Codespell (31 page)

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Authors: Kelly Mccullough

Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction

BOOK: Codespell
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“I don’t see it,” said Melchior. “What did she do?”
I tried to explain it, but after a while he just shook his imaged head. “Thinking about it makes my mind want to split itself into little tiny pieces. How about I just agree to believe you, and we move on to the next question?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“How can
you
see it?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s part of being the Raven. I . . . Quantum effects just make sense to me in a very deep way, almost subconscious.”
“You may be the only person who’s ever said that,” said Melchior.
“I don’t think so. I bet they make sense to Eris, too, and probably a few other folks who play on the chaos team. You know, I think Fate might be making a mistake by getting into quantum computing. It may allow for much more efficient processing, but it’s also at root an irrational process, something that works outside of the macroscopic rules of order that my grandmother and her sisters so love.”
“I wonder if that’s got anything to do with the problems in the Fate Core?” asked Melchior. “It’s their biggest and most constantly updated system. Wouldn’t it be funny if they introduced randomness into the system while trying to get ever-finer and more-thorough control?”
“Somehow, I don’t think they’d be laughing.”
“No,” he agreed. “I hate to bring this up, as I’m really enjoying having a connection to the data flow of the mweb, but now that we’ve done the hard bit, don’t you think we’d better finish our shopping and get home?”
“You’re right, Mel. Let’s order you up a case and some drives.”
No sooner said then done, though the ordering system for the computer-parts center we went through objected rather strenuously to the fact that the address we asked it to ship to didn’t actually exist in this world. It was nothing that an elegant hack couldn’t fix—we just needed it to firmly identify the exact location of the parts in a way that connected them to an mweb-accessible system so that we could use a bit of transportation magic on them—but it did take a few minutes. Hopefully, no one noticed when the packing boxes simply appeared beside Melchior’s laptop shape. Just in case, we went out the door and back to the coffee-grounds faerie ring in the alley as quickly after that as ever we could.
Once there, I paused because I felt bad about leaving the ring behind—it was too much like setting a pit trap for the unwary. The thing had formed when a magic-touched barista dumped a batch of Colombian ruined by a failure to insert a filter. The slurry of ground beans and water had splashed to form a near-perfect circle, and my questing mind had touched it in the minutes before the barista’s quickening touch had evaporated along with the water. A ring only in potential, it had opened to the touch of the Raven.
I stepped through into Garbage Faerie, then paused again. I was feeling incredibly up and right with the world, and an idea had occurred to me.
“What are you doing?” Mel asked from the depths of my bag. He quickly shifted back to goblin form, the tension in his voice showing his alarm at lingering in the heart of the circle’s chaos magic.
“I want to try something.” The ring behind the coffee shop had only existed in potential—like a locked and hidden door—before I’d used my Raven magic to turn the key. “Maybe I can
close
rings from a distance, too.”
“That sounds kind of dicey,” said Mel. “You won’t mind if I skip this bit, will you?”
He hopped from the bag to the ground beyond the circle of beer cans, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Instead, I was extending my mind back through the network of rings to make contact with a magically charged circle of soggy coffee. There. I twisted with my will and . . . a perfect ring of bone-dry coffee drifted to the ground around me. The ring was shut, its magic returned to chaos, and its substance sucked through to my current here and now.
“It worked!” I whooped. Then I did a little dance.
“Ah, Boss?”
“Yes.”
“I hate to bug you when you’re obviously having such fun, but could you
please
step out of the ring? The sight of you wandering around in there without going away is giving me the screaming creepies. Besides, we need to take it apart and close the door to Nemesis.”
“Oh.” I’d actually forgotten I was still in the ring. “Sure.”
I hopped over the edge—and staggered as I cut off my connection to the ring network and my sense of the universe contracted back down to the immediate. It made me feel heavy, and slow, and small, and that made me worry. Normal people could lose a part of themselves forever in the confusion of the rings. I had changed in such a way as to preclude that particular danger, but for the first time it occurred to me to wonder if maybe I hadn’t acquired a whole new set of risks. The electric charge I felt as I caught hold of the first can in the ring underscored my concern.
Tisiphone still hadn’t arrived back at Garbage Faerie by the time we finished disassembling the beer-can ring, so we headed downstairs to see whether we couldn’t do something about the overheating issues. I was really feeling energized.
“It’s a good thing you’re happy with bald,” I said to Mel—he was in laptop shape—after a couple of hours of working on the schematics. “Because any hair you had would start on fire.”
“That’s not funny,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“It wasn’t a joke. I’m getting nowhere with this.”
“It’s too bad Eris didn’t solve the heat problem while she was hacking up that gate,” said Melchior.
“What did you say?” I asked. There was something . . .
“I said, ‘It’s too bad that Eris didn’t—”
“That’s it!” I yelled. “You’re a genius, Mel. Why didn’t I think of that? It’s so simple. I should have seen it before.”
“You’ve lost me, Boss.” His tone suggested that he thought he wasn’t the only thing I’d lost—my marbles maybe.
“Look.” I called up Discord’s version of the plans and started drawing on Mel’s screen. “Eris set up this gateway so that she could magically pass information into and out of the chip from a point outside the built-in channels—from the Primal Chaos really. What if I take her modification and flip it so that nothing can get in?” I did that. “Then I pop in copies at the appropriate nodes.” I tapped a couple of dozen points. “And finally, what if I tweak it like so?”
Melchior’s eyes popped in his screen image. “I can’t get my head around the quantum stuff—it’s too alien to the way I think—but did you just figure out a way to bleed all the heat out of the system and directly into the Primal Chaos?”
“Uh-huh. I think I did.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “That pretty much sums it up.”
“Sums up what?” asked Tisiphone’s voice from behind me.
Even though I’d grown used to her silent comings and goings and not only familiar with, but deeply fond of, her voice, I still just about jumped out of my skin.
She laughed and wrapped her arms around me from behind. “I love it when you do that.”
“I don’t,” I grumped, but then she started nibbling on my ear. “OK, so it’s got its rewards. What did you find out?”
Tisiphone stiffened. “Nothing.”
“Really?” I turned in her arms and looked into her eyes.
She closed them wearily and leaned her forehead against mine. “Really.”
“Tell me about it.” If someone else had joined the very small club of Fury escapees, that was big news. “What happened? ”
Tisiphone let go of me and started to pace. “It’s hard to explain really. It went where I couldn’t follow.”
“How is that possible?” I asked. “The only place that I know of that you can’t get to at the moment is wherever Necessity is. Surely you’re not suggesting . . .”
“No, of course not. There are all sorts of places the Furies can’t go, or at least we can’t go uninvited or unsent. Hades is a good example. That’s why we didn’t just follow you through the gates when you went there the second time. Well, that and a bit of complicity on my part and that of your doggy friend. Megaera argued for hot-pursuit rules, but I insisted otherwise, and Cerberus refused to acknowledge a warrant issued by Fate instead of Necessity. Alecto agreed with me and Cerberus for reasons of her own.”
I felt something like an icy hand touch the back of my neck. That possibility had never even crossed my mind at the time.
“So, where
did
the spinnerette go?” I asked. While I might never want to return to Hades, my experiences over the last couple of years suggested that knowing someplace the Furies couldn’t follow might come in handy.
“I’d rather not say.”
I don’t know if my face gave me away or what, but Tisiphone laughed then and bent to kiss my cheek.
“You’re too transparent, my dear. We shall never again come after you without orders from Necessity herself.” She looked very sad for a moment. “Were it her hand that had signed your death decree, no power of the heavens or Earth could stop us.”
I decided that I didn’t like the way the conversation was turning and aimed it back at the spinnerette, “So, it got away?”
“For now,” growled Tisiphone, “only for now. When we have Necessity restored, things will change. In the meantime, I’ve been too long away and too long without satisfaction.”
She scooped me into her arms as easily as I might pick up a cat and started toward the stairs. As we entered the bedroom, the cynical side of my brain wondered if she had wanted to change the subject as badly as I had or if maybe this was just her way of sublimating for a failed hunt. Then I was too busy to wonder anything at all.
Tisiphone sat on a stool in the corner of the clean room while Melchior and I put the finishing touches on his shiny new home. Once we had all the parts, most of the construction was utter simplicity. Even working out the spellcode for customizing the case and motherboard hadn’t involved anything all that difficult.
The one really tricky bit of coding had been modifying the assembly spell that had come with the schematics for the quantum-processor chip so as to accommodate my new cooling scheme. But I felt pretty confident of the result. It was, after all, a hack job rather than a ground-up design task and, therefore, right up my alley.
“What do you think?” I asked Melchior after I put the last screw in place and covered it over with a rubber foot.
“Pretty spiffy,” he replied, though the slight shake in his voice belied his grin.
I couldn’t blame him on that front, although it really was a spiffy job. We’d ditched the rounded clamshell shape for a slightly more conventional but significantly smaller rectangle, making him more of a subnotebook than a true laptop. Made of Kevlar and carbon fiber, his computer form would weigh in at just under a pound and measure less than a half inch thick.
To make up for the lack of style in shape, we’d modded the hell out of his color scheme and added a bunch of LED telltales and translucence effect. His top surface was a very pale blue with the outline of his face etched into it. That made the area within the etching just enough thinner that the screen brightness could be stepped up to show through. For privacy reasons it wasn’t on all the time, but if Mel wanted to, he could put up text you could read without actually opening the case.
Underneath, we’d gone for a much deeper blue, with loops of superbright LEDs embedded in the surface. When he activated them, they looked vaguely like glowing scales edged in whatever color struck his fancy. The extrathick rubber feet we’d put on raised him just enough so that in a dark room, an eerie glow would show from underneath.
The new case was banded in hardened anodized aluminum. Edge on, you saw two mirror-bright strips of cobalt blue metal. Likewise, his screen was surrounded with a border of brightly finished aluminum, natural silver this time except for the goblin-head logo below the screen, which matched the cobalt of his outer rim.
His keyboard was a block of white surrounded by blue, with keys that lit up from underneath and a goblin-head trackpad. The ears provided left and right mouse buttons. With the assembly finished, all that was left to do was a full test run and the transfer itself. For the former, we hooked the laptop up to a bank of Ahllan’s diagnostics and controllers and set it to running. Over the next hour, it cycled all sorts of spellcode through the processor and drives and shifted the box back and forth into goblin shape a half dozen times.
That was downright creepy. Since we’d left Mel’s goblin shape essentially untouched, I kept getting moments of what felt like double vision as a comatose Mel would appear on the table beside the original, upright, version.
“Oh my,” said Haemun, who’d just brought a tray bearing a pitcher of lemonade and glasses for all as the next round of shape-shifting hit.
I took my glass with a stifled sigh. I just didn’t have the heart to tell him he shouldn’t be bringing them into the clean room.
The worst though was when the test bank ran short phrases of spoken text through the goblin form. Watching the blank-faced webgoblin’s lips move seemingly without any animating will evoked a talking corpse. Finally, the bank whistled a snippet of test spell, and we all startled.

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