Authors: Kelly Mccullough
Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction
Codespell (38 page)
“Why do I think I’m going to hate the reason for that?” asked Melchior.
I looked out over the mad chop and sighed. “Because we’re going over there.” I pointed toward an island halfway to the horizon.
“Why do you . . . Oh.”
He’d seen the island and the thick mat of dead weeds surrounding it. It was a perfect black hexagon as shiny and slick as tile, a lovely terrazzo actually. I’d visited the virtual version of that island twice before while dealing with the Persephone virus. Underneath its surface lay the computing center devoted to the fates of the gods.
He nodded. “You’re right, I’m going to hate this.” He paused for a moment and scratched his cheek. “Somehow it looks wrong without the Shara-gorgon.”
I thought so, too, despite the fact that the hundred-foot-tall, mirror-shade-wearing, animate statue had only existed in the virtual world. It was hard to forget.
Moments later, the spinnerette had once again picked us up. “*****?”
“Sure, whatever you say.”
It nodded and leaped over the edge. We dropped fifty feet in a few seconds, stopping only inches above the water. Reaching back with one foot, the creature snipped off the dragline and dropped us onto the waves. The water bowed under each of the eight web-wrapped feet, and the spinnerette started to sink. But before the surface tension could break, the thing started running again, this time skipping along the wave tops.
Between the storm and the lack of anything remotely resembling traction, we spent a lot of time moving in directions other than forward—most notably up and down, with seriously ugly consequences for the contents of my stomach—but somehow we got steadily closer to our goal. That might have been the strangest thing of all. Despite the fact that the island stood barely a yard above the surrounding water, no waves broke over its surface, leaving it bone-dry. Eventually, we arrived.
“**** ******!” Nothing happened. It started dancing in place to keep from sinking. “******* ********* ******** *******.”
“I’m not sure what it just said, but if that wasn’t swearing, I’ll eat my slipcover,” said Melchior.
“*****?”
With a creak, the top of the island opened, exposing a flight of stairs. Down we went. At the bottom, we had to pass through another watertight pressure door. I couldn’t help but notice an increase in the ruffled-plumage factor as we did so.
Beyond lay a big tomblike room filled with racks and racks of slick-looking black multiprocessor servers, each with its own bank of blinking red LEDs. Imagine Giorgio Armani designing the interior of the great pyramid of Cheops as data center—sober and clean-lined, and this was the
old
hardware. It read as professional but also shockingly cool right up to the point where I realized that all that red was alert lights. The whole damn server farm needed a reboot.
old
hardware. It read as professional but also shockingly cool right up to the point where I realized that all that red was alert lights. The whole damn server farm needed a reboot.
I walked to the nearest box and held down the power button. For several seconds nothing happened. Then, with a swooshing-boooong sort of noise, the computer reset itself. The red light went out, replaced by a lambent purple one.
“I love that,” said Mel. “Very power geek.”
I imagined all the red replaced by that deep vivid purple. OK, it was still a pretty cool design statement. Much more so than the coral-reef thing that was replacing it, but hey, in the IT biz, if you don’t move with the times, they bury you.
“So now what?” I asked.
“You look for any live machines while the Left Hand of Necessity here puts all those limbs to use doing manual re-boots. ”
“*** **, **** ********?”
Either the spinnerette was getting better at tone, or I was starting to get used to its subtleties, because that almost made sense.
“Because somebody’s got to do it, and Ravirn and I both have other jobs,” said Melchior. Apparently it was starting to make sense to him, too.
The spinnerette sighed but walked to the nearest server bank and started pushing buttons. By balancing on four legs and stretching, it was able to hold down six at once. As the boooong noise sounded in chorus, Melchior turned back to me.
“The live boxes are running all that’s left of the master control program. Shara didn’t know much about it, so you get to try to parse it on the fly, then package it for porting.”
“Doesn’t that just sound like fun?” I suppressed an urge to make raspberry noises. “From the way you say that, I have to assume you won’t be looking over my shoulder and helping me make sense of the thing.”
“No, because someone also has to reconnect the old copper trunk lines so that once you’ve figured out the ways, there’s also a means. According to the schematics Shara showed me, I go this way.” He pointed along the wall to left.
“Write if you find work,” I called after him, “especially if it’s got happy little purple running lights.” Then I turned the other way.
“Mail’s dead,” replied Melchior, his voice receding, “but I’ll keep an eye out.”
“So e-mail me,” I tossed over my shoulder.
“Will do.”
The first couple of dozen rows of racks were a solid mass of winking red eyes. I finally saw my very first spot of purple way down at the end of row thirty or thereabouts. I made a mental note of it and moved on. I’d work off a single box if I had to, but a cluster would be much better. I passed a couple more singletons and one triplet before I hit the jackpot, a row where about half the computers looked to be in working order. Now I just needed an interface device. Unfortunately, there was a distinct lack of keyboards and monitors, though there was an abundance of networking cable.
I checked the far end of the row but didn’t find anything there either. That didn’t leave me a lot of options—one really, and I didn’t like it at all. Jacking my one and only soul into a badly virus-thrashed multibox supercomputer system designed to control the destiny of the gods seemed like the worst idea I’d had in years. Not that that kind of thing had ever stopped me in the past.
I pulled out my athame and collected a length of cable. I plugged one end into the closest active machine and the other into the athame. Then I sat down on the floor, my back braced against the nearest rack, my new sword cane lying across my knees. As I set the narrow blade of the athame against my palm, my stomach replayed a sort of highlights reel of the way it had felt during our recent spider-dance across the waves.
“I don’t like it either,” I said to my stomach. Melchior wasn’t there; who else was I going to talk to?”
I pressed the blade into my skin. Blood welled . . . and I screamed, yanking the athame free and throwing it away. Tethered to the cable as it was, it didn’t go far.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered.
As the point entered my flesh, I’d felt as though the universe had split in two, with me straddling the divide. In one version, I’d sunk the athame in quickly, catapulting myself into . . . madness! There was nothing sane in the virtual environment I’d entered, no hint of normal structure, and I’d felt it pulling me under, devouring me. At the very same time, looking out through my other eye, I saw myself doing what I had just done, pulling the blade free before the irretrievably cracked system could swallow me.
Sweat covered me like a second—liquid—skin, and I could feel all of the Raven’s feathers, as though they’d gone beyond standing on end and actually tried to flee my body in search of a safer location. It seemed like a fabulous idea. I wanted to do a little fleeing myself. Dead was one thing. Trapped forever in a program gone insane, entirely another. I couldn’t even bring myself to pick up the athame as I got shakily to my feet. I was not going to try that again, not for love or money or threat of death. I would turn up a keyboard and monitor or get Melchior to whistle me up a set if that didn’t work.
I passed the spinnerette on my way back to let Melchior know what happened. It had continued methodically down the rows, leaving a trail of purple lights behind it. It took me a little longer to find Melchior because he’d crawled several yards down a huge conduit that came in through the far wall. I’d have missed him completely if I hadn’t noticed the ragged end of a huge tangle of cables twitching occasionally.
“Hey, Mel, we’ve got a problem. I need to talk to you.”
“Just a second. See that pile of cable?”
“Yeah.”
“Pull on it.”
I grabbed and yanked. Slowly, a couple hundred pounds of bundled cable slid out into the open, with Melchior riding it. I got about ten feet free before it jerked to a stop.
“That’s all there is this side of the firestop,” said Melchior. “I just hope it’s enough. Help me get it over to the router cabinet.”
As we wrestled the mass into place behind an old-fashioned patch panel, I quickly and briefly told Melchior about my run-in with the system.
He grimaced before wedging himself into the narrow gap at the back of the panel. “Nasty. Try the next cabinet over. There’s a bunch of odds and ends in there, and I thought I saw a monitor.”
We didn’t have much time, so I left him to his task and went to check out the cabinet. As I hurried away, I heard him whistle the opening code of Snake Charmer. The cable ends rose up around him like so many dancing cobras, suggesting that this spell was going to work a whole lot better than his attempt to conjure me a rapier.
Two minutes later, I was plugging a badly scratched monitor and a keyboard missing its caps lock key into a machine a couple over from the one I’d tried earlier. I left it and my athame right where they were. Unfortunately, the alternate interface couldn’t help much with the content. The image on the monitor was just as crazy as the one that had almost consumed my soul. On-screen it read as a sort Brownian sea of alphanumeric characters in every ethnic flavor from Roman and Arabic through Korean and Chinese to Greek and Russian. All in shades of pink for some reason.
It wasn’t chaos—that I could have dealt with. It was order gone horribly wrong. Looking at it made my brain hurt. I tried hitting escape, and command-escape, and control-altdelete and every other override I could think of for a dozen operating systems, all to no avail. Then I tried simply staring in the direction of the screen, trying to see without looking so that my subconscious could search for hidden patterns. All I got out of that was a strong urge to return my last meal to the wild and an ever-increasing paranoia about the approach of Nemesis.
I wasn’t going to get anywhere from the inside. That was as certain as Dionysus’s morning hangover. I hurried to the nearest of the machines the spinnerette had reset to see what the reboot looked like. Same thing, only considerably less so. Still pink, still running the Brownian-motion screen-saver, but this time with fewer characters and all of them native to a Greek keyboard, though as I watched, the whole thing seemed to shift steadily toward the wilder scene of the original.
All right, so whatever it was, it infected or reinfected new machines added to the system. In that it acted like a virus. I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Persephone’s effort was long since departed, but maybe it had left something behind that acted like an after-infection. I picked up monitor and keyboard and moved again, this time choosing a rack of crashed machines in the line opposite from where Melchior was working. After I’d held down the power button long enough to generate a boooong, I checked in with him.
“I’ve got all the connections to the patch panel reattached. I’m working on a kludge to get from there to the computer side while bypassing the weednet interface. Then I have to reset the switching computer for the old network, and we’ll see what happens. Hopefully, that’ll give Shara access. You?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute.”
As the server finished its boot cycle, rational text started scrolling by on my salvaged monitor, black letters on a blue background reading off system resources and . . . as it hit the network queries, the text blinked once, turned pink, and started to slither away from the rational. With a sigh, I physically removed the next box over from the network and hit reboot.
While I waited, I stuck the end of the sword cane through two of my belt loops and loosened the grip so it would draw easily. A few minutes later and closer to the inevitable arrival of Nemesis, I had a working machine. That lasted from the time I turned on every security measure I could think of until I reconnected it to the network. At that point: happy, dancing pink letters.
I had just gotten up a really good head of profanity when a hollow boom sounded from somewhere above.
Into the silence that followed, Melchior—still working madly away—said, “Don’t stop. If ever there was a reason to swear, it’s the one knocking on the front door right now.”
Another boom, this one followed by a sharp crack like shattering tile. A third, and sea air suddenly stirred the room. I drew my sword and moved to a point where I could see the base of the stairs. I was wishing we’d redogged the hatch, though that probably wouldn’t have held for long.
“What’s the word on the connection work-around?” I called over my shoulder, all the while keeping my eyes fixed on the entrance.
Boom.
“Hope,” replied Melchior.
“Care to elaborate?”
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