Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  “Holy shit!” said Melchior. “What about backups and subsystems?”

  “So far nothing I’ve been able to access has given me back the missing pieces. At this point, all I know is that something gorked, and you got sent off to the Norse MythOS in the gap.”

  “I thought you didn’t know what the abacus network did,” I said.

  “I didn’t beforehand, but in the postmortem, Fury Cerice managed to crack open a set of control systems and absolutely ancient memory files that gave me some clues. And, more recently . . .”

  Shara looked down at her feet.

  “More recently what?” I asked.

  “More recently, I was able to keep an eye on you via the spinnerette larva that got sent through after you did.” She didn’t sound very proud of herself.

  “Shara!” Melchior looked genuinely shocked. “You’re the one who’s been eavesdropping on us?”

  “Not exactly. It’s more that I’ve been eavesdropping on the portion of Necessity that’s been eavesdropping on you. The spinnerette was broadcasting everything she got back to a system here inside Necessity, one where nobody seems to be home but me. It’s really a mess.”

  “How bad?” I asked.

  “I honestly don’t know.” Shara closed her eyes and rubbed the lids with the heels of her hands.

  “That’s how bad things are. The number of systems I can’t access or can only partially make sense of is longer than the list I can use effectively. More than that, though, I can’t guarantee that any command I give will stick.”

  She dropped her hands to the arms of the chair like someone bracing for a blow and looked me straight in the eyes.

  “I really need your help here, Ravirn. I think Necessity may be going mad.”

  Melchior whistled. “That’d be ugly. What’s your evidence?”

  I nodded. “I thought she’d mostly gone quiet after the incident with Nemesis, that she was only communicating sporadically through the spinnerettes. Has that changed?”

  “Yes and no.” The projection of Shara rose and began to pace. “Messages are still sometimes coming in through spinnerette channels, but often they’re contradictory, and the goddess has completely stopped communicating with me directly. That’s not all. The reason I can’t be sure any changes I make will stick is that someone or possibly several someones keep rewriting my code.”

  “Several someones?” I said.

  “Yes. Let me give you an example: About three hours ago I made a repair to one of the subroutines that tracks remerges of very minor binary world splits, the sort of thing where a woman in Taipei chooses between catching a ride somewhere and walking, but nothing of moment comes of it. Maybe twenty minutes after I made the change, a much better way of programming the patch occurred to me. I went back to implement it and found the whole thing had been reverted to the damaged code I’d cleaned up in the first place.”

  “Are you sure it didn’t just break again?” I asked.

  “Absolutely. There were telltales in the access logs that proved the change was deliberate.” She grimaced. “It gets worse, too. When I made the new fixes, I encrypted the subsector so that no one could get at it but me. After another hour went by, and I decided to go in and do a quick check to see how things were working and to look for signs of anyone trying to revert the thing again.”

  I could see where this was going, or thought I could. “Let me guess; someone cracked the encryption and reverted it again.”

  “I wish it were that simple,” said Shara.

  “What did happen?” asked Melchior.

  “Well, the encryption was gone. You got that part right. But instead of reverting it, whoever cracked the system had made a significant upgrade to my code—something that did everything my repair had done but did it better and cleaner. They also added a string that would automatically send an alert if anyone changed anything.”

  “Send an alert where?” I felt simultaneously fascinated and alarmed.

  “I don’t know. I made a change just to trigger the alert so I could backtrack it. But when I tried to follow the thing, I hit some sort of weird internal firewall or scrambling system. I was just trying to figure out how to crack that when another alert pulse came through from the original subsystem.” She dropped back into the chair and started rubbing her eyes again.

  “And?” Melchior prompted.

  “And someone was trying to revert the code to the broken version.”

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. They were teleprogramming it from somewhere else in the system, and as soon as I tried a traceback, they shut down the operation and went silent, vanished completely as far as I could tell. Scarier still, what stopped me cold didn’t even slow down the thing on the far side of the firewall I’d located earlier, whoever that is. They sent a whole swarm of dataphages down a line of code I couldn’t see. I followed them to another firewall, where they started right in chewing and ripping away at the wall. At that point, whatever was on the other side did the code equivalents of dumping boiling oil on the attackers. For about the next twenty minutes the two sides hacked at each other.”

  “To what result?” I was fascinated.

  “Stalemate, then vanishment.”

  “Vanishment?” said Melchior.

  “Yes. Both sides suddenly gave up and went poof. Gone completely. I couldn’t even find the firewalls again. That’s when I called Cerice up and sent her after you. You’re the only person I know whose brain is sufficiently twisted in the right way to get to the bottom of this.”

  “Gosh, thanks.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “I’ll try.” It was my turn to get up and pace while I tried to get a mental handle on things. “If I’m hearing you right, you’re in a code war with two other entities, both of whom have access to the nitty-gritty of Necessity’s innards. Is there any chance it’s someone cracking in from outside, now that your net connection is reestablished? Discord? Or Athena maybe?”

  “I doubt it,” said Shara. “It doesn’t feel external. It doesn’t even feel like someone else.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

  “I am Necessity now,” said Shara. “Or, at least, my spiritware is running on her hardware. I don’t know if I can explain it to someone whose basic metaphor of being is one of flesh and blood. I’m still me, but for all intents and purposes, my soul is thinking with Necessity’s brain. When I looked at the changes in the code, both the improvement and the reversion, it didn’t feel like I was looking at someone else’s work. It felt like I was looking at something I had done but couldn’t remember doing. Both felt like ideas conceived by the brain of Necessity.”

  “Are you saying that Necessity has developed some sort of split-personality disorder?” asked Melchior.

  “Maybe,” replied Shara. “Or maybe she just keeps changing her mind. Sometimes it’s me. Sometimes it’s someone else.”

  A really nasty possibility occurred to me. “Necessity is the goddess who controls the way reality splits—when a decision will result in a new world and when it won’t. When that happens, a person splits into two parallel people in nearly identical worlds. What if Necessity herself has split here? There’s been enough major trauma to create some truly gargantuan divisions. Is it possible that there’s more than one version of Necessity running around in there with you?

  Struggling for supremacy?”

  Shara’s eyes widened in alarm. “That would certainly explain the way the thing feels. But I really don’t like the implications.”

  I didn’t either. The god war we now called the Titanomachy had resulted from Zeus and his father, Cronus, struggling for the Throne of Heaven in the ultimate family feud. Gods had died, and the whole pantheoverse had changed forever. It was the most catastrophic conflict in the entire history of the MythOS.

  But no matter how bad the war had gotten, there had always been a set of rules that governed the conduct of both sides of the fight. A set of rules desi
gned to preserve the foundations of reality against the worst excess of the immortals. A set of rules imposed and enforced by Necessity. If there was another god war going on now, one inside her mind, there would be no rules and nothing to guarantee the continued survival of the pantheoverse.

  And it was looking more and more like it was my job to fix the problem.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “—not really going to go through with this, are you, Shara?” Cerice demanded as she came through the hole she’d just cut in the walls of the universe.

  I didn’t know what had her so upset, though knowing her as well as I did, I got the distinct impression it was a continuation of an argument that had been running for some time. Probably Shara had been projecting her presence in more than one place simultaneously via the wonders of parallel processing.

  Shara’s image nodded at Cerice, unperturbed by her tone. “He’ll need the access.”

  “I can’t conscience this.” Cerice leaned down over her former familiar. “You know how reckless he can be.”

  Ah, that tone I recognized. “I take it this has something to do with me, then?”

  “Damn right it does,” Cerice snapped over her shoulder, “and I’m not having any.”

  “I don’t recall making you an offer,” I said, shading my tone with bafflement. “That phase of our relationship is long over.”

  Cerice spun and glared at me. “You, shut up!” Will or anger slid her finger and toe claws free of the pocket universe where Furies kept them between vivisections, though she didn’t go beyond the implied threat. “This is between me and Shara.”

  I made a zipping motion across my lips and grinned at her. She didn’t resheathe her claws, but she did turn back to Shara.

  “I won’t do it, and you won’t make me,” said Cerice.

  Shara leaned forward in her chair and rubbed her temples. “Cerice . . .”

  “Don’t wheedle,” said Cerice. “It’s not happening. I flat refuse.”

  “Fine, if that’s how you feel about, let’s make it formal: Cerice, Grant Ravirn Full Access. Please.”

  Melchior caught my eye then, and mouthed, “Ouch.” I nodded silently back. The tone and cadence of Shara’s request perfectly matched the command structure the Fates used when ordering their familiars to perform a spell or other function. The only difference was the substitution of a “please” for the “execute” that made such commands unrefusable. That change was one that Cerice and I had both made in our own interactions with our familiars after our respective discoveries of AI free will.

  For Shara to use it on Cerice under these circumstances amounted to a sharp slap. Not only did it dare Cerice to go against their long relationship of mutual trust, but it firmly underlined the fact that Shara didn’t have to ask. Several seconds ticked past while the request hung between them. Finally, Cerice’s wings slumped.

  “On your head be it.” Cerice raised her right hand and made a tiny slice in the air.

  She reached through into elsewhere and began rummaging around. After a moment, her arm reemerged holding a very familiar-looking piece of equipment. My ruined sword cane, Occam, broken in a duel with the Norse war god, Tyr.

  “Last chance to change your mind,” said Cerice.

  Shara didn’t so much as blink. With a sigh, Cerice twisted the hilt and slid the abbreviated sword free of its wooden scabbard. She knelt and set it on a low coffee table before upending the cane and letting the rest of the blade slide out into her hand. Even broken, it was a beautiful piece of work, catching the light and throwing it back in a thousand directions.

  Hilt and blade had been shaped from a single piece of crystallized chaos, the stuff of Fury claws. It looked like diamond but was a hundred times tougher and more resilient. The blade was really two blades merged the long way and at right angles to form a plus-shaped cross section. The form precluded deep cuts but made for a vicious thrusting weapon. The hilt took the form of a Fury, her fiery wings at full extension—Tisiphone.

  Almost casually, Cerice stabbed the broken end of the blade deep into her thigh. Without so much as a wince, she picked up the hilt shard and did the same. A moment later she pulled both free, fitting the now-bloody ends together along the line of the break. For a count of perhaps ten, nothing happened. Then there came a flash as hot and bright as a magnesium flare going off at close quarters. Reflex closed my eyes.

  When I opened them again, Cerice stood above me, a renewed and transformed Occam extended toward me hilt first. The hilt appeared to be made from ruby now rather than diamond, though the blade remained clear and white. I rose and took my sword back, snapping the blade through a quick series of thrusts and parries. I’d forgotten how good it felt in my hand, even with my recent injury—light and sweet and perfectly balanced.

  With a smile, I swept it up into a fencer’s salute and gave Cerice a bow. “Thank you, fair lady.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she replied, her voice sour. “Really don’t mention it. I don’t want to have to think about you running loose with that.”

  I shrugged and sheathed the blade. “Why so touchy? It’s not like I didn’t have all kinds of opportunities to make mischief with it back before it got broken.”

  Cerice rolled her eyes. “(A) neither you nor Necessity was my problem then. And (B) it had a great deal less power in that earlier incarnation.” She glanced briefly over her shoulder at Shara.

  “May I go now?”

  “Anytime,” said Shara, and I could hear real pain in the little goblin’s voice. “I would no more constrain or compel you now that our positions are reversed than you ever did me.”

  “Constraint and compulsion come in many forms, Shara. Something I understand much better now than I did when our bonds to one another ran the other way. When I accepted these”—she shivered her wings ever so slightly—“I accepted the implied fetters that come with them, and all the courtesy in the world can’t change that.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Shara.

  “I know,” said Cerice. “So am I. But this is the way it has to be. Especially when the others are considered.” Though Shara couldn’t see them from where she sat, I noted unshed tears in Cerice’s eyes. “I’m sorry, too.”

  Then she ripped a hole in the world and stepped through into another place.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” Shara said, once Cerice had gone. “I didn’t think she’d bring the argument through when she joined us here.”

  I kept silent. Cerice had never been the sort to let a little thing like propriety get in the way of winning a point, but I felt too bad for both of them to mention it.

  “What did she mean by that?” I asked.

  “By what?” replied Shara.

  “Her comment about the ‘others.’ For that matter, I’d like to hear more about what’s been done to my sword.” I found the changed color—so like crystallized blood—unsettling.

  “The two are related actually,” said Shara. “Do you remember my mentioning that I couldn’t be sure about my commands sticking? Well, that goes beyond programming. I’m having problems with the other Furies. Neither Alecto nor Megaera acknowledges my authority as a proxy for Necessity. In fact, since I brought Cerice on board, they’ll hardly even speak to me.”

  “I don’t get it.” Melchior frowned. “I thought the Furies more or less had to obey direct orders from Necessity and that you were in a position to give them.”

  “They do, and I could force the issue if I dared to access the part of the system that holds the control channel for the Furies. But after what happened the day you two got sent off to the Norse MythOS, I’ve kept pretty much all of the entry points to critical control subsystems locked down hard. Since my spiritware is running primarily on the security network, I can be fairly certain that will prevent any of the other entities running around inside Necessity from getting access. The problem is that if I lower the barriers even a little bit, say enough to allow me access . . .”

  “Everybody else migh
t get in, too,” I said. “But what’s all that got to do with Occam?”

  “First,” said Shara, “if you’re really going to help, you need access to everything, even places I currently can’t reach. Second, when you use that access, you run a significant risk of pissing off Megaera and Alecto.”

  “So, what? Are you trying to tell me my sword is now some kind of skeleton key for all of reality? And a Fury-slayer to boot?” I was joking when I said it, but Shara just nodded. I sat back down. Hard. “You’re kidding, right? You wouldn’t really just hand someone of my reputation that kind of power.”

  Shara nodded. “And no strings attached. I can’t make you as physically strong or fast as a Fury, nor give you any other special powers without accessing systems I don’t dare touch. But the real Necessity left me half a loophole in the shape of your sword, and Tisiphone’s absence opened that loophole the rest of the way by giving me a Fury willing to trust me. Occam was designed to give limited access to the admin powers of the Furies and as a weapon that could do real damage to Nemesis.”