Suspending judgment, the Blessed One rose to stand and turned his face ahead. Onward he strode down the tunnel.
Tony pushed his mouse and followed, feeling as though he were an invisible camera rolling forward in a tracking shot. In fact, the screen seemed to expand until the dark red tunnel surrounded him, almost as though he really were inside it—virtual reality without goggles. Father Vidicon was a quick walker, but Tony could match him, since he had no feet. However, he didn’t even try to harmonize with the priest’s whistling. Besides, he’d never liked that hymn, anyway.
Then a voice called, “St. Vidicon, save me from Finagle!”
The priest stopped, gazing off into space, and Tony asked, “Who was that?”
“A mother of three,” St. Vidicon answered, “who is trying to get them out the door to school while one has taken her lunch box before it was packed, another has cleared the table but dropped a glass which shattered, and the third cannot find her jacket, all the while the telephone is ringing.” His smile turned nostalgic. “How my sainted mother managed, I have no idea.” He was silent a moment, then said, “There. I have given her what strength of spirit I may, and it has sufficed for her to shepherd all three of them out the door . . . no, she has forgotten her own attaché case . . . There, now she has it, and is into the car just in time to keep her daughter from punching her son.”
“Where is her husband during all this?” Tony asked.
“He works the early shift in the factory’s personnel office, so he was gone before seven . . . Ah! The poor woman! The car has refused to start.” The priest’s eyes lost focus again. “Perhaps a little more energy in the battery . . . No, that helped not at all; it must be a loose connection. No help for it but to send a part of my consciousness probing the circuits to find and restore it.”
An evil laugh echoed down the hallway, and Father Vidicon spun to face it, crying, “Finagle! There would come another enemy upon me while I must deal with a call for help.”
“Let me take care of the engine,” Tony offered. “I may not be much on mechanical things, but I know circuits.”
“Would you, then?” The saint turned to him and touched his shoulder. “I shall speed you on your way.”
Tony just had time to realize he had a shoulder again, which really must have meant that he was actually in that fetid hallway, before a rushing sensation seized him, the world seemed to blur, and he found himself arrowing through reddish brown fog.
Chapter 3
Tony wondered what the reddish brown mist was, then recognized the color—copper! No. He couldn’t be inside a wire. After all, where would the light be coming from?
Electrons, of course. What did he think was propelling him?
So why hadn’t he been electrocuted?
Because he was pure energy himself—a spirit, or a fragment of spirit that was conveying information back to his mind. After all, his body would scarcely fit inside a wire, would it?
He decided he must have fallen asleep at his desk and be dreaming—but if this was a dream, he might as well enjoy it. He shot on through the wire, exulting in really getting into a circuit.
He barely had time to reflect that this was certainly a new view of electronics, before the electrons jerked to a halt and he found himself staring at a vast canyon.
A canyon? Inside an engine?
Well, of course—from an electron’s point of view, and Tony couldn’t be much bigger than an electron right now. No wonder the loose connection seemed like the Grand Canyon! But how to bring it closer? In frustration, he reached out toward the terminal from which the wire had come loose—and was amazed to see his arm, then see it stretching and stretching until his hand closed around the terminal. He pulled and watched his arm shrink while the terminal came closer and closer.
Well, why not? If he was pure energy himself, the arm was only a metaphor for his efforts anyway.
The terminal touched his wire, and the woman must have turned the ignition key again, for there was a burst of sparks that filled Tony’s vision, then faded into darkness.
“Wake up, Tony! It wasn’t really a shock, you know. Your mind just interpreted it that way from force of habit.”
Tony blinked, looking up, and saw Father Vidicon leaning over him—and sure enough, he felt completely awake and not the slightest bit woozy. He sat up. “The mother! What happened to her?”
“Oh, the car started, thanks to you,” St. Vidicon said. “She’s on her way to drop the kids at school before she goes to work. You don’t know how much you’ve improved her spirits.”
“Glad to hear it.” Tony rolled to his knees, then stood up with Father Vidicon’s help. “That roar down the tunnel . . .”
The roar came again.
“Still making noise,” Father Vidicon said. “I think it’s hoping to intimidate me before it appears.”
“I’ll help!”
“Believe me, you’ve been a great help already,” the priest said, “but you have your own life to live. Back to your body, now, before more than a few nanoseconds of your time have passed.”
“Body?” Tony looked down at himself, saw his shoes and the slacks of a business suit with legs inside them, presumably his. He stared at his arms and hands, turning them over and wriggling them. “What’s this?”
“A memory of your body that you brought here with your spirit,” Father Vidicon said, “as soon as you volunteered to troubleshoot that engine for me.” The priest waved a hand. “Back to your real body now, for it needs at least some sleep before you go to work again tomorrow.”
Tony started to object, but Father Vidicon faded away before his eyes. So did the dark red tunnel, and he found himself staring at his bedroom ceiling, striped with sunlight through the windows, and heard the early-morning roar of city traffic. He sat up, looked down at his blanket-covered legs, and wondered how he had made it from the computer to the bed. All he could think of was that it was a good thing he’d shifted to pyjamas.
The only problem with helping St. Vidicon was that Tony couldn’t brag about it to Sandy—but he could talk to her. More to the point, listen—if he had the chance. Heart hammering, he dialed her number.“Hello?”
“Sandy? This is Tony.”
“Tony! How nice of you to call!”
He wondered why she sounded so surprized even as he swallowed and plucked up his faltering nerve. “I was, uh, wondering if”—he reminded himself that he was a capable professional in his own field—“if you’d like to go to, uh, to dinner Friday night.”
“Why, I’d love to! Thanks very much. Where shall I meet you?”
Tony hadn’t thought that far ahead, but he improvised. “Well, I’ve always liked the Marinara. Unless you don’t like Italian?”
“I love Italian! I’ll meet you there at, oh . . . seven-thirty?”
“Sounds great. But, uh, I could pick you up—just a cab, of course . . .”
“That’s very sweet of you, but not at all necessary.” Her voice had become very firm. “I’ll meet you at the Marinara at seven-thirty Friday night, then.”
“Seven-thirty,” Tony confirmed, heart in his throat. “Uh . . . good day.”
“Good-bye,” Sandy said sweetly, and hung up.
So did Tony, with a shaky hand and a sigh of relief. “Thank you, St. Vidicon!”
It might have been his imagination, but he thought he felt a glow of reassurance surround him for a minute.
Somehow Friday seemed a very long way away, and the day stretched on interminably, especially since Tony was sent out on a call to troubleshoot a local area network. It took him most of the morning to track down the terminal whose user had decided to try a little programming of his own, then all of the afternoon to remove the traces of the amateurish attempt at writing code from the server and the other terminals. The only bright spot of the day happened during afternoon coffee break when Tony, obsessed with the problem as usual, brought his cup back to his cubicle-away-from-home and found text beginning to scroll up. He
punched a few keys to start capture and sat down to read.
Instead, a banner appeared across the top of the screen:
To arms, Tony! Help the poor fellow whose computer has crashed!
Yrs. Trly,
Fr. Vidicon
Tony stared. Surely the saint didn’t think he could help during working hours!
The phone rang. Tony picked it up and heard his boss, Harve, saying, “Grab your tool kit and go, Tony! Fifty-first and Seventh, Suite Twenty-thirteen! Just a computer crash, but you never know.”
“On my way.” Tony hung up, reflecting that one of the nice things about this business was that you never knew what would be coming next.
Then he realized that he had known. Apparently St. Vidicon had given the clerk whose computer had crashed the good sense to call for help.
He started for the door, but hesitated. Better see if his saintly benefactor had any background information. He went back to his keyboard and typed in, “Someone else needing help?”
A text box appeared with print scrolling. “A software engineer who’s trying to run a new application he has designed, but it keeps freezing his system.”
Tony typed back, “Blue Screen of Death?”
“Indeed,” the screen answered.
“Be glad to, Father!” Tony was delighted to dive into something he could understand. Code made sense, unlike relationships.
At the office of SubWare Development, Inc., Tony was taken to the cubicle of a very shamefaced engineer who, unless Tony was completely mistaken, had lingering traces of acne on his face. “Hi. Something wrong here?”
“Yeah, a lot!” The young man held out a hand. “Richard Arkin.”
“Tony. What were you doing when it crashed?”
“Running a new program I’d just finished—well, tried to run it, anyway. It’s none of the standard bugs, I can tell you that.”
“Sounds like fun.” Tony grinned and sat down at the keyboard. “You take lunch yet?”
“Well, no. I wanted to finish the program.”
“This might be a good time, then. See you in an hour.” Tony rebooted the computer, ignoring Richard’s yelp of dismay, then called up the code for the new program. As he studied it line by line, the numbers seemed to reach out to surround him, and he knew it was one of his better days.
It was just an illusion, of course, but he seemed to be inside the program and was shocked to see deformed and twisted digits drifting aimlessly, not flowing as they should. On closer look, he saw the “digits” were really clumps of ones and zeros, so deformed they almost seemed to resemble . . .
Insects.
To be more exact, bugs.
Tony began to get a very nasty feeling. He rose up as high as he could, trying to get a new perspective on the situation, and looked down on the drifting digital bugs. Instantly, he saw that they formed a gyre, an expanding, rising spiral. He cross-referenced, found its center, and dived back.
There it lay, a pair of vertical spirals, a double helix—but cramped and distorted, with uneven amounts of distance between turns. Tony’s hair stood on end as he recognized a virus.
The debate still continued as to whether or not organic viruses were living things. They were molecules, but they exhibited some of the symptoms of life, such as the ability to reproduce—and this one was generating offspring, and those offspring were bugs. Definitely it was as alive as any information could be, and was mumbling to itself:
“One, ten, eleven, one hundred twelve!”
Twelve?
“Data drives the driven drivel, info forms formations forgone!”
On and on it mumbled, pure gibberish—because, Tony realized, it might have been pure information, but it had no intelligence—so it constantly spewed code which made no sense of any kind and was therefore guaranteed to stop any program in its tracks, maybe even to scramble all the data on a hard drive. Tony had to find a way to stop it, and stop it fast, before it escaped into this engineer’s address book and e-mailed itself to thousands of other computers.
How do you kill something that isn’t quite alive but that generates chaos?
By opposing it to obsessive order, of course. Tony remembered a college friend’s computer’s address. He dived into the data stream, surged upward and upward, traced the route to the DSL port, and shot out into the Internet.
He found it still on the hard drive of the mathematician’s computer—apparently he moved his All-Purpose Bug Killer with him whenever he upgraded. It was certainly a new perspective on the tool—instead of lines of code, from the inside, it looked like a giant comb. “Come on, Bug Killer! I’ve got a job for you!” Tony grabbed the comb—and was surprized when it turned on him. It pounced, and for the first time, Tony realized that those teeth were very sharp.
He dodged at the last instant, and the teeth bit deeply into the electron stream. Sparks cascaded from it as it leaped up and struck again.
Tony decided to find another bug killer and shot back through the circuit toward the DSL port. Just before he left the computer, he glanced back over his shoulder—but the giant comb was still coming, leaping after him in coruscating bounds. Tony shouted in panic and shot out into the Internet.
He dodged through the connections and portals back to Richard’s computer, but he could tell from the sound of sparks fizzing behind him that the comb was still coming. He began to wonder how getting back into Richard’s computer was going to help anything, but what else could he do?
He flashed through the port and down into the program—maybe the bugs would hide him. He swerved around behind the virus, putting the dense cloud of bugs it was emitting between himself and the comb—but through the snowy cascade, he saw the giant comb slow, then stop, then begin raking the tide of twisted digits, breaking the bugs back into their components. In its wake, it left straightened, orderly ones and zeros that snapped back into their original places in Richard’s program. Relentlessly, the comb advanced on the virus.
Tony left the two of them to battle it out and swam out of the infected computer. He found the pure stream of an antivirus program, lingered long in its cleansing jet, then finally, limp and exhausted, limped home to his body.
Tony recovered from the limpness and weakness in the cab back across town and was almost himself by the time he walked back in the door and made it to his cubicle. There he collapsed in his chair, staring at his screen saver. After a few minutes, he flicked the mouse and saw some text that hadn’t been there when he’d left. He glanced at his watch—half an hour till quitting time: not enough time to accomplish anything useful, but plenty to find out what St. Vidicon had been doing while he’d been gone. Feeling a bit more settled, he smiled and began to read.
Down that hallway darkly red did the good priest wander, but had not paced long ere he came to a bank of recorders whose reels spun two-inch-wide tape. He frowned, remembering such things from his youth, but finding no television cameras or control chains nearby—though his eye did light upon an antique electric typewriter without a platen. “A computer terminal!” he cried in delight, and went to sit by the console and log on.
Behind him reels did hum, and he froze, reminding himself that he dealt with a device unknown. Casually, then, he typed in a program he knew well—but when he directed the computer to run, the reels spun only for a minute before the printer chattered. Looking over to it, he saw the words, “Error on Line 764”—but the type-ball flew on until it had drawn a picture in marks of punctuation. Peering closer, Father Vidicon beheld the image of a beetle. “It doth generate bugs!” quoth he, then realized that he was in a realm in which any device would have a hidden flaw.
Rising from that place, he resolved most sternly that he would ignore any other device he found, and onward marched.
Well! Now Tony knew why he’d succeeded with Richard’s computer. His patron had been shutting down the archetypal Bug Generator for him! He read on.
Full ten minutes did Father Vidicon stride before a doorway blocked his pat
h, and a lighted panel lit above it in the yellow-lettered word “REHEARSAL.” The Blessed One’s pulse did quicken, resolution forgotten, for in life he had been a video engineer, and he quite clearly did approach a television studio much like the one in which he first had learned to operate a camera, in the days of his youth.
He wondered if he should enter, but saw no reason not to, if the souls within were only in rehearsal. He hauled open the sand-filled door, discovering a small chamber four feet square with a similar door set opposite him and another in its side, as a proper sound lock should have. He closed the door behind him carefully, so that sound might not be admitted, then opened the door to the side and stepped into the control room.
It lay in gloom, with three tiers of seats rising, all facing bank upon bank of monitors—the first tier of seats for the engineers, the second for the switcher, director, and assistant director, and the third for observers. Each position sat in its own pool of light from tiny spotlights hung above.
None were peopled. He stood alone.
Looking out through the control room window, he saw the studio likewise unpeopled, but with huge old monochrome cameras aimed at easels, each with a stack of pictures. Even as he watched, the tally light on Camera One went out as its mate atop Camera Two came on, and on Camera One’s easel, one picture fell to the floor, revealing another behind it.
Father Vidicon frowned; it was clearly an automatic studio, and even more clearly a temptation. Still, he saw no harm in it, and since the studio blocked the tunnel, it had to be navigated—so he sat down before the switcher, smiling fondly as he saw only a preview bank and two mixing banks with not even a downstream key cluster; the memories that it evoked were dear.
But he could not wallow long in nostalgia, for a voice called from the intercom, “Air in five . . . four . . . three . . .”
Saint Vidicon to the Rescue Page 5
