by Tad Williams
"It won't fill up," said Beezle in his cabdriver's growl. "I'm venting—makes it look better, anyway. Security is getting calls from all over the island."
"You're moving," Ramsey said with relief as the elevator rose.
"I know."
"Sorry, of course. I'm just watching you here. Up, up, up." He sounded almost giddy. Olga felt as though she had left her stomach behind.
"Are there still guards in security?"
"Doesn't look like it," Ramsey told her. "They're probably already trying to get people out of the building."
"Lots of activity downstairs, no activity on the security floor monitors," Beezle said. "But when the door opens, don't go in right away, got me?"
I take orders from a toy, she thought. "Got you."
She waited in the elevator at the forty-fifth floor, feeling Ramsey and Beezle at her shoulders like invisible angels. The alarm was still blaring mindlessly. They don't need to get the alarm calls on the mainland, she thought. They will be able to hear this all over Louisiana.
"Still no movement," said Beezle. The door hissed open.
There was no one in the tastefully-lit reception area but the screentop desk had been hit by the automatic override and instead of woodland scenes it now displayed a map of the floor with the exits blinking red. The alarm was more distant here, as though the upper part of the building was built of some heavier, more soundproof material, but a secondary alarm whispered through the air, an irritatingly calm female voice instructing whoever was listening to "proceed directly to your designated escape location."
Some of us do not have designated escape locations, dear. The door at the back read her modified badge and pinged open. Even with Beezle's report, she still went through it like a trainer entering the cage of a particularly unpredictable animal.
The guard area was empty, the neon data-hieroglyphs on the plexiglass walls like cave paintings of a vanished race. The calm female voice kept urging her over and over to go to her escape location but Olga was finding it easier to disregard now.
She presented her badge to the reader set into the thick plastic. The door opened immediately, as though pleased by the visit. She quickly crossed the glassed-in area to the black fibramic shaft she had seen the first time. Sure enough, there was an elevator door set into it and a black reader plate beside the door. She took a breath and held up her badge. An instant later the door slid open, revealing an interior covered in some expensive kind of leather.
"It worked!" Ramsey sounded like he had been holding his breath.
"How can you tell? It didn't make any noise."
"Your ring. I've got the camera ring sending because we're going to need it. I saw the doors open."
But the doors in question had already closed again, this time with her inside, and the elevator was moving effortlessly upward. Three seconds, five, ten. . . .
"It's only supposed to be one floor up," she said. "Why is it taking so long?"
"Thick floors," said Beezle. "Just thought you might like to know, they're evacuating a buncha people out the front door now. Still no fire engines, nothing like that. I think Sellars may have had something else set up, too, to make sure everyone cleared out."
"What do you mean?" Ramsey asked.
"I'll tell you when I know."
The elevator stopped. The door opened into an airlock. Briefly, recorded messages about security and clean room procedures battled with the escape announcement, then gave up as the airlock door reader responded to her badge and the inner door hissed aside. Olga stepped out.
Her first thought was that she was watching a netflick, some science-fiction epic in full wraparound. It was harder work to convince herself it was real. The entire floor was one open room with only a few structural pillars to break what seemed like tens of thousands of square meters of floor space, and most of that space seemed to be covered with machines. The machine barn had no windows, only a continuous expanse of curving white wallscreen, currently painted with the escape route maps that had preempted the building's regular programming. The room was massive and, but for the quiet robot voice, as silent as a museum after closing. It was unreal.
But it was real.
". . . Directly to your designated escape location. Repeat, this is not a drill. . . ."
"Oh, God," Olga said. "It's huge."
"Lift the ring," Ramsey told her, his voice sharp with anxiety. "We can't see anything but the floor."
She made a fist and held out her hand, pointing it aimlessly down the rows of stacked, silent machines. She had thought the collection of machinery on the lower floor was imposing, but it was like comparing a toaster to the engine room of an ocean liner. "What . . . what do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. Beezle?"
"I ain't so good at reading visuals," the agent rasped. "Lotta translation effects, back and forth. But I'll give it my best shot. Just start walking. Give me a view side to side, will ya?"
Olga made her way up and down the rows as though led by her own outstretched hand, past what had to be billions of credits worth of gleaming machinery. First five, then ten minutes ticked away as she trudged along, her arm aching and stiffening. She could not help wondering if the firefighters were in the building now, and how long it would be until the security guards were back at their screens. Twice she stepped over things that suggested employees had been here recently but had vacated in a hurry—an expensive-looking, very small pad abandoned in the middle of a row, still fiberlinked to a port, and twenty meters away the shattered remains of a coffee cup and a puddle of gently steaming liquid.
She had just found a third artifact, a shapeless piece of synthetic fabric that she guessed might be some sort of clean-room headwear, when Beezle said, "I think that's it, boss."
She looked up to where her fist was pointing and saw a tower of components little different from many others, except that there seemed to be a greater-than-average number of huge fiberlink bundles snaking down into the floor conduits. "This?"
"It's worth a try," Ramsey said. "Will anything bad happen if you're wrong, Beezle?"
"The building might blow up. Just kidding."
"Funny," Olga said dully. The weirdness was beginning to get to her, not to mention the idiot voice still droning out the escape location warning.
"Sorry. Orlando likes stuff like that." This nonexplanation issued, Beezle began to give her instructions on where to place Sellars' mystery box. As before, she minutely changed its position several times until her instructor—Sellars the first time, Beezle this time, and if Beezle was gear, then what the hell was Sellars? she wondered—seemed satisfied; the box clicked, vibrated briefly, and adhered.
After a few long moments of silence Olga began to feel panicky. "Are you still there? Catur?"
"I'm here, Olga. Beezle, is it the right machine? What do you have?"
The silence again, but longer this time, much longer. Ramsey called Beezle several times in mounting anxiety. Only when almost a minute had passed did Beezle come back.
"Whoa," he said, his voice more than a little distorted. "I wish I could swear, but like the lady pointed out, I'm a children's toy. This is un-friggin-believable."
"What?" Ramsey demanded.
"This place is carrying the dataflow of a major city, I kid you not."
"Which city?"
"Not a real city," Beezle grunted. "Don't be literal. I'm just talking about how much throughput there is. Amazin"! There's a whole light farm on the roof of the building—a laser array like you've never seen, pumping data up, readin' it comin' back. Weird, too—some kind of boosted cesium lasers according to the schematics. You want me to do some research?"
"Not now," said Ramsey.
"What is it?" Olga wondered. "All this data—is it this Grail network I have been told about?"
"Don't ask me." Beezle sounded almost surly. "I'm not up to this. You just can't understand the quantity of data ridin' through here."
"But didn't this Sellars make any provi
sion. . . ?"
"Look, lady, I don't know what Sellars had planned. He sure didn't leave any notes about what he was going to do with this if he tapped into it. And even with all the upgrades and extra processing power Orlando rigged up for me, I can't begin to make sense of it—you might as well try to run all the UN Telecomm data through an abacus!"
For a toy, Olga thought, he sounded quite convincingly overwhelmed. And he had an admirable way with metaphor as well. "So what do we do? Mr. Ramsey?"
"I . . . I guess we've done all we can," the lawyer said. "Until we can contact Sellars again. Beezle, are you sure you can't, I don't know, hook up enough processing power to make some sense of it—any sense at all?"
The agent's snort was answer enough.
"Right," said Ramsey. "Then I suppose we really have done all we can. Good work, Olga. We'll just hope it all comes to something—that Sellars gets back to us and that he had some idea of what kind of processing this would take." Catur Ramsey did not sound entirely convinced. "So we might as well get you out. . . ."
Olga looked around the massive room. "Not yet."
It took Ramsey a moment to hear what she'd said. "Olga, that place is going to be swarming with firefighters and cops soon, not to mention J Corporation security. Get going!"
"I'm not ready to go." A calm she had not felt in hours, perhaps days, descended on her. "I didn't come here in the first place just to put in some vampire-tap or whatever your Sellers called it. I came here because the voices told me to come. I want to know why."
"What are you talking about?" He had gone from irritated to panicky and was swiftly moving on toward something even more extreme. "What the hell are you talking about, Olga?"
The alarms were still going, both the distant wordless pulse and the empty female voice. "I'm going up to the top," she said. "Where this terrible man lives. Uncle Jingle's house, I guess you could call it. Uncle Jingle's lair."
"Wow." Beezle manufactured a whistle. "You really are crazy, lady."
"Actually, it's probably true," she said, perfectly happy now to be talking to a piece of code. "I spent a. long time in a sanitarium when I was younger. And recently—well, we all know what it means when you hear voices in your head."
"You're hearing voices in your head right now," Beezle pointed out.
"Yes, you are right. I'm getting used to hearing them." She turned and began to walk across the impossibly wide room toward the elevator.
"Olga, don't!" Ramsey was desperate now. "We have to get you out of there!"
"And I am getting quite good at ignoring them, too," she added.
It was a little easier now, but not much. He didn't feel like he was dying quite so quickly.
For the hundredth time, thousandth time, he had no idea, Sellars repulsed an attack and still managed to hold open his connection into the Grail network. With all the experience he had gained from this horribly protracted encounter, as well as from his earlier incursions, he was still amazed by how the thing reacted.
He floated, bodiless, in a darkness that seemed alive with malice. Now that he had survived the original blaze of resistance the secondary attacks continued to come in waves, the timing random. Sometimes he had almost a whole minute to consider and plan, then the assaults would resume, storm following storm, and his every thought was once more focused on survival.
He had learned from his previous connections that there was more to the system's defenses than merely the technical countermeasures, however sophisticated. It could manufacture all the traces, blowbacks, and disconnection attempts that he expected from top-of-the-line gear, attacking and defending and then counterattacking so quickly that it was like fighting war in space at light speed. But there was a purely physical side, too, perhaps the same thing responsible for the Tandagore illness: during each attack he could feel the security system reaching not just into his system but into him as well, trying somehow to manipulate his autonomic responses, to slow or speed his heart rate and respiration, to reprogram his neural circuitry.
But Sellars was not an unsuspecting child stumbling into the jaws of a hidden monster. He had been studying the system a long time and had modified his own internal structures until most of the grosser attempts to manipulate him physically could be routed down harmless pathways, their force wasted on buffers almost as a lightning rod drew away the deadly force of electricity. Even so, as long as he was trapped online, struggling with the network's defenses, he had to remain completely disconnected from his physical self so his old, worn body would not pull itself to pieces in seizure. The security system might not be able to kill him yet, but neither could he disengage from it without losing contact with Cho-Cho, and he could not let one more innocent disappear into the darkness at the heart of the system—he had too many such sins on his conscience already. And although the operating system was clearly weakening, probably failing, he could not hope for that kind of release, since its ultimate collapse would probably also doom those who remained online. Sellars and the system remained locked together, neither able to let go, failing enemies trapped in a death dance.
The latest wave of attacks stuttered to a halt. He hung in the blackness, trying desperately to think of a way to break the impasse. If he could only understand what he was fighting. . . ! Dark and angry as the thing seemed to him (he had struggled against such anthropomorphic characterizations for a long time, until he realized that by doing so he was underestimating the subtle unpredictability of his enemy), there was far more to the operating system than that.
The most immediate part of it, the security programming which was trying its best to kill him, was only one head of this particular Cerberus. Another head watched him and considered him while the battle raged—even seemed, in some paradoxical way he could only feel but not define or explain, to wish him no ill. He could not help wondering whether the security system responses were something over which the operating system as a whole had almost no control, just as an ordinary human could not consciously control his own immune system. This second head, he guessed, was the part of the operating system which had achieved something like true intelligence. It must also be the part that let children like Cho-Cho into the network unharmed—for how could a mere security system know whether a human user was a child or not?—and which avidly followed his volunteers through the network.
There was a third head, too, Sellars sensed, a silent one that was turned away from him, but what it thought about—what it dreamed?—he could only guess. In some ways the third head frightened him most of all.
A new wave of defensive blitz began with no warning, a violent all-out burst that swept him up like a hurricane and for long minutes pushed all considerations but mere survival from his mind. Again he felt it trying to reach into his very mind. The attempt failed, but Sellars knew that if the stalemate went on long enough this damnably bizarre and clever machine was going to find a way to subvert his defenses. He began to wonder just how long he had been here in this no-place, wrestling with Cerberus.
After he had weathered the storm and had snatched a few seconds of much-needed rest, he accessed his own system long enough to discover that almost a full day had passed since he and Cho-Cho had first contacted the network. An entire day spent fighting for his life! No wonder he was exhausted.
In the real world it was already Sunday afternoon. He was running out of time. If the system killed him, or if he killed the system, he would fail. He needed to find some other way. His only hope was that Olga Pirofsky and Catur Ramsey could place the data tap and that the Grail network information would somehow provide answers.
No, he told himself, not just answers, but a solution to this impossible problem.
But he could not even afford to check in on their progress until he had weathered at least one more round of attacks by the security systems. He had stolen moments in the earliest lulls to make a few emergency calls and to find and activate vital defensive gear, but he needed far more time than that to deal with the data tap.
The next assault came quickly enough that he was glad he'd waited. It was as violent as any of the others, but even as he fought off the multipronged attempt he thought he sensed something different this time, a slight lessening of what he could only think of as the resolve behind the attack. When he had suppressed all but the most basic of the security routines, the ones that could be safely left to his own built-in defenses, he prepared to turn his attention to what was happening in the J Corporation tower. But just before he shifted to his own system and his connections to the real world he stopped and hesitated in the darkness, troubled by something he could not name.
That hesitation saved him. The attack that followed mere instants after the defeat of the last was the most savage so far, not just a redoubled assault on his connection but a concentrated, many-fronted attempt to break down his resistance to the more subtle and more devastating physical feedback. For long moments he could actually feel the thing reaching for him down the connection, a monster just on the other side of a splintering, flimsy door, and Sellars knew real terror. The blackness of no-visual became another kind of blackness, an endless void in which he was lost, isolated, pursued.
He held on somehow, and when the probing, searching thing touched him at last he was even able to send a jolt of resistance back down the partially opened channel. He was certain that he felt the nonphysical presence flail in pain and surprise, then the entire attack was suddenly withdrawn.
The beast had limped back to its cave.
His heart and respiration spiraling up to near-critical levels, his mind reeling at what he'd just felt, but desperate to take advantage of whatever time he had bought himself, Sellars left his automatic systems in place to warn him of a new attack, then slid back into his own system.
His beloved, carefully-nurtured interface, the Poetry Garden in which he had spent so much time, tending, planting, pruning, simply being, was all but gone now. It had been replaced by a mutant tangle of activity, a sprawling chaos of data root and virtual vine in which only he could have discerned even a trace of order.