Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

  “No thanks, Mel. Park it in a password-protected folder for later inspection.”

  “Can do,” he said.

  Then we headed out. When we got to Cerice’s building, I picked the various locks myself instead of getting Melchior to magic them open for me. I felt fabulous and couldn’t resist the pure mischief of it. I took extra care with the lock on her door, opening it as silently as possible. I wanted to surprise her.

  “Ta-dah!” I said, stepping inside.

  Cerice was sitting in a chair on the far side of the room, her feet propped up on about a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of custom mainframe. She looked even more weary and stressed than the last time I’d seen her and barely seemed to register my presence. Finally, she turned her head my way.

  “Ta-dah?” She looked confused. Then hope bloomed in her tired eyes—hope and the first hint of true happiness I’d seen there in a long time—and she leaped to her feet. “Where is she?”

  “Isn’t she here?” I could feel the ground under my feet going spongy, lab tile about to turn to quicksand. “I sent her ahead.”

  “You what?”

  “Sent her ahead.” I glanced at Melchior for support. “We e-mailed her.” Cerice looked at me like I was totally out of my mind. “We did! When was the last time you checked your e-mail?”

  Cerice pointed at the monitor hooked to the mainframe. An open mail window was clearly visible. To any normal person it would have looked like another typical UNIX e-mail client, but I recognized an mweb-enabled program originally written by Clotho.

  “You’re sure you haven’t gotten an e-mail from Hades with a really huge attachment?” I sounded like an idiot, but I couldn’t help myself. “Maybe it hit your spam filters and—”

  “Ravirn,” said Cerice, “anything over ten meg is going to trigger a query on whether or not I want to download it. How big a file are we talking?”

  “I don’t know, a couple of terabytes maybe?”

  “Two-point-two-nine,” said Melchior, whose silicon memory was much more precise than my own faulty organics. “Sent at 9:38 Olympus Standard Time. And before you ask, yes, we sent it to the right address. Shara double-checked it herself.”

  “She did?” I asked.

  “She did.”

  “Well then where the hell did she go?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Melchior. “Shit. The oath.”

  I could feel sweat breaking out on my forehead. I’d always figured that if I could get in and out of the underworld alive, I’d have this caper pretty much sewn up. The possibility that I could be both alive and in violation of my oath had never even occurred to me. Yet here I was. And if Shara didn’t show up mighty quick, I was going to have some unhappy Furies making a house call.

  “Melchior. Laptop. Please.”

  He hopped onto the desk and shifted shape. I dropped into a chair and started hitting keys. It was at times like this that I most missed the tip of my left pinkie. The loss had cost me a couple of words a minute typing speed. Still, I got a graphic representation of the mweb connections between Hades and this DecLocus’s version of Harvard up pretty quickly.

  There were an infinite number of possible routing solutions to get a set of packets from there to here, but only a couple of optimum solutions. For a job the size of Shara, the mweb master servers would be very careful not to take unnecessary steps. The network had bandwidth beyond the wildest dreams of human coders, but it had been designed always to optimize that resource—the hand of Necessity there.

  By hacking the tracking system at Clotho.net I was able to get a lock on one big mother of an e-mail coming out of Hades and heading by direct link from there into the Fate’s central routing system . . . where it vanished. Poof! No more packets.

  “What the . . .” Cerice was looking over my shoulder. “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered, madly hitting keys and calling up further information. “She hasn’t been erased or quarantined. There’d be some evidence of that. She’s just gone.”

  I pushed my chair back from the desk. I was trying to sound calm. I actually sounded dead, which was fair. I was dead. I’d escaped the Furies once before because I’d gotten very, very lucky. It wasn’t likely to happen again.

  “Don’t give up yet.” Cerice took my place in front of Melchior.

  His screen shifted, displaying nothing but ones and zeros. I prefer a nice clean graphical interface for computer and spell work. It’s closer to the way I think. Cerice goes straight into the underlying code, and she’s used her own personal magic to enhance her abilities there. Sometimes I think she’s half computer herself. Screen after screen of binary flew by so fast it blurred into complete nonsense for me.

  “There!” she cried, bring the show to a stop. “Right there.” Her finger touched the screen, and Melchior obligingly magnified that section of code.

  I didn’t know what was around it, so all I could tell was that is was some sort of routing command. “What is it?”

  “It’s a hardware-level autofunction,” said Cerice, “and it grabbed Shara.”

  “Hardware-level? Are you sure?” That could get really ugly really fast.

  While the mweb is administered by the Fates through their individual webtroll servers, I’d learned recently that the actual core architecture is a cluster of multiprocessor quantum mainframes that come preassembled from Necessity herself. When a replacement unit is needed, it’s delivered by the Furies, who are the only goddesses allowed to interact with Necessity directly. More than that, nobody knows.

  That’s because no one messes with Necessity. Repeat, no one. Not my grandmother or her sisters, not Zeus, not Hades, not even Eris—and Discord’s flat-out nuts, a friend, but nuts all the same. Necessity is to the gods what Fate is to everybody else.

  So if Shara’s trip had been interrupted at the hardware level, it was because of something Necessity had personally built into the system. The very thought made my bones itch.

  “Can you find out where she is?” I asked, trying not to get my hopes up. There was nothing at all I could do to affect Necessity, but at the same time the possibility that Shara was still somewhere meant there was a chance she’d end up here.

  “I don’t know. As far as I can tell, this”—Cerice tapped the screen for emphasis—“autoforwarded her to an address that should be a null set.”

  I closed my eyes. Not good. Not good at all. “I note your use of the word should. Can I take that to mean that it isn’t actually a null set?”

  “I don’t know.” Cerice cocked her head to one side, the way she often did when she’d found an absolutely fascinating programming problem. “It shouldn’t be possible for this string to work as an end address, but a file-received message came back to the mweb server in response to Shara’s forward. Take a look.”

  I leaned in. Sure enough, there was the standard response string from—I mentally translated the binary—souladmin@necessity . . . Dot, dot, dot? That didn’t make any sense at all. But there it was.

  The clear e-trail showed that whatever had happened to Shara made sense to the mweb architecture, but I hadn’t a clue how to do anything about it. Even if I knew where Necessity kept her personal server stack, I wouldn’t dare go after it. There are fates much worse than death. Just ask Prometheus.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “So now what?” I asked. Necessity had Shara, or at least her server did. While I might be willing to tackle Hades, the Fate of the Gods was a whole different story.

  Apparently, Cerice didn’t know what to do either. She just slumped in her chair and looked defeated. “We wait.”

  “I hate waiting.”

  Me too, said a text box on Melchior’s screen. All right if I go back to goblin now?

  I nodded, and Melchior shifted forms. “Why don’t you two head back to the apartment?” He made shooing gestures. “I’ll catch up in a little while.”

  “But I’ve got to—” Cerice began.

  Melchi
or didn’t let her finish. “Don’t argue. You’re out on your feet, and you’ve already told us your program’s screwed without Shara’s help. It won’t be any more screwed if you take thirty hours off, and maybe the rest will help you get some fresh perspective.”

  “Why thirty . . .” Cerice trailed off as she looked up at the clock. “Oh.” It was a quarter past one. In thirty hours it would be sunrise on Sunday, and the Furies would come to kill me.

  “Go,” said Melchior. “I’ll just tidy up around here.”

  “Thanks, Mel,” I said. He hates cleaning, probably even more than I do. This offer was entirely about giving Cerice and me some time alone. “I appreciate it.”

  The first time we made love it was a desperate, against-the-living-room-wall affair, all sliding flesh and seeking tongues—striving to ignore the sword of Damocles hanging over us. The second go-round was slower and longer, with Cerice riding me to a climax on the oriental rug in the hall. Finally, in our own bed, we managed to forget everything but each other. There, massage led to caresses, which moved on to mutual nibbling, then to a slow passion, spooned-up together on our sides. Mutual orgasm. Exhaustion. Sleep. And . . .

  I was in the hallway at the front of the University of Minnesota’s WeismanArt Museum. In front of me stood my cousin Moric. He wore head-to-toe armor, red and blue, blood and bruises. That couldn’t be right. Moric was dead, eaten by a burst of Primal Chaos that I had unleashed. Yet here he was.

  I heard gunshots from outside, and sparks danced on the back of his armor. He didn’t seem to notice, turning to face me instead of looking for the shooter.

  “Ah, dear little Raven. How nice of you to come out to meet me. Did you run out of places to hide? Or did you finally remember the nobility of your blood and decide to look your death in the face?”

  “Neither,” I said, echoing the words I’d spoken then through the mouth of a doppelganger. I wondered at his use of Raven. He’d died before I’d earned that name. “I decided that if I was going to go, I should at least take you with me.”

  Then, just as I had at the time, I braced myself and opened a line into the interworld chaos. What I was doing was a violation of every rule I knew about the proper management of magical power, and the potential cost was terrible. Tapping the raw chaos without taking major precautions was an invitation to end your magical career as a charcoal briquette.

  I felt like I’d stuck a needle in my arm and started pumping liquid flame directly into my veins. As I did so, I expected my knees to give way as they had that long year ago, perhaps even breaking the right one anew.

  But instead of collapsing or cooking in my own juices, I stood there and took the pain as the fires roared through my circulatory system. The pure raw stuff of chaos filled me until I felt as if I must dissolve from within. I’d never experienced such agony. I’d never experienced such . . . ecstasy. Ecstasy? Yes. Along with the fire came a terrible rush of joy, like a whole-body orgasm. The internal burning didn’t hurt any less, but I found myself wanting it to go on forever. Of course, it couldn’t. After what felt like hours but was truly not much more than the time between blinks, the chaos passed beyond my capacity to contain.

  It burst forth from the palms of my hands in twin streamers of wildfire, twisting and coiling along a line that ran from me to a point just above Moric’s heart. His armor protected him briefly, but the power of it knocked him off his feet. Soon he began to burn. Again the scene diverged from my memory. Then, the eyeballs of my doppelganger had melted. Now, I watched in horror as Moric flopped and rolled, trying to fight clear of the fire.

  My stomach turned in horror at what I was doing, yet I couldn’t look away, couldn’t even tell myself that if I’d known about this, I would never have done the deed. It had been him or me. As much as it tore at me to see him like this, I knew that if I had it all to do over again, I’d still have to pick me. Seconds ticked by. Finally, Moric died. The flow of chaos did not. It built, rolling back over me and filling the space, eating away at the walls and floor. The power had me in its grip just as it had all those months ago, and it was not letting go.

  Then, I’d had to sacrifice my doppelganger and slip between worlds to break free. Even that had only worked because the mweb was temporarily down. This time I had opened the link directly through my own body, not that of a surrogate. There was nowhere to run and no way to escape. The chaos kept flowing. Moric’s body was long gone, completely dissolved. Now the hall followed. I felt the floor give way beneath me, but I didn’t fall. I floated at the heart of a rapidly expanding globe of pure Primal Chaos.

  I could no longer see anything but the wild tumbling colors that fill the place between worlds, but somehow I could feel the stuff eating into the substance of the planet, tearing great chunks out of reality and devouring them whole. I felt the University die. The city of Minneapolis. The continent of North America. The whole damn Decision Locus, reabsorbed by the stuff that had given it birth. Then, when I was alone, a living point in the heart of a chaos, it turned on me and I, too, was devoured.

  I woke with Moric’s final throes echoing in my mind and cold sweat running off my forehead. The only light in the little bedroom came from the blinking red LEDs of the clock: 6:30. I’d only slept a few hours. It would already be getting light outside, but Melchior had drawn the curtains for us. I was dead tired, but jangling nerves and the emotional aftershocks of the nightmare were enough to let me know that I wouldn’t be getting back to sleep.

  As gently as possible, I disengaged myself from Cerice. She made a tiny noise of protest when I opened the covers and the cold air hit her but subsided when I tucked them back around her neck. I might have had the more strenuous day, but she’d been running on sheer will for weeks. Now that she’d finally let herself collapse, I didn’t expect her to move before noon.

  A selfish part of me wanted to get her up, to drag her out in a pell-mell effort to deny my danger. But she really needed the sleep, and I knew deep down that waking her would only serve to drive the awareness of impending doom deeper. Instead, I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and slipped out to the kitchen with the intention of making myself some coffee and breakfast. Melchior was there before me, handing me a cup as I staggered through the arch that led into the hallway.

  “Eggs?” he asked.

  “Depends, are you cooking them?” Melchior and food preparation made for a bad mix.

  “Great Zeus, no!” said Melchior. “I’m going to run down to the hotel on the corner and pick them up from their café like I did the coffee.”

  “That would explain the Murray’s Hall logo on the mug, then.” It was a very high-class establishment where Harvard put up visiting VIPs and rich alums. The food was outstanding, and I could avoid any guilt by leaving them the money for breakfast in my will. “Sounds good, Mel. What am I getting?”

  “Normally, I’d say ‘whatever’s under the heat lamps when I get there,’ but they just put in a new computerized ordering system, so the sky’s the limit.”

  Hacked breakfast and a menu, what more could you ask for? I told Melchior what I wanted, and fifteen minutes later he delivered a set of covered hotel dishes containing a bacon-and-mushroom omelet, crispy hash browns, homemade English muffins, a couple of dark chocolate croissants, a ham steak, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and more coffee. I picked up a place mat and wafted a breakfast-flavored breeze down the hallway. When even this enticement didn’t generate a sound from Cerice’s direction, I tucked in. I’d have to ask Melchior to steal another breakfast when she finally woke up.

  Once I’d finished transferring calories from my plate to my stomach and gotten up a good head of caffeine, I asked Melchior to go back to laptop and called up a Graphic User Interface version of the e-mail transfer point Cerice had found. Maybe GUI would show me things that hadn’t been apparent in binary.

  Collecting a tiny dagger from a sheath in the sleeve of my leather jacket, I plugged a networking cable into the hilt and connected the other end to Mel
’s laptop form. The athame was maybe five inches long and narrow enough to pass for a letter opener, but no letter opener had ever been this sharp. I braced my wrist against the edge of the table, then plunged the blade into my left palm, bearing down until the guard touched my flesh and the tip stood out from the back of my hand. Bitter agony catapulted me out of my flesh and into the world of the mweb, where it left me.

  I hung above a sort of crystalline city, the mweb server in all its multicore interconnected glory. I’d had Melchior color the native software in a pale translucent green, remote client apps in a deeper opaque olive, and the internal pathways between programs sea blue. Backbone lines into and out of the server were orange, lesser links yellow. The honking-big pipeline that went directly to the Fate Core I marked in do-not-touch radioactive red. I’d already dodged one death sentence for interfering with it; no sense giving the Furies extra incentive.