Mythos (33 page)

The spell was big and baroque and insanely up-tempo because it had to accomplish a bunch of complex things in the right order and very, very fast. First, it pushed our rainbow section up and into the surface of the one above, so that they overlapped in three dimensions. Then it simultaneously broke the overlapping sections along an invisible line and cross-spliced them.

The end result was a three-dimensional loop, or helix, of the sort you might find in a model train set to help the engine handle a steep hill. Packets went into the loop low and came out high. The one problem with the change was the increased distance of travel for the packets. That would affect speed of transmission. Normal variations in network flow rates would cover the issue for a while, but eventually, if the admins had a good monitoring system in place, the discrepancy would become obvious. How long that would take was an open question, though I figured no less than several days and probably not more than a couple of months.

In the meantime, since the loop was maintained by and part of RuneNet, all that data was ours to scan. But that was just a side benefit. The real point of the exercise had been to create a section of network where we controlled the invisible walls and so could slip in and out without setting off alarm bells. Of course, setting it in place might have set off those same bells, so now it was time to pull back and wait to see whether the folks with the lights and the sirens showed up. With a nod to Ahllan, I headed back up the red stairs on my way to the real world.

Hours later, we reconvened in meatspace in the server room to go over the data flows. Ahllan, who had to remain connected to both RuneNet and MimirNet to keep the tap in place, had never left. She lay unmoving in her wheeled chair, immersed in the network. Whether it was the effort of that, or simply her ongoing deterioration, she looked as though she were being consumed from within. Melchior and I had both tried to talk her into letting us remove her from the loop, but she flat-out refused.

When it became clear that nothing else of import was going to happen soon, Tisiphone, Fenris, Laginn, and the two-headed giant started a game of hearts. That left me and Melchior to pore over the data, while Loki looked impatiently over my shoulder. Though it irritated me, I couldn’t really fault him.

His whole future or, more hopefully,
futures
, rested on what happened over the next few days. I’d have been anxious about the results of the tap, too, but doing things right was much more important than doing them fast this time. As long as we could keep Odin and company in the dark about our actions, moving carefully was the best way to go. Especially since we didn’t know exactly what our next step should be.

As I read through the RuneNet summary of the loop data traffic, I kept rubbing my aching athame hand. I
had
to find a moment to code a better version of the athame-healing spell. Especially if we were going to continue to spend so much time in the RuneNet server room. The processors kicked out an amazing amount of heat, and in response, the air conditioners were set all the way to massive overcompensation.

Melchior popped open an IM box beside the RuneNet summary feed I’d just had him run for the third time.
What do you think, Boss? It looks pretty good to me.
The words appeared in a cartoon-style conversation balloon issuing from the mouth of a tiny goblin-head icon.

Depends on what you’re looking for,
I typed back. With Loki pretty much constantly in the room with us, IMing felt more private and intimate, even if it just meant he had to read over my shoulder instead of listening in.
If they’re on to the loop trick, they’re doing a damn good job of lying low and pretending they haven’t noticed. On that front, I think we can start the next phase of things anytime.

But?
Melchior knew me well enough to read the words I hadn’t written.

I’m not sure I follow you,
he responded.

I’m not sure I follow me either. Something’s not right, but I can’t figure out what. The traffic on the network isn’t flowing the way it should.
I paused and tried to find the right words to express what I meant, but I kept coming back to the idea of taste.
It’s like a soup that’s got too little salt in it, or too much of something else. It just tastes
wrong.

Are you sure it’s not some function of the alternate MythOS structure?
asked Melchior.
It’s a very different world here, right down to the underlying foundations of the universe. That’s bound to have effects at every level.

*sigh* I’d say you were crazy, but I know better. The amount of divinity you inherited from the Titans might be an open question. The quality is not, and every last bit of what you did get is oriented around finding the hidden flaws in a system. So, it
tastes wrong
. What does that mean in terms of an action plan?

I don’t know. Scroll the whole thing past me again.
I thought for a moment.
Why don’t you run it at ten times speed? I won’t be able to read anything, but I might see something in the shape of the data that I’m not getting out of the content.

I sighed and let it go as Melchior started streaming the data. The bad taste was there again and, if anything, stronger this time, but I still didn’t have a lock on what it meant.

Damn it, I was missing something, and it felt like something obvious. I just couldn’t figure out what.

I glanced at Ahllan in her wheeled recliner. Her feet were up, her eyes closed. A pair of large antique athames were driven through the backs of her hands and deep into the arms of her chair. Networking cables had been spliced directly to the pommel connecters of both blades in lieu of the old-fashioned plugs we didn’t have. The complete lack of hardware compatibility in this world made for even more kludge than usual. One cable led from the left athame to a Y-splitter and on to both the stolen network card and RuneNet. The cable running from the right athame—rigged to plug in to Melchior—was neatly coiled in her lap. The whole arrangement reminded me rather too much of a bad day at the hospital involving all sort of monitors and intravenous hookups.

Ahllan chose that moment to open her own eyes and look my way, perhaps because she’d felt my attention. I repressed an internal shudder at that evidence of soul-splitting. Instead of flesh-ports, webtrolls of her generation had been optimized for using those oversized athames when in troll form. Because of that, she could divide herself between the worlds of the virtual and the real in a way that would have ripped my soul in half or, more likely, killed me. It was the creepiest damn thing, and one I hadn’t known about until that very day.

“Do I really look so terrible?” Ahllan asked weakly.

Back in a sec, Mel,
I typed.

I got up and walked over to kneel beside her. “Not at all, Ahllan. I’m just having a hard time getting my mind around the idea of those.” I pointed at the athames.

“The pain isn’t anything worse than what my joints do on a daily basis, and at least this accomplishes something.” She smiled grimly, exposing brown and cracked teeth that had once been deadly sharp and only slightly yellowed. “Present circumstance does make me feel almost useful again. But let’s not talk about me. What are you and Melchior arguing about?”

“Not arguing so much as discussing. There’s something about the data flows that’s nagging at . . .” I trailed off as my eyes took in the athames and cables once again, and an odd thought flitted past the windows of my mind. “No. That can’t be it.” “What?” asked Ahllan.

“Interface,” I replied. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Not unless there’s a major incompatibility issue or some kind of weird quantum-observer effect. Ahllan, have you been storing the feed you’re pulling off the network tap?”

“No. There’s way too much data for my old storage systems. I’ve just been feeding it straight through to RuneNet. Why do you ask?”

“I’ve got a theory I want to test.” I started uncoiling the cable set up for Melchior. “How much can you comfortably hold in internal memory?”

“Ten or fifteen minutes, more if I do some hard-drive cleanup.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Ten minutes should be plenty. Do it.”

Loki came over. “Is something wrong?”

“No. Yes. Maybe. I honestly don’t know, but I think I might have an idea about how to find out.”

“The taste thing?” he asked, revealing that he had indeed been reading over my shoulder.

“Uh-huh,” I said absently.

After I hooked Melchior up to Ahllan, I grabbed a monitor and connected it directly to RuneNet.

Ten minutes later I had him run the feed from Ahllan and . . . “Huh? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Loki. “Why does the data look slightly different on the two screens?”

“I have no idea.” I rubbed my forehead. “It should be identical. It’s the same data pulled off the same incoming feed and looked at in the same way.”

“Could it have something to do with the content?” asked Loki.

“It shouldn’t,” interjected Melchior via speaker. “It’s all encrypted, and we haven’t even tried to break the cipher yet. We wanted to wait till we had a lot more raw data for that. This is just a representation of the volume, direction, and speed of packet flow.”

“It’s also deeply strange,” I said. “Ahllan?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Is there any way you can feed the data to RuneNet without looking at it?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“I think there may be some sort of really bizarre observer effect going on. I want to know if RuneNet by itself produces data that looks like the stuff that you’ve observed on its way through. Or if it looks like the stuff you sent direct to Melchior. Or something completely different.”

“Let me think about that for a bit,” said Ahllan. About five minutes ticked past while I had Melchior run and rerun the comparison. Finally, “Yes, I think I can see a way to do it.”

An hour later, I was ready to tear great chunks of my hair out by the roots. After I’d had Ahllan run the raw feed to RuneNet, I’d had her run it to Melchior as well. I couldn’t cross-compare all four varieties of feed directly because Ahllan couldn’t both observe and not observe the data simultaneously, but the more I looked at the patterns, the surer I was that no two of them matched.

“This is crazy stuff,” I said to the others. “There’s no sense to it.”

“I don’t think that’s true, Boss,” said Melchior, who had reassumed goblin shape so that he could join me in my pacing. The fact that he was doing so with a network cable dangling from his nose suggested he was at least as distracted by the results as I. “I can’t see an underlying pattern, but I can
feel
that there is one . . . in here.” He tapped his chest. “That makes me think you were right when you suggested a quantum-observer effect of some sort, something about the way the flows interact with a watcher.”

“You’re the quantum computer,” I said, “which makes you the closest thing we’ve got to an expert on the subject. I’ll take your word for it. I just wish we had another way to slice the data to see if we could . . . Hold it. Ahllan, can you do the no-lookie feed to RuneNet and Melchior again? Simultaneously this time?”

“I don’t see why not. The easiest way would be just to put a splitter in the RuneNet feed.”

“All right, now, Mel I want you to run your share of the feed without looking at it either.”

“Okay, Boss.”

We did that and . . . “Jackpot!” I yelled, pumping a fist in the air. “Something finally makes sense.”

“What?” asked Loki.

“If Ahllan and Melchior both take themselves out of the loop, the direct feed and the feed through RuneNet are identical, and it tastes right.”

“Which means what?” asked Loki.

“It means that RuneNet doesn’t have any effect on whatever is going on at all; it’s strictly a channel. It’s only when the data hits an AI that we get a change in how it looks and tastes.” I put my hands on either side of my head and squeezed while I tried to picture the differences. “But, what does that mean?”

Loki suddenly looked very concerned. “Quantum encryption?”

“What do you . . . ? Oh”—in quantum encryption, the data is encoded such that anyone trying to tap the flow is automatically detected when they scramble things because of—“the observer effect. But we haven’t tried to look at the data itself yet. We’ve only looked over the flow patterns. That shouldn’t touch the encryption, should it? Not unless there’s information actually embedded in the way the traffic is flowing at the quantum level. I can’t even imagine why that would be.”

“Maybe because Mimir’s an AI?” suggested Melchior.

“I don’t think I understand,” I said.

“According to your conversation with Odin, MimirNet is a computerized extension of what’s left of the god Mimir, a sort of cybernetic brain enhancement. If that’s true, the patterns in the data are the digitized thoughts of the god, the place where a divine intelligence crosses over into artificial intelligence.”

“I’m with you so far,” I said, “though I don’t know where you’re going next.”

“When Eris changed the Fates’ blueprints for us so that AIs would have free will, she did it by adding a component of randomness. Maybe that spark of chaos is the quantum-uncertainty effect writ large. If so, and it’s fundamental to the AI soul, then maybe Mimir has it, too.”