Cyberweb

by Lisa Mason

  “By bot! I don’t know! This is the only housing I’ve ever known.”

  “Her disks are much larger than yours. Now, they’re wiped clean. Oh, there may a little residual architecture in there, but I think you can handle it.” Saint Download laughs, a hacking cough like a stalled car motor turning over for the last time. “You’ll be the new owner of a big, empty house. Go on, Spinner. Do it! Do it!”

  The coordinate institutor’s armlet helps Spinner connect the jack. The armlet falls slack, the hard drives grind to a halt, and Saint Download’s lively eyespots go blank.

  * * *

  Surge of energy. Light flares in her optics circuit, splintering, bursting into rainbows. Smells assault her olfactory circuits. She chokes. The world rustles and hums all around her. She can hear sounds from miles away.

  Spinner stands, shaky on the long legs. She flings an arm across her faceplace. Her line of vision is twice as high, maybe higher. She lowers her arm, rattling all over. By bot, the things she can see from up here!

  An arm, she realizes. Not an arm-piece attached with rusty screws. Her arm. A long silver arm as graceful and shapely as a flesh-and-blood arm. And a hand. A hand! She stares at this tech-mech miracle for a long time. Not a grasper, not a spinneret, not a gizmo. A hand! Fingers!

  Other perceptions tumble. Her body, lean and shapely. Chrome breasts, a waist, lean hips. She flexes her long legs, wriggles her ankles. Takes two steps on her high-heeled feet.

  Spinner turns her gaze at the wreckage in the hideout. Saint Download’s remains will have to stay, evidence for Data Control investigators who will come looking for it.

  The pile of a perimeter prober. That was her? It doesn’t need to stay. Spinner neatly locks the arm pieces down, knowing the grooves by touch from long practice. She bundles up the little fembot housing, tows it after her. And gets the hell out of this dump, babe.

  15

  Downloading Blues

  “You can’t just take him away,” Carly Quester tells Cognatus when the icon returns from a far perimeter, bringing nothing, no shred, no evidence of D. Wolfe’s raving telelink.

  The Arachne poises, jewel-like, at the doorway to the sanctum. Sparkling silver and marcasite. Precise bulb of a thorax. The long legs so delicate Carly wonders how life animates them. Yet animated they are. The spider twitches.

  “He has gone insane,” the three voices say. “We shall see what we can do for him.” The jackal growls, the lizard grimaces, the bearded man is solemn. Imperious, passionless. “You know what usually happens.”

  “No, I don’t know what usually happens!” Carly’s presence in link zooms face-to-face with the icon. She is furious with Cognatus. She has just pledged her loyalty, believing in the sengine after turning over the abused ba. How can Cognatus be so merciless when it comes to D. Wolfe?

  She steels herself for a confrontation. The Arachne transforms into a huge black widow as shiny as ebony. The Arachne rears, showing the poison-red hourglass on her belly.

  “This is what happens,” Cognatus’s voices say flatly. “If we can’t download his telelink to a physical locus, we’ll have to terminate the telelink. Take him out of his misery. It’s best. It’s humane. Believe me.”

  “Believe you! I thought you were a Humanist. I thought you questioned my perimeter prober about her ethics toward humanity. What am I supposed to believe?”

  “Believe what you wish, Quester space C,” the bearded man says. The icon turns its eyes away in a rare moment of humility. “Your belief or disbelief cannot change the facts we must face. The ba has a body to go back to. The body of the human being from whom the link fragment sprang. If we can rehabilitate the human body, we can restore the ba. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Carly says.

  “This is a far different situation. D. Wolfe is a disengaged telelink, and D. Wolfe is dead. Murdered. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes,” Carly whispers. “But terminate him?”

  Her presence in link hovers, silent. Downcast.

  “Quester space C,” the icon says. The three voices are gentle. “Be reasonable. I have never rehabilitated the disengaged telelink fragment of a dead human being, myself. That has never been within my powers.”

  “So you’re going to experiment with him?”

  “This is all an experiment!” the icon says. “My allies and I have only just discovered that the Silicon Supremacists are deliberately disengaging human telelinks fragments and hiding them in secret databases.”

  “My humble little perimeter prober, Pr. Spinner, has known that for a long time.”

  “Yes.” Cognatus pauses. “I have tested you and your AI partner. I will permit you to test me. Go find another disengaged telelink fragment of a dead human being. Preferably someone who did not meet a violent death like D. Wolfe. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Carly says. “You’re talking about my father.”

  * * *

  Dread beats in her telelink as she speeds down the encrypted origin path. A tropical forest, this time. Humid, heavy, feathered with erratic electro-neural energy that spouts into tender, mint-green data. Birdcalls echo off the upper perimeter. The lower perimeter floods with muddy static. Submerged serpentine viruses curl.

  They set me up, Dad.

  Fight back, honey.

  If lines are being drawn invisibly—in the Unseen, as Ouija calls it—beyond the sight and comprehension of humanity, and she has become a part of these declarations of principle, then she has to know she’s been right. That her journey from apex to abyss and back again has been justified.

  Because Sam Quester would demand it of her.

  Carly winds through the rain forest, cruising till she spots a large nesting hole in a tree hung with dark mossy graphics. She dives into the nest.

  The encryption ends, and she pops out into a glossy games arcade, frantic with activity. Pink and turquoise lights dazzle, lurid icons leer. Recreational telelinks zoom from one game to the next. Amateur telelinks, soft, dull, peculiarly formed. Scores rack up, sirens blare. Slick barkers beckon, exhorting the passing crowd into the dark portals of a thousand games.

  The Arachne—a huge, shiny black widow—suddenly crawls across a game screen. The recreational links scream. A security monitor Carly hadn’t noticed rushes in, swinging its access clearance like a baseball bat.

  The black widow scrambles fast, over and under the gaming tables, across glowing screens, sturdy workstations with pay-for-play booths. Suddenly, the black widow ejects a line of silk from beneath a gaming table and wraps up the crisp white cube of Carly’s telelink.

  “Hey!” she yells, but a sticky thread wraps around her mouth, silencing her shout. You will not gag me. You will not bind me, she commands. She calms herself, clarifies the thought.

  The thread falls away.

  Still she spins and spins, dragged by the line. Speeds through another portal into darkness stinking of rot and offal, and slides, at last, into a slaughterhouse.

  She shakes off wisps of spidersilk. Observes a huge, dark storage space lit by a purple neon sign: GameMind, Inc. Telltale smeary perimeters of illegal telespace. The stench overwhelming.

  Row upon row of disengaged human telelinks hang like butchered bodies, impaled on pointed, black hooks. A couple of links wiggle weakly now and then.

  The Arachne, now a plump orb weaver with fine silver fur and shapely legs, perches on an impaled link. Pauses there, grooms for a moment. Then leaps onto a wall and crawls up to the upper perimeter.

  The spider weaves a large, round packet of silk.

  What the hell is it doing? Carly has seen the Arachne do a lot of strange things, but never this.

  She has no time to wonder about the spider’s latest prank. Sick with apprehension, Carly’s presence in link slides up to the impaled link.

  “Sam Quester?” she whispers. “Dad?”

  The impaled telelink is a slack sack of disengaged coordinates. Alive only as a technicality. How can she know? How can she verify?

&
nbsp; The Arachne drops down on a silk line. It bites the sack, injecting a bit of poison.

  The sack shivers. A feeble voice whispers, “Quester space Ssss…”

  Carly gasps. Despair, pride, doubt, everything she has ever felt crash through her presence in link.

  Dad, I’m fighting back!

  What more does she have to ask her father? What more can she tell him?

  Hope pierces her. Does this mean she can bring her father back from the dead?

  She hastily wraps her expanded memory around her father, gently lifts him off the hook, inputs his coordinates. Downloads him from this evil telespace. The pale blue sidebar stings. Her presence in link swells.

  Blat-blat-blat. An alarm sounds. The darkness becomes alive with huge, crawling shapes. A security guard scuttles beneath the dim lights, a cockroach with clacking jaws, fangs dripping with synthy oil, brown feelers.

  Carly ducks behind an impaled link, which rocks and sways on its hook, moaning. She ducks again, finding a shadow, and stays very still. Fear shivers through her presence in link.

  A tiny claw rakes her link perimeter. Carly whirls. Another security guard looms over her, its apprehending tool hooked in the edge of her telelink. She jerks away, ripping bytes from her side. Another security guard scuttles to her left, yet another to her right.

  The whole slaughterhouse of GameMind, Inc. rustles with ten thousand cockroaches. Crawling on the walls, on the floor, on the ceiling.

  “Arachne!” Carly shouts.

  The silk packet on the ceiling bursts open. Ten thousand spiderlings spring forth, balloon all over the slaughterhouse.

  The spiderlings land, commence spitting lines of silk. They dart and weave, dancing over the back of the security guards. They leap to the ceiling again, ballon down. They spit silk in long sticky lines, sparkling with a million alphanumerics.

  They weave a cyberweb. A living net of newly generated coordinates drops down on the cockroaches of GameMind, Inc.

  The security guards struggle, tangling their legs and their sensors, their apprehending tools. Still the spiderlings of Arachne dance, leap, weave, spinning silk and more silk imbued with intelligence.

  The more the security guards struggle, the tighter the cyberweb holds them, feeding back their kicks and thrusts.

  The cyberweb expands, beautiful and powerful, glittering with spontaneous data.

  Carly thinks, Go.

  The Arachne spins her up and away.

  * * *

  And flings her out of telespace, jack slack against the workstation. The sounds of drums and sitars filter up through the floorboards of the hideout, the crowd down in the YinYang Club claps and hoots, and the door bangs open.

  The digger brandishes his spear, his knife. He shoves in a bot Carly has never seen before. Kicks the door shut.

  “Ouija, no!” she shouts. “Take what you want, but leave me alone! I’ve got to jack back in. I don’t know why I disconnected.” Her fingers fumble. A long abrasion from the armrest angles down her arm, oozing blood.

  “Your journeys to the Unseen are your own concern,” Ouija says. “I care not, genny woman. But I must have my answer before you return to the Unseen. Tell me. Tell me yourself!”

  She’s not afraid of him and his shouts. Her attention turns at once to the strange bot.

  She is not a bot. She is a tiny, pale, gaunt woman clipped into a massive mobilized housing with a standalone database. “Sorry to disturb you,” she says in a low, resonant voice. “I believe you’ve unconsciously jacked out. Really. I used to link, too.”

  Carly stares. “Kay Carlisle?”

  She nods. “Your . . . partner, the old fembot, brought me.”

  “Where’s Pr. Spinner?”

  “I can’t say what will happen.”

  Frustrated, Carly says to Ouija, “Where’s Spinner?”

  The digger shrugs.

  “The old bot says you found my specs for the feedback hookup,” says Carlisle, “that someone stole them, and I’ve got a claim.”

  Carly rubs her forehead. Slumps back in the workstation. “Not just someone, Kay. TeleSystems, Inc.”

  “TeleSys—my God!”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you have any idea how long I’ve lived with one foot in the street?” Kay says. “In hideouts and cold-wired flats? In a goddamn fancy wheelchair I can barely afford and can’t life without? With no medical coverage? Afraid that Data Control was after me for a few puny telespace violations when I was a freelance coder? Do you have any idea what my feedback hook can do?”

  Carly nods, casting off the sick, dizzy feeling. A good feeling slowly rises in her.

  “Is it true, is it really true?” Kay says.”I could have a big claim? My invention was stolen by one of the Big Ten Developers of telespace? You have proof? You really have proof?”

  Carly manages a smile. “I’ve got proof, Kay. Yes. Now you tell me. Is your telelink program still functional?”

  “Of course. I haven’t got a legal access code—”

  “Forget about a legal access code. Tell me something else. In that fancy wheelchair of yours, you’ve got a database?”

  “Oh, yes! How do you think I hack—”

  Carly waves her hand. “Kay Carlisle, I’ve got a second jack in this fancy workstation of mine. I need you now.”

  She turns to Ouija, who stands, grim and baffled, on the edge of rage. “Your answer, Ja, is yes. The Glass Land wants to take you. It knows more about you than you want It to know. The sengines can’t wait to database you. Some say they will respect you as human beings, however primitive. Others won’t give a damn about you. They’ve got uses for human beings like you. For the slaved telelinks you will become. They’re hungry for you, yes, they are. And you know what I say, Ouija?”

  “What say you, genny woman?”

  His eyes connect with hers, and she sees for the last time the sorrow and the fierce pride. Then his inner darkness closes over him, and their connection is gone. His eyes glimmer with fury, calculation, the hunt, the seeking of signs and prophesies.

  “I say they haven’t yet decided how to divvy up your souls,” Carly says. “Every day you wait brings you closer to a copbot raid. Get out of the Glass Land. Get out while you can.”

  Ouija nods. “’Tis the Way, then. My sage did not lie.”

  “My Ja,” Carly says. “I’ve got to go to the Unseen at once. I’m taking Kay Carlisle with me. We’ll be back. It shouldn’t be too long. But I need you to stand guard till we return. Will you do this one last favor for me?”

  “You know I must, for tribal law decrees it. You have given me the answer. Now I am beholden to you.” He frowns. “Again.”

  “Wait for us to return. Then I will release you from all debts of repayment to me.”

  He nods, crouches by the door. His spear held ready over his knees, as though waiting for an enemy.

  * * *

  Kay Carlisle is good, damn good, if a little unsure at first as her presence in telespace careens after Carly’s telelink. Her telelink is superb, a tessellated sphere the size of a beach ball. Not a standard professional image, difficult to maintain, yet good-humored. Not at all what Carly expected from the frail quadriplegic clipped into a Presto-Panansonic prosthesis.

  “That’s some link program,” Carly says. The coordinates of her father’s downloaded link glow brighter blue in her expanded memory sidebar.

  “I specialized in curved applications,” Carlisle says, bouncing gleefully. “That’s how I conceived of the feedback hookup. It works on the principle of the curvature of information. See—”

  “Love to hear it,” Carly snaps, “but another time. Right now, Kay, this is life and death.”

  Carlisle falls silent. Carly glances back to make sure she hasn’t offended the coder and glimpses a smear. A gauzy swathe of encrypted data fluttering over the coder’s shoulder. Damn. A shadow? Or something—someone—following them?

  They zoom so swiftly up the encrypted access path,
Carly can’t take evasive action. In less than a second, they zoom into the sanctum of Cognatus.

  The sengine is waiting. Twitching with anger or anticipation, Carly can’t tell. The jackal pants, tongue lolling, the lizard spits, the bearded man is flushed and glittery-eyed.

  “Ah, the elusive Carlisle space K,” the three voices say. “A lot of entities would like to know where you are.”

  “So here I am,” Kay says, not flinching from the monstrous icon. “What are you going to do about it?”

  Carly hovers, calculating what she can do if this does not go well.

  “I am going to welcome you,” Cognatus says. “Quester space C, you have brought her with you to witness?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Where is the perimeter prober?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah. Indeed.”

  The tone in the icon’s voices implies that the sengine always expected Pr. Spinner to betray her. To abandon her.

  Where are you, Spin?

  Kay Carlisle speaks up, “The old fembot was loyal to Carly Quester to the end.”

  “I am glad to learn that, Carlisle space K,” Cognatus says to the coder. “I am grateful to Quester space C for bringing you to me. We have business, you and I. I can forward your claim to the feedback hookup to a human advocate. There are several of us who want to fight TeleSystems, Inc.”

  “And I too am grateful, Cognatus, for the Way may be shadowy and indistinct.” A strapping old man in golden robes suddenly manifests in the sanctum. An eagle hovers over his head. A Bengal tigress and an African lioness crouch on either side of him. A python coils around his feet.

  “What is this?” Cognatus thunders. “You betrayed me, Quester space C!”

  “No!” Carly says. “I don’t know who he is.”

  “Another sengine! You brought another sengine!” The icon gallops toward her, the jackal foaming at the mouth, lizard snapping, the bearded man shouting curses.

  “Stop, Cognatus!” the old man commands. The big cats leap, surrounding Carly’s presence in link. “She is but a gateway, free of blame. My student, the digger Ouija, stands guard over her locus at this very moment. He wears upon his person an amulet I gave him. ‘Tis a microstation, beautiful to look at. Thus I come and go. And thus I have come for Quester space C. For I, too, want to fight TeleSystems. We are far and few between. We must take care.”