Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

  Melchior tightened focus on the place where Shara had gone elsewhere. It felt like a slow-motion skydive as I went from a satellite’s-eye city view through neighborhood mode down to looking at a single building. The e-mail routing node was a cube about the size of a six-story office building and part of a big cluster of similar nodes, mostly much larger ones. It also stood out like a cyclops in an optometrist’s shop. Instead of the greens we’d used for software nodes, it was literally a black box, an enigma attached directly to the motherboard. There were no obvious connections leading out of the server. E-mail went in and then it went . . . somewhere else. Then verification of messages received came back from wherever that somewhere was.

  I moved closer, almost touching the node. I couldn’t be sure without entering, but it looked an awful lot like an independent core, a computer within the computer. I reached out toward it and . . . stopped. Something about the node raised the virtual hairs on the back of my electronic neck, and it wasn’t just knowing I was flirting on the edges of Necessity’s business. Accessing Melchior, I had him pull up one of my standard hacking tools, a code weasel, a completely independent program with no connections back to him or me. It appeared in my hand, a small furry thing like its namesake, different only in that it had bat wings. Moving well away from the node, I released it.

  It dropped like a hunting hawk, backwinging just before it touched the black surface and landing gently. Before it had time to so much as fold its wings, a ball of black fire emerged from the node and engulfed it, incinerating it instantly. A dark flash and the weasel was gone. The flame, hovering above the node and spinning in place, remained. I decided I’d used up my luck for the day and had better leave. The second I moved, so did the ball. It came after me like an ebony comet with a tail of black sparks glinting behind it like chips of midnight.

  I moved as quickly as thought could take me, but it gained steadily. I wouldn’t make—

  Sudden searing pain, like I’d put my hand on the burner of a stove. I heard a whimper and realized it had come from my own lips. I was back in my body, and the pain was on this side of the link. The athame embedded in my palm had fresh carbon on it, a loose star of char marks, centered on the networking port, whose delicate contacts were actually glowing a dull red as they melted. The connector itself was gone. Using the tail of my shirt as an insulator, I grabbed the hilt and pulled the blade out.

  It didn’t quite burn my fingers through the cloth, but it came close. Almost out of reflex I whistled the binary spell that closed athame-induced wounds. To my surprise it worked, sealing the flesh and soothing most of my pain. I could still feel a dull throbbing, but it no longer dominated my thinking. It was only then that I remembered Melchior. If the security program had done that to my athame, what had it done to my familiar?

  I looked up and saw a line burned into the surface of the wooden table. It led from the place where my wrist had rested to the now-empty spot Mel had occupied when I crossed over into the virtual world of the mweb. It was only then that I heard the running water and swearing. Turning, I found my webgoblin. He was kneeling in the sink and swearing a streak as blue as he was. Water from the tap ran across his nose—the location of his networking port in goblin shape—and from there over his right hand, both of which were showing blisters. I rose to help him, then almost went down when the world wavered around me.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, my voice sounding tinny and distant.

  “I will be,” he answered, “with a couple of minor repairs. I take it from the fact that you’re speaking to me that I pulled the plug in time.”

  “What happened?”

  “You know how they say that ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, she’s a mother all right.” Melchior shook his burned right hand a couple of times. “Man but that smarts. I don’t know how the security on that black box worked, but it went through my system without leaving a mark until it hit the line out to its target.”

  “Me.”

  “You. That’s when the networking cable caught fire.” He pointed at the burned line on the table, his pupils huge and black, and shook his head. “It actually caught fire. I didn’t know that was possible. I’ve never shifted shape so fast in my life—burned my nose pretty badly, too, what with the cable being on fire—but it was the only thing I could think of. You got lucky then. Once it got into the cable, it was hot and nasty, but slow. I was able to rip it free of the athame before it nailed you. I’m not sure why it didn’t move faster.”

  “Maybe destroying the line as it went degraded the transmission rate?”

  “Maybe,” said Melchior. “Whatever the reason, you’d better thank whatever high-ranking cousin of yours is the patron of hackers.”

  “Eris,” I interjected.

  He nodded. “Of course. I must be feeling more scrambled than I thought. Maybe you should send her some flowers or chocolate or something.”

  “Tomorrow, if I’m still alive.” Not that Discord actually ever intervened to help people, but hey, it couldn’t hurt. “What happened to the cable after you pulled it?”

  “Consumed.” He pointed at the floor, where a broken circle had burned itself into the linoleum.

  “So much for my damage deposit,” I said.

  “There’s a surprise.” Cerice’s sleepy voice came through the arch into the hall. “Have you ever gotten a deposit back?”

  “What’s your point?” I asked.

  “Only that you’re a bit closer to Eris in nature than you are by blood. Chaos and discord follow in your wake. Clotho was right to call you a dark bird.”

  I let it pass. This might be my last day on the right side of Hades’ gate, and I didn’t want to spend it fighting with Cerice.

  “Feeling a little crabby, are we?” I asked.

  She smiled sadly. “A little, perhaps. It has something to do with being wakened from a sound sleep by a swearing webgoblin and the smell of my boyfriend’s charred flesh.”

  “Hey!” I said. “I’m only a little burned.” I held my hand to my nose. “You can’t even smell it close-up.”

  “My mistake, then. Care to tell me what happened?”

  “In a moment,” I answered. “First, I need to see to Mel’s injuries. Come here, you.” I lifted him out of the sink and into my lap.

  “Melchior, Root Access. Please.”

  “Root Access granted,” he replied, his face going a little dreamy.

  “Righthand/allfingers/fingertips.source,” I said, “Terminate Signal. Initiate Recovery Cycle. Run Command, Run Command. Nose/networkingport.source Terminate Signal. Initiate Recovery Cycle. Run Command, Run Command. Root Exit.”

  “Exiting Root,” he responded. I’d just shut down the pain sensors in the affected areas and initiated a regeneration program for the damage. “Oh, that’s much better. I should have thought of it myself.”

  “Good,” I said. “Why don’t you go fetch Cerice breakfast while I fill her in on what happened.”

  “Sure,” said Melchior. “That way I get to skip the safety lecture, too.” Cerice shot him a sharp look but didn’t say anything. He bowed low and winked. “What do you want, my lady? Murray’s Hall just put in a computerized ordering system.”

  She grinned and asked for a breakfast every bit as big and elaborate as mine. With another bow, he was gone. While we waited, I told Cerice about our little misadventure.

  “Interesting,” she said, when I’d finished. “Remind me not to try to hack any of Necessity’s equipment. So what now?”

  “Now we check your e-mail and hope that Shara’s come in while we were napping. I can’t really see past that at the moment. The idea that I went through my little encounter with Cerberus just to buy a day pass out of the underworld is a bit too much for me to get around.”

  “For you to get around?” asked Melchior, returning with Cerice’s breakfast. “What about me? If you get nailed by the Furies, I’m going to have to break in a new
employer. And in case you hadn’t noticed, most of your extended family thinks the solution to free will and the AI is an electronic lobotomy.”

  I wanted to laugh—he was making wise to cheer me up—I just couldn’t manage it. I tried instead for light irony. “Somehow, I find that to be a less pressing problem than I otherwise might. I’m sure Cerice will see that you don’t starve,” I replied. “Won’t you, my dear?”

  “Of course,” she said, and there was a seriousness to her words that made them a promise and let all the air out of our joking. “But let’s hope it won’t come to that. Mel, would you be so kind as to allow me use you as a webmail terminal? I can see whether Shara’s parked in my account at Clotho.net.”

  Melchior nodded and made the transition back to laptop. Cerice brought up his browser and opened a line to Clotho.net. At that point I turned and looked out the window. We were lovers and friends. But we were also hackers and crackers, and it would have been deeply rude of me to watch her type her password. Even with the iris recognition and all the other biometric security we now used, passwords mattered. Like true names, they were not shared lightly.

  Besides, I could always get it out of Melchior later if I really needed to.

  Cerice knew that of course, but she chose to use him anyway—something she’d never done before. That was a sign of great trust on her part, and to me it said “I love you,” as clearly as the words she hadn’t yet been willing to voice.

  Seconds ticked past. “Nothing,” she finally said. “Nothing at all.”

  As the hours ticked down, we returned to the lab. Cerice had a really nice sleeping bag that she kept tucked under the desk for nights when she couldn’t make it home. We unzipped it and laid it on the tile, lying side by side where we could see the mainframe monitor. Melchior sat on the floor near our heads, legs crossed goblin fashion. We spoke very little, and when we did talk, it was about inconsequential things. Memories from childhoods spent in the Houses of Fate or clever hacks we’d created.

  The sky began to lighten. Still no Shara. At this point I began to wonder if it would even be possible to download her in the time we had left and how half returning her might count with the Furies in the matter of my oath. Maybe I could get them to agree to only one Fury chasing me, though I had my doubts. They hadn’t been particularly happy about having to give up on me after our last encounter. They are legendary for their relentlessness, and being called off at the last minute had probably caused them more than a little stress.

  Then, just when everything was looking bleakest, I heard the faint “bing” that announced incoming e-mail. I was halfway to the screen without crossing the intervening space, but Cerice was ahead of me.

  “There’s nothing here!” she said, as she tapped on the keyboard to wake the monitor. “What the hell?”

  But I knew the answer. Turning, I said to Melchior, “Who’s it from?”

  He didn’t look at all happy. “Tisiphone@necessity . . .”

  Tisiphone, the Fury with wings and hair of living fire. The one who liked to play with her victims. I could actually feel my already pale skin going paler. It was the oddest sensation.

  “What’s the header?”

  “Save a dance for me.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Uh, Boss,” said Melchior.

  “What is it?” I asked, but my heart wasn’t in it. E-mail from Tisiphone. I couldn’t get past that. Death was on its way. Sure I’d fight, but I’d lose. I’d seen the Furies take down Eris, one of the toughest goddesses in the whole damn pantheon. I wouldn’t even make a good speed bump.

  “You might want to look at this,” said Melchior.

  “Why? How could the exact phrasing possibly matter?”

  “Well,” said Melchior, “it’s a visual and—”

  He was interrupted by a chime from the mainframe. I turned to see what was up. I had just an instant to read over Cerice’s shoulder, “You have received a 2.21-terabyte message from Hades@hades.net with the header: Here she is. Do you want to download the message, save it for later, or delete it from the server? Automatic download will begin in sixty seconds.” Cerice hit the download-message button. But was it too late? Was the download going to finish after sunrise? Was that why Tisiphone had e-mailed me? To mock me for failing at the last possible moment?

  “Melchior,” I began.

  “I’m on it.” He opened his eyes and mouth, shooting out three beams of light, one blue, one red, one green. Where they met, a golden sphere formed. It fogged, then became translucent. Inside, a three-dimensional image formed. Tisiphone.

  She was naked, as the Furies always were, and beautiful even by goddess standards, very tall and almost boyishly slender, with small high breasts and red hair touched by living fire, both on her head and where her thighs met. Her eyes held flames as well, globes of fire where her irises should have been and pupils like roiling smoke. Her skin was so white it was almost transparent, the blue veins clearly visible in her breasts and thighs. Fiery wings sprouted from her back, expanding out of the picture. I knew from past experience that she could extend them thirty or forty feet in either direction and that what they touched burned.

  “Save a dance for me, Raven,” she said. “The music stopped too early this time, but I’m sure you’ll play doom’s song again. You live too close to the cliff ’s edge for it to go any other way.” Suddenly lines of twisting rainbow light slithered through the image, and Melchior’s speaker gave a faint static hiss as though something had disturbed the transmission. It lasted only an instant, but I’d never seen anything like it before. “It’s been a very long time since someone escaped my sisters and me as you did last year. Megaera takes it personally. She wants your hide nailed to the mantel, ideally with you still in it, alive and screaming. Alecto merely thinks you provide a bad example and wishes you dead at her hand. I take you as a challenge and look forward to playing catch again soon. Good-bye. For now.”

  Then she touched her fingertips to her lips and blew a kiss in my direction. A kiss of fire. Like a burning smoke ring, it sailed toward me. When the flaming lips hit the edge of Melchior’s projection, they vanished, and so did Tisiphone.

  “I think someone’s got a crush on you,” said Melchior. “Isn’t that cute.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Cerice, her mouth pressed into a thin line.

  “Neither do I,” I snapped. “A, she called me Raven. B, I’m spoken for. C, hot times with Tisiphone would be a little too hot—I’ve never been much for third-degree burns on delicate tissue. And D, she’s a fucking Fury! You know, Goddess of Vengeance and all that jazz? No one in his right mind would date her.”

  “Methinks thou dost protest too much,” said Melchior, but he said it from comfortably beyond my reach. “Lighten up, why don’tcha? You’re off the hook, Boss.” Then he did a little dance.

  “I . . .”

  It finally sank in. I’d done it. We had Shara back, and I wasn’t going to pay for it with my life. I’d visited the underworld without taking up permanent residence. For the first time in more than a year I didn’t have anything life-threatening hanging over my head. My bad knee buckled, followed by my good one, and I found myself sitting on the sleeping bag. I opened my arms wide and flopped onto my back.

  I felt wonderful and empty and hot and cold all at once. It felt like someone had removed a huge boulder from my back, one I’d carried so long I’d forgotten it was there.

  “Are you all right?” Melchior paused in his dance.

  But I couldn’t answer. I had no words to express what was happening in my head and heart. Contrary to all the laws of nature, I expected to float right off the floor and into space. Nothing as light as I felt could possibly stay on the ground.

  Cerice knelt beside me and put a hand on my chest. She didn’t say anything, just sat there touching me. It was just what I needed. If time had stopped then and there, I would have been fine with it. But time does not stop, not even for the gods and their myriad children. So, after a
while, when the relief had faded a bit, I sat up and gave Cerice a gentle kiss and a nod. I knew she had to be dying to check on Shara. She rose and went to the monitor. Before I could even make a token effort at following, Melchior landed square in my lap.

  “Have I ever told you how beautiful you are?” he said, a wicked grin on his face. Then he took one of my ears in each hand, planted a big smooch square on my lips, and said, “I love you, man.”

  With a wild cackle he was gone, back to his goblin dance. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and promised myself I’d think of some suitable revenge later on. For now, I just smiled and joined Cerice. Shara had almost finished downloading, so I collected her mortal shell from my bag and ran a networking cable from it to the back of the mainframe.