Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

  Just like the various human sorts of network, the mweb experiences the occasional hiccup. But what’s merely frustrating when the error involves an e-mail going astray becomes infinitely worse when it happens in the few brief moments while a person exists as nothing more than a very fragile string of ones and zeros traveling between gates. I’d lost relatives that way. Still, I suppose it beats walking.

  I stepped into the column of light.

  Gating, said the words on Melchior’s screen.

  The stone-dotted shores of the Styx wavered before my eyes as the gate transformed me into one more electronic signal in a sea of data. For an infinite instant I could almost feel myself streaming down the channel between worlds, the pressure of chaos all around me, my laptop familiar a dim presence at my nonexistent side. Then, as abruptly as it had opened, the gate closed, returning us to the world of the physical.

  We arrived in a cold and moonlit elsewhere, Harvard Yard in another layer of reality, one where winter held sway. Our point of entry, a secluded corner between Stoughton Hall and the Phillips Brooks House, was further shielded from view by the bulk of a tree. Since I’d been excommunicated from my family and dropped out of college, I’d been living in a nearby apartment with my girlfriend.

  Cerice, another of the Greek pantheon’s demi-immortal children, was finishing up a doctorate in C-Sci at the HarvardCenter for Experimental Computing before going to work as a coder for Clotho, her family matriarch. I could have gated directly back to our apartment, but I wanted to walk a bit, and I wanted to see Cerice. As anyone who’s ever lived with a Ph.D. science candidate in her last year of research knows, she would be found in the lab and not at home, even so very late on Thursday night.

  Run Melchior. Please, I typed into the laptop for a second time.

  Executing in 5, 4 . . .

  I set the computer on the ground as the countdown ended. The screen, suddenly as pliable as a sheet of latex, bulged forward as though someone—or perhaps something would be more apt—had pressed its face against it from the far side. Sharp ears and a sharper nose shaped themselves into being as my familiar shifted from laptop to webgoblin. The back of the screen formed into the round dome of his bald blue head. The lower half of the clamshell frame became a miniature torso with arms and legs ending in clever hands and tiny feet.

  He stretched and grinned. “Better. I was starting to get a little stiff.”

  “It’s your own fault for insisting on playing laptop whenever we visit Cerberus.”

  “Given the choice,” said Melchior, “I wouldn’t get within a hundred Decision Loci of the security firm Fido, Fido, and Rover. At least in laptop shape I don’t look quite so edible.” He cocked his head to one side. “Speaking of shapes, yours could use a little work.”

  “Chaos and Discord!” I swore, though the oath no longer held the outrage it once had. I tended to think of the goddesses in question as the loyal opposition these days rather than the monsters I’d been raised to see. “Since I quit bothering with the wardrobe change, I keep forgetting to fix my face.”

  I whistled a half dozen bars of binary code, initiating a process of transformation. Melchior nodded his approval as the vertical slits of my green eyes became humanlike circles, and my slightly pointed ears rounded themselves. I left my long black hair, fine bone structure, and dead white skin—I could always pretend I was a Goth.

  “Better?” I asked.

  He shook his head sadly. “What would you do without me?”

  “Get a moment’s peace?” I responded sourly.

  “I don’t think so,” replied Melchior. “Not with that sword attracting the attention of every cop within a thousand yards.”

  “Oops.” I blushed.

  In former times, whenever I visited with family—cousin Cerberus, for example—I’d always made sure to follow the protocols laid down by my grandmother, Lachesis, and worn my natural face along with the proper court garb in my black and green colors: tights, doublet, boots, and, of course, rapier and dagger. Now that I was apostate, I didn’t bother with the fancy clothes, preferring the protection and comfort of my Kevlar-lined motorcycle jacket, emerald Jack-of-lost-souls T-shirt, and black jeans. The boots I kept. Likewise the blades. They still seemed prudent, as did my .45 automatic. It wouldn’t do much good if Cerberus decided I looked bite-sized, but I had other enemies.

  I undid the sheaths on my belt and handed them to Melchior, though I retained my pistol. The low-profile shoulder holster barely made a bulge under my leathers. He whistled a complicated binary passage that would have taken me an hour to perform on top of three days of practice and who knows how much coding time, did something creative with the local fabric of space-time, and made the weapons disappear.

  And that is why I thank the Powers and Incarnations that I was born into modern times, when a hacker-cum-sorcerer like myself doesn’t need to do all of his coding on a dumb terminal or, worse, perform actual wild magic with all its inherent dangers and limitations. All magic taps chaos for its power, but the advent of the mweb, with its carefully regulated energy flows, has made the process much safer.

  “Let’s go find Cerice and tell her what happened,” I said. She wasn’t going to be happy, but then, with her thesis defense scheduled in seven weeks, how would that be any different from her base state? Lately, she’d been so stressed, I half expected her to start bleeding from the ears.

  “It’s your neck,” said Melchior, perhaps divining the direction of my thoughts. “Kneel, would you?”

  I knelt, and he scrambled up onto my shoulder, where another whistled spell made him fade into his surroundings. It wasn’t quite invisibility, but anyone who saw him probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. Webgoblins didn’t exist. For that matter—a thought to remember when next I forgot to alter my appearance—neither did ex-princes of the middle house of Fate.

  It was very late, and the night cold was really gnawing at my joints, especially the old injuries in my right knee, so I hurried. We had just reached the steps of Cerice’s lab building when a tiny blue hexagon of light appeared on the concrete railing.

  “Now what?” I muttered.

  There were any number of folks who might gate in on me unannounced, most of them with ill intent, but none of them was six inches tall. Because of that I waited to see what happened next rather than do anything drastic. A moment later, a tiny naked woman popped into existence atop the pitted concrete. She had waist-length black hair, dragonfly wings, and—as I’d discovered the first time I met her—a thoroughly nasty disposition. A webpixie and sometime PDA, her name was Kira.

  “There yer are,” she snarled as soon as she spotted me. She did a lot of snarling.

  “And a lovely good morning to you, too, Kira.”

  “Ar, go on with yer,” she said. “What’s the likes o’ yer care about formalities from the likes o’ me?”

  “Can I eat her?” asked Melchior hopefully.

  “Just yer try it!” said Kira. “I’ll tear yer eyes out and feed ’em to yer.”

  “Somehow, Mel, I think she’d stick in your throat. What do you want, Kira?” She might be a royal pain, but I owed her a favor or two.

  “What makes yer think I want summat?” I just looked at her. “Ar, all right. So maybe I’m in a bit o’ need, and I thought I could touch yer fer help.”

  She did look rather bedraggled, exhibiting a few rips in her wings and a certain air of poverty. “Go on.”

  “It’s been forever and a day since I’ve had a bit of an upgrade, and I figured yer was the one ought to set things to rights, seein’ as it’s yer fault I’m out o’ work.”

  True enough on one level. She’d once been the property of my cousin Dairn, who had very different views on the rights of the AI, which might have something to do with both her disposition and grammar, and I had been responsible for their parting. At the time she’d thanked me.

  “What do you need?” I asked. She looked at her feet. “Come on, I’m kind of in a hurry. Besides, this
isn’t exactly a private forum.” Only the lateness of the hour and the emptiness of the streets had kept our conversation from attracting attention already, and I really didn’t want to have to explain Kira to any passersby.

  “Well, it’s been near two years since I came online and my RAM is sorely inadequate by today’s standards. Also, I don’t have any o’ them fancy cell phone doodads, and I’ll need one. Voice Over Mweb Protocol enabled o’ course.”

  “Anything else?” This was clearly going to take work.

  “I don’t know. I’m about three OS upgrades behind the curve, and I haven’t exactly been keepin’ up with the trade magazines. What would yer suggest?”

  “I could suggest that you go jump . . .” She looked heartbroken. I sighed, then smiled a yes. For some reason, I can’t resist a damsel in distress, even if she’s only six inches tall and has the manners of a moth-eaten weasel. Besides, I’d just had an idea. I put out my hand, palm up. “Hop aboard, and we’ll talk. Melchior, would you get the door?”

  He rolled his eyes but whistled a spell of unlocking—nobody in his right mind would give an old hacker like me the keys to Harvard’s crown jewels of computing—then held the door. I decided to wait on seeing Cerice until I’d found out whether I could manage the upgrade I had in mind. So I had Mel open up the small computer repair shop just down the hall from her lab. I did a quick inventory and decided they had about half of what I needed on hand.

  “The software will be easy enough. So will the RAM. But the rest? Your microphone is totally inadequate, so that’ll have to go. You haven’t got an audio-out jack, and I can’t imagine where I’d put an antenna.”

  “Are yer trying to slither out on me?” she demanded.

  “No, just thinking aloud. I wish this could wait until after I get back from—”

  She cut me off. “No chance. I know yer too well fer that,” she said. “Yer errands tend to the hazardous. How am I supposed to get fixed with yer dead and gone?”

  “See,” said Melchior, “even the great unwashed can tell you’re not long for this world.” He looked her up and down. “Well, unwashed at any rate.”

  “Why is everyone convinced I’m going to get myself killed?” I asked. The look of scorn and disbelief on the two small faces was identical. “Right. Mel, why don’t you make yourself useful? I need you to run to the electronics store and find me the highest-capacity flash memory device you can find. Oh, and a couple of really nice cell phones.”

  “I could still eat her,” he replied. “It’d probably be easier.”

  “Go.” He went. I turned back to Kira and gave her a visual once-over. She put her hands on her tiny hips and glared back at me. It was quite disconcerting. “Do you want help or not?” She held my gaze a moment longer, then nodded, almost meekly.

  “Right. Then you, Handheld. Execute, please.”

  For a moment I thought she was going to argue, but all she said was, “Executing,” in the strange, almost timbreless voice the various AIs used when running commands.

  With that, the webpixie was gone. In her place lay a small translucent green handheld computer. There were scuffs on her cover, and the top left corner of her case was badly cracked, but she was still a fine little piece of hardware—state of the art in her day. I started removing screws. After a time, Melchior returned with the gear. I mumbled a quick thank-you, then got back to work.

  I removed the cracked bit of casing and used the resultant hole to mount her new antenna and a headset jack. Inelegant but functional, and a little bit of liquid latex helped with the looks. In addition to the bits I’d asked for, Melchior had turned up one of the new ultraminiature hard drives.

  When he handed that over, I looked a question at him. He pointed at Kira and tapped his ear inquiringly.

  “Fully shut down,” I answered. “Can’t hear a thing.”

  “She’ll need that if she’s going to get into MP3s.” I raised an eyebrow. “I figured that was what you wanted the flash memory for. This is a better storage solution. Individually, MP3s may not take much memory, but they do add up and . . .” I kept my eyebrow up. “All right. She’s about as much fun as a sand burr in your shorts, but she’s got enough attitude for a whole herd of webtroll servers. She’s fragile and obsolete, but she’s not going to let anyone push her around. She’s got this whole free will thing nailed. Since I’m still working on it, I admire that.”

  “I just hope I haven’t scrambled her brains completely with this rush job,” I replied.

  Two hours after I’d started the project, it was time to find out. With a quick jab of my smallest screwdriver, I initiated a hard reboot. Several long seconds passed with the only sound a faint whir from her new hard drive. Then her little speaker let out a rude Bronx cheer.

  “If her start-up sound is any indicator,” said Melchior, “she’s well on her way to normal.”

  When she shifted into webpixie shape, she confirmed that. “A bloody butcher yer are,” she growled, “lopping a great huge chunk of my casing off like that. And with no anesthetic, I might add. Ar!” She took wing and shot out the door into the hallway.

  “Not even a thank-yer,” said Melchior. “Typical.”

  But before I could get out of my chair, Kira had returned, hovering a few inches in front of my nose.

  “Thanks, yer great booby.” She flitted down to Melchior. “Yer too, blue boy. I know that hard drive weren’t his lordship’s idea.” She jerked a thumb at me. “That’s pure fellow webcritter thoughtfulness that is.” She grinned impishly. “It’s too bad yer such a monstrous huge fellow, or I might show you my gratitude in a manner a bit more personal, if yer catch my drift.” Melchior blushed a deep indigo. “Ar well, different ports for different connectors and all that. But if yer ever have the urge, remember this.” She zipped up close to his ear and let out a burst of binary far too fast for my ears to decode.

  Melchior was still looking stunned when she opened a tiny gate in the substance of reality and vanished.

  “What was that last?” I asked.

  “She gave me her new cell number,” said Melchior. “She said now that she’s got one, she might as well get some use out of it.” He blushed again. “Then she suggested that even if we didn’t have any hardware in common, we could always try wireless.”

  I grinned but didn’t say a word as I headed out the door. We’d kept Cerice waiting long enough.

  As expected, I found her in the lab pacing and swearing. She did a lot of that lately; the dissertation was practically killing her. She looked depressed and exhausted. Around her lay a couple reams of paper covered with a million or so lines of code that I could barely read, much less really understand, and a dozen monitors scrolling different sorts of graphical and textual representations of The Program of Doom.

  Did I mention that Cerice is way smarter than I am? She’s also beautiful, with ice blond hair, eyes like blue fire, and a bone structure that makes mine look crude. As always, she wore red and gold, in this case jeans in a muted gold, a red silk blouse, and scarlet high-tops.

  “There you are!” she said, about a minute after I sat down behind a desk strewn with junk. In her fogged state, it took her that long to notice me. “It’s about time.”

  “Were you expecting me?” I asked in surprise.

  “No, I wasn’t.” She came and sat down on the edge of the desk, putting her feet on my chair so that they rested on either side of my knees. “But I had hopes.” Dark circles underlined her eyes.

  She leaned forward, wrapped her arms around my shoulders, and rested her chin on top of my head with a sigh. This put my lips squarely between her collarbones, so I kissed her gently in the hollow there, then again a bit lower. She pulled back and shook her head, though there was a wistful smile on her face.

  “You tempt me,” she said, her voice husky.

  “I’ve got all night.”

  “It’s morning, and I don’t have any time at all,” she replied, abruptly rising and starting to pace again. “I promi
sed Dr. Doravian I’d have the analysis data on the theta-theta decision point subroutines ready for him by Tuesday noon.”

  “And?”

  “And my thesis defense is going to look like an auto-defé.” She tried to make a joke of it, but I could hear the strain in her voice. “The whole segment’s gone trash can.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Cerice is smarter than I am and a better from-the-ground-up coder, but nobody anywhere finds programming flaws better than I do. It’s where my share of divine spark manifests itself. Even Atropos, my most inveterate critic, acknowledges that, though she has some problems with the fact that I mostly use that talent on other people’s security software. I looked at the screens of data and stacks of paper Cerice had accumulated and frowned. She’d been working on this project for years.