Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

  I found myself shivering, and not from cold. “We need to find Shara and get out of here.”

  Did we ever! The so-very-alive Shara would be beyond suffering here. It was a good thing Cerice couldn’t know how Hades really felt. She was almost around the bend from grief and stress as it was.

  “I’ll work on the Shara problem if you’ll cover our exit,” said Melchior.

  “Actually, I have an idea or two on the subject,” I said.

  Cerberus himself had given me the hint, though he was right about my not being another Orpheus. I couldn’t carry a tune in an amphora, but there was more than one way to fleece the golden sheep. Melchior gave me a questioning look, but I didn’t elaborate. I wasn’t sure any of it would work, and besides, why ruin my reputation for poor planning? With a sigh, he started making electronic blood-hound noises.

  I held my breath. Hades’ internal system is totally disconnected from the mweb—no way in, no way out—and I hadn’t been able to find out anything about it. That had been one of the factors that prevented me from getting here sooner. What if he was as much of a technophobe as Apollo? The chariot of the sun was still run on B.C. technology—Before Computers, that is. But a few moments after he started searching, Melchior tapped into hades.net.

  The system was like WiFi on speed, totally wireless and blazing fast but very short-range. There were dampers set up all around the perimeter of the underworld so no wardriving hacker on the outside could cop free access. Hades also believed in firewalls—the kind that came with brimstone—and security by sneaker-net.

  The sole connection from the mweb to the underworld was a hardwired link to the desktop machine in Hades’ office, and it had zero cross-connects to the intranet that ran the show down here. It also had weird access parameters that completely blocked outgoing locus transfers. That meant hacking and gating from the outside would only buy you a one-way ticket to invade Hades’ personal space, a bad idea of Iliadic proportions. Even if you managed to slide a little hack into his machine and gated in undetected, the only way to move a program on from there to where the preowned souls were processed was to have it loaded onto a disk and physically carried to one of the hades.net servers. Then, just as in my current situation, you had to get it back out. Very serious ugliness.

  Working from the inside, however, his intranet security was cake. It took Melchior about fifteen seconds to pop a hole into the command line, and from there we owned the soul-tracking software. I opened a terminal shell and ordered up a real-time lock on the current location of entry #99691046-Sh, better known as Shara. Once we had that, an in-system gate took care of getting us all together in the same meatspace. We found her sitting on a cliff edge overlooking the Lethe.

  “You don’t look so hot,” whispered Melchior, as we came up behind her.

  He was right. Shara, normally a bright lipstick purple in either of her shapes, had faded to a sort of lilac-tinted white. She barely even blinked at our arrival. I could have cried.

  “It’s kind of hard to maintain a tan down here, big boy,” she answered, pointing at the sunless, starless cavern roof above. “Land of twilight and all that.” Her webgoblin form and mannerisms had been modeled on the late, great Mae West, but they, too, seemed to have faded. The land of death was slowly converting her into a lost soul. “You’ll go the same way soon enough.”

  “Actually,” I said, “we weren’t planning on staying.”

  “Nobody ever does.” She looked sadly at Melchior. “He finally got you killed, huh? I always knew it would happen. At least he didn’t manage to do the same for Cerice.” A look of terrible pain crossed her face, all too similar to the ones I’d seen on Cerice when she thought I wasn’t looking. “I miss her so. Every time I think of her, I start wondering if I shouldn’t take a walk off the Lethe pier. I don’t want to forget her, but it hurts to remember.”

  “She sure hasn’t forgotten you,” I said. “That’s why we’re here, to get you out.”

  “Right.”

  “No, really,” said Melchior. “We’re not dead . . . at least not yet.”

  Shara looked dubious.

  “He’s telling the truth,” I said. “Look.” I unzipped my bag and pulled out a freezer-bagged bundle. Inside was the purple clamshell that normally housed Shara’s soul. I opened it wide and set it on the ground. The blank screen looked like a bottomless hole. “Hop in.”

  “You’re serious,” she said.

  “Yes, if you’ll pardon the expression, dead serious.”

  Shara reached out to touch the surface of her former self, then pulled back abruptly. She looked simultaneously fascinated and disturbed.

  “I’m not sure this is such a good idea,” she said, leaning over as if trying to see her reflection in the depths of the dead monitor.

  “I am,” said Melchior.

  He placed both hands on her butt and shoved. She tipped forward and smacked headfirst into the black rectangle with an audible thunk.

  “Huh,” he said. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

  “I should hope not.” Shara rubbed her forehead. “What did you expect?”

  “It should have been like falling into a hole,” said Melchior. “Hang on a second.” He licked a fingertip and reached for Shara’s ear, then stopped. “Is this all right?”

  Shara nodded. “I’d make a joke about there being better ports for you to try, but I’m just not up to it.”

  I winced. If Shara really wasn’t feeling up to innuendo, she was a seriously hurting unit. Melchior stuck his finger in Shara’s ear and whistled a short spell protocol. After a few moments, he pulled back, a thoughtful look on his face.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Problem. Big problem. She’s been recompiled into a noncompliant format. We’ve got about thirty-six hours to get her back to Cerice, and she’s not currently compatible with her own hardware.”

  I blinked. That was unexpected and very bad. “Are you sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why in Hades’ name . . . ?” Somehow that seemed an inappropriate oath at the moment.

  “Who knows?” said Melchior. “Mysteries of death and all that. Maybe Hades’ server does an automatic recompile as it processes incoming souls.”

  “You guys really are here to get me out, aren’t you?” Shara blinked and rubbed her eyes like someone waking from a long sleep. “Alive and in the flesh?”

  “Of course,” agreed Melchior. “You don’t think we’d let a little thing like death get in our way, do you?”

  She shook her head. “Sweet. Icarus-grade stupid, but sweet nonetheless. Thanks!” She smiled for the first time since we’d arrived and gave Melchior a hug, then held her arms out to me. I scooped her up and gave her two, one from me, one from Cerice.

  “Sorry we’re late,” I said.

  “No problem,” she answered. “It’s not like I’ve had a lot to do. What’s the plan for getting out?”

  “It’s not a plan so much as an outline,” I said, “with plenty of room for improvisation. Unfortunately, we’ve got a deadline.” I quickly sketched out the conditions of my oath.

  “I should be appalled,” said Shara, “but somehow, I’m not even surprised. Why do you suppose that is?”

  Melchior held up a hand in the classic pick-me pose. “Is it because Ravirn and planning go together like satyrs and celibacy pledges?”

  “That’d be it,” said Shara with a sigh. “All right then, so what’s the outline?”

  “Well, version 1.0 sort of went out the window when you didn’t go back into your mortal shell,” I said. “So, we’re going to 1.1.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  She sighed again. “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, right?” I nodded. “Goody. Do you just want to invite the Goddess of Discord to the party now? Or do we have to pretend this has some hope of ending well?”

  “Hey,” I said. “It won’t get that bad. I promise.”

  She rolled her ey
es. “Oh, of course not.”

  “Oh, I’m not saying things aren’t going to get sticky, but I’m just not in Eris’s league. If the ability to mess things up were a boat, I’d be a canoe to Eris’s Titanic.”

  “Why don’t I find that reassuring?” asked Shara.

  “Maybe because you’ve seen what happens when someone stands up in a canoe?” said Melchior.

  I decided it was time to cut the pick-on-Ravirn session short. It was nothing personal, of course. I could easily hold my own in a battle of wits with a couple of webgoblins. It’s just that I’d had a fresh idea for what to do next. Really.

  “Can we skip straight through escape versions 1.1 to 1.9 and start fresh with 2.0?” asked Melchior. “I really don’t like being here.”

  “Hush,” I said as I scrolled down the screen. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Truth be told, I didn’t like being “here” either. After I’d told Mel where I wanted to go, he’d gated us directly into an office where any sybaritically inclined CEO would have felt at home. Lush carpet. Imposing desk. Pricey art. Expensive chair. Honking-big plasma-screen monitor. Of course it all had that same grayed-out quality as the landscape, but cutting a few artistic corners seemed an inevitable consequence of running the underworld.

  So it wasn’t that I had anything against the office itself—and Hades’ big leather chair was one of the most comfortable I’d ever sat in—I just didn’t want be there when he got back. Unfortunately, if you want to read the God of Death’s e-mail, you have to go to the source. That meant the desktop computer in Hades’ office, the one that had the only link of any kind to the outside in the entire underworld.

  Typing fast, I pulled up Hades’ e-mail client. It gave me a password prompt. Now, if only he was as unimaginative and technolazy as his brother Zeus . . .

  I’d done a little troubleshooting for the big guy once. While he had godly power practically oozing out of his pores, you had to suspect that his wits had followed his wisdom when Athena popped out of his forehead fully formed.

  I entered, Hades123.

  Access granted. I let out a sigh, then almost swallowed my tongue when I heard a faint noise from beyond the office door, as of someone pausing there, then walking past. I really wanted to get away, but we had to get Shara back to Cerice ASAP if I wanted to keep my oath. That meant finding out what had been done to her. Forcing myself to concentrate on the screen, I checked out the client software. Then I started swearing.

  I’d been spoiled growing up in the Houses of Fate. My umpteen-times-great-grandmother Lachesis is the Fate who measures the threads for Atropos to cut. Control freak doesn’t begin to describe her personality. Neither does anal-retentive. She doesn’t just want everything in its place. She insists that it like it there.

  I’m about as sloppy a child of Fate as ever lived, but every e-mail I’ve ever received is neatly filed away in an appropriate folder for archival purposes. Some of them are even duplicated in multiple folders since they fit into more than one category. Cerice is the same way. It’s our upbringing, and the source is more organized yet. Lachesis even archives her spam.

  Hades was a whole different story. He didn’t so much as have folders, just an in-box with about 300 messages, half unopened. Apparently anything that didn’t have immediate importance went into the trash, where I found 23,897 messages, again about half unopened. After a few minutes I realized his search functions were shit, too, and that I’d have to code my own e-mail sorting script. It’s amazing how fast a man with nine fingertips can type when he’s got the right motivation.

  More precious minutes ticked past, and I kept thinking that if Hades were a better record keeper, we’d have been in and out by now. As it was, I still had to look at 163 messages that might possibly contain the info I needed. I was able to discard some quickly, things with headers like “Smite 500 Percent More” and “Totally Nude Nymphs.”

  That got me down to fifty or so I actually had to open and skim. Forty. Thirty. Twenty-five. Twenty. I was sweating. What if the info I needed wasn’t here? Ten. Still no luck. The next one claimed to be from Persephone@gaia.net. It was six months old, from before Shara’s arrival, the date stamp was 10 July OST (Olympus Standard Time). I wanted to skip it, but my script had selected it as containing at least a couple of my search terms. I double-clicked.

  It opened, Dear Hades, I hope this finds you dead. As always, I hate you . . .

  I reached for the closing keys, then froze as heat seemed to shimmer above the surface of the screen, opening an instant-messaging box in the thin air between me and the monitor. Hello, little hacker, read the IM, or would you prefer that I called you Raven?

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I think we have a problem,” I said, staring at the words hovering above the screen.

  Mel looked over my shoulder and whistled. It began as a note of alarm but quickly changed into the binary line of an escape spell. Nothing happened. It was like he hadn’t even run the program. He tried again. Ditto. Before I could think to do anything else, the office door opened. I reached for my gun, but my hand stopped halfway.

  A goddess stood in the doorway. Persephone, daughter of the Earth and Hades’ consort, the queen of the damned. Hades, the place, is not Hell any more than Hades, the god, is Lucifer. And yet . . .

  No one comes to Hades for fun, and only the desperate few visit by choice. Persephone wasn’t one of the latter. Long ago Hades stole her from her mother, Demeter, the Goddess of the Corn and one of the many faces of Gaia. In those days, Persephone was the very embodiment of spring, its beauty made flesh. Hades saw her walking in the world above and kidnapped her, raped her, made her his wife. For Persephone, Hades is indeed Hell. Perhaps all the more so because she is free to leave for nine months each year.

  When Demeter discovered that her daughter had been stolen, she ended summer, calling down an eternal winter where no seed could be sown in the frozen ground, no flower would grow on the vine, and no fruit might ripen in the tree. Finally, Zeus forced Hades to give Persephone up to her mother so that winter might end, but not before Hades made her eat three pomegranate seeds from one of the trees of the underworld and bound her to spend three months of each year at his side.

  When Persephone returned to Demeter in the youth of the year, she brought the spring with her. When Hades summoned her back to the underworld, winter reigned again.

  It’s one of the darker, starker tales of the gods. There’s no sugarcoating it, and even I can’t bear to joke about it. It makes me ashamed that Hades shares my blood. Now I discovered that the scariest part of the whole thing is that you can read the story in her face.

  She was every bit as beautiful as ever. Tall, lissome, long dark hair and perfect skin, the classical Greek goddess, only more so. None of that mattered once you’d seen her eyes. They were winter and sorrow bound into living tissue. Ever-changing, yet eternally frozen and monochrome. Gray and bottomless, like the leaden clouds of December one moment, the white that brings ice-blindness the next, and as black as a frozen lake in between. It took a huge effort of will to look away. When I did, all thoughts of weapons had fled. Adding to her pain was something I would not, could not, do. Instead, I placed my hands flat on the desk in front of me.

  Long seconds slid past in silence. The Goddess entered the room and closed the door behind her, then leaned against it. More silence. I tried not to meet her eyes but knew it was only a matter of time. The tension visible in her body made me want to see what her face was doing. I glanced toward the screen, hoping to distract myself. Words appeared in the floating IM box, wiping away the older ones.

  About time, they said. I was beginning to think you’d never look.

  “I . . . What do you want from me?” I asked, keeping my gaze fixed on the box that hovered between me and the screen.

  What do I want, little Raven? Why don’t you tell me?

  “I’m not Raven,” I said, anger drawing the words from me before I could think. I almost looked at her
again but remembered not to just in time. “Fate gave me that name, and Fate is my enemy.”

  Even Clotho, who took your side against your grandmother and Atropos? The Goddess’s words splattered across the IM box. The name was a mighty gift. Do you not want it?

  “I want to be me,” I said, “simply Ravirn and no more.”

  But that name was a gift of Fate, too, or did you think your parents would have given it to you without consulting the matriarch of your line? And what makes you think that being Ravirn is a simple thing?

  I didn’t want to hear it, or in this case, read it. I’d had this argument too many times with Cerice. I was who I was and not what Fate would make of me. Besides, the clock was ticking, and Hades might return at any moment. I didn’t know what Persephone’s agenda was or what it might cost me, but since my heart was still beating, she obviously wanted more than my life.