Anything but Ordinary (25 page)

Denny listened. 

 ‘A deleted file?’ thought Denny. It made sense (the file was definitely empty) as did everything else Clive had told him, except the part about going back.  Why go back? There was clearly no point.  Unless he had meant something else. 

Not that you could rely on Clive, he often edited the truth, as Denny knew to his cost.  The problem was you could never be sure of him. One minute he was asking for your help, the next saving your life, and the next telling you blatant lies for his own unfathomable purposes.

But this time, he had left Denny in a real dilemma. He could escape right now and leave everyone else to their fate. Or he could stay here and … leave everybody to their fate, come to think of it. Not really a dilemma then. 

There had to be a third choice.  One that Clive had left deliberately vague, in order to cover his own back perhaps with the other clerks, those who had set them up – or so Clive averred. 

‘
The only way to win a war is not to hold it.  Go back.’

Denny closed his eyes. ‘Close file,’ he said. 

‘You took your time didn’t you? We have work to do, you know.’

‘
Tamar
?’ 

* * *

One minute Stiles was fighting back to back with Denny and the next, he felt a cold wind, a rushing of empty air behind him and then everything went dark. 

 ‘Jack’ll never go for it,’ said Denny.  ‘Not if he thinks he’s leaving us behind.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Tamar, ‘just so long as I have you.’ 

‘
Tamar
!’

‘Oh calm down, I don’t mean I’m leaving them behind. I just mean that my little plan for sorting this out will work better with your help.’

‘What little plan? Actually, look, go back to the beginning. What the hell is going on? How did
you
get out anyway, was it Clive?’

‘No, I got out by myself, but because I did, it gave Clive the chance to get us all out. Without them knowing it was him.’

‘Why didn’t he just
say
that then?’ said Denny, exasperated.

‘Because, then they might find out it was him. It’s all to do with free will and all that. Denny, you
know
this stuff. He isn’t supposed to help us really. And from now on, it’s up to us. He’ll give the others the chance to leave, but it’s got to be
their
decision. But, like I said, it doesn’t matter anyway. There are no restrictions on
us
helping them out.’

‘Okay,’ said Denny falling in with the new situation with the ease of long practice. ‘So what
is
this great plan?’

‘Sarky!’ said Tamar but without rancour.  ‘You must have noticed where we are,’ she added inconsequentially. 

‘Mainframe, so what? It’s what I expected.’

‘Me too. That’s why I need you.’ She gave him a sidelong glance of pure delighted wickedness, which he found deliciously irresistible. ‘Come on Super-Geek,’ she said. ‘Let’s Hack!’  

‘Hack what?’

‘Everything!’

* * *

Stiles knew exactly where he was, but he had not the faintest idea what to do about it.  He had spent enough time in deleted files to recognise the peculiar emptiness that surrounded him, and his investigative brain soon put together the pieces and deduced that this was the deleted file of the Norse Gods and all their history.  So, it was all over, was it? Well, that was what Ragnoroc was all about he supposed. But until this moment of revelation, he had seen nothing inevitable about it. A typically human failing this. Few people truly believe in the inevitability of a preordained destiny.  The belief in free will and the ability to effect change is too deeply ingrained in the human psyche.  An “it’s not over till it’s over” attitude that precludes the possibility that something One is currently experiencing might have been over and done with long ago.  If people knew the true nature of time and destiny, they would not see the world in such simple terms. But then again, what would be the point of living in such a world? 

Stiles had had the advantage of experiencing a different view of the world than most. He had seen eternity, and it did not frighten him. But that did not mean that he was ready to accept it without a fight.  The thing about humans is that when faced with the inevitable, they invariably set about trying to change it.  It was one of the things about humanity that drove the clerks mad because, occasionally, when humans took this attitude, the inevitable could suddenly become very uncertain indeed.  This made things very untidy and caused a lot of unpaid overtime. 

Tamar
never
accepted the inevitable (at least, not if she did not agree with it) even though, with all she knew about the universe, she ought to have known better. And Stiles had learned, through her, that although the flow of the universe was a pattern of preordained events – unchanging and unchangeable – marching inexorably toward their unavoidable conclusion, yet through sheer force of will, the inevitable could become the un-inevitable.  He had seen her force a path through destiny and out the other side many times.  In other words, humans were right, free will counts and nothing is inevitable really. Even when it’s over. 

With all this in mind, Stiles shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the battle.

* * *

‘There’s no point in going back through time,’ Tamar explained.  ‘Not this time. Because it’s not there, all the history of the Norse gods is now part of the same deleted file. It’s no longer a part of history. And that includes
our
interactions with them, like me meeting Loki. If we want to change what’s happened, the only thing we can do is crash the system.’

‘They’ll make us fix it afterwards,’ said Denny gloomily. ‘It’ll take a hundred years.’

‘Well, we’re going to have to reprogramme anyway,’ said Tamar blithely; apparently unaware of what she was suggesting. 

‘Reprogramme
mainframe
?’ said Denny aghast.  ‘The whole
universe
?’

Then he shrugged. ‘Sounds like a challenge.’

Tamar grinned. ‘I knew you’d say that,’ she said. ‘So, come on then tech-head, how do we do it?’ 

‘I think I preferred “Super-Geek”,’ said Denny. ‘We could try a virus,’ he added thoughtfully.

‘Got one in your pocket?’ 

‘I’d need to write one,’ he said. ‘It’d need to be pretty bad to crash the whole of mainframe. Do we really need to crash the whole system?’

‘You tell me, brainiac. We need to be able to get into the Ragnoroc file and change it. Which we can’t do since it’s already been deleted. Is this too complicated for you?’ 

‘It’s just a bit metaphysical. I can cope,’ he said pulling a wry face. ‘So, we need to be able to go in to a file that’s already been deleted.’ He thrust his hands into his pockets and slouched languidly. ‘We need to somehow open this file
before
it was deleted – even though it already is.’ He sighed and straightened up. ‘We need to crash the system.’ he said decisively.

‘Can’t we just find the file on the hard drive and, oh I don’t know retrieve it or something?’ asked Tamar. ‘Deleted files
can
be retrieved can’t they?’ Crashing mainframe suddenly seemed
too
drastic, even though it had been her idea in the first place. 

‘Cold feet?’ asked Denny raising an eyebrow.  ‘Okay, yes we
could
just retrieve the file –
if
we could get into the hard drive, which, we’re going to have to do anyway if we want to crash it, and it won’t be easy. I mean there
is
security. They aren’t just going to
give
us access.  But if we simply go in and retrieve the file what would we get?’ He answered his own question. ‘Nothing, a deleted file. Big deal. You said it yourself. We need to get into the file
before
it was deleted in the first place. It’s not in the history files. We can’t find it that way. We need to crash the system and restart it. That way,
every
file that belongs to the Norse gods will be rebooted from the start. Well, in fact, every file in mainframe will. But we needn’t concern ourselves with the rest of them, actually.  They’ll just run the way they did before – or rather
continue
to run, the way they did before. We won’t actually have to reprogramme mainframe, after all. It’s not as bad as I first thought.’

 Sensing that Tamar was still uncertain, he felt compelled to explain.  ‘You see, a program file isn’t like a tape that rewinds and starts from the beginning, there is no beginning, not in a traditional sense.  Just like a picture has no beginning, it’s just pixels. A file is just data, a web of interconnected code.’

Tamar’s blank look was not encouraging. Denny tried again.

 ‘What I’m saying,’ he sighed, ‘is that it’s not going to be like starting again from the beginning of time. There is no time in mainframe anyway, and time doesn’t actually have a beginning as such. It’s like a big ocean …’ he halted realising he was getting off the point.  ‘Look, when mainframe reboots, all the program files will just come back on line. As long as we don’t go in and actually, rewrite the code. The files will just be … Well, it’ll just
be
, basically. (We had certainly better hope so anyway). The clerks might have a
bit
of sorting out to do; some of the data might be corrupted in the crash.  But it’ll serve them right if they do.  Anyway, once they restart
et tout voila
, we can retrieve the file we want
before
it gets erased and do what we want with it. And the best part is, they’ll never know what happened. After mainframe reboots, apart from the one file we change, it’ll be like it never happened.’

‘I’m just going to have to take your word for it, aren’t I?’

‘This was
your
idea in the first place. You
knew
we would have to do this.
You
told
me
.’

‘I know.’

‘So what are you talking about then?’

‘Nothing.  I guess I just hoped there might be another way.’

Denny nodded understandingly. This was a like changing history in a big way – you never knew what it might do to your own destiny, not to mention that of countless billions of other people.  But he was confident that he knew what he was doing. He knew and understood mainframe these days far better than she did.  Far better than anyone – even the clerks that ran it; they only knew their own little departments but Denny knew a lot more. On top of which, he was pretty certain that something like this had probably been done before, perhaps many times. After all, how would anyone know?

‘You know where mainframe central control is, don’t you?’ he said, thus taking the decision out of her hands.

‘Yes, I’ve been there. It’s awesome actually, like talking to God.’ She was biting her lip – a bad sign.

‘How are we going to get in?’

‘Well actually, getting in won’t be a problem,’ said Tamar holding up the access card that she had stolen on a previous excursion to mainframe. ‘I never leave home without it,’ she said. ‘Well, you never know,’ she defended herself, as Denny started to laugh. 

‘You’re wonderful,’ he told her. 

‘Are you sure that crashing the system won’t cause a lot of damage?’ she said suddenly, cutting across his merriment. 

‘Trust me,’ he said reassuringly, slouching back against the wall and grinning.  ‘I can do this. Take me to see God.’

~ Chapter Eighteen ~

T
here was actually nothing altruistic at all about Clive’s rescue mission.  He was merely running damage control.

As soon as he had realised that Tamar had somehow escaped from the file, he knew that, sooner or later, she would cause a whole lot of trouble in mainframe in order to get her friends out too.  The other clerks would never see it that way, of course. Their understanding of human behaviour was non-existent, and Clive just did not have time to waste trying to convince them. 

But if he managed to get all her friends safely out of the file, all fit and ready to fight another day, then Clive hoped that would satisfy her enough to persuade her to leave the rest well enough alone. (You can see that Clive did not understand Tamar very well either if he thought that.)

The problem was, they had to be brought out in the same order that they had arrived.  Only the one who had arrived with Tamar, before the battle began and the files merged ready for deletion, was an inconstant factor. He would have to come out last. 

Denny first then. 
He
had been no problem. He had cottoned on immediately and left like a good boy – back into the loving arms of his sweetheart all happy ever after. But the man Stiles had gone and buggered it all up.  The bloody hero type, Clive dubbed him and cursed him up and down. He had only gone and rejoined the battle.
Why
?

Clive seriously doubted that Tamar would be satisfied with only Denny’s release. She would want them all. It was a concept that Clive did not personally relate too, but he understood it in an abstract way. He had observed enough of it among Tamar and her friends. Loyalty. 

Well, he had done all he could. The man Stiles had ruined his perfect plan, and now Tamar and her sidekick were running loose in mainframe somewhere, doing God knows what.  And, heaven knew,
she
was bad enough on her own. Clive gnawed at his nails and prayed to the Processor that they were not going to do anything stupid.   

* * *

‘You know, you’d think I’d get used to this,’ said Denny sitting on a cloud and looking distinctly uncomfortable. 

‘I mean, let’s face it, it’s a bit disappointing really, isn’t it? At least it is for me.’

‘Disappointing?’ Tamar was nonplussed. 

‘When people think about talking to God, I seriously doubt that this is what
anyone
has in mind,’ he explained. ‘It’s not very… glorious, is it?’

‘It’s not really
God
,’ said Tamar.

‘I know that. It’s just … you know it’s getting hard to believe in anything anymore.’