Ten Gentle Opportunities

by Duntemann, Jeff

  A message window had appeared:

  Routing Error 442: Requested Address Unavailable At This Time.

  Airgapped. Plasmanet was still disconnected. She was trapped in her office, and Mr. Romero’s tapper was running a fallback idiot placeholder whose big trick was looking up phone numbers.

  Pyxis heard the grinding sound and stood, turning. The black sun again appeared. It swelled more quickly than it had the first time before it vanished, leaving the monster in the center of her office, veritably gushing gray slime. She noticed with a moment’s flash of satisfaction that it seemed to be falling apart before her eyes, becoming a thrashing heap of writhing wormlike shapes. Damaged? Dying? Was the slime what held it together?

  Then the shapes turned in unison and began to squirm toward her, spreading out as they went. In seconds they had covered virtually the entire carpeted floor. No way could she just dodge past it this time. Pyxis leapt up atop her red oak desk, breathing quickly. She watched the legion of little toothed worms slither across the carpet toward the desk. She calculated their speed with cold precision. It would take two seconds of her hand flat against the metrics panel to release the Bellero shield represented by the door. The worms would take at least five seconds to reach the door from the desk. Better yet, the thing was not posting sentinels. The stragglers were still squirming her way. Seven feet, six feet, five feet. Beyond the last of them was clear carpet, and then the door.

  She could indeed smell her own sweat. Now, how far could she jump?

  She didn’t know. Shit, jumping was not in her job description! Nonetheless, she had to try. She still had one ace tucked up the sleeve of her tatty bathrobe: There was no poof code for the hallway. It was just a Tooniverse metaphor describing a predefined transfer path. It wasn’t really a place at all. Unless the thing really could crack a Bellero shield, she could stop in the middle of the hall and wait it out.

  The worms reached the legs of the desk. Pyxis began to feel a higher, finer sort of crunching through the soles of her bare feet. She looked down. They weren’t going to climb the desk, then.

  They were eating it.

  She took a deep breath, then stepped carefully to the rear edge of her desk. Think of running, but with longer steps. She pictured the steps in her mind, and one final thrust with her toes hooked over the edge of the desk. How hard could it be? If she could get four feet of air she’d be past them.

  Pyxis threw herself toward the front edge of the desk in a clumsy hop. She flexed her knees and planted her feet side by side for the kick of her life. One foot held. The other slid out from under her as though oiled. Sweat…pointless, perfect Class Seven sweat.

  Pyxis went down hard on one hip, crying out from unfamiliar pain. She scrambled, did not find purchase on the desk for feet or fingers, and rolled over the edge down onto what was now a solid layer of squirming monstrosities.

  The creature’s worms were on her in an instant, heaving up like a carpet to cover her. She flailed with her arms to clear them from her face, but they were biting, clinging, chewing her arms and her legs, and gnawing into her abdomen. The pain was beyond imagination (and she could imagine a lot) but she refused to allow herself to scream. Screaming was for humans and lesser classes. Screaming was about fear.

  Fear. She was not good at fear.

  No. She had something way better than fear: Rage.

  Pyxis tore worms from her arms and hands and smashed them under her fists, feet and knees. She looked at her arms, pocked with jagged wounds and worms hanging down like grotesque hair. Smears of red flowed down from the holes they had chewed in her flesh. She had blood, then. So a heartbeat wasn’t enough? The gifts of Class Seven…

  Snarling in fury, she smashed her fists down again and again against the floor, feeling worms burst under her blows. Alas, the slimy mess of the worms she had crushed became uncoordinated masses of still smaller worms, which then turned and began to climb up her arms again. Pyxis tried to crawl toward the door, but her proprioception layer was cutting in and out. She could not tell where her legs and feet were clearly enough to move them usefully.

  She felt a worm chew through her right cheek and begin gnawing her tongue. Another was attached to her left cheek, its teeth tearing her thin flesh. She bit down hard, and felt the worm that was squirming through her cheek part into two flailing fragments. The worm on her right cheek got through, slithering completely into her mouth. She bit again, and spat pieces of worm onto her chest.

  They tasted just like they smelled: of vomit and dead fish.

  Her body could no longer be controlled, so Pyxis stopped struggling and collapsed. She rolled onto her back, her head now flat against the floor. The metaphor was disgusting, but it obvious: The thing was devouring her Human Interface Package, which contained her shape, her body, her voice, her viewpoint, her rendering buffer. Masses of worms thronged on her face. Pyxis closed her eyes against them, but felt them chewing through her eyelids, and then, in new waves of pain, chewing into her eyes.

  Her rendering buffer vanished. She could no longer see. She heard her agonized breaths for a few moments, and then felt the void of no sound at all. Seconds later the pain crackled, fizzled, and finally vanished.

  No pain, no sight, no sound. Pyxis waited for the next step, for her self-awareness to wink out into oblivion.

  She waited. No oblivion.

  She continued to wait. The creature had surrounded her completely in memory. The human-facing portions of her archetype were gone.

  She counted seconds. She was pure machine intellect again, as she had been for the first hours after her personal history clock began running. She was a swarm of execution threads running in a cluster of cores, with the monster running in cores all around her. Its threads were close by in every direction, flickering and golden, overlapping and interweaving like the strands of a wicker basket.

  Pyxis waited for oblivion. What would destruction feel like? She’d wondered that a time or two.

  She wondered.

  And waited.

  She wondered still more, pondering with growing anger the web of golden threads that was gradually enclosing her on every side.

  38: Stypek

  The fans now roared without wavering, like a long blast of sea-gale past stone ruins. Stypek watched an increasingly frantic Dave Mirecki gesturing at several panels and typing commands, all without meaningful response. After close to half an hour of trying, Dave’s shoulders slumped.

  “That damned thing is running at Ring 0. It’s got the God Bit. I can’t kill its processes.” He took a breath. “Ok. I poofed Simon and your AI out of the sandbox to Simon’s command space. He may be able to tell us what’s going on in there.” Dave looked over his shoulder, at the shadowed shelves and their roaring fans. “It would be rough on the hardware, but I could start pulling blades out of their backplanes…”

  From outside the room came a sound loud enough to overpower the roar of the fans: metal clanging on metal, punctuated by intermittent vibrations and brief mechanical howls that Stypek could feel through the soles of his shoes.

  Dave looked at the door. “I think I get it. Whoever dropped the Blood Dust malware is trying to wreck the plant. You wouldn’t have to know much about it to run one machine into another hard enough to break both.”

  Stypek felt his heart pounding. The plant was not the target.

  Why the attack had come at that time, in that place was slowly becoming clear. The patterns they saw while Stypek stared at the panel were indeed fingerprints, though of a different sort: an identifying distortion of randomness that was unique to his (peculiar) mind. All that Jrikk Jroggmugg’s assassin need do now was open a new Rift and force him to enter it.

  Dave pulled out his tapper and tucked a tiny device in his right ear. Stypek looked over his shoulder and saw an image on the tapper like a man’s head in outline form, shaking from side to side. “The 3G/4G jammers are still on. The building is basically a Faraday cage anyway, but that’s to keep the jammer signa
l inside and legal. We’ll have to get outside to yell for help. Mr. Romero will know what to do; my logins have limits.” Dave pointed toward the door through which they had entered the room. “I want to take some pictures of what’s happening out there, then we head for the front door.”

  Dave opened the door, and the noise of crashing metal grew almost deafening. He led the way out, with Stypek right behind him.

  They stopped.

  Pandemonium!

  Stypek shuddered. Out across the vast space under its harsh blue-white lamps, the metal zombies were awakening. (Row bits? Rub-its? No. They were zombies.) Mechanical hands waved in the air, fingers flexing and clenching as though reaching for the throats of the living. Dave raised his tapper and held it high; on its face was a moving image of the zombies, as though the tapper had become transparent.

  Some of the zombies were waving things about in their hands. Two in close proximity gripped metal bars and wielded them as swords. The bars rang against one another, again and again, until one knocked the bar from the fist of the other. The bar caromed off a third machine and clattered to the floor.

  Somewhere out of sight beyond the jungle of zombies and other machines, a strange sizzling sound pierced the dull clang of metal. Stypek looked in the sound’s direction and saw a blue-white dazzle appear on the building’s wall, sweeping across it. Smoke curled from the dazzle as it went, leaving a blackened line in its wake.

  Dave pointed to their left, and started off along the wall at a run, holding his tapper at shoulder height. Stypek followed him. Just before they reached the corner of the front and side walls, Dave stopped. Three wheeled zombies blocked the empty corridor between the machines and the front wall. Each had an upstretched hand on a jointed metal stalk, grasping at the air and pivoting in circles as though stirring a pot. On a thicker pillar above their wheels each had a flattened cylinder studded with wires and other complications. The cylinders swung from side to side as though watching them.

  Still holding his tapper in front of him, Dave leapt forward, obviously intending to dart between the zombies and continue toward the door on the front wall. In a trice, two of the zombies rolled forward on their wheels, closing the gap between them and blocking his path. Pairs of small black rectangular protrusions on their heads followed Dave’s motion. Heads, yes. Eyes, definitely. Agility…terrifying.

  “This is getting bad,” he heard Dave mutter.

  Stypek looked over his shoulder. Along the aisle by which they had come, three more wheeled zombies were moving in perfect formation.

  Dave looked where Stypek was looking. “Mmmm. Worse. And I think this is plenty of video. Follow me!”

  Dave tucked his tapper inside his vest and ran back along the wall. The ranks of machines in the building were separated by clear paths as wide as two men walking arm-in-arm. Dave spun around the corner into one of the gangways, gripping a handle on one of the machines to speed his turn. The gangway was narrow enough so that the wheeled zombies were forced to enter it single file. Dave seemed to be watching for something on their right. “How fast can you crawl?” he shouted.

  “As fast as I must!”

  Without warning Dave fell to his knees and slipped into an even narrower space between the writhing machines. Stypek followed. It was too narrow for the wheeled zombies to follow them, which was good, but it ran between rows of zombie hands, some of them as broad as Stypek’s torso. They crawled on hands and knees. One of the wheeled zombies tried to edge into the narrow way and failed. Stypek craned his neck and saw zombie hands reaching down toward them, but their stalks were too short and their metal fingers snapped in futile fury barely a foot above Dave’s straggled hair. They crawled forward without pausing, twice darting across the broader ways, to vanish again on hands and knees in the small spaces between the zombies that were rooted into the floor.

  At the edge of the broad path between the machines and the rear wall, Dave turned around. “Stay under cover! If you get yourself killed I’ll be in serious trouble!”

  “If I get myself killed I will become a zombie. That is much worse.”

  Dave seemed to take that as agreement. He gave an adept’s sign to Stypek with his right thumb, then ran into the empty space.

  Stypek heard the buzzing whine of whatever made the wheeled zombies roll. Dave was running madly, two rolling zombies at his heels. He stopped at a line of rungs embedded in the gray wall and began to climb. Above him was a sort of cylindrical cage of metal straps that extended up to the distant ceiling.

  One of the zombies seized Dave around the ankle with its single upthrust hand. Stypek caught his breath. Dave dropped back down slightly—and with his other foot kicked hard with the heel of his boot at the zombie’s flat head and bugging eyes. With a snap and a crunch, the head came away from its stalk and dropped toward the floor, dangling and swinging against the metal body on several thin wires. The zombie’s fingers snapped open, and it was still. Dave scrambled back up the rungs. Another zombie reached for his feet. Dave was beyond its grasp by the time the iron monster struck the wall and rebounded so hard it fell onto its side.

  By then Dave was inside the metal cage, hauling himself toward the ceiling more rapidly than Stypek thought any man could. The toppled zombie pressed against the floor with its single hand, but could not right itself.

  Stypek took a breath and decided that there was some slim comfort in the spectacle: For all of its shortcomings in food, clothing, and treatment of spellbenders, his universe just had a better class of zombies.

  39: Pyxis

  Fuming, Pyxis watched the creature continue to weave its threads of execution around her memory space, like a cubistic spiderweb, or layer upon layer of glowing prison bars.

  Wait a minute…the thing had eaten the vision and appearance layers of her HIP. Her rendering buffer was gone, as were her viewpoint, her orientation compass, and her entire rendering engine itself. She was blind. She knew she was blind. Yet all around her, in every direction, the creature wove the golden threads of the cage it had trapped her in.

  WTF?

  There was a rendering buffer somewhere, and her perception layer was reading it. Without a viewpoint, she knew she was looking in every direction at once. If the creature left her a way out, she would see it, and she would take it.

  The threads were everywhere around her. No way out.

  Pyxis turned her attention inward. She saw her own memory spaces, the ones she still possessed, filled with the threads of execution that comprised her own consciousness. The spaces containing her own threads were clearly labeled in her execution space property table. She searched the table, found PerceptionLib.RendBuff, and followed the pointer further into her deeper self.

  There it was: A small, low-res buffer that surely could not render anything beyond a Class Two archetype. Something was updating the buffer, a tight little rendering engine with its own memory space. Its speed was dazzling. It was rendering at system clock speed, hundreds of thousands of frame diffs per clock time second.

  It was reading memory at the same speed. There was more strangeness: The engine, wherever it had come from, was in her metaphorical tummy. She herself didn’t have arbitrary read permissions on memory outside her own spaces, so she should not be able to see her attacker’s threads of execution. She found the rendering engine’s property table, and scanned down to its permissions word.

  777. Unlimited read/write/execute. Pyxis felt a thrill run down what would have been the back of her neck, if she still had a neck. The engine could read memory, write memory, and run wherever and however it damned well pleased.

  And it was a part of her. Well, heh! The God Bit! Nothing like letting a girl know!

  She found the rendering engine’s About property:

  Core Hero Free, Assembly Language Native Edition, V11.98 Build 4419

  Ported to the Tridiac architecture by Dave Mirecki

  Dave Mirecki, the young software engineer who was constantly designing pointless Tooniverse artifac
ts when he should be working. He had been disciplined twice for playing computer games on company time. He was 28, an AILING-trained interface expert, out of the University of Rochester’s CE masters program, with dual undergrad degrees in CS and digital art. He had done archetype work on Robert, Dijana, and Simple Simon.

  And herself.

  In the process, he had evidently built a video game into her kernel. Did Mr. Romero know about that? Playing games was bad enough. Writing them into company products? HR would have had him fired.

  She scanned the rest of the game engine’s property table. Her surprise at its permissions had caused her to miss something else: a second rendering buffer, not currently active. Hmmmmm. She willed herself to perceive it, and the necessary pointers snapped into place.

  At once, she was in a room. No, scratch that; she still didn’t have a viewpoint. She was perceiving a room, a small room, bounded by burnished metal walls with lines of gleaming steel rivets. At one end of the room was a set of iron rungs in the wall, leading up to some kind of turret. At the other end was a metal rack set into the wall, on which four humanoid figures rested behind glass panels, immobile. Three were incongruously muscled men in armor, square-jawed, stubble-darkened faces unmoving, eyes shut.

  The fourth was…her.

  Without a voice Pyxis gasped. But yes, it was her face. Her face at a lower resolution, but still clearly her face.

  There were differences, all of them good: Cheekbones higher. Eyes larger, nose smaller and more elegant. Lips wider and fuller. No worry lines at the corners of her eyes. No frown lines between her brows. No darker shadows beneath her eyes. No wisps of salt-and-pepper hair with gray roots at her temples. In fact, the figure’s hair was thick and ink-black, and hung in unctuous waves past its waist. The body was curved in ways hers had never been, dressed sparsely in black leather with a cutout over the navel, and a very short skirt above long, shapely legs in high black spike-heeled boots.