuum close to him an empty space that had been filled with noise, blood and confusion. Then the whole world went dark.

  ‘Funny, I don’t feel dead,’ he told the empty space. ‘Christ, now I’m talking to myself,’ he added.

  ‘The only way to win a war is not to hold it. Go back.’

  ‘Who said that?’ snapped Denny. ‘I know that voice.’

  ‘Damn,’ came the voice. There was a crackling sound and, ‘is this thing on?’ Then dead silence.

  ‘Hello?’ said Denny uncertainly. ‘Is anybody there?’ He felt a fool. Like a man at the wrong end of a séance. Surely, it was the living who said things like that to the dead, not the other way around.

  But now he was certain that he was not dead, but somehow in a file in mainframe, and somebody was trying to contact him.

  ‘Hello?’ he tried again.

  ‘Crackle crackle hiss … ‘ve to go back.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘… go back, damn! Wait … min…te … tryi… fix… blast… thing… stan… by… hell.’

  ‘Clive?’ asked Denny suddenly recognising the broken voice.

  ‘Of course … stupi… boy,’ came the voice. ‘Other… tried to fit you up. Felt oblig… help. Owe you one … can … hear me?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Denny. ‘You’re breaking up terribly.’

  ‘Unauthoris… tra…mission… bad quality… sorry crackle, crackle beeeeep! Is that better?’

  ‘Yes, where are you?’

  ‘Better you don’t know. Now, I haven’t got long before they find me, so listen carefully…’

  Denny listened.

  ‘A deleted file?’ thought Denny. It made sense (the file was definitely empty) as did everything else Clive had told him, except the part about going back. Why go back? There was clearly no point. Unless he had meant something else.

  Not that you could rely on Clive, he often edited the truth, as Denny knew to his cost. The problem was you could never be sure of him. One minute he was asking for your help, the next saving your life, and the next telling you blatant lies for his own unfathomable purposes.

  But this time, he had left Denny in a real dilemma. He could escape right now and leave everyone else to their fate. Or he could stay here and … leave everybody to their fate, come to think of it. Not really a dilemma then.

  There had to be a third choice. One that Clive had left deliberately vague, in order to cover his own back perhaps with the other clerks, those who had set them up – or so Clive averred.

  ‘The only way to win a war is not to hold it. Go back.’

  Denny closed his eyes. ‘Close file,’ he said.

  ‘You took your time didn’t you? We have work to do, you know.’

  ‘Tamar?’

  * * *

  One minute Stiles was fighting back to back with Denny and the next, he felt a cold wind, a rushing of empty air behind him and then everything went dark.

  ‘Jack’ll never go for it,’ said Denny. ‘Not if he thinks he’s leaving us behind.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Tamar, ‘just so long as I have you.’

  �
��Tamar!’

  ‘Oh calm down, I don’t mean I’m leaving them behind. I just mean that my little plan for sorting this out will work better with your help.’

  ‘What little plan? Actually, look, go back to the beginning. What the hell is going on? How did you get out anyway, was it Clive?’

  ‘No, I got out by myself, but because I did, it gave Clive the chance to get us all out. Without them knowing it was him.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just say that then?’ said Denny, exasperated.

  ‘Because, then they might find out it was him. It’s all to do with free will and all that. Denny, you know this stuff. He isn’t supposed to help us really. And from now on, it’s up to us. He’ll give the others the chance to leave, but it’s got to be their decision. But, like I said, it doesn’t matter anyway. There are no restrictions on us helping them out.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Denny falling in with the new situation with the ease of long practice. ‘So what is this great plan?’

  ‘Sarky!’ said Tamar but without rancour. ‘You must have noticed where we are,’ she added inconsequentially.

  ‘Mainframe, so what? It’s what I expected.’

  ‘Me too. That’s why I need you.’ She gave him a sidelong glance of pure delighted wickedness, which he found deliciously irresistible. ‘Come on Super-Geek,’ she said. ‘Let’s Hack!’

  ‘Hack what?’

  ‘Everything!’

  * * *

  Stiles knew exactly where he was, but he had not the faintest idea what to do about it. He had spent enough time in deleted files to recognise the peculiar emptiness that surrounded him, and his investigative brain soon put together the pieces and deduced that this was the deleted file of the Norse Gods and all their history. So, it was all over, was it? Well, that was what Ragnoroc was all about he supposed. But until this moment of revelation, he had seen nothing inevitable about it. A typically human failing this. Few people truly believe in the inevitability of a preordained destiny. The belief in free will and the ability to effect change is too deeply ingrained in the human psyche. An “it’s not over till it’s over” attitude that precludes the possibility that something One is currently experiencing might have been over and done with long ago. If people knew the true nature of time and destiny, they would not see the world in such simple terms. But then again, what would be the point of living in such a world?

  Stiles had had the advantage of experiencing a different view of the world than most. He had seen eternity, and it did not frighten him. But that did not mean that he was ready to accept it without a fight. The thing about humans is that when faced with the inevitable, they invariably set about trying to change it. It was one of the things about humanity that drove the clerks mad because, occasionally, when humans took this attitude, the inevitable could suddenly become very uncertain indeed. This made things very untidy and caused a lot of unpaid overtime.

  Tamar never accepted the inevitable (at least, not if she did not agree with it) even though, with all she knew about the universe, she ought to have known better. And Stiles had learned, through her, that although the flow of the universe was a pattern of preordained events – unchanging and unchangeable – marching inexorably toward their unavoidable conclusion, yet through sheer force of will, the inevitable could become the un-inevitable. He had seen her force a path through destiny and out the other side many times. In other words, humans were right, free will counts and nothing is inevitable really. Even when it’s over.

  With all this in mind, Stiles shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the battle.

  * * *

  ‘There’s no point in going back through time,’ Tamar explained. ‘Not this time. Because it’s not there, all the history of the Norse gods is now part of the same deleted file. It’s no longer a part of history. And that includes our interactions with them, like me meeting Loki. If we want to change what’s happened, the only thing we can do is crash the system.’

  ‘They’ll make us fix it afterwards,’ said Denny gloomily. ‘It’ll take a hundred years.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to have to reprogramme anyway,’ said Tamar blithely; apparently unaware of what she was suggesting.

  ‘Reprogramme mainframe?’ said Denny aghast. ‘The whole universe?’

  Then he shrugged. ‘Sounds like a challenge.’

  Tamar grinned. ‘I knew you’d say that,’ she said. ‘So, come on then tech-head, how do we do it?’

  ‘I think I preferred “Super-Geek”,’ said Denny. ‘We could try a virus,’ he added thoughtfully.

  ‘Got one in your pocket?’

  ‘I’d need to write one,’ he said. ‘It’d need to be pretty bad to crash the whole of mainframe. Do we really need to crash the whole system?’

  ‘You tell me, brainiac. We need to be able to get into the Ragnoroc file and change it. Which we can’t do since it’s already been deleted. Is this too complicated for you?’

  ‘It’s just a bit metaphysical. I can cope,’ he said pulling a wry face. ‘So, we need to be able to go in to a file that’s already been deleted.’ He thrust his hands into his pockets and slouched languidly. ‘We need to somehow open this file before it was deleted – even though it already is.’ He sighed and straightened up. ‘We need to crash the system.’ he said decisively.

  ‘Can’t we just find the file on the hard drive and, oh I don’t know retrieve it or something?’ asked Tamar. ‘Deleted files can be retrieved can’t they?’ Crashing mainframe suddenly seemed too drastic, even though it had been her idea in the first place.

  ‘Cold feet?’ asked Denny raising an eyebrow. ‘Okay, yes we could just retrieve the file – if we could get into the hard drive, which, we’re going to have to do anyway if we want to crash it, and it won’t be easy. I mean there is security. They aren’t just going to give us access. But if we simply go in and retrieve the file what would we get?’ He answered his own question. ‘Nothing, a deleted file. Big deal. You said it yourself. We need to get into the file before it was deleted in the first place. It’s not in the history files. We can’t find it that way. We need to crash the system and restart it. That way, every file that belongs to the Norse gods will be rebooted from the start. Well, in fact, every file in mainframe will. But we needn’t concern ourselves with the rest of them, actually. They’ll just run the way they did before – or rather continue to run, the way they did before. We won’t actually have to reprogramme mainframe, after all. It’s not as bad as I first thought.’

  Sensing that Tamar was still uncertain, he felt compelled to explain. ‘You see, a program file isn’t like a tape that rewinds and starts from the beginning, there is no beginning, not in a traditional sense. Just like a picture has no beginning, it’s just pixels. A file is just data, a web of interconnected code.’

  Tamar’s blank look was not encouraging. Denny tried again.

  ‘What I’m saying,’ he sighed, ‘is that it’s not going to be like starting again from the beginning of time. There is no time in mainframe anyway, and time doesn’t actually have a beginning as such. It’s like a big ocean …’ he halted realising he was getting off the point. ‘Look, when mainframe reboots, all the program files will just come back on line. As long as we don’t go in and actually, rewrite the code. The files will just be … Well, it’ll just be, basically. (We had certainly better hope so anyway). The clerks might have a bit of sorting out to do; some of the data might be corrupted in the crash. But it’ll serve them right if they do. Anyway, once they restart et tout voila, we can retrieve the file we want before it gets erased and do what we want with it. And the best part is, they’ll never know what happened. After mainframe reboots, apart from the one file we change, it’ll be like it never happened.’

  ‘I’m just going to have to take your word for it, aren’t I?’

  ‘This was your idea in the first place. You knew we would have to do this. You told me.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So what are you talking about then?’


  ‘Nothing. I guess I just hoped there might be another way.’

  Denny nodded understandingly. This was a like changing history in a big way – you never knew what it might do to your own destiny, not to mention that of countless billions of other people. But he was confident that he knew what he was doing. He knew and understood mainframe these days far better than she did. Far better than anyone – even the clerks that ran it; they only knew their own little departments but Denny knew a lot more. On top of which, he was pretty certain that something like this had probably been done before, perhaps many times. After all, how would anyone know?

  ‘You know where mainframe central control is, don’t you?’ he said, thus taking the decision out of her hands.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been there. It’s awesome actually, like talking to God.’ She was biting her lip – a bad sign.

  ‘How are we going to get in?’

  ‘Well actually, getting in won’t be a problem,’ said Tamar holding up the access card that she had stolen on a previous excursion to mainframe. ‘I never leave home without it,’ she said. ‘Well, you never know,’ she defended herself, as Denny started to laugh.

  ‘You’re wonderful,’ he told her.

  ‘Are you sure that crashing the system won’t cause a lot of damage?’ she said suddenly, cutting across his merriment.

  ‘Trust me,’ he said reassuringly, slouching back against the wall and grinning. ‘I can do this. Take me to see God.’

  ~ Chapter Eighteen ~

  There was actually nothing altruistic at all about Clive’s rescue mission. He was merely running damage control.

  As soon as he had realised that Tamar had somehow escaped from the file, he knew that, sooner or later, she would cause a whole lot of trouble in mainframe in order to get her friends out too. The other clerks would never see it that way, of course. Their understanding of human behaviour was non-existent, and Clive just did not have time to waste trying to convince them.