Codespell (7 page)
Authors: Kelly Mccullough
Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction
“What happened?” he whispered, as I set him on a chair near the fountain.
“Dairn crashed you.” I flopped down across from him. “Pretty solidly, too.”
“How in Hades’ name did he manage that?”
“The same way he canceled that spell you tried to nail him with right before Tisiphone showed up.” I whistled a little bit of binary nonsense and waggled my fingers. “Some kind of high-powered programming voodoo.”
“That’s crazy talk,” said Melchior, though he didn’t sound like he doubted me. “The last time we ran into Dairn, he didn’t even own a real computer, just poor little Kira. Where the hell did he learn those kinds of leet skillz? And how’d he do it so quickly?”
“Poor little Kira?” I lifted my eyebrows.
Kira was a webpixie/PDA and tough as Dionysus’s liver. She might only stand six inches tall, but she carried around six tons of attitude. Melchior had a soft spot for her.
He blushed but was saved from responding by the arrival of Haemun with a tray holding my drink, a couple of AA batteries, and a variety of snacks. In his free hand he held a pair of board shorts and a matching aloha shirt. They were technically in my colors—black penguins on black surf-boards riding big waves in an emerald sea—but the sheer ugliness of the set looked more like something that might have come out of his closet. Of course, he didn’t wear pants . . . and they were clean and dry, and I wasn’t. So I didn’t complain.
Mel tucked the AAs into his cheeks while I pulled off my filthy party gear and changed. For a little while after that we said nothing. I just sipped my drink, and Mel did the same with his direct current.
Finally, he removed the batteries and set them on the tray. “What happened after I checked out?”
I told him about the faerie ring, and he whistled in appreciation. “Nice trick, very nice.”
I grinned. “That sounds an awful lot like praise, Mel. Are you sure you’re not feverish?”
“Don’t let it go to your head. It’s never been your competence I’ve worried about. It’s your sanity and your sense of self-preservation. That and your near-suicidal need to make jokes at the worst possible time. I may have to excuse that one from here on out though; with Thalia as your grandmother it’s probably in your blood. Stupid, but in your blood.”
“Ah, there’s the Melchior I’m used to. But you’re right. It was a nice trick. Even I thought so. I guess it proves that anything that doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger. I’d never have come up with it if I hadn’t had the last faerie ring I built blow up in my face.”
It was only the second one I’d ever made, and things had not gone at all according to plan. I’d put a lot of work and power into my first ring and had expected to do the same with the second, but no. Quite the contrary really. I’d barely begun when the thing had ignited, another side effect of the Raven transformation and my greater affinity for chaos.
Melchior rolled his eyes and made like he was about to say something, then paused. His expression went abstract in the way it always did when he received an incoming call over the mweb. Except that wasn’t possible at Raven House. I felt a twinge in the depths of my stomach.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said.
“I’ve got new mail?”
He nodded. “It’s a request for Vtp from Cerice.”
“How is she managing that?” I asked.
“It’s via Taured.”
“Taured?” The name didn’t ring a bell.
"Clotho’s new webtroll.” Mel’s voice came out flat and cold.
“Oh.” That explained it.
Webtrolls are to Mel what he is to a PDA/pixie like Kira. Heavy-duty supercomputers, webtrolls draw their energy directly from the Primal Chaos. In fact, that’s a big part of their purpose—transforming the raw stuff of chaos into the tame magic that flows through the mweb. The Fates use them to maintain and power the mweb in concert with the master servers and software supplied by Necessity. Their nature allows them to do all sorts of things impossible for a webgoblin like Mel, like connecting to places that aren’t attached to the mweb by making a running calculation of the relative locations of the two DecLoci.
“What happened to Boxer, her old . . .”
Melchior looked away. The Fates were very hard on their hardware, and none too keen on the rights of the AI. It was one of the biggest reasons Cerice had resigned from Clotho’s service, bigger even than her relationship with me.
“How could Cerice go back there?” asked Melchior. “Even for a couple of days?”
“I don’t know. You’d better put her through. Maybe that way we’ll find out.”
Melchior nodded, and I spoke the formal request, “Melchior, Vlink; [email protected] to [email protected]. Please.”
His eyes and mouth shot wide, and light poured out, three beams, blue, red, and green. They met at a point a few feet in front of his face and formed a misty globe of gold that quickly cleared to reveal a three-dimensional image of Cerice. I smiled at her, but the twinge in my belly had returned. She didn’t look very happy.
“Hello, Cerice. I don’t suppose you’re calling for a ride home?”
She bit her lip and looked down for a second. “I’m afraid not. I’m going to stay here for a few days.”
“Clotho make you an offer you couldn’t refuse?” I asked it lightly, but I knew the Fates were more than capable of holding Cerice prisoner. They’d done it once already.
She shook her head. “No, or at least not that way. Necessity’s really a mess, Ravirn. The virus that you . . . no, that’s not fair. The Persephone virus that Shara carried did a number on her—on the whole mweb. There’s been no communication from Necessity since the day Persephone was freed. None. And the network . . . It’s bad enough that the Fates can’t even tell how bad it is. At least ten percent of the world resource locator forks are fried, but it could be as many as half.”
“Half?” The question burst out of me.
Cerice nodded. Half the mweb. That was almost incomprehensible. Even ten percent was terrifying, to say nothing of the silence of Necessity. The mweb ties together a theoretically infinite number of potential worlds. I say theoretically because in theory every decision splits reality such that one branch goes in each direction the decision could have gone. But in practical terms, a lot of decisions are pretty inconsequential, and in those cases the worlds just tend to collapse back together. Tiny changes
can
have huge effects on big systems, but mostly they don’t. Reality has a lot of inertia, and until very recently Necessity had strongly added to the effect,
forcing
most world splits back together. But now, with Necessity off-line and as many as half the links in the mweb broken—my mind boggled.
can
have huge effects on big systems, but mostly they don’t. Reality has a lot of inertia, and until very recently Necessity had strongly added to the effect,
forcing
most world splits back together. But now, with Necessity off-line and as many as half the links in the mweb broken—my mind boggled.
“The Fates are very concerned,” said Cerice, and it was obvious that she was as well. “The Fate Core is doing things they don’t understand, self-programming weird work-arounds involving the old ley-line network, and spontaneously growing whole tiers of subroutines.”
“Very concerned, that’s euphemese for wigging out, right?” Melchior asked around the beam, inserting himself into the conversation for the first time.
“Pretty much,” answered Cerice. “When they switched the soul-tracking and management system over from the ley net to the mweb a generation ago, they mostly closed down the ley architecture. A lot of the original infrastructure for running it doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“The old spinnerettes,” I said.
“Exactly. But now the Fate Core appears to be re-creating them all on its own, and the Fates are beginning to think it’s become self-aware.”
I felt like a whole herd of icy-footed spiders had decided to hold a dance competition on my back. The Fates Do Not Like things to get out of their control—the current extremely complex state of my life is a testament to this fact. Calling them control freaks is akin to calling Ares a fight fan. The idea that the Fate Core—the computer that had replaced the Great Loom of Fate—might have become a creature with a will of its own would not be well received. Nor would the resurrection of the spinnerettes, and the Fates would be looking for someone to blame. The dancing spiders upped the tempo.
Every world had ley lines, spontaneously generated magical networks that connect the thin points in the walls of reality, the places where the Primal Chaos leaks through and makes magic easier. The Fates had always used them to monitor worlds and manage life threads, but a Fate had to physically go to a world to tap into its ley net. Sometime around the birth of the Roman Empire, the system had expanded beyond the ability of the Fates to manage it all directly. For another hundred years or so they’d kept trying, but the problem had only gotten exponentially worse.
Then Lachesis had reluctantly advanced the idea of the spinnerette, an elaborate, entirely magical entity that could both be tied in to the ley net of a world and transmit information and commands across the gulf between worlds. Because the process was so complex, and the devices would have to operate largely independently, the Fates had been forced to give them their own direct taps into the Primal Chaos for power and considerable self-awareness. In order to reduce their ability to cause the Fates problems, the spinnerettes had been bound to a set of rules of conduct and to physical items or locations.
But they were creatures of pure chaos magic and correspondingly rebellious. Over the years quite a number of them managed to trick mortals into aiding them to escape their servitude, most famously the one Aladdin had found bound to a lamp and mistakenly called a genie. The Fates absolutely hated having to use them but had no alternatives until the invention of the computer, which they had delightedly used to replace the spinnerettes. Not long after that, Necessity had transformed herself into the ultimate supercomputer to cope with the ever-expanding structure of reality. Then she’d spun the mweb to help her in the task, making the Fates its administrators and putting them eternally in her debt and, not coincidentally, under her thumb.
That was then. Now, Necessity was broken, the whole system was coming apart with wildly unpredictable results, and a good argument could be made that it was all my fault.
“Have they mentioned what they’re going to do about all this?” I asked, trying to sound as casual as possible.
“Taured. Strictly Confidential. Please.”
In the image, Cerice paused for a moment as though listening to something I couldn’t hear, then nodded. Some of the color leached out of the projection, a sign that some sort of heavy encryption had been introduced.
“We’re off the record for a few seconds,” said Cerice. “They haven’t sent anyone to kill you just yet, but I think that’s more of an oversight than anything. They’re desperate to get the mweb fixed, and the Fate Core problems have them very focused. That’s the real reason Clotho called me back. They know Shara’s still inside of Necessity, and possibly still running her security systems, and I’m the multiverse’s number one Shara expert. I’ve got to help them. I’m needed here and—” Cerice glanced to one side as the projection suddenly brightened.
“Grandmother,” she said, “I didn’t . . . oh. Yes, of course I’ll come. I was just saying good-bye to Ravirn.” She turned back to me. “Anyway, like I said, I’m going to stay here for a while and see how much I can help. I know you can’t reach me from there, so I’ll call if I need you.” She bit her lip again. “Good-bye, Ravirn.”
“Good-bye, Cerice.”
She blew me a kiss and was gone before I could respond. I hadn’t gotten a chance to tell her about cousin Dairn either, which might have changed her mind about whether or not the Fates had decided to actively try to kill me. Then again, it might not. She had been welcomed back into the fold in a way that was forever closed to me. I sighed and took another sip of my daiquiri, then threw the glass so that it shattered against a pillar.
“Hell with it,” I said to Melchior. “I’m going surfing. You want to come along?”
He looked warily from me to the shattered glass and then back again. Then he whistled a quick little spell that caused the mess to clean itself up.
“I suppose I’d better. Someone has to watch out for you.”
I grabbed a short board, since I was in a mood for aquabatics and spectacular wipeouts rather than long, smooth rides. I could have used a variety of magic to short-circuit the long hike down to the beach or the paddle out to the break point, but I also felt the need to break a sweat.
I was tired and dehydrated and more than a little strung out after the adrenaline fest getting shot had caused, and the paddling in particular made me ache, but it all felt right. There’s something deeply soothing about working your body so hard you can barely remember you have a brain, much less listen to it whine about things you can’t change.
When we hit the main break, I paddled just a little bit farther and rolled off my board to bob in the swells. The water felt surprisingly cold as it invaded the shorty wetsuit I’d donned. But it warmed to body temperature quickly. For a while I just played kelp, riding up and down beyond the break and mindlessly watching the long waves roll in. They were powerful, breaking in the classic Hawaiian pipeline, but foamy in the gusty wind.
I tried to let go of everything but simply being. It’s something I’m not very good at most of the time, but it’s easier out there, away from land with nothing between me and Alaska but ocean. I probably lost a half hour in the lull between two thoughts.
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