Cybermancy (3 page)

“There yer are,” she snarled as soon as she spotted me. She did a lot of snarling.

“And a lovely good morning to you, too, Kira.”

“Ar, go on with yer,” she said. “
What’s the likes
o’ yer care about formalities from the likes o’ me?”

“Can I eat her?” asked Melchior hopefully.

“Just yer try it!” said Kira. “I’ll tear yer eyes out and feed ’em to yer.”

“Somehow, Mel, I think she’d stick in your throat. What do you want, Kira?” She might be a royal pain, but I owed her a favor or two.

“What makes yer think I want summat?” I just looked at her.
“Ar, all right.
So maybe I’m in a bit o’ need, and I thought I could touch yer fer help.”

She did look rather bedraggled, exhibiting a few rips in her wings and a certain air of poverty. “Go on.”

“It’s been forever and a day since I’ve had a bit of an upgrade, and I figured yer was the one ought to set things to rights, seein’ as
it’s
yer fault I’m out o’ work.”

True enough on one level. She’d once been the property of my cousin Dairn, who had very different views on the rights of the AI, which might have something to do with both her disposition and grammar, and I had been responsible for their parting. At the time she’d thanked me.

“What do you need?” I asked. She looked at her feet. “Come on, I’m kind of in a hurry. Besides, this isn’t exactly a private forum.” Only the lateness of the hour and the emptiness of the streets had kept our conversation from attracting attention already, and I really didn’t want to have to explain Kira to any passersby.

“Well, it’s been near two years since I came online and my RAM is sorely inadequate by today’s standards. Also, I don’t have any o’ them fancy cell phone doodads, and I’ll need one. Voice
Over
Mweb Protocol enabled o’ course.”

“Anything else?”
This was clearly going to take work.

“I don’t know. I’m about three OS upgrades behind the curve, and I haven’t exactly been keepin’ up with the trade magazines. What would yer suggest?”

“I could suggest that you go jump . . .” She looked heartbroken. I sighed,
then
smiled a yes. For some reason, I can’t resist a damsel in distress, even if she’s only six inches tall and has the manners of a moth-eaten weasel. Besides, I’d just had an idea. I put out my hand, palm up. “Hop aboard, and we’ll talk. Melchior, would you get the door?”

He rolled his eyes but whistled a spell of unlocking—nobody in his right mind would give an old hacker like me the keys to Harvard’s crown jewels of computing—then held the door. I decided to wait on seeing Cerice until I’d found out whether I could manage the upgrade I had in mind. So I had Mel open up the small computer repair shop just down the hall from her lab. I did a quick inventory and decided they had about half of what I needed on hand.

“The software will be easy enough. So will the RAM.
But the rest?
Your microphone is totally inadequate, so that’ll have to go. You haven’t got an audio-out jack, and I can’t imagine where I’d put an antenna.”

“Are yer trying to slither out on me?” she demanded.

“No, just thinking aloud. I wish this could wait until after I get back from—”

She cut me off. “No chance. I know yer too well fer that,” she said. “Yer
errands
tend to the hazardous. How am I supposed to get fixed with yer dead and gone?”

“See,” said Melchior, “even the great unwashed can tell you’re not long for this world.” He looked her up and down. “Well, unwashed at any rate.”

“Why is everyone convinced I’m going to get myself killed?” I asked. The look of scorn and disbelief on the two small faces was identical.
“Right.
Mel, why don’t you make yourself useful? I need you to run to the electronics store and find me the highest-capacity flash memory device you can find.
Oh, and a couple of really nice cell phones.”

“I could still eat her,” he replied. “It’d probably be easier.”

“Go.” He went. I turned back to Kira and gave her a visual once-over. She put her hands on her tiny hips and glared back at me. It was quite disconcerting. “Do you want help or not?” She held my gaze a moment longer,
then
nodded, almost meekly.

“Right.
Then you, Handheld.
Execute, please.”

For a moment I thought she was going to argue, but all she said was, “Executing,” in the strange, almost timbreless voice the various AIs used when running commands.

With that, the webpixie was gone. In her place lay a small translucent green handheld computer. There were scuffs on her cover, and the top left corner of her case was badly cracked, but she was still a fine little piece of hardware—state of the art in her day. I started removing screws. After a time, Melchior returned with the gear. I mumbled a quick thank-you,
then
got back to work.

I removed the cracked bit of casing and used the resultant hole to mount her new antenna and a headset jack.
Inelegant but functional, and a little bit of liquid latex helped with the looks.
In addition to the bits I’d asked for, Melchior had turned up one of the new ultraminiature hard drives.

When he handed that over, I looked a question at him. He pointed at Kira and tapped his ear inquiringly.

“Fully shut down,” I answered.
“Can’t hear a thing.”

“She’ll need that if she’s going to get into MP3s.” I raised an eyebrow. “I figured that was what you wanted the flash memory for. This is a better storage solution. Individually, MP3s may not take much memory, but they do add up and . . .” I kept my eyebrow up.
“All right.
She’s about as much fun as a sand burr in your shorts, but she’s got enough
attitude
for a whole herd of webtroll servers. She’s fragile and obsolete, but she’s not going to let anyone push her around. She’s got this whole free will thing nailed. Since I’m still working on it, I admire that.”

“I just hope I haven’t scrambled her brains completely with this rush job,” I replied.

Two hours after I’d started the
project,
it was time to find out. With a quick jab of my smallest screwdriver, I initiated a hard reboot. Several long seconds passed with the only sound a faint whir from her new hard drive. Then her little speaker let out a rude Bronx cheer.

“If her start-up sound is any indicator,” said Melchior, “she’s well on her way to normal.”

When she shifted into webpixie shape, she confirmed that. “A bloody butcher yer are,” she growled, “lopping a great huge chunk of my casing off like that. And with no anesthetic, I might add.
Ar!”
She took wing and shot out the door into the hallway.

“Not even a thank-yer,” said Melchior. “Typical.”

But before I could get out of my chair, Kira had returned, hovering a few inches in front of my nose.

“Thanks, yer great booby.” She flitted down to Melchior. “Yer too, blue boy. I know that hard drive weren’t his lordship’s idea.” She jerked a thumb at me. “That’s pure fellow webcritter thoughtfulness that is.” She grinned impishly. “It’s too bad yer such a monstrous huge fellow, or I might show you my gratitude in a manner a bit more personal, if yer catch my drift.” Melchior
blushed
a deep indigo. “Ar well, different ports for different connectors and all that. But if yer ever have the urge, remember this.” She zipped up close to his ear and let out a burst of binary far too fast for my ears to decode.

Melchior was still looking stunned when she opened a tiny gate in the substance of reality and vanished.

“What was that last?” I asked.

“She gave me her new cell number,” said Melchior. “She said now that she’s got one, she might as well get some use out of it.” He blushed again. “Then she suggested that even if we didn’t have any hardware in common, we could always try wireless.”

I grinned but didn’t say a word as I headed out the door. We’d kept Cerice waiting long enough.

As expected, I found her in the lab pacing and swearing. She did a lot of that lately; the dissertation was practically killing her. She looked depressed and exhausted. Around her lay a couple reams of paper covered with a million or so lines of code that I could barely read, much less really understand, and a dozen monitors scrolling different sorts of graphical and textual representations of The Program of Doom.

Did I mention that Cerice is way smarter than I am? She’s also beautiful, with ice blond hair, eyes like blue fire, and a bone structure that makes mine look crude. As always, she wore red and gold, in this case jeans in a muted gold, a red silk blouse, and scarlet high-tops.

“There you are!” she said, about a minute after I sat down behind a desk strewn with junk. In her fogged state, it took her that long to notice me. “It’s about time.”

“Were you expecting me?” I asked in surprise.

“No, I wasn’t.” She came and sat down on the edge of the desk, putting her feet on my chair so that they rested on either side of my knees. “But I had hopes.” Dark circles underlined her eyes.

She leaned forward, wrapped her arms around my shoulders, and rested her chin on top of my head with a sigh. This put my lips squarely between her collarbones, so I kissed her gently in the hollow there, then again a bit lower. She pulled back and shook her head, though there was a wistful smile on her face.

“You tempt me,” she said, her voice husky.

“I’ve got all night.”

“
It’s
morning, and I don’t have any time at all,” she replied, abruptly rising and starting to pace again. “I promised Dr. Doravian I’d have the analysis data on the theta-theta decision point subroutines ready for him by Tuesday noon.”

“And?”

“And my thesis defense is going to look like an auto-defé.” She tried to make a joke of it, but I could hear the strain in her voice. “The whole segment’s gone trash can.”

I thought about that for a moment. Cerice is smarter than I am and a better from-the-ground-up coder, but nobody anywhere finds programming flaws better than I do. It’s where my share of divine spark manifests itself. Even Atropos, my most inveterate critic, acknowledges that, though she has some problems with the fact that I mostly use that talent on other people’s security software. I looked at the screens of data and stacks of paper Cerice had accumulated and frowned. She’d been working on this project for years.

She’d even created her own programming language when the available choices proved inadequate. And that was the problem. Given time to learn the system, I might be able to do something for her, but it would take a month to get up to speed, and she only had three days before she needed the segment running again. Still, I had to offer.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

She gave me a look that mixed longing and concern with resignation and real fear. That gave me a clue as to what she wanted but wasn’t willing to ask. She shook her head and looked away. I caught her chin in my left hand and gently turned her back to face me. She covered my hand with her own, stroking the end of my foreshortened pinkie.

I’d permanently lost the first joint to a spell a bit over a year before. It had happened the night she’d saved my life for the first of several times. It was a debt she’d never think to call in, but one I owed her all the same. She owned more than just my heart.

I took a deep breath and plunged forward. “What do you need?
Really.
If I can help, I will.”

She closed her eyes and practically stopped breathing while long seconds slid by. Finally, pulling loose of my hand and turning her face toward the floor, she whispered, “Nothing. There’s nothing you can do.”

“What if you had Shara?”

“She’s gone, Ravirn. Dead, and that’s not a problem with a solution.”

“Orpheus—”

“No!” She cut me off. “That’s madness. All that’ll happen if you try to bring her back is that I’ll lose you, too. Don’t even think about it.”

But the moment had come. Cerice knew I’d been working on how to get Shara out of Hades. She’d tried to talk me out of it enough times. Maybe she was right; maybe it was crazy. But I couldn’t let that stop me. Shara’d died because of me—a victim of collateral damage in my recent confrontation with the Fates. An arrow that should have had my name on it had punched right through her screen, causing massive short circuits.

While I’d been horrified, I’d figured fixing her up would involve little more than solving a really tricky hardware problem. Cerice, knowing the architecture of the various webgoblins and webtrolls that ran the backbone of the mweb better than I ever would, had concurred. But when we’d gotten all the parts put back together, Shara wouldn’t boot. The hardware was
fine,
the software was fine, but no Shara. That’s when we’d realized that she had a “spiritware” problem. Her soul had passed through the gate so ably guarded by my new pal Cerberus, probably at the instigation of my great-aunt Atropos.

I owed it to Shara to at least make the attempt to restore her to life, and now was the time—when a rescue could do double duty. Shara was as much Cerice’s programming counterpart as Melchior was mine. She contained every scrap of information Cerice had ever voiced or written about her thesis project. As a coding resource and a friend, Cerice’s familiar was irreplaceable. If anything could save Cerice’s thesis, Shara was it.

So, all I had to do was get moving. It was time and past to screw my “courage to the sticking-place,” as Lady Mac-beth had so elegantly phrased it. But now that the moment had arrived, I felt like I’d been hit in the chest with a hammer.
Best to act now before I had any second thoughts.
“Melchior,” I said, “my dagger.”