Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  As usual, Melchior had configured his inner cyberspace in the manner of an extremely expensive lawyer’s office, with indigo pebbled-leather walls and barrister’s book-cases. A brass spiral staircase led upward to the places where Melchior kept his inner self, while a large irregular gateway opened onto the broader world of the net.

  I turned toward the latter, took a long step, and almost fell right through it when my knees went all soft and spongy, and I collapsed. Before I could hit the floor, Melchior was there to catch me with arms grown suddenly long and strong. He’d taken on a shape that made me think he’d played one too many Japanese role-playing games. Something like a half goblin, half serpent, only the latter half had feathers and wings—sort of Quetzalcoatl goes Naga, only with Melchior stuck on top. A horrible mishmash in any case.

  I’d have told him so, too, if I could have gotten my lips to work right, but they felt like I’d just come from seeing a dentist who really needed to use up an oversupply of Novocain before it expired.

  “Gobujuhu,” I said—meaning, “I feel a little funky.”

  “Sure thing, Boss. Let me just . . .” His expression went abstract for split second. Then he set me on a blue leather couch that hadn’t been there when I started my fall. “What’s wrong with y—

  Oh, that’s totally whacked!”

  “Bugububu?” I asked—meaning, “What are you talking about?”

  Great, now I knew how the spinnerette felt. But maybe Melchior understood what I meant, because a moment later he held something very strange up for my inspection. It looked like nothing so much as one of those self-coiling cables that connect the handset of a landline phone to its base, one made from sterling silver that someone had carefully crafted and tatted into halfshredded Irish lace.

  “Gubgubbugu?”—meaning, “What the hell is that?” “. . . Bogub.”— “ . . . Oh, shit.”

  It was the thread of my life, the silver cord that tied the physical body I’d left with a dagger stabbed through its hand to my spiritual projection within the machine. It wasn’t supposed to look like that, not even a little bit. The color was okay, but the coiling and the lace effect were most emphatically nonstandard developments. No wonder I felt like crap.

  “I think I’d better get you back to your body, ASAP, or possibly even sooner.” Melchior picked me up again, and the world blurred and went away for a little while.

  When it came back, I was lying on my back on the hard floor of the computer room with a roll of static-free bubble wrap pillowing my head. It was actually less uncomfortable than it sounded, and not the first time I’d woken up in similar circumstances. Good pillow material being notably lacking in most computer rooms, you made do with what you could find. Melchior was seated goblin fashion on a banged-up and backless old office chair a few feet from me, a worried frown twisting his face.

  I said, “Urgl,” or something very like it.

  Melchior look up at me and faked a smile. “Good to have you back.”

  “Wha’ hoppen?” At least this time it came out close to what I wanted to say.

  “***’** ******,” said the spinnerette.

  “I’ve got a theory,” replied Melchior. “But let me ask you a question first. How do you feel?”

  “Like I got hit by a bus for the second time in a week. What’s your theory?”

  “That the first bus came back for another pass.”

  “Okay, Mel, you’ve lost me.”

  “No, you lost you, when you pulled that boneheaded wave-function escape trick a few days back. I don’t think I ever told you why I dragged you off to Persephone. Now I’m thinking I should have made a point of it and of trying to keep you out of the game a little longer.”

  “I don’t get it.” I shook my head on the improvised pillow—it took a lot more effort than it should have.

  “You were in a seriously bad way, my friend. Next thing to dead, really. Way beyond my powers to fix. I could barely find a pulse, Fenris said you smelled like something that ought to be buried, and Haemun couldn’t read anything off you about what you wanted or needed. That last is the one that really scared me. So I decided to take you to Persephone because she was the only one I could think of who I could trust and who might be powerful enough to do anything for you.”

  “Sounds ugly.”

  “It was. Persephone barely managed to pull you back from the brink. She said you’d done a pretty good job of scrambling your soul, but not to worry about it because it would all sort itself out in time.”

  “And you’re thinking that’s why my cord looked like it did.”

  “Uh-huh. That, and that I should have told you the whole thing sooner. But you seemed to be doing so well, and I didn’t want to bum you out with scary might-havebeens. Oh, and on top of all the other reasons, I know risk-taking is the Raven’s middle name, and I didn’t want to put any more temptation in your power’s way than necessary. I’m sorry, Boss.”

  “No worries, Mel. I can’t see how it would have changed anything I’ve done over the last couple of days, and I’d probably have made the same decision in your place. This does, however, leave us with one major problem.”

  “Necessity’s broken, and so is the guy who’s supposed to fix her?”

  “Yeah. If I can’t leave my body behind and enter cyberspace, that rather drastically limits our options.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Some computer demigod I was. With the survival of the entire multiverse resting on my divine hacking skills, I’d just run face-first into the limits of my powers. It didn’t help that I’d gotten to this place by making a really stupid decision and trying to use god-level magic that I didn’t understand.

  “*** *** **** ***** ** *** ***** *** **** ***** *** ********?” The spinnerette had climbed up onto my chest and was now glaring at me disgustedly from a few inches. “**** ****

  ** ****-*** ****** *** * ***** *** ***?”

  I couldn’t understand a word she was saying, but the tone didn’t leave much doubt that I was being chewed out.

  “She doesn’t sound very happy with you, Boss.” Melchior hopped down from his chair and came over to kneel beside me. “What do you think she wants?”

  “*** *** *** ****-*** **** ** **** **** *** ***-** *** *** ** ********!” She pointed first to me, then to Melchior, then raised her fist in a “charge” gesture.

  “I think she wants us to get off our butts and make with the fixing of Necessity.”

  I lifted my head so I could get a better look at the little spider-centaur. It didn’t take as much effort as I expected—apparently I wasn’t in full-on relapse mode. She shook her head sadly and put her hands on her hips in a classic “What am I going to do with you?” sort of way.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m fresh out of both ideas and motivation. If you’ve got some way to get me inside the system that doesn’t involve my having to rely on a slightly shredded silver cord, I’m all for it, but if you do, it’ll be news to—” Wait a second.

  “Boss?” Melchior looked alarmed.

  I shushed him with a waving hand—there was something at the edge of memory, something important. What was it . . . There!

  Back when I’d been dueling with Nemesis but before I’d figured out why she had come after me, I cracked my way into the Fate servers as part of my efforts to find out what was going on. Inside, I’d run into Tisiphone, Cerice, Nemesis, the original Necessity spinnerette, and a webtroll named Asalka. It was a rock-the-walls kind of party right up until the authorities arrived ready to break heads.

  They’d have killed me then if Tisiphone hadn’t swept me up and carried me off to parts elsewhere. On some levels it was just another exciting day in the life of the multiverse’s only Fate/Slapstick hybrid child. On one, however, it was a radical departure from everything I knew about life in the net. You see, Tisiphone had moved me and Melchior from our location within the Fate servers, into chaos, then back into a different part of the net without benefit of traversing the parts of the
mweb that lay between points A and B. Normally that would have cut both his and my threads and ended a beautiful partnership. It hadn’t, though I still didn’t understand why.

  Since then I hadn’t thought much about it because I’d never really expected anyone would ever be crazy enough to make me a junior Fury. But now that Shara had, the memory suggested that maybe there was a way around my current problem—one that involved a different sort of entry into the world of the electronic. As there’s never any time like the present, I forced myself upright. The sudden movement knocked the spinnerette for a loop and made my ears ring, but I really didn’t care.

  “Melchior, can you give me a playback of the information space right before Necessity’s security tried to burn your brain out?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I’ll explain in a bit if I’m right.” My idea was three kinds of crazy, especially considering the results of my last attempt at using magic I didn’t understand, and I didn’t want to have to argue it out with him.

  “All right.” He flickered into laptop shape, his screen open and facing me, and started running the data stream again.

  “Pause there,” I said, as a sudden emergence of a patch of crystalline order in the turbulent flow signaled the advent of the security algorithm that had attacked Melchior. “Can you switch me over to a graphical representation?”

  Of course, though it won’t look as it would if you were in the space with me.

  I nodded. We’d never done anything quite like this before, since normally I would have just jacked in and looked around for myself. As a result, I got a crash course on the differences in our perceptions.

  Melchior experienced the inner workings of the net in a radically different manner from the way I did. Much as a fish’s experience of water differed from a scuba diver’s. It was more than just the native/visitor dichotomy, though that was part of it. We had a fundamental difference in species outlook rooted in things like sensory differentiation and our wildly divergent processing speeds. Melchior didn’t experience net space as a series of real-world metaphors as I did. For him, net space was its very own special kind of real world.

  All of which meant that the first images he ran for me looked awfully strange. More like a picture of the inside of a cat as seen through a fish-eye lens than anything I would have expected to encounter in person. The proportions were off from what they would have been for me because we placed different emphasis on different parts of the cyberuniverse. The colors didn’t match my preconceptions because when it came to looking at data, Melchior could see about a zillion more gradations than I could—infra-zero and ultra-one, or something like that. Even the basic environment looked different from the way I’d have seen it—where I might have seen hard, angular, architectural kinds of spaces, Mel’s view looked organic and fractal and dynamically alive.

  “Okay,” I said. “Good start. Now can you edit out the time-conditional stuff? I want to know what the address looks like, not the traffic out front.”

  He did so, and we moved on to make other changes. Slowly, carefully, with a lot of stops and starts, I got him to shift the picture from his view into something more like mine. I tried to keep all the details—I very much wanted the net space to remain the sort of real space it was for him—but I needed to adjust the proportioning and other elements to make it at least borderline comprehensible for me. Finally, we had something I thought I could work with.

  “I think that’ll do it.” I fixed the picture firmly in my mind, then negotiated the transition from sitting to standing, discovering in the process that I felt much better than I had even a few minutes earlier.

  “Do what, exactly?” Melchior shifted back to goblin form and gave me a suspicious look.

  “This.” I summoned up my frustration at getting bounced out of the net and with it my sword.

  “No tatty silver cord is keeping me out of my home ground.” I made an angry cut in the stuff of reality, threw a fencing salute to Melchior, and stepped through the gap.

  “What the—” began Melchior. Then, “Wait for me, you idiot!”

  I barely heard him. I had passed from the world of the physical into the electronic dreamtime of the net, and I had done so within the heart of the greatest processing system ever devised—the world-computer that ran Necessity, the goddess in operating-system shape. All around me churned a wild, fluid datascape. It looked sort of like the break point in Hanalei Bay might with a hurricane rolling in—giant waves and cascades of foam and spray going every which way. Except you’d have to replace the gray of the water with a complete rainbow palette of liquid light, and the clouds, too.

  Mad and magnificent and potentially deadly. Especially without a surfboard.

  I am a child of the digital age. As far back as I can remember, there have been computers, and they have fascinated me. The earliest scar on my athame hand comes from when I was five and Lachesis took me for my first trip into the marvelous magical world of the mweb. I was enraptured. My soul has surfed the data flows so long and so deeply that they have written themselves into my sense of self.

  I even occasionally dream in binary. Not as a programmer speaking the foreign language of machines, but rather as a pseudomachine myself. In my dreams, I am every bit as much a creature of the net as is Melchior. Then I wake, and it all fades away. I can ride the ones and zeros but never move freely among them. Always there is the silver cord and the subconscious awareness of the body I’ve left behind—its inputs continuing to feed into my meat-mind, regardless of what my soul-self experiences. Until now, that was.

  By cutting a magical portal in the wall of the world and taking my whole self through it into cyberspace, I had finally achieved a lifelong ambition. I’d never felt more lost.

  Turns out there were big advantages to entering the net the way I normally did. (1) An anchor. My silver cord gave me a sense of place and a method for finding my way home. (2) Versatility. When I traveled through the net in soul form, the only thing keeping me in any one shape or physical relationship to the datascape was personal choice. Here I was drowning in information. I had just decided to try to cut my way back out of the no-longer-so-wonderful world of data, when Melchior arrived.

  “Idiot,” he said, as he fished me out of the wild turbulence and set me on the front thwart of a big oceangoing canoe.

  Then he went back to paddling. The weirdest thing about the transition was that in the very instant I left the data sea, I felt dry again. Of course, I’d never actually been wet, since the whole thing was more of a metaphor than any kind of reality—a way for senses adapted to an entirely different sort of environment to cope with the utterly alien landscape of the datasphere—but, instantly, dry really felt wrong.

  “Where’d you find this thing?” I patted the nearest scaly gunwale. Scaly?

  “I spun it out of moonbeams and cobwebs. Where’d you think I found it?” Melchior replied, with a definite “you moron” undertone. Then he sighed and shook his head. “I coded it. You don’t really think I’d be fool enough to physically follow you through a gate into electronic faerie when I had the option of entering the normal way and retaining all of my powers over the medium, do you?”

  That was when I realized that Melchior had once again taken a Nagaesque shape, with his lower body gone all snakelike. In this case, a very flat sort of snake, as he had actually contorted his lower half to form the boat in which I sat. I grinned and started to look around. Now that the data hurricane no longer posed an immediate risk of drowning for me, the stormy sea of light had an eerie sort of beauty to it.

  “Actually, that’s exactly what I thought you’d done,” I said as I slowly rotated in my seat. “I should have known better. I’m glad you’re less of an idiot than I am.”

  “That really doesn’t take a lot of effort. Well, except in the anticipation. You know, figuring out the dumb thing you’re going to do before you do it, so that I have time to take mitigating action. You completely surprised me with this one, or
I’d have gotten here sooner. I’m duly impressed.”

  “Thanks, little buddy.”

  “Hey, what are familiars for if not to pull their lords and masters out of the drink when a piece of magic goes wrong?”

  “I always thought you were there to fetch the beer and do the dishes.”

  “I could always throw you back . . .” He tilted his canoe-self to one side, tipping me toward the edge.

  “Sorry.” I raised my hands in mock-surrender. “I ought to remember that making fun of the guy steering the boat is always a bad idea. What do you think is causing all this turbulence? I’ve never seen a bigger data storm.”

  “I don’t think it’s possible for there to be a bigger one,” said Melchior. “No other system in the whole multiverse would be large enough to contain it. As to causes . . .” The corners of his mouth turned down, and his eyes softened sadly. “I think this is the result of a sort of madness, the mind of Necessity at war with itself.”