Trio of Sorcery (26 page)

If you've ever trusted me, trust me now,
said jquest77.
You're not imagining this. Dark Valley's trying to kill us. The Wendigo is more than just code. Ell can find out why.

Tom stared up at the old brick apartment building, one of many similar buildings in a modest neighborhood. He wasn't sure of the vintage; pre-1950s, he thought. Maybe 1930ish. It was only four stories tall and had huge screened-in porches on the front, less like balconies and more like sunrooms. This was where the so-called techno shaman lived. Whatever a techno-shaman was. It seemed an odd choice of living space for anyone calling themselves techno-anything; he would have expected glass and steel, or maybe something futuristic. Four flights of stairs later, it seemed an even odder choice, unless the person in question really needed a lot of exercise. On the plus side, the apartment he wanted was the first door off the landing.

He'd had to buzz to get access to the building, so Ellen McBride was waiting for him at the door. He had a chance to get a real good look at her as he trudged up the last half-flight of stairs.

He hadn't been expecting the red hair. She had a wild, exuberantly curly mop of it, currently threatening to
explode from the jaws of a banana clip. Then there were the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose. And green eyes, just now looking at him with a suggestion of laughter. From the floor up, no-name running shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt that said
I'M ONLY HERE BECAUSE THE SERVER IS DOWN
.

“You must be—”

“Quiet Knight, yeah,” he said, taking the hand she had extended and giving the name of the signature character he played when he was doing something public in the game.

“I was gonna say ‘Bob.'” She grinned, giving him a good firm, dry handshake. “I don't play MWO. I'm more of an action-adventure, puzzle-game kind of gal.” Her eyes twinkled. “Although classic Doom still has a lot to be said for it. Besides, playing in your MMORPG would be too much like going to work. I prefer something not fantasy, and something that has so little mind of its own that there is no way you can get a ‘ghost in the machine.'”

“The which-what? Isn't there an anime with that name?” he asked as she waved him in the door.

“That would be
Ghost in the Shell.
No, the ‘ghost in the machine' is from René Descartes.” At his blank look, she elaborated. “‘I think, therefore I am'? Which brings to mind a great joke—never mind, I'll get back to that.” She ushered him to a seat in what probably would have been a living room in anyone else's house, but was a three-workstation office in hers. And the workstations—they
were at least as good as Tom's office computers. Which was saying a lot. His mind kind of boggled as it added up the cost of what he was looking at. The center station, which had three screens that were twenty-one inchers, was the kind of thing a gamer would buy if he'd won the lottery. “Anyway, Decartes was the formulator of the theory of mind-body dualism—the mind is a separate thing from the body, making it the ‘ghost' in the corporeal ‘machine.' The phrase comes from a critic of his, who wrote a book by the same title. Anyway, that applies here, where according to the fellow you know as jquest77, we seem to have a ghost, or the beginnings of one, in your machine.” She sat down in a comfortable-looking office chair, and whirled on its wheels to face him. “So.
Is
that your problem?”

Unwilling to launch straight into his problem, Tom dodged the conversational bullet. “How do you know—”

“Milton? He's one of my tabletoppers.” She grinned. “Every other weekend, Saturday from ten to whenever we start to pass out. It's a nasty little habit I picked up in college. The wives are okay with this, because we all explained to them that it is better to have spent twenty bucks and fallen off the low-cholesterol diet twice a month than to have lost the mortgage payment in a poker game and indulged in way too much beer. MMORPGs just don't give me the same kick. I'm the Game Master and I like to see them suffer.”

That surprised a bark of a laugh out of him.

“Now as for what I do”—she leaned back in her chair
and steepled her fingers, looking for all the world as if she was only a white cat and a tuxedo short of being a Bond villain—“I solve the problems that happen when mind intersects with machine and stuff crops up that was never coded for. You folks with your carefully crafted worlds, inhabited by thousands of avatars, each one with a brain and a spirit behind it, created more than you guess.”

“I'm not sure I follow,” Tom said carefully.

She nodded. “I'm not surprised. This sort of thing never occurs to coders. It's just too fantastic. But it does happen, and I will explain, but first I want you to accept—for the moment anyway—something that will sound completely ridiculous.”

“Which is?”

“Magic is a real force.” She looked at him penetratingly, as if daring him to laugh. He almost did, but stopped himself at the last minute.

She nodded. “Suspend your disbelief and accept it, just for the moment. Remember Occam's Razor; the simplest explanation is always the best, and when you eliminate the impossible, the merely improbable starts to look pretty good. Now, magic has never been a powerful force, except when someone with aptitude, training, and will manages to figure out how to use it. Even then, the results are not always predictable. And it tends to operate on the quantum level, so the smaller the thing you ask it to do, the more likely it is that it will get done. Think you can force the bouncing balls to spell out
your
lottery ticket number?
Won't happen. Especially not when at least a dozen other trained mages are trying to get it to do the same thing, not to mention the thousands who aren't trained but have the talent and the will and are wishing with everything they can drag up on the night. Planning to look into the future to predict what numbers you should pick? Maybe that will work, and maybe not. But there is no such thing as fate and destiny, and the future is infinitely flexible; you're looking into
a
future, one of many, and there is no guarantee that you've picked the right one, where the numbers will match what will come up where
you
are.”

Tom snorted. “What good is magic, then,” he demanded, “if it can't actually do anything?”

“You're thinking macro. Think micro.” She leaned back and waited. He shook his head.

“That which we call ‘luck,' my friend, is magic. The deliberate manipulation of tiny actions to bring about the desired goal. The successful mage devotes every day of his life, and every waking minute of every day, to finding the optimal path from where he is to where he wants to be. In short, the goal of his existence is to find the place to put his lever so he can move the world. Micromanagement at its finest. And it doesn't operate well under stress, which is why you won't find any magicians at the World Series of Poker.” She grinned at him. He scowled. She laughed and waved a hand at the room around them. “Doubt all you want, my Thomas, but it got me here, and I live a very comfortable lifestyle where I have just enough of everything I
want to be happy and just enough of a challenge to keep me sharp.”

“So what do you
do
exactly?” he demanded.

She leaned forward. “I find the ghosts in the machines,” she said in a sepulchral voice that, despite his annoyance, put goose bumps on his arms. She leaned back again. “There are all kinds of them. Actually, to be honest, I do a lot of other work too—garden-variety ghostbusting, bailing people out of magical situations they can't handle. But what puts the
fromage
on the table and the
pâté
on the
pain
, is, yes, finding stuff that crept into the machine and is lurking outside the code.”

Now he did laugh. “Haunted computers? Yeah, right. Okay, so long—” He began to rise to his feet.

She nailed him back into his chair with a look. “Remember what I said about magic being micromanagement? Can you get any more
micro
than electrons? A magician can make those electrons dance for him. The last job I did was for Parks Winterhouse.”

His mouth fell open. “The brokerage firm?”

She nodded. “Suppose, just suppose, you could make, not the whole stock market, but just one big board show a stock at a tiny bit higher than what it actually was trading at everywhere else? Then everybody looking at that big board would trade that stock at that higher price. And meanwhile, you're buying the stock elsewhere, or have already bought it, and you've done so at that lower price.
Then you wait for the buyers. And
then,
because one market starts trading the stock at that higher price, pretty soon the entire world just upped the price of the stock.”

He nodded slowly. “You'd make a killing.”

“No,” she corrected. “I would make a profit. A small one. Smart magicians don't draw attention to themselves by making fortunes, at least not all at once. And no one is likely to catch that first artificial price increase because at the end of the day, that number
is
what the stock is really trading at. But sometimes someone notices, knows something about mages, and decides to call in a hired gun, which would be me.” She jabbed a thumb at her chest.

“Did you catch him?” Tom asked.

She shook her head. “Magic is harder to trace than a properly spoofed IM running through three dozen proxy servers. So I did the next best thing. I put up magical firewalls. All Parks Winterhouse cared about was that it stopped.” He thought he saw annoyance in her eyes as she shrugged. “And after all, even if I caught him, what could they do about it? Go to the board of trade or the SEC and say ‘this guy did stock fraud with magic'?”

Tom opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Okay. But how did he do it?”

The muscles around her eyes relaxed a little. “A good question. And one I can answer pretty easily, if you are willing to make the assumption that magic is an energy that can be manipulated by will, and
perhaps
by other
things. I say
perhaps
because at the moment, no one in the magic business is entirely sure if the various spells, incantations, and recipes are another way to manipulate the energy, or if they simply serve as tools that allow the magician to hone his concentration to a razor edge. That energy is—fantasy movies notwithstanding—weak, just as I keep telling you. You can't even flip a pair of dice with it. Now, if you got a thousand magicians all trying to do the same thing for the common good, which is a very rare thing indeed, you might be able to pull off something impressive in the real world. It's been done. The storm that wrecked the Spanish Armada, for instance. But it's rare.

“Now tell me, my friend, just what
is
a bit? Forget programming. Think real world. What is it?”

He floundered for a moment. He was so used to thinking in terms of
code
that for a moment the most fundamental definition of programming eluded him. “It's a—state,” he said finally. “Kind of a switch in the memory, it's either on or it's off. Either way, that is how information is stored.”

“Now think about this. How hard is it to alter that state?” She nodded encouragingly as he felt his eyes widen. “Remember when I told you to think micro? Magic may be weak, but it's strong enough to get in there and flip bit switches very easily. So, now we are in the computer age; important things hinge on a very, very small and weak thing, a bit, a collection of bits, inside something that operates on a quantum level itself. And all those magicians
and sorcerers and witches and what have you have discovered that, and they are now trying to figure out the killer app that will put them on easy street.”

“And you aren't?” He raised an eyebrow.

“
This
is my killer app.” She chuckled and spread her hands to indicate her surroundings. “So far I am the only sheriff on a very wild frontier. As such, the pay is very nice. Now let's get down to business. Since you have come to me, and I am pitching my service, the explanation and initial consultation are free. Actually helping you, however, is not.”

He blanched at the thought of trying to explain that sort of expense to upstairs, and blanched again at the idea of trying to pay for it himself. She regarded him with some sympathy.

“Relax, this isn't my first rodeo.” She snaked her arm to a folder nestled in beside one terminal and handed it to him. “Here's my CV, tailored to the problem at hand. You'll note I have worked for several of your rivals—all of whom will stoutly deny that I did anything that had the faintest whiff of magic.”

He scanned it quickly, with mounting relief. “Ah—what did you do for Worlds of Wonder?”

She laughed. “I made it harder for Chinese gold farmers to use magic.”