Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  “And Shara . . .”

  “Is thinking with this.” He swept his arm in a wide circle that took in the rainbow sea of data and the churning light clouds above. “Or worse, she’s lost in it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “Is there any way we can be sure that the Shara we talked to was the real her?”

  “Why are you asking me? All that electronic-handshake, security-verification protocol, webgoblin soulgaze stuff is your department.”

  He looked sheepish. “Normally, yes. But normally we’d either have had some kind of formal message protocol exchange before the meeting happened or snuck off for some personal electronic . . . handshaking and goblin gossip afterward.”

  I smiled at his slight hesitation before the word handshaking but chose not to tease him about it for mercy’s sake. Instead, I said, “But this time, Cerice made the arrangements beforehand, and there was no after, so none of that happened.”

  “Exactly.” Melchior nodded. “It didn’t even seem strange to me under the circumstances. Since you and Nemesis fried most of Necessity’s remaining higher-order functions, Shara hasn’t had much time to go back to her body, and I’ve been pretty careful not to do or say anything that might make her feel bad about it. But that also means I’ve got no way of knowing beyond her actions whether we’re talking to the real Shara or not. And her actions are mighty suspi . . . Oh shit.”

  I was about to ask him what that last bit was supposed to mean when I realized that he’d stopped looking at me and started looking past me. I pivoted on the thwart in time to see a whole series of shark-toothed, green dogs’ heads rise out of the water in front of the boat, each mounted on a long serpentine neck.

  “Tell me that’s not Scylla,” I said.

  “Well, it’s sure as hell not Charybdis,” replied Melchior. “Though, technically, you’re probably right. It’s not the physical Scylla, just Necessity’s very own internal electronic version of same.”

  He canted his head to one side. “On the other hand, since Necessity is the goddess that runs everything, and all the major powers are defined and delimited by her internal files, you could make a pretty convincing argument that this is the real or Platonic ideal of Scylla and that the flesh-and-blood version is just the shadow on the cave wall. In either case, that is the thing that slagged my connection earlier—it just opened its mouth and out came a firebolt that went straight through the server and into the real-world cable.”

  The monster slid farther out of the data sea, exposing a deep, scaly chest at the junction of six snaky necks.

  “Mel, you’re babbling,” I said over my shoulder since I didn’t dare take my eye off eScylla, or whatever it ought to be called.

  “Yep, terror will do that to a guy. Babbling, that is.”

  “You did okay with this thing last time, or you wouldn’t be here. Why are you so worked up now?”

  “Because last time I didn’t have the complete version of you along for the ride. Alone, I could just go with the sprinting-for-the-exits strategy and not worry about anything but putting one metaphorical foot in front of the other as quick as ever I could. I can’t do that now without leaving you behind.”

  “Ooh, good point.” And one I hadn’t thought of despite being the one who was going to be responsible for getting us both cooked if I couldn’t come up with an exit strategy here sometime real soon. “Any thoughts on how to solve that problem?”

  “Nope, just the babbling. I think this one’s yours.”

  “Got it,” I replied. “Good to know. How about this?” I held up my sword hand and willed Occam to appear. Nothing.

  Damn. Terror ? the anger necessary to summon my Fury blade. Not a surprise, really, but a guy can dream. The sea monster leaned down closer, eyeing my raised hand in a way that I found quite alarming. Unfortunately, my fight-or-flight reflex had opted for the better part of valor, at least for the moment. Wouldn’t you know it? Stupid adrenal gland, always calling the wrong shots, and, ooh, hey. Work that!

  I growled at my own stupid reflexes some more, and, presto chango, there was my sword. Of course, when I held it up in front of the eScylla, it looked more like something you’d use to hold olives in a drink than a monster-slayer. But that was okay. I wasn’t planning on applying blade to monster, just to the empty space between us. When I tried, I was reminded that I needed more than terror to make the gates work, too. That and . . . Now what was the thing doing?

  It came in closer, but shut all six mouths as it did so. Closer still. It seemed to want a look at Occam. One nose leaned down close enough for me to touch it and sniffed at the blade. Then it snorted and, finally, sneezed hard enough to knock me over backwards into the bottom of the canoe.

  Mel rolled his eyes. “Good one, Boss. That’ll show it. By the way, is there a reason you’re not cutting us an escape hatch?” eScylla’s nearest head retreated back toward the others and barked something rather seal-like. Then they all turned inward and started barking at one another, forming a sort of committee of one, complete with what sounded like long-standing feuds and alliances.

  “Actually, yes,” I said to Mel. “I’m curious. Oh, and I think I just figured out how this turns out.”

  I have to admit that fear had given way to fascination not long after the thing sneezed. After a lot of deliberation, all six heads turned my way again, nodded once, then sank beneath the data sea.

  “I don’t get it,” said Mel. “What was that all about?”

  I laughed. It was kind of nice to be a jump ahead of my familiar for a change.

  “That was the official security-system determination that I am the funniest-looking Fury that ever lived and thus have the full run of the place.”

  “Ohhhh.” Melchior nodded and smiled. “That would explain things. And, frankly, I have to agree. You are one funny-looking Fury. The rest of them are all kinds of hot, and you’re more—

  how should I put this?”

  “Carefully, Mel, very carefully. Your job security is hanging by a thread here.”

  “Said the man in the very tippy canoe.” Melchior lurched and lowered one side of the canoe, and I almost went back into the water.

  “Okay, point, set, match. The familiar wins this round, and I am forced to admit that I am not a fabulous Fury babe.”

  Then we both broke out giggling. There is something about not having to fight a giant angry sea monster that makes you giddy. Once I’d recovered what little dignity I owned, I climbed back up onto the thwart.

  “You know something, Mel. I’m getting really tired of this whole saving-the-world gig. Honestly, if the way back to Tisiphone didn’t lead through Necessity, I’d vote for scrapping the whole project and heading for greener pastures right now. I’m really not the Hercules or Achilles type.”

  “You know, that’s what all the girls say, too. He’s no Hercules, nor even a Perseus. I think it’s the hacker physique. You really ought to work out more.”

  “Hey, this deathly pallor takes a lot of effort to maintain in the face of my surfer-lifestyle choices. Do you know how much sunblock I go through?”

  “The pallid paladin?” asked Melchior with a grin.

  “Something like that.” I grinned back, then looked around and sighed. “Problem is, none of this gets us any closer to the point where I hand Necessity’s headaches back to Necessity.”

  I looked out over the endless, storm-tossed sea of light again and felt utterly overwhelmed. The scale was beyond anything I’d ever tried to deal with before. Both in terms of the underlying system and the problem. It made the Fate Core and [http://Hades.net] Hades.net look like pocket calculators. For a brief time in the Norse MythOS I’d become all-knowing in the Odin mode, and it had very nearly destroyed me because I didn’t have the divine capacity of a true god. No matter how much I might need to, I simply couldn’t hold a system this large in my head.

  “I hope you have some ideas, Mel. Because this is way too much for me. I don’t even know
where to begin.”

  “We could start by getting out of the primary database and into one of the subsystems.”

  “Good idea—break the problem down into manageable chunks. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Because you’re really just the flashy front man for Melchior Inc.?”

  “Hey, if that’s true, I’m going to take a nap. You can wake me up when there’s a massive victory I can take credit for.” Melchior just looked at me. “Right. What was I thinking? Did you have a specific subsystem in mind? Or is that my department?”

  “Actually, I might,” he replied. “Do you remember what Shara said about the subroutine for minor world-remerges?”

  “That there was some kind of internal edit war going on? Yeah. That’s a great idea, Mel. Make it so.”

  He rolled his eyes, but then shifted his shape, becoming the feathered flying Meltzalcoatl once again. This resulted in my splashing down in the data but only very briefly—as he scooped me out with the end of his tail a moment later. The feathers tickled.

  As we flew along, I started to wonder about the state of my being within the datascape and the nature of the gate that had brought me here. I couldn’t really be the physical me I was in the waking world—that just wouldn’t work. Yet I felt very much me and not at all as I did when I entered cyberspace in soul form.

  So, given phenomenal godly power, how would I have arranged my arrival in the world of the electronic? What would I have made of me? A sort of ensouled avatar? A self-aware subroutine?

  A simulation? A virtual machine running a miniature Ravirn OS?

  It was a hell of a spellcoding problem, and it occupied me pretty completely for the next ten minutes or so of subjective time while Mel negotiated both the physical distance from system to subsystem and all of the security checkpoints. I still didn’t have an answer at the point when Mel set us down amidst a sort of data river delta or coastal swamp where the “water” once again glowed in all the shades of the rainbow as it meandered toward the data sea we’d just left. I did feel that I was starting to get a better handle on the minimum programming conditions.

  “What do you think?” Melchior asked me a few minutes later.

  I jerked my attention back from staring out over the tangled threads of the data channels and realized I hadn’t spoken since we landed.

  “Sorry, Mel. Not what I’m supposed to be thinking; that’s for certain. I’ve been pondering the nature of being.”

  He canted his head to the side and frowned puzzledly. “Far be it from me to criticize, Boss, but this seems an awfully odd time to go all existential.”

  “Not like that. In terms of cyberspace and the Fury gates.” I quickly outlined the issue as I saw it.

  By the time I finished, he was pinching his lips together with his right hand and looking very thoughtful. “That is a poser. I . . .” He looked suddenly down, and my eyes followed.

  What had been a sort of dry hummock of stable memory amidst the more active—read that as

  “liquid”—data flows around it had vanished, leaving us knee-deep in a brightly colored cascade of ones and zeros. Well, knee-deep for me anyway—Melchior’s current shape not having knees and all. I looked out over the area I’d been idly overlooking before. Everything had changed: Colors. Rates of data transfer. Stable memory vs. active rewriting. Everything. And, all in an instant.

  “That has to be a revert,” I said. “One of the players simply restoring the old code they’d written for this space sometime in the past.”

  Melchior nodded. “I wonder how long it will last.”

  I decided to drop the nature-of-existence question for a little while and stomp around in the delta. Again, that really wasn’t what it was at all, but that was how my meatspaceevolved brain wanted to deal with the situation. Perhaps the strangest consequence of that was that after half an hour of splashing through what basically looked and felt like a swamp, I was dry and clean, and didn’t smell any worse than I usually do. I sometimes wonder if that’s part of why smells have never been all that important to me—cyberspace tended to skip them entirely.

  That was when Melchior called me back to the place where I’d left him. Since I’d been at it long enough to get a rough feel for the underlying software architecture responsible for the shape of the information being manipulated, I headed back his way.

  “What do you need?” I asked as I got closer.

  “Can you try an experiment for me?”

  “It depends. Is this like the time you wanted me to see how many drinks it took before I was no longer able to pat my head and rub my belly at the same time?”

  Mel shrugged. “This will probably hurt more, but not for nearly as long.”

  “Have I ever mentioned that you’d make a terrible salesman?” I asked.

  “Once or twice. Is it my fault that I’m a realist in a world filled with foolish optimists? I certainly don’t think so. I blame my creator.”

  “I just built you, my cynical little friend. Core design specs are the fault of Fate Inc. with a couple of little industrial sabotagesque tweaks provided by Mademoiselle Discord.”

  “I seem to remember from looking at the plans that (A) you put some of your own tweaks in the original mix, and (B) the current version of moi is even more of a Ravirn mod-job than the first iteration. But none of that answers my question about the experiment. What I want is for you to do that shapechanging voodoo that you do so well.”

  “I don’t see what that would . . . Oh. This is about the nature of my current being in cyberspace. Very clever. I’ll try the otter.”

  I reached inward, searching for the place where blood and chaos merged. Found it. Drew the shadow of the Raven over me. And twisted . . .

  “There you go, and . . . Hey, that didn’t hurt one little bit,” I said, after I finished the transition.

  “Instant otter, just add magic and mix. Some restrictions and blackout dates may apply. Not responsible for lost or stolen organs. I feel great!”

  Then I flopped on my back and giggled. That lasted right up until the software rewrote itself around us again, putting me high on a dry bank. Deep instincts rolled me onto my belly, and I slid down into the pseudowater. For the next several minutes I paddled around and chortled like a maniac. There’s something about being an otter that completely dislocates my alreadycompromised sense of propriety.

  Finally, I climbed back up to Melchior and shifted again, becoming a giant Raven. Again, no pain. So, why stop there? I drew a new picture of myself in my mind and poured myself into it, becoming a gigantic coyote. I stayed there just long enough to let out one long, wild howl of delight, then tried to add a pair of wings to the package. When I had no luck, I returned to my natural shape and told Melchior about the wings.

  “So, you’re more plastic than you are in the real world but perhaps only within a set of naturalized bonds. Interesting. I—Damn it, there it goes again.” The virtual world reverted to the second configuration we’d encountered.

  Melchior rubbed his temples. “That’s starting to give me such a headache. The software turbulence is very hard on my psyche.”

  “Imagine how hard it must be on the worlds that are governed by this remerge system . . . Oh, Mel.” For the first time, the fundamental horror of that idea really sank in.

  This wasn’t just some software snafu happening on the servers of a company selling widgets to people who didn’t really need them. This was Necessity, and the edit wars were happening in a subroutine that literally rewrote the futures of entire worlds.

  One minute a minor decision creates two probable worlds. Each is peopled by an entire version of the human race almost but not quite identical to the other. In the next minute, the two become one again, remerging the infinitesimally different versions of those people. But as potentially scary as that picture is, it’s only half the story.

  Because that’s what happens when things work right. What happens with Necessity broken? Do those same worlds simply fall off the
net and go blithely along in their own pocket universes?

  Maybe. Sometimes. But sometimes, they simply evaporate into chaos, taking every last living thing with them.

  Worse, this was only one of Necessity’s control systems, and a minor one at that, governing the least of decisions. Our entire MythOS was currently under the reign of a goddess who had come unglued. Nothing and no one was safe from the effects of that. Even if I were to get the whole thing fixed and running tomorrow, uncounted—no, un-countable lives would already have been affected in the time between now and then. Real lives belonging to real people that might have been saved or bettered if I’d acted more quickly would be irreparably changed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Boss, are you all right? You look like you just ran face-first through a plate-glass window.”