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Authors: Kelly Mccullough

Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction

Codespell (27 page)

BOOK: Codespell
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“Let’s start with base six,” said Melchior. “We can use up, down, front, back, left, and right. Octal would be better, but if this round’s representative of general wear and tear on our speaker system”—he nodded at Tisiphone—“six is going to be more than hard enough. Maybe later, if she gets used to it, we can move up to something faster.”
Looking at the wreck even this short conversation had made of Tisiphone—I had to admit I had doubts. Not that we had any other options.
“Are you ready for some more ward-field fluctuations?” I asked, though I felt like a cad for doing so. “We need to let Shara know we got her message.”
She closed her eyes, and I could see the blue veins in that thin skin all too clearly, but she nodded anyway.
“Do it.”
Over the course of the next several days, we established a solid system for communication. It was slow and ungainly and played merry hell with Tisiphone’s digestive system and general well-being. But it worked, Tisiphone was damned tough, and slowly, very slowly, she did seem to be adapting.
What ultimately developed was a very slow conversation with anywhere from minutes to hours between the segments. With Melchior sending the messages the three of us collectively agreed on, it went something like this:
“I’m so glad to hear from you,”
sent Shara.
“Us, too,”
sent Melchior.
“Need to go to plain hex for speed
—
front, back, up, down, left, right. Can do?”
“Yes. Will compress syntax, too.”
“Good,”
sent Melchior.
“Need to fix Necessity. Will come there soon. Can you speak with her?”
“Yes/No,”
Shara both agreed and denied.
“Complex. Can’t explain. Like stroke, only worse.”
That one stressed Tisiphone out so badly she was ready to bite chunks out of the walls.
“Try to explain.”
Tisiphone insisted Mel send that one.
“Very complex,”
sent Shara.
“Very long. Too much of both. Goddess still controls underneath? But can’t speak. Maybe. Need you here.”
“Can’t get there,”
sent Melchior, as Tisiphone snarled it out.
“Furies blocked. Send work-around?”
“Not possible yet. Running security and parts of other systems, but not master/nexus/locus of decisions. Locked out.”
I threw up my hands. “Whatever that means. Tisiphone? ”
“I’m not sure,” she whispered. “A big part of what Necessity does—what Necessity is—has to do with controlling how decision loci are formed and whether they continue to exist after the initial split. That’s really the core of the whole system, and if Shara doesn’t have access to it, she may not
know
where she is.”
A thought that probably should have occurred to me earlier hit me then. “Where is Necessity usually? I know you’ve said you can’t reach her, but I guess I always just assumed it was a firewall kind of problem. Now I’m getting the feeling that I don’t actually understand the issues at all.”
“Necessity isn’t in any one place,” said Tisiphone. “I guess I thought everyone knew that. She resides at the point of maximum uncertainty—the exact point of the next DecLocus split.”
“How does she know where that is?” asked Melchior.
“She doesn’t.” Tisiphone looked baffled. “It’s a part of what she is. She exists in the gap, and it exists in her. Wherever she is, the gap is also.”
“How do you usually find her there?” he asked.
“We don’t,” said Tisiphone. “Normally, when she needs us or we need her, she simply is where we are. The multiverse where we are becomes the multiverse where she is. But that’s not happening now, and we don’t know why.”
“And . . .” Melchior closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Hang on. I’m going to hate the answer to this, but I have to ask. You’ve been to Castle Discord . . .”
“Many times.” Tisiphone nodded.
“Are you telling us that for Necessity the whole multiverse works like Castle Discord does for Eris? That she doesn’t move through space so much as it changes its shape to suit her needs?”
Tisiphone rocked her head from side to side. “That’s not how it works in the guts of the thing, but the effect’s pretty much the same. And—oh!” She clutched at her stomach. "Shara’s transmitting again.”
"Still there?”
“Yes,”
sent Melchior.
“Working on understanding the problem. More later?”
“Later. Give my love to Cerice.”
That was the better part of two days’ work, a short, confusing exchange with a ticking guilt bomb attached to the back end. A guilt bomb that detonated the next morning when Melchior walked into the bedroom and binged at me.
I was sitting up with Tisiphone’s head in my lap, stroking her hair. Neither one of us had slept very well. Me because sleep didn’t seem to be my friend anymore, and Tisiphone because stress and her abused stomach kept waking her up.
“What is it?” I asked Melchior.
“Request for Vtp link—Cerice via
Asalka.trl
. It’s marked urgent. Do you want to take it?”
“I suppose I’d better, but not here with Tisiphone. Let Cerice know I’ll be there in a second.” I squeezed Tisiphone’s shoulder and eased out from under her, putting on a robe as I went out the door. “I wonder how Cerice knew where we were. I don’t like that at all, not when she’s back in Clotho’s fold, and especially not after the way she reworked the mweb-server firewalls.”
We hurried down the hall and through the ruined pressure hatch that led to the basement. The big steel door and its frame had once belonged to an analogue of the USS
Arizona
, or at least that’s what the sign said.
“She just pinged me again, Boss.” Melchior sounded more than a little irritated by that. “I think she’s feeling a bit impatient.”
“Well, it won’t kill her to wait an extra thirty seconds, and I’m doing her a favor. I’m betting she really didn’t want me to take her call naked and in bed with Tisiphone.”
“That’s got my vote for understatement of the day,” said Melchior.
“Don’t bet on it. The day is young, and I’ve got plenty of time.”
“Not to mention a brutal record in that department,” said Melchior.
Then he hopped up onto the workbench and opened up his eyes and mouth. Light poured forth, and the image of Cerice appeared at its heart. She was wearing her irritated expression, the serious one. That made seeing her easier somehow.
“Hello, Cerice.” I tried to keep my voice as neutral as possible.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Ravirn?” She leaned forward, her face filling the display. She looked both angry and frightened.
“Answering the computer, or isn’t that obvious? Oh, and nice to see you, too.”
Cerice rolled her eyes. “Don’t be an ass. I’m under pretty close surveillance and getting a window where I can talk without being monitored isn’t easy. I don’t have much time, and you already burned an unreasonable chunk of it making me wait while you crawled out of bed. I’m not sure why you bothered—it’s not like I don’t know what you look like first thing in the morning.”
“Cerice, as much as I’d love to listen to you snarl at me for another twenty minutes, I’ve been informed by a reliable source that you don’t have much time.” My temper was fraying rapidly. “If that’s
really
the case, you might want to get to the point.”
“You are the most maddening man I’ve ever known.” She bit her lip and looked down for a moment. “I’m trying to save your butt, and you’re making smart remarks.” When she met my eyes again, her voice was very firm. “What are you doing to Necessity?”
“Who says I’m doing anything to Necessity?” She opened her mouth, but I was getting angrier by the second and I kept right on going. “Even if I were, what business would it be of yours?”
“I notice you didn’t actually deny it,” said Cerice. “Thanks for not lying to me at least. As to who I am to ask, I’m in charge of Fate’s Necessity project. It’s my job to find out exactly what is going on with Necessity, which means I need to know what it is you think you’re doing and to shut it down if I have to. I’d like to do it before Atropos or somebody else with a grudge notices that you’re involved and does something drastic, but that’s my preference, not an absolute condition. I’m only going to ask you one more time: what
are
you up to?”
“Cerice, you’ve just told me why you’re asking. You haven’t said a thing about why I should answer you. I am no longer of the Houses of Fate. I am a power unto myself, and a chaos power at that—you know, the loyal opposition. Not only do I not recognize Fate’s authority to question me on anything whatsoever, but I don’t recognize Fate’s authority to be messing around with Necessity.” I could hear my voice rising, but couldn’t seem to stop it. “In fact, considering all that I know of Fate and its desire for total control, I don’t think Fate should be allowed within a thousand miles of Necessity while she has such an obviously diminished capacity to defend herself.”
“
You’re
accusing
me
of designs on Necessity? When I’ve been trying to keep you off Fate’s radar?” Cerice’s face went tight and hard.
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said. “It’s your boss I’m worried about. You know, the one that you left me for.”
Her cheeks darkened, and I decided to push and see if I could get any more information since I seemed to be burning bridges anyway. I really wanted to find out how she’d known we were in contact with Necessity. I put on my best innocent smile.
“Cerice,” I drawled, “
why
are you calling me about this again?”
She looked momentarily as tired and drawn as Tisiphone, and I felt bad for her. Briefly. Until she opened her mouth again.
“Because,” she said, “I wanted to give you a chance to account for yourself before I decided whether or not to tell Clotho you’ve been messing around with Necessity. The spinnerette activity and the pulses in the data flows from Necessity to the mweb servers have your fingerprints all over them. But clearly you’re not interested in being civil to me. I wonder if you’ll change your tune when I turn in my report, and Fate sends the Furies to do the asking.”
I felt a now-familiar hand slide around my back as Tisiphone joined me.
“Somehow,” she said, leaning into the picture, “I don’t think that’s very likely to happen. Ravirn is working with us on this one. Isn’t that right, dear?” Then she leaned over and nibbled on my ear.
“She! You! Oh, Ravirn, how could you? Asalka, cut us off. That’s it!”
Then she was gone.
“I thought that went very well,” said Tisiphone. “Don’t you?”
I jerked away from her, stung. For some reason Tisiphone’s mistreatment of Cerice put my own argument with her in a much darker light. Why had I been so harsh? Was it the Raven again? Fomenting trouble? Or was it just my own anger and hurt? And did it matter why if the result was the same?
“Did you have to do that?” I asked Tisiphone and, by implication, myself. “It was unnecessary, and it hurt her.”
Tisiphone shrugged. “So? She made me mad, and this wasn’t the first time. I’m a Fury, Ravirn. I do not forgive, and I do not forget.”
I felt as though she’d poured a bucket of icy water over my head or slapped me.
“I do,” I said. “Forget, that is. In this case, your nature. I forgive, too. But you’ll have to ask me nicely.”
Then I walked away. I needed to get out and away for a bit.

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tisiphone was wise enough or angry enough not to call after me as I went up the stairs. I more than half expected her to show up as I pulled out my leathers—I needed to remember to have Melchior conjure me up some fresh clothes—but she didn’t.
As I put on my right boot, I couldn’t help wondering at how little stiffness remained from the gunshot wound. Whatever Tisiphone had done, it really helped. I’d have to ask her how she managed it. I should have done it before, but I’d been distracted by the Shara problem and by taking care of her when she was sick from the solution.
That was kind of sweet actually. Cerice had never really let me take care of her, and she’d resented me when I tried.
Cerice! Just what I didn’t want to think about. I had a hard time believing we’d just had the conversation we had. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been as hard on her as I had, but then she’d all but threatened me with exposure to Clotho, so maybe we were even. I growled as I pulled on my jacket. Did she really mean that? Could she really have changed so much in just the short weeks she’d been back under the wing of Fate? Or had I never really known her? I decided not to think about that or the possibility of her reporting me to Clotho. Better to focus on the technical details of what she’d said about Necessity and how we’d been detected. That was information I could use.
It sounded like Shara’s efforts with the ELF—or whatever the hell it really was—had affected the data flows for the mweb servers. That made a certain amount of sense. The soul locks built by the Shara virus allowed command data to flow from Necessity’s systems out to the mweb but not back the other way. If Shara’s current efforts caused turbulence in that flow, Cerice was bound to notice. As for the spinnerettes, they represented an unknown quantity as far as I was concerned—technology so outdated that no one had ever bothered to teach me about it. Aggravating.
BOOK: Codespell
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