The Wiz Biz

by Rick Cook

  “Thank you, My Lord. In the meantime, you can expect a formal visit from representatives of the Council sometime very soon.”

  “Lucky,” Karl said with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “Just what we need. A project review.”

  Eighteen: Playing in the Bullpen

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  —Clarke’s Law

  Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

  —Murphy’s reformulation of Clarke’s Law

  Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a rigged demonstration.

  —programmers’ restatement of Murphy’s reformulation of Clarke

  “We’ve got a good team,” Jerry told the wizards as they walked toward the converted cow barn, now known universally as the Bullpen.

  The late afternoon sun slanted golden across the court and the air smelled of warm flagstones and dust, with just a tinge of manure to remind them of the Bullpen’s original purpose.

  Jerry kept up a flow of half-defensive small talk, Bal-Simba was soothing and the other two, Malus and Petronus, were distinctly cold.

  “Have you had trouble adapting?” Bal-Simba asked.

  “Some. It turns out that there’s a strong psychological component here. What a piece of code—a spell—does is constrained by its structure, but its manifestation, the demon it creates, is strongly influenced by the outlook and attitude of the programmer.” He sighed. “It’s tough, but we’re making good progress.”

  “We have confidence in you, of course,” the giant black magician told him. “But the Council has a responsibility to oversee any use of magic in the North.”

  “And to see that magic is used wisely and safely,” Malus said pointedly.

  “Naturally, we’re glad to have you, but there probably won’t be much to see,” Jerry told him. I hope, he added to himself.

  Bal-Simba nodded amicably. Actually the visit was about as casual as a surprise inspection by a team of Defense Department auditors, but part of the game was to pretend otherwise.

  “There have been certain questions about your performance,” Bal-Simba said as they approached the door. “I fear you have not made the best possible impression.”

  “With all due respect, Lord, we didn’t choose our programmers to make a good impression. You need a difficult job done on a very tight schedule and we got the best people we could. I’m sorry that we aren’t more presentable, but the most talented people are often a little eccentric.”

  Bal-Simba nodded, thinking of some of the peculiarities of his fellow wizards.

  “Some say your people are as flighty as the Little Folk,” Petronus said as they reached the door to the barn.

  “That’s because they don’t know them,” Jerry said, reaching out to open the small door set in the larger one. “People who do what we do tend to be very concentrated on their work. They may seem a little strange to anyone on the outside, but their main goal is always to get the job done. We’ve got a good team here and they’re a pretty serious bunch.”

  He motioned Bal-Simba and the others ahead of him. The black giant ducked his head and stepped over the sill. They stood together at the threshold to let their eyes adjust to the dim light. The barn still smelled of hay, grain and cattle, a dusty odor that tickled the back of the nose but not unpleasantly.

  “Welcome to the . . .” Jerry’s head jerked back as something zoomed past his nose, climbing almost straight up.

  It was a Mirage jet fighter no bigger than his thumb. As it topped out of its climb it fired two toothpick-sized missiles toward the ceiling. There above them a half-dozen tiny airplanes were mixing it up in an aerial melee. One of the Mirage’s missiles caught a miniature Mig-21 and blew its tail away. A tiny ejection seat popped out of the plane as it spiraled helplessly toward the flagstone floor and an equally tiny parachute blossomed carrying the pilot down to safety.

  Jerry and the wizards gaped.

  A two-inch-long F-16 peeled off from the dogfight and dove at Jerry’s head.

  “Now cut that out!” Jerry roared. The fighters vanished with soft pops and there was a snickering from one comer of the Bullpen.

  Bal-Simba stared off at the wall and carefully avoided saying anything.

  “Ah, yes,” Jerry said. “Well, ah, this is where we work.”

  The central aisle of the barn was taken up by a plank-and-sawhorse table piled high with books, scrolls, blank sheets of parchment, inkpots, quills and wooden tablets marked and unmarked. At the far end of the barn the whitewashed wall was streaked and smudged from being used as an impromptu whiteboard. Next to the wall sat a waist-high brazier warming an enormous pot of black moss tea.

  The stalls were on either side of the aisles and each stall held a littered trestle table and a chair. Most of them also held at least one programmer.

  “All these ones are working on one great spell?” the giant magician asked dubiously.

  “Yes, Lord. We divide the work so each of us has a specific part. Our first week here was spent doing systems analysis and producing a design document so we’d all know what we were doing.”

  Jerry gestured at the long table. “This is our central library. We keep the project documentation and specs here where we can all consult them.”

  Petronus reached out to examine a large book on top of the pile. Just as his fingers touched it, the pile shifted and hissed at him. He yanked his hand back as a scaly head on a long neck rose out of the mass and slitted yellow eyes transfixed him. Sinuously a small dragon flowed out of its lair among the books. It was bigger than the beast which had guarded Wiz’s original book, perhaps two feet long. Its scales were the same vivid red, but they were tinged with blue along the edges. It eyed Bal-Simba with suspicious disapproval.

  “Another demon?” the wizard asked.

  “No, that’s a real dragon. Wandered in here one day and decided it liked it.”

  “Hunts mice real good,” Danny volunteered.

  Petronus sniffed and the group moved on. The dragon whuffed suspiciously, decided these people bore watching, and trailed after them, eyeing the hem of Petronus’s robe speculatively.

  Jerry scanned the cubicles desperately for someone to show off. Cindy Naismith’s feminist manner was likely to offend them, Larry Fox hadn’t had a bath since they arrived and Danny was too big a risk to even consider. Finally he saw Karl was in his cubicle and steered the group, dragon and all, in there.

  “This is Karl Dershowitz, one of our programmers. Karl, you know Bal-Simba and these are, ah, Malus and Petronius.”

  “Petronus,” the wizard corrected, stonefaced.

  “Ah, yes. Petronus. Anyway, they’re here observing today and I wanted to show them what you were doing.”

  Bal-Simba pushed into the stall until he stood directly behind Karl. “What have you there?” he asked.

  “I’m working on a sequencing module,” Karl told them, slightly awed by Bal-Simba’s bulk and pointed teeth. “This is the part that reports conflicts between the different processors.”

  “And this is the—ah—sequencer?” Bal-Simba gestured at what sat on the desk.

  “No, this is a debugging tool. Each of these demons monitors one of the versions of the code and reports any destructive interactions.”

  Sitting on Karl’s desk were three monkeys. One had his paws clasped tightly over its ears, another had its eyes clinched shut and the third was covering its mouth. “Hear-no-see-no-speak-no-evil,” Karl said. “That means everything’s running fine.”

  “There’s something familiar about those three,” Jerry said. “Something in their faces.”

  Karl looked sheepish. “Well, yeah. That kinda just happened.”

  The monkey demon in the middle suddenly opened his eyes and glared at the one to his left. He reached out and poked his fingers in the other’s eyes. The demon recoiled and then grabbed his tormentor by the nose, twisting it sideways and leading him around the desk
. The third monkey broke up laughing at the sight and the first two turned on him.

  “Okay,” Karl said, “we’ve got a conflict here. One of the processors jumped the queue and grabbed a resource intended for another one. When they got locked in contention the third processor got more than his share of resources.”

  He looked down at the orgy of eye-poking, nose-twisting and noggin-bopping going on his desk.

  “Now I recognize them,” Jerry said.

  “Uh huh,” Karl said. “I’ve got the sound turned off. Otherwise it gets kinda noisy in here.”

  They watched the byplay between the monkey demons for a while longer.

  “I know I’m going to regret asking this,” Jerry said at last, “but what’s the name of that module?”

  “That’s the Scheduling Transport Operating-system Object Generator and Editing System.”

  Jerry’s lips moved as he worked out the acronym. Then closed his eyes. “I knew I was going to be sorry I asked.”

  The group backed out of the stall and moved down to the end of the aisle. Several benches had been arranged about the section used as a whiteboard. Jerry gestured for them to sit.

  The dragon had decided Jerry and Bal-Simba were all right. He crowded close to Jerry’s legs and bumped his head insistently on his calf. Absently, Jerry reached down and scratched him on the scales behind his pointed ears.

  “Have some tea?”

  Bal-Simba’s nose wrinkled. “I thank you, no.” The others also shook their heads and the wizards started to sit down.

  The dragon sighed luxuriously and pressed harder against Jerry’s legs, forcing him to shift his stance or be knocked off balance. Jerry sat down on the bench harder than he intended, causing the other end to jump up and smack Petronus on the bottom as he sat down. The wizard glared, Jerry reddened and the dragon wuffed insistently, demanding more scratching.

  “I want to apologize. Things aren’t usually this lively.”

  “I should hope not,” Petronus said.

  “Quite a display,” Malus said. “Attacked by a swarm of miniature demons as soon as we entered.”

  “Oh, they weren’t attacking us,” Jerry assured him. “They were playing a game. The idea is to shoot down your opponent’s fighter.”

  “Your opponent’s fighter?” asked Bal-Simba. “You mean those demons were not self-motivated?”

  “Oh no. What would be the fun of that? The idea is to outfly the other guy.”

  “So each of those—fighters?—was directly controlled by a magician.”

  “Sure. At least most of them are. A few were probably drones thrown in to improve the dogfight simulation, but . . .”

  “Dogs?” asked Malus. “You call those dogs?”

  “Well, no, but it’s called a dogfight you see, and . . .”

  “If the creatures who are fighting are not dogs, why call it a dogfight?” The pudgy wizard waggled his finger at Jerry. “Confusion. That’s what this new magic of yours does, it sows confusion everywhere.”

  “No, you see—” But he was interrupted before he could get any further.

  “Fox,” a female voice proclaimed from the other end of the Bull Pen, “that’s disgusting!”

  Cindy Naismith came striding down the aisle, eyes blazing, with Larry Fox trailing behind her.

  “Jerry, I want you to do something about this right now!”

  “Cindy, can’t you see we’re having a meeting?”

  “Now!” Cindy demanded.

  Jerry turned to the wizards. “Ah, excuse me, Lords.” Then he faced Cindy and Larry. “Let’s go talk, shall we?” and he herded them down to the opposite end of the Bull Pen.

  “What the hell is this all about?” Jerry hissed as soon as they were safely away from the inspection party.

  “It’s about the so-called user interface this cretin wrote for the front end.”

  “The code’s in spec,” Larry said sullenly.

  “Spec my ass!” Cindy blazed. “That routine is pornographic and demeaning to women!”

  “Pornographic code?” Jerry asked, totally bewildered.

  “Here,” Cindy said. “See for yourself!” She turned and gestured to call up the demon. There was a small billow of pinkish smoke above the central table. It writhed and coalesced into solid flesh. Very solid and very pink.

  Jerry gaped. “Holy shit!”

  The demon was gorgeous, voluptuous and totally nude. A mass of blue-black hair spilled down over her shoulders, her blue eyes were alight with amusement and promise. She smiled at her watchers and ran a pink tongue tip over her blood-red lips in a way that was blatant invitation. Then she stretched and reclined on the table in a way that made her enormous breasts ride even higher on her ribcage and her dark nipples stick out like strawberries.

  In the small part of his mind that was not totally occupied by the vision stretched out on the table, Jerry realized that all three wizards could see what was going on. In fact Malus was standing on the bench and craning his neck to get a better view.

  “It gets worse,” Cindy said. “You should see the things she does!”

  “Yeah,” breathed Jerry. “I mean, no. Of course not!” The demon shifted her shoulders and pointed her delicate toes at him, still smiling.

  “Well, it’s supposed to be user-friendly,” Larry said in an aggrieved tone. “Hey, I offered to do a male version. Tom Selleck or something. But noooo, she wants to spoil everyone’s fun.”

  “If that’s your idea of fun . . .”

  The demon smiled again and scissored her legs in a way that showed off her dark pubic patch.

  “That’s enough!” Jerry said sharply, tearing his eyes away from the demon. “Look,” he mumbled, examining his shoelaces, “this module is supposed to help the user, not distract him. Do some work on that interface, all right?”

  As Jerry walked away he heard Danny whisper urgently. “Hey Larry, give me that code, will you?”

  “Sorry about the interruption,” Jerry said as he came back to the wizards. “Now, let me show you what you came to see.”

  “I think we have seen enough of this—this circus!” Petronus said.

  “Quite enough,” Bal-Simba agreed amicably. “My Lord, could you create a demon so obedient to your commands as the ones we saw when we first came in?”

  Petronus froze. “I would not demean myself . . .”

  “But if you wished to, could you?” he shook his head. “I could not, I know. Have you ever seen a demon so instantly responsive?”

  “No,” Petronus finally admitted. “No, I have not.”

  Bal-Simba turned to Jerry. “And how long did it take to create that swarm of demons?”

  “Hey Danny,” Jerry called out, “how long did it take you to write that air combat game?”

  Danny stuck his head around the corner of his cubicle. “Jeez, Jerry, you always assume . . .”

  “How long, Danny?” Jerry said inexorably.

  The young programmer shrugged. “Oh, maybe four hours.”

  “You see,” Bal-Simba said to his fellow wizards. “In less time than it takes us to frame a moderately complex spell, this young one created a dozen demons whose subtlety we cannot match. This shows the worth of the effort, I think.”

  Petronus snorted. “Trinkets. A handful of magical trinkets.”

  Bal-Simba shifted his bulk and the bench teetered alarmingly. “You would rather they write their spells large for practice? Or released them outside the confines of this building? No, I think their wisdom in making trinkets is manifest.”

  “Well,” said Malus, looking longingly down the table toward the spot where the “user interface” had been, “they are certainly accomplishing something.”

  “It is obvious they are accomplishing a great deal,” Bal-Simba said. “I think their work should continue unhindered.”

  Petronus looked from Bal-Simba to Malus. “Oh very well,” he said at last. “I only hope we do not regret this afternoon’s work.” He rose and bowed to his colleagu
es. “My Lords, if you will forgive me, my own work presses.” He turned and stalked the length of the Bull Pen without a backward glance.

  “I too must be gone,” said Malus. “Unless you have another demonstration?” he asked hopefully.

  “No,” Jerry said firmly. “Thank you for coming, Lord.” Malus bowed and followed his colleague out.

  “Thanks, Lord,” Jerry said to Bal-Simba as the dumpy wizard pulled the door shut behind him.

  “Petronus is firm in resolution, but not subtle in debate,” Bal-Simba said, smiling to show off his filed teeth. “He gave me an opportunity and I took it.” Then he sobered. “Besides, I was afraid of what might happen if we stayed within a moment longer.”

  “You and me both, Lord,” Jerry agreed fervently.

  Bal-Simba rose and Jerry rose with him. “I admit I had some misgivings, but it did not go badly, I think.”

  “I had a few misgivings myself. Uh, we really are making progress. I can show you if you want.”

  Bal-Simba chuckled. “Oh, I believe you, Lord. And no, it is not necessary to show me. I trust you and I doubt I would understand half of it.”

  Jerry followed the huge wizard to the door lost in thought.

  “You look as if you have something pressing upon your mind,” Bal-Simba said as he held the door for him.

  “Well, yes Lord,” Jerry said as they stepped out into the courtyard. He sighed. “Look, I know this is a new environment and it’s a completely different culture and all, and I know that even the laws of nature are different here.” He stopped and for an instant looked as if he might cry. “But Lord, this place gets weirder every day!”

  Bal-Simba nodded and looked back at the Bull Pen. “My thought precisely,” he said in a bemused tone.

  ###

  Wiz eased his way down the corridor, hugging the wall and keeping a tight grip on his rusty halberd head. Somewhere off in the distance he could hear the faint drip, drip, drip of water. Dripping water meant running water and running water was likely to be cleaner than the foul musty slop he had found so far. So in spite of his misgivings, Wiz pressed on. It was so cold his breath hung in puffs before him. Short, sharp puffs because Wiz was panting from fear.