Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

  I sighed; she was probably right, but I wasn’t quite ready to surrender the point. “So why didn’t you just ring the doorbell? What if Necessity hadn’t agreed with you?”

  “The sentinel would have smacked us around a little, and I’d have apologized. This gave me a free shot at Necessity’s security. I don’t ever intend on going up against her, but if I have to try it someday, I now know a lot more about what to expect. If you’re going to stay in the chaos business, you’ll have to learn these things, Raven.”

  “But I don’t want to be in the chaos business.” Then I shook my head. When you’re reduced to whining about your problems to the Goddess of Discord, it’s way past time to shut up. “Forget it. Let’s move on.”

  In apparent response to my comment, the world shifted around us. Sunlight burned the mist away, exposing the horizon. We were indeed on an island, one surrounded by dark water as far as the eye could see. It became as smooth as the black terrazzo that now replaced the rough rock beneath us, changing the island from a rounded hummock to a neat hexagon a few feet above the water. No waves touched the endless ocean anymore, and no wind rippled the surface. It looked as though you could have walked on it, though where you’d go I couldn’t imagine. Of our original situation, only the huge gorgon remained.

  “And?” I said aloud. I was getting really tired of rapidly changing scenery and digital metaphors for reality.

  “Uh, Boss,” said Melchior. “Maybe you shouldn’t push—”

  “I’m waiting,” I said.

  Lines of white fire shot away from the island in every direction, like underwater lightning, forking and crossing in every conceivable combination without ever breaking the surface, until they filled the ocean in all directions.

  “Thank you.” Here was what I wanted, the master map of the mweb.

  Sliding off of Eris’s back, I walked down to the edge of the water. For a long time I just stood there and watched the lightning dance. I needed to get a feel for the interface. The island represented the core architecture, the master servers of the mweb and the deeper layers inside Necessity’s black boxes. The lightning showed the various lines of connection. Where the bolts crossed, subnodes existed, some permanent, some temporary. Since the countless worlds of possibility remained in constant motion relative to each other, the mweb continually had to readjust itself to keep everything connected. Hence the dance of the lightning.

  At first it seemed an impossibly complex and chaotic structure, beyond any comprehension. But the longer I looked, the more I felt that I could sense patterns, even if I couldn’t see them outright, certain iterations that repeated themselves. With a thought, I lifted my virtual self high into the air, levitating up to stand on the shoulder of the gorgon. I unfocused my eyes, trying to let the visual information pass through me, direct from the sea to my hindbrain without the intervening filter of directed vision or thought. Time flowed around me, and I let it go unmarked.

  Then, in a flash that mirrored the ones I watched, the whole image made sense. It was only for an instant, and I couldn’t hold on to it, but I waited and it came again. And then again. Like a series of related slides flashing on a screen, a pattern emerged.

  When Hades calls Persephone back to his side each year, her mother brings winter down upon the world of Olympus, a winter mirrored to some degree in every other branch of reality that has split off from that first of all worlds. With the cold comes frost painted on the surface of an infinite number of windowpanes. The variety of starting conditions is such that no two of these frozen portraits are quite the same; but if you look at enough of them, recurring patterns emerge, patterns described with the mathematics of fractals, patterns that repeat themselves over and over again as you move from the scale of the very small up to the very large.

  After a time I could see that the lightning in the waters conformed to the same sorts of rules, infinitely more complex perhaps, but still recurring and still building from very small to very large through self-replicating iteration. More time passed, and my ability to see the patterns increased. Instead of snapshots of recognition separated by seconds or even minutes, the whole began to resolve itself into a single pattern expressed in both space and time. I didn’t think I’d ever really be able to comprehend the totality of it, but now I could at least see that it was there. I could also see that something was wrong.

  Around the edges of my vision, I could catch flickering gaps in the network, irregularities that prevented the thing from completing itself as it should. When I focused on them, they seemed to slip away, but by catching them out of the corners of my eyes I slowly came to understand that another pattern governed the gaps. It was a pattern of absence, as of things torn loose in a systematic way.

  “Melchior?” I said then.

  “Oh good, you’re alive. I’d begun to wonder. You haven’t moved in over an hour, and your virtual self doesn’t betray itself with little things like breathing or blinking.”

  “Sorry,” I said absently. “I want your opinion on something.”

  “Of course you do. If you didn’t want something, you’d still be ignoring me.” He held up a hand before I could argue with him. “Don’t deny it, and don’t worry about it. We’re here to find out what’s wrong with the mweb, and I’m not going to get in a snit if you ignore me so you can do that. Not with Ahllan’s safety possibly riding on the outcome. So what do you need? I haven’t been able to make hide nor hair of whatever’s happening down there.” His gesture took in all of the sea that lay in front of us.

  “Neither have I,” said Eris’s voice from above and behind me. I looked up and found that she’d made herself at home among the stone snakes of the gorgon’s hair. She didn’t quite blend in, but she came close. “Give.”

  So I described what I had seen and pointed out the gaps. “I can see the flaws, but I’m not sure I understand the underlying realities well enough to know what they mean.”

  “Worlds cut off,” said Eris after a moment. “I can see it now that you’ve pointed it out. Mweb lines that have lost their anchoring points.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “But how would that work?”

  “Maybe it’s something like losing file resource locator forks,” said Melchior.

  “The fragments of code that identify where a given piece of software is to the master system,” I said. It sounded right.

  Melchior nodded. “The mweb is like a hard drive that’s having bits of its catalog erased.”

  “Or corrupted,” I said. “Everything is still there. It just can’t find it anymore. That sounds promising. So, if we go with that for a moment, the next question is, what’s causing the corruption? I wonder. Why don’t we go have a look?”

  “Sounds good,” said Melchior. “There’s something about Goldilocks and her very bad hair day here that sets my teeth on edge, something both right and terribly wrong, if that makes any sense.”

  “Eris?” I asked.

  “You’re driving.” She slithered loose of the stony hair, and I remounted the saddle on her serpentine back.

  I pointed at where I wanted to go, and we went, a particularly prominent dark spot in the pattern of light. I don’t know how far we traveled in space, but it took only a few seconds of time for us to get to a point above the blot. On closer inspection it proved to be more complex than first impressions. Instead of a simple point of darkness, it looked like a seething ball of stringy shadows, each with a more intense dark point at its tip, and those tips appeared to be eating away at the dancing lightning around them. I was reminded of a ball of worms, or . . . snakes. A disturbing thought occurred to me.

  “Take us closer,” I said to Eris, and we dropped down toward the water.

  “Yes,” I said leaning over. “That looks like—”

  “Get lost!” The words came from the center of that roiling darkness in the disturbingly familiar voice of our guardian gorgon and were echoed from the island behind us. This time I recognized the voice. It belonged to S
hara.

  I whipped my attention back toward the island and its sentinel. The gorgon had sprung to life once more, moving its great marble hand up toward its face, a hand veined in the exact purple of Cerice’s webgoblin familiar. The figure tore away its mirror shades and lifted its killing gaze toward us.

  For a frozen instant I tried to fathom what her presence here could mean. Then I let it go. I didn’t yet know what was going on, but I knew that if we stayed here, we would die.

  “Dive!” I screamed and, suiting action to words, flung myself off Eris’s back into the dark waters.

  With a splash, I plunged through the surface and touched the lightning. In that instant I understood how a bullet feels when the hammer comes down. With a bang and a stunning impact, I found myself accelerated to impossible speeds. The world blurred around me, becoming a tunnel of light roaring past too quickly to comprehend.

  The trip ended as suddenly and harshly as it had begun when I slammed back into my own flesh-and-blood body with a stunning impact, as if the bullet I had felt myself to be an instant before had lodged itself in my heart. For long seconds I simply couldn’t breathe. I pulled the athame from my hand but couldn’t whistle the healing spell and had to watch silently as my blood dripped and spattered on the tiles of Discord’s computer room.

  When the seven notes that closed the wound did finally come, it was Shara’s lips that shaped them, not mine. She stood before me as she cast the spell. When she was done she reached up and gently stroked the thin white scar that marked both the back of my hand and my many comings and goings into the electronic elsewhere of the mweb. I met her eyes and tried to hold them, but she looked away.

  “You know,” she said, utterly defeated.

  I nodded, though I wasn’t yet certain of exactly what it was that I knew. Somehow Shara—or something that wore her face and magical signature—had taken up residence in the heart of Necessity’s computer system while at the same time she kept walking around in the real world. It shouldn’t have been possible—the whole reason I’d had to go to Hades to fetch her was that souls are one-off, no copies allowed. Somehow, I’d messed up the rescue. Badly.

  I could figure all the details out later. The more immediate problem, the one that was all too likely to get me killed, broke down into two parts: A, whatever the gorgon was, its presence in Necessity’s domain coincided with the ongoing destruction of the mweb. And, B, it had almost certainly gotten there via the e-mail I’d sent from Hades.

  Now, if I’d managed to cat-burgle my way in and out without leaving a trace, that might not be so much of a problem, but I hadn’t. While my break-in wasn’t quite as famous as Orpheus’s little venture yet, it was all over the Olympian gossip circuit. So when Necessity started looking around for someone to punish, my name was going to be right at the top of the list. Because of that I had a number of questions I wanted to ask Shara. Before I could start, Eris intervened.

  “I think you owe me some answers, Ravirn.” Her tone was deadly serious. “About her”—she pointed a finger at Shara—“about the mweb, and about your involvement with both.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” I said, with as straight a face as I could manage.

  “Don’t play games with me, child. Necessity’s guardian and this little one”—she tapped the top of Shara’s skull lightly—“look to be sharing a whole lot of code. The obvious link is you, my little chaos godlet. And—” She was cut off by a harsh buzz from the master console for the Grendel group. She turned toward the controls, calling to me over her shoulder, “We’re not done.”

  “Boss,” whispered Melchior, who chose that moment to shift back to goblin form.

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “Ask her.” I jerked a thumb at Shara.

  She looked at the floor. “I’m not sure, but I’m starting to have some flashes, maybe memories coming back.”

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “Necessity. Hades. I—”

  “Get your skinny butt over here,” called Eris. “Tell me what you make of this.”

  I joined her at the console, where an alarm bell icon blinked beside a message. “Mweb access cut off. User Eris does not match any profile in system. Close this window or face immediate sanction by Necessity.”

  “I’d close the window,” I said.

  “But . . .” A countdown had started on the screen: 5. 4. 3—Eris clicked on the close button.

  Another window opened. “Mweb carrier unreachable. Reboot?”

  Eris looked down her long nose at me. “I was only joking about your trying to usurp the throne of Discord back in the conference room. You do know that, right?”

  “I wouldn’t have it on a golden platter, with a side order of anything I want.”

  “Why am I having trouble believing you?” she asked, an unspoken threat in her tone.

  “Because you’re naturally suspicious?” Behind me, I heard the familiar sound of Melchior slapping his forehead.

  Eris snorted. “Even paranoids have enemies, little Raven. But you might be right. Not, of course, that that’s important. No, what’s important is that either you’ve succeeded in the most amazing hacking job since Prometheus stole the encryption key for fire, or you haven’t, but no one’s going to believe you. In either case, you have just added a great deal to the cosmic balance of entropy, and for that I must take my hat off to you.”

  She leaned forward in a low, sweeping bow, pulling a propeller beanie off her head and saluting me with it. It hadn’t been there a moment before, and when she let it go after completing her bow, it flew off like a Blackhawk looking for its target zone.

  “But taking on Necessity is going way too far, and the consequences are likely to be very messy. I can’t and won’t protect you on this.”

  “Surprise,” I said. I hadn’t expected it of her. “Are you going to hand me over?”

  “No,” said Eris. “I respect your accomplishment too much for that. But I won’t lie to the Furies for you either, and they’ll be back to ask about what I found out soon enough. The best I can do is offer you a head start. If you leave quickly, you might get far enough ahead of them to make an interesting chase of it.”

  “Will you take Cerice for me?” I’d run faster if I didn’t have to protect her.

  “I—”

  “No,” said Cerice. She had entered without my noticing her. “She won’t. I’m not staying here, and I’m not going with you either.” She was no longer crying, but the tracks of dried tears stained her cheeks. “How could you even think of hacking Necessity? Do you want to end up chained to a rock with an eagle tearing your liver out every morning?”

  “You heard the bit about Prometheus, then,” I said.

  “That’s when I came in, yes.” Her voice was flat and furious.

  “Are you going to listen to my side of the story, or are you just going to leap to conclusions and snarl at me like you usually do?”

  “What the hell is your problem, Ravirn!”

  “What’s my problem? Honey, look in the mirror when you ask that.” I’d finally, completely had it. “Bailing your webgoblin out of Hades is how I got involved in this mess in the first place!”

  “Don’t you dare pick on Shara! She’s got enough problems!”

  “You mean like the fact that she, or her twin, is right smack in the middle of whatever’s wrong with the mweb! Or did you not eavesdrop on that part of the conversation?”

  Cerice looked stunned. “I didn’t know . . . No. What? How is that possible?”

  “I . . .” I paused then because a thought had occurred to me, and I really looked at Cerice for the first time in . . . how long? That’s hard to say. We see the people we spend our lives with all the time, but how often do we actually look at them?

  Cerice is at least as good a coder as I am. I can outcrack her, and on most things outhack her, but she writes better code than I do. Look at her thesis program. It’s huge and elegant and designed to tot
ally own Clotho’s network. Shara is the tool she built expressly for that purpose, taking over a Fate network. Now Shara, or her evil twin, was in the process of doing something sinister to the network belonging to the Fate of the Gods. Was I missing something vitally important because I was too close to the problem? Suspicion laid her icy hand on the back of my neck in that moment.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” asked Cerice.

  “I’m just . . . thinking.”

  Eris’s laugh shattered my concentration. “What fun you children are. If time weren’t pressing, I’d love to watch this little tiff play itself out. But it is, and I won’t. I really don’t want your radioactive self on my premises when the Furies arrive, so if you could speed this up and get out of here, I’d appreciate it.”