WebMage (19 page)

"Consider it forgotten, boy." She gestured toward Melchior. "Shall we get to work?"

"I'd really love to," I said. "But haven't you been listening to me? I need a mainframe."

"And I told you I would provide you with the necessary tools, did I not?"

"Sure, but—" I stopped abruptly as what she said penetrated the fuzziness that seemed to surround my mind. "Are you trying to tell me that somewhere in this backwater corner of reality there's a modern mainframe? Where?"

"You might be surprised," she said. She reached up and ran a clawed finger along a scar just below her left ear. "Let's see. There." She jabbed sharply with the claw. It slid deep into her flesh, but instead of blood, green light welled out.

"What the hell?" I began, then realized the answer. "You're a webtroll."

"Yes. A little antiquated perhaps, but adequate for the task at hand."

"I don't understand. The only webtrolls I know of belong to the Fates."

She nodded. "So did I once. To Atropos."

"What happened?"

"Obsolescence," said Ahllan, her rich voice suddenly flat. "She upgraded to a newer model. First she vacuumed out my memory and yanked the relay unit that let me draw power from the interworld chaos, then she tossed me on the junk heap. Only, a funny thing happened. I didn't die." She shook herself like a dog shedding water.

"As I lay there, my systems blinking out one by one, I realized I wanted to live. Not an original idea, but very important to me. I used the last of the power in my battery backup to create a locus transfer link directly into the primal chaos. Then I stepped through."

"You what?" I couldn't help but interrupt. "That's suicide."

"No. It was a carefully calculated risk. The Fates use the primal chaos all the time. Life threads are spun from it. The mweb runs on it. Every aspect of magical power comes from harnessing the beast of chaos into the yoke of order."

"Yes," I said. "I know all that. I learned it at my grandmother's knee. I also learned that it will eat you if you try to deal with it directly."

"True for you perhaps, but not for me. Do you know how the Fates channel chaos into the mweb?"

"Of course. They use their mainframes to control the flows and…" Then I understood. Ahllan
was
a mainframe. "Oh."

"Indeed. Now, let me just get the other one."

She poked a claw into the matching scar on the right side of her neck. A moment later her flesh began to twist and shift. It was slower than Melchior's transition, and rougher, more mechanical and jerky. I'd never seen an autonomous webdevice that transformed itself in such a primitive fashion, and I remembered the early-model webgoblin my mother had kept around for sentimental reasons. Instead of becoming a laptop, it changed into what she referred to as a portable. My father always insisted that luggable was a more accurate description. When the transformation was complete, she had become a tall rectangular box studded with blinking lights. A flip-down keyboard covered a green-screen CRT. For a minute I worried about compatibility, but even as the thought went through my head, two networking cables and a power shunt lowered themselves from a small box crudely welded onto the machine's side.

Taking a memory crystal from my bag, I popped it into a receptacle on the top of the mainframe. It was my most recent backup of Melchior's DASD, or dynamically accessed storage device, his memory. The next steps would all have been much easier if he'd crashed in laptop form, but using outside magic to shift his shape might cause further damage, so I would just have to do things the hard way. I started by plugging one of the cables into Melchior's nose. Opening his mouth as wide as it would go, I reached in and disengaged his central processor by pulling on his uvula. The power shunt slid into the depths of one pointy ear. When that was firmly in place, I reached into the interface box on the side of Ahllan's mainframe form and flipped a switch. Melchior twitched like a heart-attack victim when you hit him with the paddles, and a low hum began to emerge from the area of his belly.

He was all prepped. It would have been nice if I could have taken a nap first, but what I'd said to Ahllan about Fate-coded viruses still held true. If I really wanted to save him, I didn't dare wait. So the remaining cable slid into the port on the athame's hilt and the slender blade slid into the palm of my hand, letting my animating will flow out of my body.

* * * *

The outside world vanished, and I plunged into a universe of the electronic. Ahllan's interface was odd. All of the 3-D objects were harsh-edged and translucent, with no curves. Colors were bright glowing primaries. It was like an early nineteen-eighties vision of cyberspace made real. If I hadn't been in such a hurry, it might have been fun in a weird retro sort of way. As it was, the effect was distracting. It took me a couple of minutes to orient myself properly and find the pathway to Melchior's drive system. It was a long, burnt-orange chute. A huge gate made of what looked like neon-green ice blocked it off from the main flow of Ahllan's consciousness. There was a big old biohazard symbol set over the latch of the gate.

Ahllan wasn't taking any chances with whatever had crashed Melchior. If the Fates had been true to form, there was a nasty pathogen of some kind in there, and anything that worked on webgoblins was probably also effective against webtrolls. The data gate swung open to let me pass, then closed behind me with a harsh clang. At times like these I wished I could put my faith in prayer. Unfortunately, I'd met Zeus. When you know a god personally, it's very hard to believe in him, especially if he's a lecherous idiot. Sure, there are other gods, but none of the ones I've talked to have struck me as particularly useful, and Necessity, the governing power of the multiverse, is too impersonal. So I sent off a vague request to the Powers and Incarnations to not let me kill myself too badly and jumped into the chute.

I went zipping down a waterslide filled with jellied light, all bright and slippery and vaguely disturbing. At the bottom, I crossed into Melchior's memory. The difference was like digital and analog. One second I was up to my neck in bright orange goo, the next I was sitting on a huge, overstuffed footstool. I was inside Melchior's head. It looked like one of those houses people tell creepy stories about. It was large, drafty, poorly lit, and full of shadows that didn't belong to anything I could see. On the plus side, that was pretty much what it looked like the last time I'd been there. On the minus side, well… it looked like it looked and felt like it felt. Also, the electricity was off.

The lights and other systems normally would have run off Melchior's internal power, which was currently out of the circuit. The only reason this little corner of cyberspace existed at the moment was that we had the power shunt sending a trickle charge into the driver for his optical storage. In theory, that meant there was no power available to either his CPU or whatever nastiness the Fates had coded into the mweb's security algorithms. I only wished I could believe it.

I headed for the basement. Like most houses, the mansion of my familiar's memory kept all the important operational bits in the darkest, dampest, least inviting place. My theory is that it's a subtle means of speeding the work of repair crews. Soonest done, soonest gone. I was on the fourth step down when I had my first encounter with whatever was wrong with Melchior. The tread made a sad little splintery sound as I put my foot on it and gave way. Kicking off with my other foot got me clear of the collapsing step, but it also put me off-balance. When the stair I jumped to also started to let go, I just curled up in a little ball and hoped.

Remarkably, that seemed to work. I ended up tumbling down a series of disintegrating steps, but each one held long enough for me to bounce to the next. I eventually came to rest at the bottom, bruised, but essentially unharmed. Dusting myself off, I turned and examined the damage. The stairs looked as though something had been gnawing on them. If I were a pest expert I might even have been able to hazard a guess as to what. Instead, all I could say was that it had sharp teeth. I drew my rapier.

The next bit was going to be tricky. The entrance to the equipment room was guarded by a steel vault door. Under normal circumstances, I'd have placed my hand on the palm reader and it would have opened. That wasn't going to work without power. But a small door sat just above the reader. Opening it exposed a large dial.

I stood quietly with my fingers hovering above it for several minutes while I tried to remember the combination, but the numbers just wouldn't come. In frustration I kicked the door. It rocked. Or rather, the whole structure of the doorframe rocked. Checking around the edges, I found more evidence of gnawing. Whatever had been eating the house had found its way into the equipment room. While this meant the damage was going to be worse than it would have been if the room had maintained its integrity, it also meant I was probably going to be able to get in. A small consolation, but a real one. Stepping back to get a good run at it, I charged the door.

It leaned heavily into the room, hit something, and bounced back, sending me staggering away. I was just starting to swear about that when the door tipped past its balance point and fell outward. It was six inches thick and made of hardened steel. The frame was similarly constructed, and together they must have weighed more than a ton. The noise they made when they hit the floor was spectacular. Dust shot up at the impact, cracks spiderwebbed the concrete, and a cascade of what looked like huge fuzzy June bugs followed the door into the hall.

Most of them were inert, robbed of motion by Melchior's loss of power, but a few had managed to link themselves to the power shunt. They were sickly and torpid, unable to fly, because of the weakness of the charge, but there were thousands of them, and it wasn't always easy to tell the live ones from the dead ones. For ten or fifteen minutes, I danced around the dark basement trying to skewer them all with my rapier, while they tried to take thousands of very small bites out of my hide. It was beginning to look like I might have played my last video game. In the end, however, the low-power environment saved my neck, and I got off with only minor bleeding. I didn't want to think about what they would have been like if I'd had to deal with them awake and lively. An image of fuzzy, flying piranhas came to mind.

Walking across drifts of little bodies to get into the equipment room had to qualify as one of the most disturbing events of my life. I knew that if I lived to be a thousand, my dreams would always be haunted by the crunch of little carapaces cracking, and the squishy feeling as their insides made a break for it.

The bodies were thigh deep in the room beyond, and a few of them still had some life left, but it was more an irritation than a real obstacle. The equipment room was dominated by a huge antique furnace that looked something like a giant squid developing a close personal relationship with a '72 Dodge Dart. There was also a big old junction box, a decrepit hot water heater, and a cluster of pipes experimenting with non-Euclidean geometry. In the center of the area was a large, stainless-steel rack packed with bright shiny computer equipment. It seemed terribly out of place, which was a bizarre thought when you considered that the entire structure was actually a sort of tangible metaphor for the interior architecture of a very modern laptop.

But then, both computers and sorcery have always attracted an odd catalog of practitioners. Taking a seat in front of the central monitor, I pulled out the keyboard tray. Since this was the core processor for the optical memory, it was powered up. It was also covered with something that looked like very fine pink cobwebs. Closer inspection revealed it was actually thousands of individual strands. I picked one at random and traced it from the place it was attached to the monitor out to the punctured corpse of one of my june bug things. That explained why some of them had still been working. Even as I watched, a fine thread extended from a dormant one lying near the computer rack, and started probing for something to latch on to. I brushed it aside.

Typing quickly, I pulled up a schematic of the optical memory. It appeared as a 3-D walk-through blueprint of the Victorian house I currently occupied. After activating a second monitor, I pulled a memory crystal from my pouch. This action sent a message back to Ahllan, and she responded by accessing the actual, physical crystal I'd left in her reader. It would provide me with a complete copy of Melchior's read/write memory as it had been the last time I backed him up. Sadly, I hadn't been making backups as often as I should have, and the crystal was over a month old. If I just restored from there, he was going to lose all that time.

Worse still, a backup of an autonomous webdevice like Melchior was never completely accurate. I think it's the chaos tap that powers them that's ultimately responsible. Having the stuff of randomness fed directly into their veins day and night has a warping effect. They start with all their ones and zeros in neat little rows, but over time some of those binary numbers go irrational. It's that disorder that gives them a sort of personality. Nothing can survive contact with the raw stuff of creation without changing.

There was a gentle chime from the memory processor and an almost identical blueprint came up on the second monitor. Now we would see whether I was really as good a hacker as I thought I was. The task was to compare the two schematics, find where the newer one differed from the older, and decide whether the difference was due to injury or the transformations of time. I would need to carefully excise the damaged portions and slot in pieces from the older model. The nasty part would come when I hit a place where I was dealing with damage to new memory files. There I'd have to wing it.

It was hard, tedious work, and it took hours. The thorniest problem came from the fuzzy little attack vectors mweb security had sent into Melchior's system. They bred like roaches, and they were everywhere. If I missed even one, they would be back on the offensive a matter of minutes after reboot. I swept up as many as I could, using subroutines like Roto-Rooter and Spic-n-Span to clean out hard-to-reach nooks and crannies of the DASD, but I knew they wouldn't get them all. After I finished reconstruction and cleanup, I'd have to code a really serious insecticide and fog the whole place. Then, and only then, could I try rebooting Melchior.