“Not even my parents?” Thea asked. “When I go home…”
“I will speak to your parents,” Humphrey said. “But that’s it. Not your brothers. Not anybody else. Are we clear?”
“Absolutely,” Thea said.
“One more thing—I will have your word on it that you will not be using this to go on any solo trips for fun and adventure. It isn’t a toy.”
“I never—” Thea began defensively, but Humphrey shook his head and lifted his hand in emphasis.
“Thea. You came to get me last spring, from that hell-place I had got myself locked up in by picking up that stupid travel spellspam. I am grateful, but I will not have you use it to get yourself killed. You must promise me—no matter what, you come get me first, before you use it for anything. Do we have a deal?”
“I promise,” Thea said.
“Fine, then. I officially entrust the prototype to you—and remember, it’s my head if you misuse it. Now, Terry. I want to know what you think of these.”
He fished in an inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a small envelope from which he extracted a computer printout and an opaque CD case.
“If I were anywhere else on this planet I’d just snap my fingers and I’d have the papers I wanted in my hand, straight from my office safe,” he grumbled. “This is some of the data we got from those tapes that were retrieved with the Elemental cube, back in the summer,” he said. “Everything we have is on this disk—we don’t keep any of it on a permanent hard drive; it’s been transferred onto a closely guarded handful of disks. We don’t want a trace of this anywhere that it can be potentially hacked, no matter how many layers of security we wrap it in. You can look at the whole thing later—on the disk, don’t copy anything—but take a look at these, in the meantime.”
Terry flipped through the papers. The first page was densely covered with type, but Thea could glimpse plenty of blanks in the rest of it. Some pages were mostly blank, in fact; one of them had just a single line of text that went from edge to edge of the paper, as though it had got in the way of some slithering snail-like creature leaving letters for a trail.
“What is this?” Terry said, his attention caught. “Some of it looks…almost familiar.” His head snapped up suddenly. “Some of this looks like the code I’ve just been tweaking to get Twitterpat back online. I mean, Mr. Wittering.”
Humphrey laughed. “I know of the nickname,” he said. “You’re talking about the holographic image of your former computer teacher I saw when I first came here, right?”
“Yeah,” Terry said. “All I could get him to do back then was to ask you to repeat whatever it was you said to him, because he insisted his faculties were limited, but I found that there was a loop in the system. I’ll show you.”
He piled Humphrey’s papers on the edge of the desk and started typing something on the keyboard in front of him. Thea reached out curiously and picked up the papers, riffling through them as Terry typed. It meant nothing to her, a mess of gibberish words, out-of-place punctuation marks, lines of what looked like mathematical formulae.
“There,” Terry said suddenly, dragging her attention away from the papers. “Look.”
On the other side of the computer desk, the air shimmered slightly and then snapped into an image. It was slightly blurred around the edges, but recognizably Twitterpat. Thea caught her breath.
“Good afternoon, Terry,” the image said in Twitterpat’s own voice.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Wittering,” Terry said. “We have visitors today.”
The image blurred and then re-formed, this time facing Humphrey and Thea. “Patrick Wittering,” it said courteously, apparently by way of introduction.
“Humphrey May, Federal Bureau of Magic. We met a number of times when you came out to Washington on Nexus consultations. And this is one of your former students at the Wandless Academy, Thea Winthrop.”
The image did its blur-blink-regenerate thing again.
“Why is it doing that?” Thea hissed into Terry’s ear.
“Processing,” Terry whispered back. “It’s capable of responding, but it doesn’t have independent vision sensors, so it can’t ‘see’ you. It can just be aware of your presence.”
“There’s something wrong with it,” Thea said.
“Hands,” Terry said briefly.
The characteristic hand motions that had partly earned Twitterpat his nickname were missing. The hologram’s appearance was perfect, and his voice was Twitterpat’s down to its nuances, but those expressive hands were still, hanging down beside him. The rest of him was almost enough to make anyone believe that Twitterpat was not, in fact, dead, but those motionless hands made Thea acutely aware that this was just a copy, a high-tech “living” puppet.
“Can I be of assistance in any way?” Twitterpat inquired, still facing Humphrey.
“Terry, is it possible for the entity to offer independent insight?” Humphrey said in a low voice.
“It’s…helped me with things, once I knew how to ask, and what to ask,” Terry said. “I’ve typed in questions, or scanned in things—and there is an analytic ability.”
“Real intelligence? Rudimentary AI?”
“I am perfectly capable of answering those questions, Humphrey,” Twitterpat said. “When I was created, it was with cutting-edge holographic and fuzzy logic algorithms. I am very much ‘intelligent,’ if you wish to phrase it that way. It is what I was created for—interactive intelligence that might be useful for providing insight into machine logic, at a speed and precision that is still beyond an unassisted human brain.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Humphrey said. “I never knew that Patrick Wittering had fine-tuned it this far.”
“Can I be of any assistance?” Twitterpat asked again.
Terry glanced at Humphrey. “Is it okay if I let him at the disk?”
“Can’t hurt,” Humphrey said.
“Let me see those printouts again,” Thea murmured as Terry slipped the CD out of its case and fed it into the drive for Twitterpat to examine. She had noticed something in those incomprehensible pages that now tugged at her memory and understanding, though she couldn’t quite put it into context. Terry glanced at Humphrey and passed over the papers; at the same instant the Twitterpat image began speaking again.
“The data is incomplete,” it said.
“I know. We are still trying to rescue more material from the tapes, but this is the best we can do right now. If you recognize any of it, perhaps you can fill in some of the blanks.”
“My own code has roots in some of this,” Twitterpat said. “I do recognize some of the algorithms. However, there is an anomaly.”
“What anomaly?” Humphrey said, his attention suddenly focused on the holographic wraith before him.
“The data is, as I said, incomplete, but I can begin to understand what the material behind it is about,” Twitterpat said. “Some of the working methodology appears to be obsolete. Some of it resembles what I know of the current state-of-the-art data on artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. And the rest of it appears to be of unknown provenance. I would—” He blurred rapidly, and then blurred again. “I’d be grateful if you could rephrase the question. My abilities are limited at this time,” it said after a moment, its voice gone oddly flat.
“It’s gone back into the loop,” Terry said, striding back to his main keyboard. “Whatever you fed it, Mr. May, you scrambled its brain again.”
“What’s this?” Thea said suddenly, pointing at the page with the single line of type. Humphrey glanced over.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, shrugging. “That page, as it happens, was the product of one of the attempts to open up the cube—one of the better ones. The consensus is that we asked the thing its name, and it told us.”
Thea drew her finger along the line of type. It appeared to be a single word, repeated over and over:
SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE
“Slate,” Terr
y said, peering over Thea’s shoulder. “The cube says its name is Slate?”
“No,” Thea said, staring at the page.
Humphrey turned sharply to look at her. “What?” he said.
Thea reached out for a pen that Terry had left lying on the computer desk and underlined five letters on the page:
SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE
“Not Slate,” she said slowly, looking up at Humphrey. “Tesla. The Elemental mage who created the professor’s house. Nikola Tesla. It’s his cube.”
3.
HUMPHREY STARED AT THE paper in his hand with an expression that was equal parts astonishment and furious indignation.
“I cannot believe I didn’t see that,” he said. “It goes a long way to explaining why we haven’t made much headway with the thing. Tesla was the only quad-Element mage in the history of the human race—the only one that we know of, anyway. It stands to reason that a uni-Element mage couldn’t even begin to make a dent in it, and even bi-Elementals were out of their depth.”
“Where’s the cube now?” Thea asked.
Humphrey glanced at her, his eyebrow raised. “In a safe back at the Bureau,” he said. “Why?”
“Have you tried taking it back to the professor’s house? The house, too, was Tesla’s doing. Maybe something in there could help unlock the cube.”
“That is not a bad idea at all,” Humphrey said. “I simply stopped at the professor—it never occurred to me that the house might be helpful.” He pulled a silver-gray cell phone from a pouch at his waist. “No good,” he muttered, staring at the phone screen, “no signal in this underground bunker. Thea, can you get us out of here? I need to make a phone call. Terry, I’m really sorry about screwing up your hologram, but if you can make anything of those scanned pages, I’d appreciate knowing about it. If I missed the obvious clue in slate, who knows what else I might have passed over.”
“Will do, sir,” Terry said, sounding mystified.
Humphrey glanced over at Thea. She nodded imperceptibly, and in the next moment they were back in the drizzly woods of the school grounds.
Humphrey immediately punched a speed-dial key on his cell phone and stood tapping his foot impatiently.
“Rafe?” he said abruptly. “No time to explain now, but get Slate and ’port immediately to Professor de los Reyes’s house…. Yes, in San Francisco…. Yes, I know the professor is still in the hospital. Just do what I say, quietly. I have access to the house; everything is cleared at the highest level. If anyone does try to stop you, tell them you’re acting on my authority—but avoid attention if you can, and most particularly try not to trip any of Luana’s wires. Certainly if I were Slate I would think twice about manifesting with her waiting to pin me out on an examination board like a rare butterfly. Yes, now, Rafe. I know it’s late. I’ll meet you there.”
He flipped the phone closed and turned back to Thea.
“What are you going to do?” Thea asked.
“I don’t have a clue,” Humphrey said frankly. “I don’t think we’re dealing with anything remotely familiar here. I might have to go back into the archives and read up on things that nobody’s needed to know in decades. I need to get to the professor’s house myself, in a hurry.”
“Can I help?”
“I’ve a car here; I can drive down to the nearest public ’port and I can—” He broke off as Thea lifted her wrist, her new gadget still strapped to it, and gave him an innocent smile.
“I can get you there faster,” she said.
“And then we’ll both get into trouble,” Humphrey said, chuckling. “I’ve no wish to add kidnapping to my list of sins.”
“But it wouldn’t be kidnapping, not really. You said that you had an idea about what I can do.”
Humphrey hesitated, but only briefly, then flipped his phone open again, and punched in another number.
“John?…It’s Humphrey May. Listen, something’s come up. I need to borrow young Thea for a couple of hours. Yes, off-campus.” He listened for a moment, and then sighed. “All right, sure. I can take Mrs. Chen with us. I’ll swing by the residence hall now. Could you alert her?…It’s on FBM authority. I can have a letter to you by the morning. Thanks, John. Good night.”
Thea grimaced at him as he put the phone away. “Mrs. Chen?”
“Well, I didn’t think he was going to let me just whisk you out of here on my say-so. There’s a limit to how far FBM’s writ runs, and he’s responsible to your father. Now come on, we need to get going.”
“No, we don’t,” Thea said, grinning. “If you’re worried about getting there in time to meet Rafe—who’s Rafe, anyway?—I can get us there at whatever time you want, remember?”
“Raphael Wynn. One of my assistants. He’s an intern at the FBM. You’ll like him. Let’s go.”
“Um…” Thea said, hanging back.
Humphrey, who had already taken a few long strides, paused to turn and look at her. “What’s up?”
Thea lifted her wrist again. “Do you want anyone else to know about this thing?”
“Point,” Humphrey said. “She has a computer in her office, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll use that, then, for this time,” Humphrey said. “Sooner or later you’ll have to let the cat out of the bag, but I’d rather it was later, under the circumstances.”
“Are you sure you want to leave it with me?”
“I think it will prove useful. But for the time being, let’s follow the rules.”
Twilight had started to shade into full dark by the time they got to the residence hall. Mrs. Chen flung open the door to her office almost before Humphrey had a chance to knock.
“The principal just called,” she said. “What’s going on now, Thea? Mr. May…?”
“We need Thea’s help with something that turned up last summer at Professor de los Reyes’s, Mrs. Chen. I promise we won’t keep her long.”
“Fine,” said Mrs. Chen, in a tone of voice that signified that it was anything but fine. “I’ll just get my coat….”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Humphrey said, ushering Thea past Mrs. Chen and stepping into the office. “Time being of the essence…if we could borrow your computer…?”
Mrs. Chen rolled her eyes but stood aside. “I might have known.”
“You might want to lock your office,” Humphrey suggested, as Thea, receiving a reluctant nod of approval, began pecking at Mrs. Chen’s keyboard. The Elemental house, she typed in, and then added, just in time to fling open the front door as Humphrey’s assistant ’ports in.
She glanced around, saw the other two waiting on the other side of the desk, and hit ENTER.
The great tiled hallway of Professor de los Reyes’s Elemental house in San Francisco suddenly blinked into existence around the three of them, and Margaret Chen clutched at her shoulders with both hands.
“I don’t know how you do this on a regular basis,” she said to Thea.
But Thea had already turned to the door.
“He’s here,” she told Humphrey.
Humphrey reached over her shoulder and pulled open the door.
On the front step, one hand half-raised to knock and the other curled protectively around the handle of a reinforced security-locked briefcase, stood a young man with dark hair falling a little untidily over his collar and eyes of such incandescent blue that Thea found herself staring.
“Good timing,” Humphrey said easily. “Don’t just stand there; come inside, we have work to do. This is Margaret Chen, from the Wandless Academy, and Thea Winthrop. Margaret, Thea, this is Raphael Wynn.”
“Raphael,” Mrs. Chen said graciously, extending her hand.
“Rafe,” said the angelic young man, stepping inside and allowing Humphrey to close the door behind him. He shook Mrs. Chen’s hand and then turned to nod companionably at Thea. “Hi.”
“Um…er, hi. I’m Thea.”
“So I understand,” Rafe said, smilin
g.
Humphrey reached for the briefcase. “All clear back at the office?”
“If you mean Luana, she’s long gone. She had a hot date or something. In any event, nobody was in the way. What’s up? You found something new?”
The two of them fell into step, leading the way to the professor’s office, with Humphrey turning to signal Mrs. Chen and Thea that they should follow.
“Um, hi, I’m Thea,” Thea muttered furiously, mimicking herself, staring at Rafe’s back. “What a wonderfully intelligent thing to say.”
“He does have striking eyes,” murmured Mrs. Chen, smiling.
Thea glared at her, and Mrs. Chen quickly schooled her features into a serious and serene expression.
“Mr. May…Is that you, sir?”
Madeline Emmett, the housekeeper, came hurrying out of the dining room.
“We need access to the Nexus, Mrs. Emmett,” said Humphrey. “I don’t think we will be too long.”
“I see. Will you be requiring anything?”
“No, we’re fine. Thank you, Mrs. Emmett.”
The others had come to a stop outside the closed door to the study. Humphrey approached the door and laid a gentle hand on the handle; after a moment, the door made a small clicking sound and swung open a crack.
“The keys in this house,” Humphrey said, looking up to meet Mrs. Chen’s raised eyebrow, “are a little different from other keys.”
“Do you have an Elemental gift, Mr. May? I never knew that.”
“No, that is not my talent. But this house has been instructed that I am allowed access to this room. Come on in. Rafe, put that thing on the desk.”
Curious to see the white cube again, Thea watched Rafe carefully pass a hand over the briefcase’s complicated locking mechanism. He placed it on the leather desk pad so as not to scratch the gleaming wood of the professor’s desk and flashed Thea a quick, friendly smile. Once again she found herself struck dumb, and was barely able to smile back as Rafe flipped open the final catch manually and lifted the lid of the briefcase. Inside, nestled in a padded cocoon of protective dark blue velvet, the white cube seemed to glitter with a light of its own.
Worldweavers: Cybermage Page 3