Authors: Kelly Mccullough
Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction
Codespell (32 page)
“Really,” gasped Mel. “That’s so cool!” The new Mel self-harmonized. Or at least, the test run did.
“Makes sense,” I said, “since the processor’s a webtroll model.”
A moment later, the test bank beeped itself into silence, and the diagnostics screen started scrolling information. There was a lot there, and we read it all, but the key phrase came at the very end. “Unit is fully functional and ready for transfer.”
I turned to Melchior. “Are you
ready
?”
ready
?”
“As I ever will be,” he whispered.
"You don’t have to do this,” I said. “You know that, right?”
“I’m scared,” he replied. “But I want to do it. Hook me up.”
He climbed onto the table and shifted into laptop form, opening his external drive bay. I took one last look at the memory crystal we’d selected and placed it in the bay. A bright rich blue, it was the cleanest and clearest of all the crystals in Ahllan’s stores, never before used and still in the original packaging until we’d plugged it in for a function check. It wasn’t the biggest unit she’d had, though it
was
huge—about six terabytes capacity—because what was important was the least possible corruption and cross contamination.
was
huge—about six terabytes capacity—because what was important was the least possible corruption and cross contamination.
The drive closed and I plugged Melchior into the controller bank, then did one last check on the transfer program. Everything looked good.
“Take care, my friend.”
I hit the button that would copy Melchior into the crystal, erasing each individual bit of information from his online memory as soon as it had verified the write function in the crystal. A cumbersome and dangerous process—any information that miscopied would be lost forever—but a necessary one.
For many years, the Fates had copied files across to a new troll each time they upgraded, discarding the old hardware and personality rather than performing this sort of transfer. That hadn’t always been the case, or so I’d learned from Ahllan. In the beginning, there’d been multiple attempts to copy the contents of the old drive over the new one via a networking cable. They had always failed, with resultant massive data loss in both computers. Restoring from backups could usually reproduce all the files, but it always left both systems as plain old computers rather than AIs.
The reason for that—unknown at the time—was the soulware, the actual extraphysical entity of the original AI. It couldn’t exist in two places simultaneously, and when it was forced to try, the soul died. The only exception to that rule in the history of the multiverse to date was Shara, when she split herself because of the Persephone virus, and we still didn’t fully understand what had happened there. Only by completely transferring the soul to an internal vessel—the memory crystal—and then moving that across to the new body could the transfer be effected safely.
The Fates had discovered the process through trial and error—though they still hadn’t known about the souls—but decided it risked too much data loss and opted for the more wasteful but reliable cycle of junking the old trolls, personality and all.
“How long will it take?” Haemun asked after a while.
“About twenty minutes of write time, thirty seconds to move the crystal, another twenty minutes of read time, and at least an hour for system initialization on the new body.”
“When will we know if it worked?” Haemun’s voice sounded very small and worried, and I was forcefully reminded that his own personal magic gave him special insight into my emotional states and needs.
“Not until the very end,” I replied. “Not until he—”
I was interrupted by a crash as Haemun dropped the drinks tray he still carried. The heavy earthenware pitcher burst apart, spraying lemonade everywhere. I had just an instant to regret not telling him to wait outside the clean room before he fell to the floor, curling into a ball in the mess and slipping quickly into unconsciousness.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, kneeling and putting a hand on his shoulder.
It was Tisiphone who answered after sniffing the air for a moment. “Nemesis is here.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I glanced from Haemun’s crumpled form to the table that held Melchior’s body in mid-soul transfer. Nemesis would be knocking on the door any second, and in my whole life I’d rarely felt more helpless.
“How much longer?” Tisiphone jerked her chin at Melchior.
“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “Ten minutes? Maybe a bit more. It’s hard to say. But that’s just the write function— you heard what I told Haemun.”
“Once he’s written into the crystal, will he be stable?” she asked.
A boom sounded from upstairs—the front door shattering.
“For a while at least, but I don’t know how long. No one’s ever tested what happens if you delay the transfer. I’d rather not be the first.”
Tisiphone shrugged, her face grim. “I can buy you ten minutes; that I swear. I don’t know if I can do more, but I’ll try. You’d better get some sort of exit strategy going in the meantime.” She turned toward the door. “Good-bye.”
I leaped up and caught her arm, and she let me spin her back to face me.
“Good luck,” I said, and kissed her.
She leaned into the kiss for just a second, then pulled away. “Thanks, but don’t worry so much. This will be the most fun I’ve had in years.” She winked. “Present company excepted, of course. Bar the door.” Then she was gone, moving with that insane speed that dazzled the eye.
I locked both the wardroom and clean-room doors, then set about crafting a faerie ring. As I worked, the sounds of violent destruction filtered down from above, along with the occasional puff of dust from the ceiling after a particularly loud and destructive impact. The horrible screams and howls sounded worse yet, something like a Hollywood director’s fantasy of fifty giant alien cat creatures in the midst of a drug-fueled interstellar gang war.
Then the ring was finished, manifesting as a perfect circle of circuit-patterned mushrooms. I’d performed the task often enough now that I managed not to scorch the ceiling or knock myself over. Next, I checked the telltales on the controller to see where Melchior was in the process—perhaps three-quarters done.
I hate waiting. My eyes fell on Haemun, and I had an idea for reducing the total number of hostages. Half-lifting the satyr, I very gently slid him over the edge of the faerie ring. I could feel the magic tugging at him, ready to tumble him randomly through the infinity of the multiverse, but I didn’t let him go. That would have been almost as bad as anything Nemesis could do. Instead, I sent my awareness into the network, creating a set of conditions rather than searching for a specific ring. When I thought I’d achieved them, I gave him a gentle nudge, and he was gone.
If things worked as I intended, he would in the very same instant have appeared in a temporary ring on Olympus, one tilted steeply enough to tumble him out of the ring and into the grasses beyond. It was the best I could do at the moment and a whole lot better than what he might have had to face if he stayed with us.
After that there was nothing left to do but wait. I put my body between Melchior and the clean-room door and kept one eye on the monitor as the seconds ticked away. The transfer was almost complete when the first impact struck the door of the wardroom beyond.
“Come on, little buddy,” I whispered. “Hurry.” Then I drew my sword and my pistol, the latter left-handed.
I wouldn’t have much time. As the door cracked under a second blow, I whistled a spell significantly shorter than its name: “Safeties? We don’t need no stinking safeties.”
A moment later I heard the outer door shatter. Only one thin panel now stood between me and my Nemesis. I took a firm stance and pointed my pistol at the door even as it bowed inward with Nemesis’s first strike. Three more blows broke the door in two, sending the upper half tumbling into the clean room. For a second Nemesis’s torso was silhouetted in the opening. I centered my sights on her chest and pulled the trigger, emptying my .45’s clip at a magically enhanced full auto.
A human wouldn’t have been able to hold the pistol on target. Even my wrist ached at the recoil, but it only lasted for an instant. Without waiting to see what damage I might have done, I threw the gun at her face and went for my dagger.
She caught it out of the air and snapped it back at me—so much for any hopes that the bullets would accomplish what Tisiphone had not. Reflexively, I dodged aside, then winced as I heard the pistol hit the equipment behind me. Breathing a little prayer to the goddess of fortune that it hadn’t destroyed anything involved in Melchior’s transfer, I took a long, lunging step forward, trying to skewer Nemesis with my rapier as she burst through what was left of the door.
There was a snap and a flash of numbing pain in my cheek as the world tumbled around me. Somewhere in there I lost my grip on my sword’s hilt. It was only as I hit and shattered the legs of the table where Melchior’s new body rested that I realized I was flying through the air. With a convulsive effort, I caught the falling subnotebook before it could hit the floor. Together, we slid into the corner. I ended up flat on my back, with my legs pressed against the wall amidst the wreckage of the table.
Nemesis stood just inside the doorway, a brutal smile twisting the bloodied lips she’d borrowed from Dairn. I did have the satisfaction of seeing a foot or so of my sword’s blade standing out from her left side below the ribs—apparently the snap had been the sound of the blade breaking. She had other marks of having been in a fight as well. Besides the split lip, her nose was flattened, and she had a line of bullet holes running across her torso from right hip to just above the sword blade. She also had a set of deep claw marks on her left thigh—so deep, in fact, that I could see exposed bone—and I wondered sickly what had become of Tisiphone. With all of her injuries, Nemesis should have been dead. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like anyone had explained that to her, not if the smile and the lack of significant bleeding were anything to go by
“Oh, look,” she said, stepping deeper into the room and circling to her left—taking her farther away from me, “a faerie ring.” She whistled something complex and self-harmonizing. The ring and the stone on which it stood dropped into a great pit that opened in the floor. “You should have used that before I came through the door. Now, why didn’t you? I wonder.”
I didn’t want her thinking along those lines, not when I couldn’t tell if Melchior was done with his transfer or not. Bracing my feet against the wall, I shoved, sending myself sliding across the floor toward Nemesis, dagger extended in front of me. With almost contemptuous ease, she stomped on the blade, pinning it to the floor and arresting my progress.
“Didn’t like that question much, did you? Could it be because your familiar is over there on the slab, utterly helpless? ” She twisted her heel, breaking my dagger, and stepped toward Melchior.
I whipped the subnotebook at the back of her head as I might have thrown a discus. I didn’t want to give it up, but better that than let her put a finger on Melchior. She batted it away without even looking my way. It struck the wall with a sickening crunch. I rolled backwards onto my feet and lunged at her with the broken stub of my dagger.
With as little effort as she’d expended on the thrown computer, she caught my left wrist and twisted. My world blurred as the bones in my wrist broke, and I dropped the weapon. She twisted again, and I fell to my knees, darkness edging my vision and a rushing sound filling my ears.
“Naughty boy, mustn’t get in Nemesis’s way,” I heard her say as if from a great distance.
Then she shoved me so hard that I almost tumbled into the pit. I lost track of things for a moment then, but came to on my feet. For reasons I could no longer understand, I had picked up the broken subnotebook and was clutching it to my chest. Across the room, Nemesis mirrored my pose with Melchior’s laptop shape. Shredded cables dangled from his case, and I could only hope the copying job had finished running before she’d torn him loose. Now I just needed to figure out how to get him away from her.
“Did you want this?” she asked, holding him up in front of her. “Is it precious to you?”
“
He
is,” I replied, meeting her mirrored eyes. “You know that, or you wouldn’t be doing this.”
He
is,” I replied, meeting her mirrored eyes. “You know that, or you wouldn’t be doing this.”
“True enough,” said Nemesis. “What would you give for it?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then paused for a split second as I saw movement beyond the doorway. The fight had shifted us so that I was in the farthest corner from the entrance, and Nemesis stood half-turned away from it.
“Anything,” I said, forcing my eyes to move back to her face despite what I’d seen through the door. “I’d give anything to have him back.”
Tisiphone stood in the room beyond. She didn’t seem as bloodied as Nemesis, but the entire right side of her head looked black and blue. The wing on that side hung broken and limp, trailing behind her with its flames barely visible. Even as I registered that, she lifted her left hand to her mouth and touched her lips in a shushing gesture. Then she faded from view—the chameleon effect.
“Anything?” asked Nemesis. “Really? How about your right hand?” She pulled the hiltless blade from her side—no blood followed it.
Pinning the subnotebook to my chest with my broken left arm, I extended my right. “Melchior
is
my right hand.
is
my right hand.
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