Cybermancy (21 page)

“So where are the reins?” I asked eventually. We were still sliding along an essentially unbroken tunnel, but I knew I’d want more control at some point.

“Steer with your knees, my dear. I can be
very
responsive.”

“Yeah, it’s that ‘can be’ part I’m worried about.”

“Support and transport and nothing more,” replied Eris. “Isn’t that what we agreed?”

I sighed but nodded and looked ahead. A light quickly grew until the walls opened out around us. Eris stopped then, leaving most of her long body in the tunnel behind, and reared up like a cobra preparing to strike. We had emerged high up on a mountain with the core server architecture of the mweb lying like an endless gem-studded plain below.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Eris.

“Uh-huh.”

“But this is all on the public side and not much use for finding out what’s wrong. For that, we’ll have to dig deeper.”

“Wait a second,” I said.

But my protest fell on seemingly deaf ears as we slithered down the mountainside. Before I had time even to frame my argument, we were among the jewel-toned shapes that represented the many, many cores of the mweb mainframes. We didn’t stop until we’d reached a huge ebony sphere, like some massive pearl—one of Necessity’s black boxes. Remembering my last encounter with the goddess’s security, I squeezed Eris’s sides hard with my knees.

“Whoa there.
I almost got fried the first time I messed with one of these. We should take it slow.” I quickly described my experience with trying to crack Necessity.

Eris shrugged. “Last time you didn’t have me along to play crowbar.”

Then she slid to the left of the sphere and circled back until she’d met herself on the other side. She did this again and again until she’d looped three coils of herself around the huge black globe. She must have been elongating herself as she went, because I was pretty sure the Eris I’d first mounted couldn’t have managed the feat.

“I thought I was in charge,” I said.

“You are.”

“Then tell me you aren’t about to crush that thing in your coils.”

“All right.
I’m not going to crush that thing in my coils.” She grinned. “But I’m sure as hell going to try.”

With that, she squeezed. The black fire that had destroyed my code weasel broke out over the entire surface of the processor core, and the world filled with blinding sparks and the smell of burning snake.

“Sssshiiittt!” and whether it was Discord’s voice or mine doing the screaming, I couldn’t say.

The sound of shattering glass filled the universe, and it was both Eris’s laugh and the cracking of the great ebony sphere. The dark fires faded as the black globe fell to ruin around us. Exposed within was another pearl, this one with all the rainbow highlights of the real thing. Eris’s coils clutched tighter, catching this new sphere within them. But there was no resistance. It was like squeezing Jell-O, and together we sank into the core’s surface.

So this was how the great powers played the hacking game.
Smashing aside barriers that I would have been hard-pressed to finesse.
I didn’t like the style much, though it obviously had its strong points—effectiveness for example. I had just a moment to enjoy the idea that we’d beaten the system before I noticed the shards of blackness springing back into place behind us. We were in all right, but I suddenly had doubts about getting back out. Then the spheres were gone, and we arrived in a new frame of reference.

We were in the open, though mist, swirling gray and pearlescent, provided the illusion of boundaries. Beneath us lay harsh black volcanic
rock,
and I could hear waves breaking somewhere not too far away. Perhaps because of the way the ocean sounds came to me, or perhaps for some other reason, I felt certain that we were on a small island. I was about to share my thoughts with Eris when I noticed the guardian, or really, her foot.

It was a big foot, one that rearranged my sense of perspective. Now instead of a knight-errant riding a serpent of epic proportions, I felt like an action figure strapped to the back of a garter snake.
A garter snake in very real danger of being stepped on.
The foot, definitely feminine and a scant ten feet away, appeared to be formed of living purple-veined marble, hard and cold yet still alive and vital. My eyes traced upward, drawn to follow the living-stone column of the ankle up into the mist. As if on cue, the gray curtain parted, and I found myself staring past a curvy body into an enormous veiled face.

“We should have just stayed in Hades,” said the bat-shaped Melchior. “It would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

He had a point. In addition to her veil, the giantess also wore the world’s biggest mirror shades. That was all to the good. It prevented me from meeting her gaze, a circumstance that would have resulted in my getting stoned, and I don’t mean blissed-out. But circumstances could change at any moment, and that would mean game over, because I wasn’t the only one in the company of snakes.
The enormous guardian had seen my serpentine steed and raised me about a hundredfold.
Her hair was alive, and it was looking at me. I had just found the world’s biggest gorgon, and every single strand of her hair appeared ready to strike.

“Who?” asked the guardian in a female voice both strange and strangely
familiar.

“Discord and Raven, on errand from Necessity herself,” answered Eris.
Which was good, since I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
I was too busy panicking.

Long seconds dripped past as the great presence loomed above us. An internal struggle seemed to take hold of the gorgon, manifested in the wild twisting and hissing of her hair. It had been relatively still before. Now it was self-braiding.

Finally, the snakes subsided, and the voice spoke again. “Pass.” It sounded oddly constricted, as though it were acting against its own will.

My spine turned into liquid from sheer relief and flowed away through a tailbone gone suddenly hollow. At least, that’s what it felt like. The mist closed once again and the life seemed to leach out of the marble, transforming active guardian into passive statue.

“Are you totally insane?” I snapped at Eris. “I told you what happened to me last time I got near one of Necessity’s black boxes, and now you just bull your way in? I thought I was supposed to be running this show.”

“You are, and you will from here on out,” said Eris. “But your last encounter with Necessity’s security is exactly why I pushed things now. I knew you’d take forever and a day to get to the point of the matter, and that’s not why we’re here. Necessity and her security aren’t the problem. Whatever’s eating the mweb is, and we needed to get on to finding it. Besides, last time you weren’t acting at the express request of Necessity herself, as delivered by her handmaidens. I figured we’d be golden on cracking our way in here on that count alone.”

I sighed; she was probably right, but I wasn’t quite ready to surrender the point. “So why didn’t you just ring the doorbell? What if Necessity hadn’t agreed with you?”

“The sentinel would have smacked us around a little, and I’d have apologized. This gave me a free shot at Necessity’s security. I don’t ever intend on going up against her, but if I have to try it someday, I now know a lot more about what to expect. If you’re going to stay in the chaos business, you’ll have to learn these things, Raven.”

“But I don’t
want
to be in the chaos business.” Then I shook my head. When you’re reduced to whining about your problems to the Goddess of Discord,
it’s
way past time to shut up. “Forget it. Let’s move on.”

In apparent response to my comment, the world shifted around us. Sunlight burned the mist away, exposing the horizon. We were indeed on an island, one surrounded by dark water as far as the eye could see. It became as smooth as the black terrazzo that now replaced the rough rock beneath us, changing the island from a rounded hummock to a neat hexagon a few feet above the water. No waves touched the endless ocean anymore, and no wind rippled the surface. It looked as though you could have walked on it, though where you’d go I couldn’t imagine. Of our original situation, only the huge gorgon remained.

“And?”
I said aloud. I was getting really tired of rapidly changing scenery and digital metaphors for reality.

“Uh, Boss,” said Melchior. “Maybe you shouldn’t push—”

“I’m waiting,” I said.

Lines of white fire shot away from the island in every direction, like underwater lightning, forking and crossing in every conceivable combination without ever breaking the surface, until they filled the ocean in all directions.

“Thank you.” Here was what I wanted, the master map of the mweb.

Sliding off of Eris’s back, I walked down to the edge of the water. For a long time I just stood there and watched the lightning dance. I needed to get a feel for the interface. The island represented the core architecture, the master servers of the mweb and the deeper layers inside Necessity’s black boxes. The lightning showed the various lines of connection. Where the bolts crossed, subnodes existed, some permanent, some temporary. Since the countless worlds of possibility remained in constant motion relative to each other, the mweb continually had to readjust itself to keep everything connected.
Hence the dance of the lightning.

At first it seemed an impossibly complex and chaotic structure, beyond any comprehension. But the longer I looked, the more I felt that I could sense patterns, even if I couldn’t see them outright, certain iterations that repeated
themselves
. With a thought, I lifted my virtual self high into the air, levitating up to stand on the shoulder of the gorgon. I unfocused my eyes, trying to let the visual information pass through me, direct from the sea to my hindbrain without the intervening filter of directed vision or thought. Time flowed around me, and I let it go unmarked.

Then, in a flash that mirrored the ones I watched, the whole image made sense. It was only for an instant, and I couldn’t hold on to it, but I waited and it came again.
And then again.
Like a series of related slides flashing on a screen, a pattern emerged.

When Hades calls Persephone back to his side each year, her mother brings winter down upon the world of Olympus, a winter mirrored to some degree in every other branch of reality that has split off from that first of all worlds. With the cold comes frost painted on the surface of an infinite number of windowpanes. The variety of starting conditions is such that no two of these frozen portraits are quite the same; but if you look at enough of them, recurring patterns emerge, patterns described with the mathematics of fractals, patterns that repeat themselves over and over again as you move from the scale of the very small up to the very large.

After a time I could see that the lightning in the waters conformed to the same sorts of rules, infinitely more complex perhaps, but still recurring and still building from very small to very large through self-replicating iteration. More time passed, and my ability to see the patterns increased. Instead of snapshots of recognition separated by seconds or even minutes, the whole began to resolve itself into a single pattern expressed in both space and time. I didn’t think I’d ever really be able to comprehend the totality of it, but now I could at least see that it was there. I could also see that something was wrong.

Around the edges of my vision, I could catch flickering gaps in the network, irregularities that prevented the thing from completing itself as it should. When I focused on them, they seemed to slip away, but by catching them out of the corners of my eyes I slowly came to understand that another pattern governed the gaps. It was a pattern of absence, as of things torn loose in a systematic way.

“Melchior?” I said then.

“Oh good, you’re alive. I’d begun to wonder. You haven’t moved in over an hour, and your virtual self doesn’t betray itself with little things like breathing or blinking.”

“Sorry,” I said absently. “I want your opinion on something.”

“Of course you do. If you didn’t want something, you’d still be ignoring me.” He held up a hand before I could argue with him. “Don’t deny it, and don’t worry about it. We’re here to find out what’s wrong with the mweb, and I’m not going to get in a snit if you ignore me so you can do that. Not with Ahllan’s safety possibly riding on the outcome. So what do you need? I haven’t been able to make hide nor hair of whatever’s happening down there.” His gesture took in all of the sea that lay in front of us.

“Neither have I,” said Eris’s voice from above and behind me. I looked up and found that she’d made herself at home among the stone snakes of the gorgon’s hair. She didn’t quite blend in, but she came close. “Give.”

So I described what I had seen and pointed out the gaps. “I can see the flaws, but I’m not sure I understand the underlying realities well enough to know what they mean.”

“Worlds cut off,” said Eris after a moment. “I can see it now that you’ve pointed it out.
Mweb lines that have lost their anchoring points.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “But how would that work?”

“Maybe it’s something like losing file resource locator forks,” said Melchior.

“The fragments of code that identify where a given piece of software is to the master system,” I said. It sounded right.

Melchior nodded. “The mweb is like a hard drive that’s having bits of its catalog erased.”