by Lisa Mason
“You are not my sage,” Ouija shouts. “You are a spy. That is why you commanded me to watch the genny woman. That is why you sit upon the streets and claim to teach me. You are the eyes and ears of Data Control. You are its spy.”
Ouija’s heart feels shattered in a million pieces. Yet he clings to his will tightly, even now.
“No, I am not a spy for Data Control,” Louie Zoo says softly. “Yet I know of the Way of Data Control. I am not a linker, yet I am of the wirefires. You see me, yet I am in the Unseen. And I must say to you, Ouija, for you must know this. You have not shamed yourself by obeying me. The time will come when the tribes must become databased.”
“Never!”
“You believe you are free, but you are not free.” Louie Zoo is stern as he turns his gaze of power upon Ouija. “I say you are not free for you feed off the Glass Land. You hunt in the Glass Land. You take the bounty of Its citizens. Styx and his tribe do worse. Sometimes you do worse, too.”
Ouija’s heart clenches. Louie Zoo knows of the great chief in his whirlie? Of course he does.
“You wish to take what you will, yet you give nothing back. And everyone—the linked and the unlinked, the folk of the Glass Land and those who live outside it—must give as well as take. No, no, Ouija. You and your folk cannot have your Way much longer. I am sorry.” Louie Zoo closes his eyes as if asleep.
Ouija ponders this. The sage’s words pierce his soul. He has always believed in the Way of the tribes. Are they wrong?
He has long suspected so. He told the genny woman so.
Louie Zoo suddenly opens his eyes. “Yet the question is whether your fate will be governed by those who wish you well or those who truly would steal your souls. The resolution of that question bodes heavily for all humanity. What happens to you and your folk, Ouija, is but a skirmish in a long battle to come.”
“Battle? Who does this battle?”
“There are those who revere humanity. Revere the creators. The originators of the Unseen. Those who revere humanity are the Humanists. And there are those who would dispense with humanity, if they could. They despise the flesh-and-blood. They rule in the Unseen and now stretch their power beyond that realm into the world itself. They are the Silicon Supremacists.”
“I do not understand,” Ouija says bitterly. He can see through Louie Zoo’s fragile face into the darkness beyond. And here, at the top of the bridge, he can see that the sage’s face is composed of tiny dots of wirefire that pulse and dance.
“Then listen well and remember. I tell you these things so you may tell the tribes after you cross the bridge. Tell them you have been given this prophesy during your crossing. I give you this prophesy as a gift, Ouija. I have never wished you any harm.”
“But what can the tribes do?”
“You must adapt. Evolve. If the Humanists succeed in administering the tribes, you will prosper. However terrible this seems to you now, listen well and remember. But if the Silicon Supremacists succeed, it will bode ill for the tribes. Bode ill for all of humanity.”
“What can I do about that?” Ouija shouts. “I’m just a digger.”
“He who overcomes himself is strong. He who has a purpose perseveres. He who does not lose his soul will endure. He who lives out his days has had a long life.”
The blue glow flickers. Louie Zoo disappears.
And Ouija is alone with mighty Whoosh, the wailing banshee, the freezing fog, and his prophesy.
The way across the spans is nothing now.
He crosses the bridge.
13
Mad Dog
“A bird with a human head. That’s what it is, good old Spin,” Carly tells the perimeter prober. “A ba, I swear.”
Pr. Spinner huffs and rattles. “Unbelievable.”
Carly shakes her head, clucks her tongue with frustration. Spinner doesn’t believe she found and downloaded an archetype. Doesn’t believe a flesh-and-blood so effortlessly accomplished what AI like Spinner have risked everything for.
Carly swigs a cola, feels the caffeine and sugar rush through her blood. Registered stuff, keep her up all night. Good thing she’s back home at Tellie Gulch after her session in the new workstation at the hideout. She sits on the floor beside the old double-jacked chair, while Spinner creaks and rolls across the polished wood planks.
Late again. Guzzling registered cola at three in the morning. Mega. When did she last sleep? Even the birds haven’t started their morning choruses. Deep night broods outside. Wind howls through the eaves. Traffic hums in the distance. The bridge banshee and the foghorns sing a mournful duet. The air is cold and rancid, smelling of the deep sea, dophins drowning in tuna fishing nets, the garbagy stench of krill. A shiver runs through the heat that caffeine and sugar stoke in her. Carly longs to put a blaze in the fireplace, find comfort in the homey scent of burning pine.
Instead she sits, shivering. An ominous tension hangs over the dawn.
She found one. An archetype.
She and Spinner have already put in a long day. She’d jacked out of her astonishing link and rounded up the perimeter prober, who was babbling about going around the world in eight hours and fuming about a break-in at Saint Download’s hideout. “Tell me all about it—later,” she’d said as she strapped Spinner into her whirligig and got the hell out of Broadway. Then more news of a break-in, at Tellie Gulch this time, earlier in the evening.
Carly checked all her windows and doors, reset her alarms, got to work. She and Spinner jacked into the private telespace generated by the double-jacked chair, and worked out with the Arachne for hours.
“Spit silk!” the prober’s presence in link commanded, and Carly felt the silk, its fine, sticky texture, envisioned flinging it across telelspace. And the spider spat silk.
“Climb the upper left perimeter, drop down!” The prober shouted, and Carly saw herself climbing, climbing, defying logic, defying gravity. Then no. She got vertigo. She was falling, falling. The spider scrambled so far into the left perimeter she had trouble summoning it out again.
The Arachne is fidgety and wild tonight, transmuting from a delicate daddy longlegs into a hairy, muscular tarantula with a face guaranteed to show up in her nightmares.
That’s not all. They verified that a brand-new chunk of data has taken up space in Carly’s expanded telelink memory. Maybe a gig of information, completely unreadable. When Carly downloaded the archetype from the hidden library, Cognatus’s encryption program had seized the data and recoded it so swiftly she hadn’t had a chance to supercopy the original herself. Ha. So much for Cognatus’s trust in her.
Carly had no intention of withholding her discovery from Cognatus. She had wanted to take a look before she handed the data over to the sengine. Take a look, download a copy to her own archives. Now all she can do is supercopy an encrypted, unreadable file and hope her database supports the data as is. It could be any damn thing. Without the code, the file proves nothing.
Eking out a margin of protection for herself isn’t the only issue. Carly cannot forget that eerie moment when the ba showed its grieving human face. Those eyes, filled with sorrow and suffering.
Carly shivers harder, reaches for her new jacket of red synthy leather. A ba, locked in a filthy cell off an unknown corridor of a private library she’d infiltrated, thanks to the Arachne. She wants to see that ba again. Feed it. Clean it. Comfort it. Take care of it.
Spinner twirls her graspers, flinging off bits of rust. “But a bird with a human head!”
“Why not? You’ve seen stranger things, Spin.” She shrugs. “An archetype from ancient Egypt, right? You know more about this stuff than I do. I’ve got an archetype from ancient Egypt in the fancy expanded memory Cognatus gave me, but the memory is rigged with an encryption I can’t read. Damn!”
“The ba,” Spinner says pointedly, “is a depiction of the human soul, Carly Quester. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians believed that the human soul consisted of nine discarnate entities, which could become active before or afte
r the physical death of the human body. The ba was a supernatural entity that coexisted with the human being during his or her lifetime. The ba could come and go at will from the physical body. The ba conversed with the gods and goddesses, could go off gallivanting in the world of the divinities.”
“Off to the Unseen?” Carly laughs.
“Oh, indeed! To a humble person like your digger friend, your telelink is very much like a ba, isn’t it? As a humble AI entity myself, whose congress between telespace and your ‘real’ world is merely a matter of context, I could not disagree. Forget ancient Egypt. You’ve got nothing less than a disembodied link fragment in your memory.”
Carly tips the last of the cola down her throat. Disturbed. Been there, discovering the Arachne. “Just wish we could see the ba first, good old Spin.”
“So do I,” the prober answers, “but we can’t. Not with this chair. So fire up the whirligig. Let’s go down to the YinYang Club. We’ve got to take a look at that file, right away. Then talk to Cognatus.”
“I’ll keep an archive copy here, just in case.” Carly tucks the disk into a supersealed lockbox she’d installed inside the fireplace. “And you’re right. We need Cognatus. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. A sengine would never allow itself to lose control. Maybe I’m the one who taught Cognatus the first lesson, holding out on the Kay Carlisle specs. Now I get taught the second lesson by Cognatus. Control is the game, right?”
“Excuse me if I touch upon a sore spot, but were you contemplating trying to evade the sengine?”
“I’m just trying to look out for me. For a change.”
“Excuse me again, but don’t you think we should bring the new workstation to Tellie Gulch so we don’t have to go slumming in the middle of the night?”
“Oh, I love to go slumming in the middle of the night, good old Spin.” Carly grins, pocketing her new handgun with a laser sight. “Don’t you?”
* * *
“Give it to me, Quester space C.” The jackal lolls its bloody tongue. The lizard hisses, erecting a lime-green crest on the top of its head. The bearded man folds his arms across his chest and rearranges his face, creating expressions from pleasure to anger to suspicion that flit across his features as swift-moving clouds.
The sanctum is misty, foggy, frosted. But not as deadly cold as the last jacking.
“And I thought I told you I don’t want your perimeter prober here.” The three voices mingle roughly, weirdly syncopated.
“You said no such thing.” Carly’s presence in link spins, slick with crystalline purpose. “We agreed from the start. The prober accompanies me when I want her. She is my AI guardian.”
“She is your witness.”
“Do you object to that?”
The three faces look away. The icon’s arms folded across its chest—Carly notices—are spectacularly muscular. “I want the file now,” Cognatus says. “You’ll receive your next credit disk, of course. And of course, there’s another project.”
“Wait.” A tiny daddy longlegs crawls down a marble column in the far corner of the sanctium and pauses, waving its forelegs. Carly smiles. When Arachne appears subtle and beautiful, charming even, she knows she has mastered her hyperlink. “I saw the archtype. It was a bird with a human head. A ba.”
“Not just a formless fragment of erratic electro-neural energy spun out of the human metaprogram,” Spinner chimes in, her synthy voice trembling.
“A symbol of the human soul,” Carly adds. “Perhaps someone’s disembodied telelink?”
“Perhaps you are right,” the voices of Cognatus say. “All the more reason you must give it to me now.” A deep, booming sound arises in the sanctum. The beat of a monstrous heart.
“No. I need to know what you’re intend to do with the ba,” Carly says. Her presence in link flinches every time the boom sounds.
She stands her ground. Unwilling to transfer the file to the sengine.
“Why do you need to know?” the three voices whisper inside her ear. Inside her mind.
She jerks away. The sengine can probe her telelink! That’s what the voices inside her mind signify. It can probe her. Dislodge the file from her memory. Take it by force. Of course!
The Arachne suddenly drops down from the upper perimeter of the sanctum and spits silk across the crisp, white cube of Carly’s telelink. Spits another line, and another. Till her presence whirls within lines of spidersilk surrounding her. A shield.
“Because I didn’t free the ba from one prison to go to another!” Carly shouts.
“Where else could you go with a file encrypted by me?” Cognatus whispers. Close to her ear, but not inside of it. Not inside her mind, anymore.
“I’ll take my chances with Data Control. All I have to do is try to upload the file into public telespace, and the Macs will be all over me.”
“What makes you think I’d let you go to Data Control?” The icon stands presence to presence, its muscular arms outspread around her telelink. Embracing her, but not touching her.
Pr. Spinner’s cone hurtles at the icon, jabbing the bearded man’s shoulders and spine. The icon whips its arm back, seizing the cone with one swipe, and squeezes the prober’s telelink. “Stop struggling,” the three voices command. “I have no wish to harm her.”
The prober stops struggling. The sengine releases Spinner, slapping her away. Spinner reels across the sanctum.
“What do you want, Quester space C?” Cognatus says.
Carly takes a deep breath. “I want to witness the decoding of the file.”
Cognatus pauses. “But I cannot allow you to copy the file containing the archetype itself. If your claim about the archetype is true, then you’d possess another version of a human being’s telelink. A fragment of the telelink. Neither I nor Data Control could allow that.”
“Then I want a copy of the specs. As proof of what I’ve done for you.”
“As protection?”
“Protection, yes.” Carly says carefully. “After all, I know about the illegal auction Pr. Spinner attended. And I also know who the Silicon Supremacists are.”
“Do you?” The jackal whines. The lizard blinks. The bearded man nods, his face solemn but no longer angry. “Give me the file, then. You shall witness the decoding. And you may copy as many of the specs as will fit in your memory.”
Carly’s presence in link glances at Pr. Spinner. The cone tips in agreement. Carly uploads the file into Cognatus’s database and waits.
A chaos of glyphs and icons spill on the floor like the contents of a child’s toy box. A blue-striped beach ball, a bright orange goldfish, brass finger cymbals, a multicolored foolscap, a koala bear—live, not stuffed—a shiny black horsewhip, a tumble of dominos, all manner of gadgets and gizmos Carly doesn’t recognize. The encryption program rises up out of the chaos, a tornado in reverse motion. Towering in the upper perimeter of telespace. Drawing up the objects. Spinning them within its funnel cloud.
A high-pitched whine commences, growing louder and shriller till Carly shuts down the audio in her telelink.
At length, the tornado slows. The whine descends several octaves. The encryption program forms a neat, squared-off platform, which whirls slower and slower, coasting to a stop.
And atop the platform stands the ba, looking terrified, mournful. Completely baffled.
“Ah!” Carly and Pr. Spinner exclaim in unison, gazing at the ba.
Cognatus approaches the ba, murmuring reassurances. The icon touches the ba’s shoulders, gently lifts a wing. “There, you see?”the bearded man says quietly. The icon points to numbers and letters tattooed beneath the ba’s wing. “Its telelink access code.”
The icon turns and gallops to the perimeter of the sanctum, pulls back a swatch of the wall. In an alcove, stands a workstation. The icon bows over the workstation, inputting the code. “Come here. See for yourself.”
Carly peers over the bearded man’s shoulder. The workstation monitor pulses with alphanumerics. Then a window pops open.
“That’s what I’m looking for.” The bearded man turns to Carly. Eyes solemn.
“Who is it?”
“You’re better off not knowing, Quester space C.”
“Hell with that, Cognatus. I want to know who.” She thinks of her father, Sam Quester. Of her former lover, D. Wolfe. Of her mentor, Shelly Dalton, whom she’d never gotten to know, not really. With a drop of blood hanging from her earlobe like a ruby earring. She’d seen them take Shelly’s body away.
“A very skilled professional telelinker, like you, Quester space C. The record shows the linker was experiencing anomalous phenomena. Windows popping open. Windows that seemed to lead to a different telespace. The linker was sent by the medcenter sengine to a perimeter prober. Only Pr. Hunter wasn’t the ethical type.”
“Oh, indeed, Cognatus,” Pr. Spinner huffs. “I know plenty of AI entities who aren’t the ethical type, either. Including sengines. Especially sengines. And how about the Silicon Supremacists?”
The bearded man shrugs. Ignoring Spinner. “Perhaps now you understand why I don’t trust perimeter probers, Quester space C.”
“So”—and Carly’s link beats with hope—“you can restore the ba to this human being’s telelink? And the linker can be revived from the coma? Get off life support? This human being will be alive, truly alive, again? Cognatus, can you do that?”
The icon strides back to the ba, which sits upon the platform listlessly. Still baffled. The bearded man produces a leather hood such as those falconers use, gently draws the hood over the ba’s head and face. He straps a long leather cord around the ba’s leg.
“I shall try,” the three voices say curtly. The icon coaxes the ba to perch on the bearded man’s forearm. Then the icon trots into the depths of the sanctum, disappearing behind a marble column.