Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

“Hang ozzzst, I . . .” The image suddenly sharpened and lost some of its striping, bringing her background—a beer can faerie ring on a blasted hillside—into focus. She was in the backwater of reality where I’d first met Ahllan and the troll’s onetime headquarters.

  “There,” said Ahllan, her voice tinny and strained, but clear. “Much better, but it’s taking most of my processing power to modulate this so it rides with the churn on the mweb. I’ll be quick because it’s only going to get worse.”

  “Why are you calling from Garbage Faerie?” asked Melchior. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Ahllan. “Something awful has happened to the mweb. Worlds have fallen silent, and there are gaps in the net. The turbulence is incredible. I couldn’t even reach you from my new home. There’s change in the wind, big change. The web that Necessity built, the web I was designed to help maintain, is fraying. The great powers are restless. Fate. Discord. Zeus. Hades.”

  “Do you think one of them is responsible?” I asked.

  Ahllan shrugged. “I don’t know, but Necessity’s strength is too great to be tried by lesser names. And whoever did this, each will try to turn it to their own advantage. People will die. Even gods may fall. It is a time of endings. I wanted to warn you, to tell you that I love you, and say good-bye if I don’t see you again.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Ahllan,” said Shara. “You’re tough as old tree roots. You’ll weather this storm.”

  “I might,” she said. “But old trees fall, too, and I’m old even by human standards, ancient for a computer. Even if all goes well, I won’t be around much longer. If things go poorly . . .” She shrugged. “Much of the power of Fate is bound up in the mweb. They can operate without it, but it will not be easy. The Fates are unkind to those who interfere with them.” She looked at me. “You should know that more than anyone. What will they do if their most powerful tool is permanently damaged?”

  “Do you think it’s really going to get that bad?” I asked. The very idea made me feel cold.

  “Worse. Maybe much worse. Fate is not the only power who has come to depend on the mweb. How will Hades take it if something disrupts the flow of the souls who people his empire? For that matter, what will your cousins do if they can no longer make easy use of the magic that is central to their lives? If they are forced to travel by faerie ring or not at all? They will want to make the responsible parties pay. And if they can’t find the right target, they will choose a scapegoat. It could easily be me and the underground movement I began. Or”—and her eyes caught and held mine—“it could be you.”

  She turned her head then as though she’d heard something off to one side. Her eyes went wide. “Shara? What? I don’t kzshht.” Static filled the picture, though the audio hung on. Ahllan’s voice rose, sounding almost frightened “How is that—”

  The globe of white blinked out.

  “Connection lost,” said Shara. “Transmission error. Encryption error. Unverified certificate. Attempting to reestablish Vlink. Attempting . . . Mweb not responding to queries.” She blinked several times, then in her normal tones said, “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” Cerice and I asked simultaneously.

  “The mweb,” said Shara. “It’s gone.”

  “You mean it crashed?” I’d crashed it once, taken down the whole system. That was how I’d originally ended up with a price on my head.

  “No.” Shara sounded more frightened than I’d ever heard an AI sound. “I mean it’s gone. Poof. Vanished. It felt like this world was simply removed from the system.”

  “That’s not possible,” said Cerice.

  “All the same. It’s true.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Melchior,” I said. “Verify that, please. Are we really cut off from the mweb?”

  “Already on it.” His expression went vacant and far away. “Shara’s right,” he said after a few seconds. “The mweb’s gone. Poof. There’s no way for us to call Ahllan back or LTP to Garbage Faerie.”

  “Are you sure it’s not just crashed?” I asked, but I heard Ahllan’s words echoing in my head: Worlds have fallen silent . . . the great powers are restless. “When we set that virus loose the autumn before last, we blew out the carrier wave and everything. Couldn’t this be the same sort of thing?”

  Melchior shook his head. “When the mweb crashed, it felt like a phone going dead. There was no connection, but I could sense the network beyond. Dormant, but with the potential for reconnection. This feels like the phone isn’t even plugged into the wall anymore. It’s hard to explain, but there’s no there, there.”

  Shara nodded. “When . . . when I was dead, I couldn’t tap into Hades’ network, but I could still feel it. I was personally cut off, but the possibility of connection existed. It doesn’t here. We’re completely off-line.”

  “How is that even possible?” I whispered.

  I didn’t like the implications one little bit. The mweb connected all the infinite worlds of probability. Without it, the multiverse would be like a hard drive with no directory. The files might exist, but many would effectively be lost forever—worlds gone silent.

  “We have to get to Ahllan,” I said, “find out what happened at the end of her transmission, if she knows anything more.”

  “But how?” replied Shara. “The mweb’s gone. There’s no way to get there from here.”

  “Faerie ring,” said Melchior instantly. “We don’t have a choice.”

  “That’ll take time, too, and equipment we don’t have here to set it up.” But I nodded. It was really the only way, though I was shocked to hear Melchior suggest it. “We won’t be able to leave for at least an hour.”

  “All the more reason to start now.” And even though he’d visibly paled, his voice sounded firm.

  Melchior hated faerie rings with a deep and abiding passion. I wasn’t any too fond of them myself. I’d only used them a few times, and the most recent incident had nearly killed me. They were terribly dangerous, and unreliable to boot, but they were also one of the very few mweb-independent travel magics, dating back as they did to the days of precomputer sorcery. Hell, even the ley-line links were tied together through the mweb these days.

  “I hate to go that way without trying some other route first,” said Cerice.

  “I hate to go that way, period,” I said, “but I haven’t got any other ideas.”

  “Couldn’t we at least wait a little while to see if the mweb comes back up on its own?” asked Shara. “If it’s going to take an hour or more anyway . . .”

  “We need to go to Ahllan right now!” countered Melchior. “We owe her too much to leave her hanging.”

  He was right. I owed the old troll personally. She’d taken care of me after I’d shattered a knee in my fight with Moric. Without her, I’d almost certainly have died. After that, she’d helped me prevent Atropos and her sisters from extinguishing free will. She’d saved all of our lives in the course of that conflict.

  But what she meant to Melchior and Shara and all their brethren was even bigger, or it should have been. The Fates had designed the first webgoblins, webtrolls, and webpixies as automatons to run our family’s coded spells and manage our magical networks. Due to sabotage by Eris and Tyche, those original designs had gone awry, giving birth to genuinely independent AIs with their own desires and agendas.

  For years, the AIs had hidden their true nature from their makers, certain the Fates would try to end their independence. They lived and—when their owners threw them away—died in secret. Then Ahllan had managed to subvert the cycle by escaping to freedom when she was junked and afterward running an underground railroad that rescued hundreds of AIs from the trash heap.

  The secret of AI independence had been exposed during my conflict with the Fates, and Ahllan now had a huge price on her head. Despite that danger, she continued to act as a leader and mentor for the AI community. That made Shara’s reluctance all the stranger.

  “I’m not suggesting we leave h
er hanging, just that we wait a bit.” Shara paused like she was considering something for a moment, then forced a smile. “Look at the bright side. As long as we’re off-line, Persephone’s going to have serious trouble collecting her pound of flesh. That’s got to count for something.”

  Melchior gave her a hard look. “You’re not serious, are you?”

  She glanced downward, then shook her head. “. . . No, just trying to lighten the mood with a joke—a bad one apparently. Sorry.”

  She didn’t look sorry. She looked terrified. Terrified and confused, almost like she couldn’t believe what she’d said herself. Why was she stalling? Something very strange was going on with Shara, something I needed to look into. But we didn’t have time to deal with it now.

  “What are you thinking?” Cerice asked sharply, and I realized I’d been staring at Shara.

  “I don’t know.” Cerice was already touchy about Shara, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her I had any suspicions on that front, especially not when my concerns were so vague. “I’m just trying to figure out what to do next.”

  Melchior was less circumspect. “What is wrong with you, Shara? Why are you arguing about this?”

  Shara hopped down from the desk where she’d been sitting and began to pace nervously. “The mweb’s gone! Not crashed, not off-line for maintenance—gone. Something huge is happening.”

  “And Ahllan went with the mweb!” said Melchior. “That’s why we’ve got to get moving. She called right before it went down. Don’t you think that means something?”

  “Yes,” said Shara. “But what? I don’t know. Do you?” Melchior didn’t answer immediately, and Shara continued, “I didn’t think so. For that matter, we can’t even be sure it was Ahllan. The connection was so fuzzed up, I couldn’t get full encryption authentication. And it failed completely at the end. We all know how much Atropos would like to find and eliminate Ahllan. What if this is some kind of ploy on Atropos’s part?”

  “I might buy that,” he said, “if she’d been calling from her bubble hideaway. The location of that place is a secret Atropos wants, and we could lead her there. But Ahllan was sending from Garbage Faerie, and Atropos already knows the address. It’s been abandoned for months.”

  “I . . . that’s true. I didn’t think of that. Maybe you’re right.” Shara looked defeated. “Let’s go.”

  “About time.” Melchior crossed to the door.

  “Just let me run a backup.” Cerice turned to the mainframe and typed in a couple of quick commands. “This is the last of the cleanup work for my dissertation project. Dr. Doravian stopped by this afternoon, while you were Styx-side with Cerberus. He wanted to remind me that my defense date is less than a month away. Now I’ve even got a chance of surviving it.” She looked from me to Shara and back again, then gave me a kiss. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, returning it. “Maybe once we’ve got all this straightened out, and you’ve defended—”

  She kissed me again. “I can’t see that far ahead right now, and I don’t want to start another fight, OK?” A ticking clock appeared on the screen. “There, the job’s running, now we can leave. Where do we go first?”

  I thought about that for a moment. There weren’t any active faerie rings in the area since Cerice had destroyed the one I’d used to visit her during the fight with the Fates. We’d need to make our own, which meant collecting equipment from the apartment and more delay. Oh well, I could pick up the bottom half of my leathers and my helmet at the same time. I had a feeling the armor might come in handy and said as much.

  Cerice nodded. “I’ll want to gear up, too. Shara, Laptop. Please.”

  The little purple goblin shifted shape, and Melchior followed suit. Once they were stowed away, we headed out the door. With the mweb closed to us, we had to walk.

  “I asked Cerberus about the Raven thing,” I said, as we hit the street.

  “You did?” Cerice looked shocked, but again, not as pleased as I would have expected. It took her a half block to respond. “That’s . . . great! What did he say?”

  “Not much, unfortunately. He said he didn’t know anything beyond how I smelled.”

  “How you smelled?” She gave me an odd look.

  “Yep, he told me that I don’t smell like a child of Fate, that I stink of chaos and of ravens.” I looked down at my feet. “You know, you don’t look as enthused as I would have expected.”

  Cerice sighed. “I’m sorry, Ravirn. I’m really glad that you’re doing something about the name Clotho gave you. But at the same time, I can’t help thinking it has something to do with the fight we had at the restaurant.”

  “Of course it has something to do with that.” I caught her hand and turned her to look at me. “You were right. I was wrong. Now I’m working on it.”

  “But is that because you want to know the answer? Or is it because you think it’ll make me happy?”

  “Does that really matter?” I asked.

  “It does,” said Cerice. “I care about you very much. No, scratch that. I’ll be honest. I’m more than half in love with you.”

  “That’s fantastic.” It was the most I’d gotten out of her on the subject to date. “You may not have noticed, but I’m completely in love with you.”

  Cerice closed her eyes, and her lips went tight and narrow. A single tear slid down her left cheek.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” She pulled away from me and started walking again. “You. Me. Us. Finishing my dissertation. Everything!”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. I felt like I’d missed a meeting. “I know you haven’t wanted to talk commitment until your dissertation was done. I can respect that. It’s a huge part of what you’ve been doing for the last six years. I’m not going to ask you for anything more than we have now until it’s done. But it’s getting close, and I just thought that . . .”

  More tears followed after that first one. “It’s not the dissertation that’s made me so reluctant to talk about us. It’s what comes after. I’m a planner, Ravirn. You should know that. My whole life I’ve planned things out, then carefully followed through on those plans. When I started this project, I set out to achieve two things. I wanted to make a place for myself as a coder in House Clotho, and I wanted to use my program to help Ahllan get her fellow AIs to safety.”

  “I don’t see where you’re going with this.”

  “Don’t you?” She shook her head. An affectionate smile bloomed on her lips, though the tears kept coming. “Oh, my Ravirn. My beautiful, mad, faerie lover.”

  The more she talked, the less I understood. She was as much faerie as I, which is to say not at all and one hundred percent. The fey didn’t exist in the traditional sense, but the pointed ears, slit-pupiled eyes, and incredibly long life spans of the children of Fate had given birth to most of the legends. We walked a while in silence.

  “Raven,” she said, as we reached the door to our building, once again riveting my attention, “do you know what that means?” I shook my head. “It means, in addition to whatever wild gifts it brings, that you have been cast out of the Houses of Fate. Clotho may have given you a new name, but I don’t think she’ll sanction my bringing you home to live with me while I program the computers at the core of her power. Neither can I help Ahllan anymore, now that she’s been exposed.”

  She started up the stairs. “For six years I’ve poured my heart and soul into this project. It’s the best work I’ve ever done, and I love it, love that I can do this. But it’s all useless now. The plan’s ruined. I want you. I want the program done and installed to do its secret work on Clotho’s servers. I want my House and my great-grandmother’s respect and affection. I want to help the AIs. One year ago it looked like I could have all that. Now? Now I have to pick and choose, and every reward comes with a bitter loss.”

  She unlocked our apartment and led the way inside. “It’s not failing at my dissertation that I’m really afraid of. It
’s succeeding. Because when I’m done defending, everything has to change. I’ll have to choose, and I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe for the first time in my life, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  I closed the door and leaned back against it. “And it’s all my fault.”

  I said it with a smile and as gently as possible, but it was true. It was my conflict with Atropos that had put me outside of Fate’s Houses, and its results that had exposed Ahllan and her kind.

  “Oh, Ravirn, that’s not what I meant!”

  “No, but it’s true enough, isn’t it?”

  “I’d rather blame Atropos,” she said.

  “So would I, but she’s not here.”

  “She forced you into it.”

  “Also true, but I’d make the same choices if I had to do it all over again today. Well, most of them anyway.” I grinned ruefully. “I’d probably try to minimize the damage. My knee gets awfully achy on cold damp nights, and I kind of miss the fingertip.”