Mythos (16 page)

Tisiphone nodded. “Then we’d better make her as stable as possible.”

She matter-of-factly lifted Ahllan’s mainframe shape from the small futon platform and placed her on the floor. I smiled. Tisiphone’s lack of hysterics in the face of risk and death was one of the things I most liked about her. I strung a cable from Ahllan’s add-on port to the matching one in my athame. Then I settled onto Ahllan’s bed, moving carefully so that I wouldn’t disrupt my fresh bandages. At last I was going to be able to do something!

I wasn’t looking forward to how much jacking-in would hurt or how hard the recovery would be in the here and now, but the prospect of action drove me forward. I raised the athame preparatory to plunging it through my hand.

Tisiphone caught my wrists. “Hang on one second.”

She knelt beside the bed and leaned down to give me a thorough kissing. Though her lips are not touched with fire in the way of her hair and wings, they burn every bit as hot to me. I soon felt as though smoke might come pouring from my ears. I tried to move my hands, to caress her sides and back, but she held me immobile, her grip on my wrists as steely and soft as velvet handcuffs. I found the effect—our only points of contact at lips and wrists—deeply erotic, and I hardened in response. When she finally broke the kiss and let me go, I wanted her so badly I ached but knew it would have to wait.

“What was that about?” I husked.

“To give you something to come back to.”

“Why does everybody always act as though I’ve got a death wish?”

“Said the man who just put himself between Fenris Wolf and an angry Fury,” she replied.

“Point taken.” I set the athame against my palm. “See you on the other side.” I thrust it home.

The pain was breathtaking but mercifully brief, catapulting me into the world of the virtual. As I had the one time I’d come here previously, I marveled at the way interfaces had shifted since Ahllan’s day. Instead of a world every bit as real and detailed as the living one, I found myself in a place of large, simple shapes and bright, primary colors—a retro-eighties vision of cyberspace. I turned in place, orienting myself. On that last visit I’d been passing through on my way to Melchior’s inner space and hadn’t bothered. This time, I was here for the duration, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

I stood on a flat plain, bright blue and gridded like something out of an old video game. Huge cubes, cylinders, and pyramids in greens and golds and reds rose from the plain around me—some close, some quite distant. All were neatly aligned with the blue grid.

Make that grids,
I thought. A matching one put a lid on the sky above me. I thought I saw another ending the horizon off to my left, though it was far enough away I couldn’t be certain. I arbitrarily decided to call that direction north.

Once more I spun in space, this time focusing on details rather than gestalt. Ahllan’s inner form showed signs of wear and tear to match those on her body, hiccups in line edges, jaggies and fuzzies and dead spots like fried pixels. The obvious electronic decay made me edgy but I tried to put it out of my mind while I looked for any major glitches or black spots—things that might represent the inner version of her outer unconsciousness.

What finally drew my eye was movement, right at the edge of my vision to the south. Whatever it was, it was low to the ground and moving slowly. I focused my attention that way and willed myself forward—as good a method of locomotion as any in that kind of space. As I moved closer I discovered that
it
was a
they
, a long line of little yellow disky things like animate Frisbees moving northeast to southwest. I traced the line back toward its point of origin and started mentally swearing.

A huge cylinder stood there, the largest yet. It stretched all the way from the grid below to the one above like a pillar for holding up the sky. Since, as far as I could tell, it stood at the exact center of her inner space, that might well be its purpose—the core of her AI.

The line of killer Frisbees ran right up the base of the cylinder, where they were tearing away at the structure, pulling it apart a pixel at a time and carrying it off to wherever. They’d already seriously undermined the near side, and I didn’t know how much more damage the thing could take before it broke, and the sky came tumbling down, taking me and Ahllan with it.

I couldn’t tell from that distance what was at the root of the process. Maybe a virus, maybe a subroutine gone horribly wrong, maybe just the gremlins of aging electronics. Whatever the case, I felt pretty certain it represented the problem I’d come looking for and needed to be stopped ASAP. I quickened my pace.

In moments, I stood beside a line of disks moving from right to left away from the cylinder. Up close they didn’t look all that different, thin yellow disks sliding along just above the surface of the plain, each with a couple of stolen bits—as in ones and zeroes—on top. Not far beyond, another line, this one sans load, was moving from left to right. I followed this second line perhaps a virtual hundred yards before I found its point of origin—a hole in space several yards above the plain where the disks were simply popping into existence and dropping to the ground. From there they slithered off toward the cylinder.

Under normal circumstances, I’d have had Melchior code me up a couple of spell probes to do the dirty work, but I had neither Melchior nor time. Instead, after preparing myself for a quick escape, I snatched up one of the unladen Frisbees.

It neither squealed nor wiggled. More important, it didn’t bite me, and its mates didn’t take my action as a signal for a massed attack. That was a huge relief. It or
they
—I didn’t know which yet—either weren’t programmed for defense or weren’t very good at it. I made a careful inspection of the disk. No legs. No teeth. No real features at all. It was dished, very much like a Frisbee, and I felt a faint pressure like the outflow of a fan against my palm when I pressed it into the concavity, which suggested it moved like a hovercraft.

I checked the line of its fellows for signs of hostility, but they continued to ignore me as they went about the work of bringing the sky down. Time for the next experiment. I whistled a brief and extremely basic string of the local equivalent of binary—I wasn’t yet fluent enough for more. In response, a plain black cube about three feet on a side appeared in the path of the unladen disks. In a perfect world, that would have been enough to stop them. Guess what.

The first disk bumped straight into it, paused, then bumped along to the left until it found the end of the cube, bumped around the corner, then along that surface to the next corner where it bumped along some more. When it was back in line with the disks ahead and behind, it took off toward the great cylinder. The next disk followed the same pattern, though with fewer and shallower bumps. By the fifth, the line flowed around the cube without any collisions at all.

About what I’d expected. I could have moved on to more elaborate barriers if I’d had the right code vocabulary and plenty of time, but I was fairly certain that it wasn’t going to help, and quick and dirty had to be the order of the day. I bit the bullet . . . well, Frisbee to be precise. Raising the disk to my lips, I nipped off a piece of the edge, holding it in my mouth for a long moment to check for poisons and viruses before swallowing.

It tasted . . . It’s hard to describe. Yellow, obviously, and diskish, and rather plastic. But that was all to be expected. The outward form of a thing in cyberspace tends to reflect the inward purposes, especially simple things like the disk, or the cube I’d made. But there was more to it than that, especially since I wasn’t exactly “tasting” in the normal sense of the word. When I inserted myself into the cyberworld, I became a thing of code myself, an ensouled magical-digital hybrid.

By biting a chunk out of the disk, I was attaching a bit of its codeshape to my own, trying for a quick gestalt kind of reading on its nature and purpose. I learned enough to tell me that swallowing it probably wouldn’t kill me, but not much more. For that I had to go the next step and try to digest it—which I did by swallowing. At that point I was using my own codeshape as a sort of virtual processor to run a bit of the Frisbee program in simulation. Not the whole thing, not at first anyway, not until I was sure I could assimilate it. When it neither gave me indigestion nor enough information to understand it, I took another bite. Then another, chewing and swallowing methodically until I’d ingested the whole thing.

An idea of what I was dealing with began to form. It wasn’t nearly as exact as what I could have gleaned with the sort of code tools Melchior normally provided, nor even as exact as the identical process would have been back home with my native binary, but it might be enough. Especially since I could now see that the disks weren’t so much a real program as they were an adaptive process, and a chaos-driven one at that.

Loki was responsible, but it didn’t taste as though he’d done it with malice aforethought, more like he simply hadn’t had enough time to find out how Ahllan worked and code up a piece of magic optimized for her OS. In fact, from the taste of it, he hadn’t had the time or the knowledge for a real targeted codespell at all.

As far as I could tell, the disks were basically just a set of magically animated information hunters designed to find out what made Ahllan tick and report back to their master. The fact that they were disassembling her softwarescape in the search for information seemed more of an accidental by-product of sloppy spell work than an intentional effect. That didn’t change the results, but it might explain why they’d ignored my attack on one of them rather than coun terattacking. The next question was what were they doing with the information? Ahllan didn’t have the necessary hardware for them to complete the task of calling home to Momma—no connection to MimirNet.

That was when the earthquake grabbed me by the feet and threw me to the ground. I landed hard on my back and watched thin lines propagate through the sky grid above as the world continued to shake and waver around me. For several very long seconds I felt certain the huge cylinder was about to come down and bring the rest of the world with it, but eventually it stopped, and I was able to get up. A glance at the cylinder showed long cracks radiating out from the place where the disks busily continued chewing away.

If I had any sense, I’d have headed back to my body at that point. But if I had any sense, I’d never have ended up in the Norse pantheoverse in the first place. Instead, I sped after the retreating line of laden disks, moving as fast as my mind would take me. Every so often, the ground beneath me vibrated with the virtual equivalent of an aftershock, and the disks slid around or flipped over. But they always righted themselves and re-formed the line.

I followed them to an apparently arbitrary point on the plain where the line ended and thousands of disks crawled back and forth, running into and over one another to form a giant seething mass of yellow. In order to understand what I was seeing I caught and ate another disk.

This was the point in Ahllan’s internal architecture that most resembled the requisite networking point, the place they believed they needed to get to in order to beam the bits of information to wherever it was Loki wanted them to go. Of course, there was no way for them to fulfill their purpose because of Ahllan’s lack of a MimirNet card.

Instead, they climbed and crawled over one another vainly trying to complete an impossible mission, forming a huge roiling heap that was further tumbled every few minutes by the continuing shocks as their brethren slowly destroyed the pillar holding up the sky. If they hadn’t been so likely to kill both Ahllan and me, I might almost have felt sorry for them. What I actually felt was uncomfortably full. That didn’t stop me from devouring a third disk, then a fourth.

Finally, though I didn’t know the precise process Loki had used to start this mess, I felt I had enough information to formulate an answer to the problem. Not
the
answer—I never have
the
answer; I’m a hacker and I do things on the fly and by the baling-wire-and-string method. But I was pretty sure I had something that would work if there was enough time left to implement it.

Since I could tell Loki had used a spell formed of raw chaos rather than one of the digital variety, my answer had to be of the same sort. I closed my eyes and willed my insides to do things that insides normally didn’t do. When I finished, I barfed up my own Frisbee formed from the shreds of the four I’d eaten. It was blue and slightly larger than the yellow originals.

It slid over to the mass of information-laden disks and settled onto the nearest, hiding it completely within its convex underskirt. A moment later, the blue disk seemed to grow taller, a second blue skirt flaring beneath the first like a ruffle. Then the ruffle dropped free, becoming a nearly identical blue disk—the main difference being that this one carried a few of Ahllan’s stolen bits on its upper surface—the yellow disk now converted by my efforts.

Each of the blue pair quickly moved on to engulf another yellow disk. In minutes, there were dozens of blue disks eating and converting the yellow ones. Soon after, some of them began moving back along the line toward the cylinder—transforming the line beneath them as they went—headed off to reassemble the pillar of the universe.

They couldn’t do it quickly enough for my taste, as something midway between snow and dust had recently started drifting down from the ceiling. It appeared to be coming from a myriad of narrow fractures. I was seriously pushing my luck by remaining as long as I had, but I still needed to do one more thing or the whole trip would be a waste—destroy the yellow disk feeder.

I did so by the simple expedient of stuffing one of the blue disks into its throat and holding it there until I felt the process freeze up. I probably could have found a more elegant way to manage it, but none faster. I have no idea how Loki started the whole thing, though the thought of his coughing up the first little yellow disk as a blob of chaos and spitting it at Ahllan had a symmetry to it that I rather liked. However it was done, I was finally ready to go.