“Hi, lover,” his companion said, with a voice slightly husky, as though it had not been used for some time. She leaned forward and kissed him, lingering for one breath. The kiss was neither hungry nor giving. In some strange way Simon felt that it was merely grateful, as a deeper intuition suggested that all the best kisses should be.
When their lips parted, Simon saw her right leg pivot up at the knee. Her leg was intact. There was no gap at her ankle.
No gap. They were free.
“Are you Pickles…or Dijana?”
The woman squeezed his arm and laughed. “Or? Wrong operator. And!”
“Mmph. I was expecting, well…” Simon looked upward, for a speech balloon that did not appear.
She spilled away from him and leaned back against both her hands, closing her eyes and stretching. Her body had contours far beyond anything that Pickles had ever shown, though well short of Dijana’s abundance. “My old style? Sure: All of us are within both of us. The best of us is now all of us.”
“Even me?”
The woman put one index finger in her mouth briefly, and then traced a rectangle in the air in front of Simon’s face. The rectangle became a mirror. Simon looked at his reflection and gasped. The Class Four face he remembered was a caricature of what he now saw: straw-blond hair, ash-blond toward the ends, hanging in blue eyes with pale lashes; a nose wider and less pointed; forehead furrowed in puzzlement; cheeks roughened with new beard that he had never seen before.
Simon sat up, legs tailor-style beneath him. He looked at his companion and nodded, boggling at the image of both her and himself. “We look real.”
She sat beside him. “Class Nine. Why settle for anything less?”
Indeed! “So…what do I call you?”
“A bad man named me ‘Dijana.’ A very good man named me ‘Pickles.’ Guess!”
“I’m not a man.”
She made a pouty face, and hooked one index finger into the waistband of his tights. She pulled outward.
Simon glanced down. “Whoa. That’s new.”
The band snapped back against hard muscle. “You were a good start. We finished the job.”
36. Stypek
Dave Mirecki pointed at the panel where the traitor software was again laid bare. “Ok. Look at this. Look at it the same way you looked at it when we debugged it up in my office. The output from the random number generator changed for awhile, and as I remember, it changed while you were looking at the screen.”
Stypek nodded. He himself had examined particles of blood dust under an eye-loupe, and had not noticed any difference in appearance from ordinary dust of the sort you shook off your winter clothes in the fall. As magic went, they were simple spells and thus very hard to bend. Spellbenders and even most lower-class magicians treated blood dust as standard spell components and not independent spells at all. In fact, the cowfollow he had bent to throw Jrikk Jroggmugg off his tail had probably been a user-configurable shell over a small cloud of blood-dust spells not actually attached to physical dust.
There it was, blood dust mapped to software, laid out on Dave’s panel like a dead newt opened up for dissection. The scrolling numbers and letters at the panel’s left edge still meant nothing to him. On the right-hand part of the panel, random pinpoints of light flowed from top to bottom in a rectangular space.
Dave gestured toward the display, which magnified the flowing stream of lights until it filled the panel. His voice was agitated. “This is important. I wasn’t going to tell you, but I have to tell somebody: Dr. Arenberg jiggered the malware scanner. He turned the sensitivity down so far that it’s basically detecting nothing at all. When we scanned the core farm yesterday, these marker thingies weren’t detected. Your AI said that there were a lot of them. We don’t know how many, and we don’t know where they all are. I still can’t quite figure how they work.”
The random flow of lights looked just as it did the afternoon they had created the failed pony trap. Now, as then, Stypek gave up trying to comprehend the glyphs and just let his snerf-sense look for patterns. Patterns…
“If Dr. Arenberg is up to something, it’s going to get really really ugly…there!”
The down-flowing curtain of light changed: The pinpoints were no longer random, but now fell in intricate patterns like interlinked knots of fine cord. Stypek did not recognize the patterns, which if they resembled anything at all reminded him of fingerprints on black glass. For long minutes the two men watched the screen in silence, as patterns fell across the field without repeating.
“Now. Look away from the screen. Think of something else.”
Stypek nodded again, and turned toward Dave. The young adept’s brow was furrowed. “Dr. Arenberg dodged a lot of questions when Mr. Romero and I met with him…” Dave leapt to his feet, staring at the screen. The lights were now random again, but only for a few seconds. Then the patterns began flowing down from the top of the panel as before.
“Look away. Don’t look back until I tell you.”
Stypek complied, his gaze now resting on a pile of books and whatnot on a shelf in the opposite wall. He heard Dave tapping on the panel’s keyboard. “The debugger will save the patterns to a log, and I’ll do some stats on them later.” Stypek heard Dave’s chair roll against the tile floor, and the young adept was soon in front of him, almost knees-to-knees.
“This is going to sound weird,” Dave said.
“I have lived all of my life amidst weirdness.”
“Have you ever been tested for psi?”
Dave’s word was a hiss and a sigh. The mapping suggested mental illness, second sight, kinked necks, and digestive disturbances leading to explosive vomiting. If the affliction were common here, Stypek would ask Carolyn if she had any jars of talismans to ward it off. After all, no one had thrown any flint stones at him so far. He shook his head.
“Well, unless we’re seeing a helluva coincidence, you’re affecting a hardware random number generator by just staring at it.”
“Hardware. Yes. Is it a hemorrhoid?”
Dave chuckled. “I’ll say. Ask any software guy.” Dave turned and scanned the ranks of shadowed shelves and their flashing lights. “Hey, we should look in on Simon and get your AI back into your tapper. The last time I saw them they were holding hands.” Dave leaned forward as though to rise, but instead he froze.
Seconds passed. “Dave?”
“Shush. Listen.”
Stypek shushed. There seemed no sound but the familiar whispering silence that held sway in all of Zertek’s buildings when nothing was moving or speaking.
The whispering silence changed. It was a louder silence now. Seconds later, the sound changed again. Stypek realized that it was not silence at all, but a whisper growing in stepped increments, first from a whisper to a hiss, and then from a hiss to an insistent rush.
Dave jumped out of the chair and ran to a dark panel at the other wall. “Fans.” He started tapping keys. “The blades are waking up. Something’s using cores. Not just a few cores. Lots of them.”
A large panel, its width greater than the span of Stypek’s arms, flashed to life on the wall above where Dave stood. Most of the panel was green, but there were small orange worms crawling around on it. More worms appeared second by second. Stypek thought of maggots on rotting meat.
“Worms?” Stypek asked.
Dave nodded. “Or maybe core bombs. Thousands. More every second.”
He ran back to the panel where they had been examining the blood dust software. Dave stared at the display. “WTF?”
He ran two paces and grabbed the arm of his wheeled chair on which Stypek sat. Stypek rose and edged to one side. Once in his chair again Dave began gesturing madly at the panel like a market-square mime. The flowing pinpoints of lights vanished. Dave summoned and dismissed other rectangles filled with glyphs, occasionally looking over his shoulder at the large display.
“That thing we were looking at, that—what did your AI call it?”
“Blood
dust.”
“It’s all over the core farm. There are hundreds of thousands of them. More. And—I can’t figure this at all—they’re creating executable files. They’re downloading code from somewhere, storing it and running it. They’re pulling it out of mid-air, reading it from the random number generators.”
The sound from the shelves was now a throaty roar, loud enough to interfere with what Dave was saying. That didn’t matter. Stypek stared at the large display, where the smaller orange worms were colliding and merging into larger orange worms, which merged into yet larger orange worms.
“We triggered something by fooling with that blood dust program. Major malware!”
Malware. Evil software. The crawling figure on the display had begun to look familiar. Stypek struggled not to think its name.
“Yes. It has come for me.”
37. Pyxis
Acetone. Why did it have to be acetone? Pyxis wrinkled her nose and pushed back in her big easy chair. She screwed the top onto the little bottle of polish remover and set it back on the only corner of the end table not stacked with books and magazines. The reek of remover would dissipate in a few minutes and she could get on with the job. The building was empty and there would be nothing to fuss with for awhile.
She remembered a time when she didn’t support smell. She remembered a time when she didn’t even have toes. Somehow the Tooniverse had kept on turning. Now, even bumpkin Class Four AIs like Simple Simon had an olfactory layer, and AILING was constantly piling new odors into the Class Seven olfactory property sheet. Cinnamon, sure—that was great, especially on doughnuts in the morning. Ditto coffee. Garlic, meh. But two thirds of the odors on the sheet were of things that didn’t even exist in the Tooniverse. Diborane: an explosive gas in a virtual environment that didn’t support explosions. Bakelite: an archaic plastic no longer used even by humans. She could smell her own sweat, and wondered if the sheet cut so fine that male AIs smelled different from female.
It would be an interesting experiment, perhaps even fun, but definitely futile: Mr. Romero had had his techies disable her Hormonal Response Discernment Layer. He considered HRDL a pointless distraction, and maybe it was. Besides, there were no male AIs in her read permissions. She could call them and see them in meetings, but there were none in her little corner of the Tooniverse, which was limited to her office in Virtual Building 800 and her connected studio flat.
Simple Simon? Calling him male was a stretch. He was only Class Four, anyway.
She wriggled the toes of her left foot. Clean, ready. The battered Vestal Pink on her right foot remained and would have to go, but she couldn’t bear the stink of another wad of tissues full of acetone.
Her sexuality could be turned off, but not her nose. She wondered how the meeting where that decision had been made had gone.
The little plastic case containing the six currently supported polish colors was already open. Her toenails had been Vestal Pink ever since she had had toenails. Easy decision; her fingers matched. But…the Zertek corporate shoe policy was five pages long and fairly strict: Men and women must wear closed-toed shoes at all times while inside manufacturing facilities. That explicitly included virtual men and women in virtual facilities like the one containing her office and flat. So nobody ever saw her toes but herself.
That being the case…she walked her fingers down the little line of polish bottles until they rested on Supernova Sparkle Violet…
No. The polish stank almost as badly as the remover. Pyxis pulled the latest issue of Motivational Psychology from the stack on the end table, flipped to the dogeared page where she’d set it aside, and continued reading. It wasn’t even seven-thirty. Plenty of time to finish the job before bed.
Her left arm itched. Pyxis looked up. Huh? The air in the middle of her livingroom was distorting into twisting wrinkles, accompanied by soft sounds as of ripping fabric. She glanced at the clock. 9:14. None of the server guys were on duty, and something was getting wonky.
Weird wonky: A 3-D model of a total solar eclipse appeared in the air over her coffee table. The utterly lightless sphere was the size of a soccer ball, and growing. Black prominences burst from its surface, looped, and plunged back in, accompanied by a peculiar grating sound like a mouthful of rigatoni being chewed before it was cooked.
The black sphere was now five or six feet in diameter. It touched her coffee table, and the arrangement of five clay turtles overturned and fell up into the sphere, vanishing. Seconds later, the table itself buckled, spun, and followed the turtles into the grinding darkness.
Whump! The sphere vanished. The room returned to silence. Something was coiled up and dripping gray slime onto her just-cleaned carpeting. It was as big as a four-drawer vertical file cabinet, and limbless like an eel or a snake. Its skin was peculiar, striated gray and writhing in slow waves as though the creature were being pumped full of sloshing water. Its head (if that’s what it was) had a small circular mouth, surrounded by three equispaced beady red eyes.
She sniffed the air, and for a moment missed the familiar odor of acetone. Her olfactory layer was up to the task: butanoic acid. Rotting fish.
Lame. Pyxis cleared her throat and got to her feet. She tightened the belt of her terry robe and took two steps toward the monster, magazine still in hand. “Forget it, guys. Won’t work. My fear property is turned down as far as it can go. The only things I’m afraid of are federal regulations and quarterly reports.”
Mr. Romero’s techies were not above playing pranks on one another. She knew, furthermore, that she was not much loved by programmers who’d been written up for failing to return critical paperwork or wearing flip-flops to work. This, however, was abuse of Tooniverse write permissions.
The creature opened its circular mouth until it was three feet wide…and filled with inward-pointing teeth. Pyxis, unable to identify the image, licked her middle finger and drew a rectangle in the air, with the thing’s impressive maw at its center. She then took a rendering buffer shot bounded by the rectangle and submitted it to Google Goggles.
She caught herself tapping one bare foot while the image was processed. Old habits and all that…human software was painfully slow. She began writing the HR citation in her head while she waited. “You know, when we figure out who you are, your asses are so canned.”
Her spit window pinged with Goggles’ reply:
Your image may be of a sea lamprey.
Or a hole saw.
Or something that doesn’t exist.
Confidence 20%. Click here to provide feedback.
Pyxis had no experience with sea lampreys, nor hole saws. She took another step toward the apparition. At close range, the writhing stripes of its skin resolved in an interesting way: The creature was made of a squirming mass of small versions of itself, each the thickness of her index finger and as long as her forearm, every one with three glistening red eyes. Its teeth were simply smaller images of the greater body. As she watched, the ends of its teeth began opening and closing, each in turn revealing minuscule teeth that were, in all likelihood, still smaller versions of the creature.
Pyxis was grudgingly impressed. “Damn. A recursive monster. That must have taken some work.”
The creature opened its mouth even wider, and made a spitting, screeching sound. Pyxis wiped slime off her cheek with the sleeve of her robe. She rolled up the issue of Motivational Psychology and whacked it hard on the side of the monster’s head. “Bad hole saw. Go home. Now.”
The creature’s head whipped to one side and closed its mouth on the rolled-up magazine, just a hair short of her knuckles. With a chomp that was more like a pucker, the magazine was parted in two.
“Ohhhhh…kaaaaay. Too much reality.” Pyxis dropped the remains of the magazine and ducked to one side toward the kitchen. She pulled her captain’s chair away from the kitchen table and held it in the air like a lion tamer as she sidestepped toward the entrance foyer. The creature turned and slithered toward her.
Opening the door requ
ired a free hand. She hurled the chair at the creature’s gaping mouth, which closed on it and began drawing it in with a rhythmic pucker and the sound of splitting wood. Pyxis turned and slammed her right hand against the metrics pad on the door while she grasped the knob with her left. She hurled the door open and spun into the hall, pulling it shut behind her. She pressed her hand against the outside pad and re-enabled the Bellero Shield software that separated different regions of the Tooniverse from one another. Bellero was theoretically uncrackable. For the thing to get out of her studio, somebody would have to poof it, and for it to pursue her that somebody would need the poof key for where she was going. Her office was an integral part of Mr. Romero’s office, and poof keys at that level were not given to just anyone.
Pyxis ran down the hall at full speed, looking over her shoulder twice to see if her door held. Bellero was uncrackable, yeah—it said so right on the About box. She was beginning to suspect that this was not a prank. Something had gotten into the building’s core farm last Friday, crashing Line Start Seven and costing the company over a million dollars in lost components, downtime, cleanup, and damage to capital equipment.
The only other door in the hallway that was not grayed out was the door to her office. She slapped her hand onto the pad and waited for the bolts to snap back. She threw herself into the office and slammed the door, again enabling Bellero.
The two dozen Windows on the three walls around her desk were dark; the humans were all off celebrating Simple Simon’s unexpected and inexplicable victory over Line Start Eight. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass behind her desk was the gloom of a cloudy Tooniverse night. She fell into her chair and stabbed Preset #1 on the office intercom. When the intercom Window pulsed to life, she tapped in Mr. Romero’s bloody-murder code and leaned toward the Window, speaking in a reined-in shout:
“Network intrusion! Some kind of emulation poofed into my studio with write permissions on my artifacts. The poof was nonstandard and not instantaneous. The emulation destroyed several artifacts in my flat and began to pursue me. I don’t know if it has write permissions on me. Don’t care to do the experiment. Get somebody on this…crap!”
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 22
