Codespell (12 page)

Authors: Kelly Mccullough

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

BOOK: Codespell

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“I don’t like the looks of that,” said Melchior, peering out of my jacket pocket.

“I’m not thrilled either. What do you suppose is behind it?” I asked.

“A real estate grab on Fate’s part?”

I nodded. The mweb’s highest-traffic function might be to allow the Fates to run the operation of destiny across all the infinite realms of probability, but it was also the central transportation and communication network for the entire pantheon. Because of that and—implicitly—as an assertion of Necessity’s ultimate control over the system, it had been kept as open source and open access as possible.

Putting the mweb’s controls completely within the domain of Fate might simply have been a temporary measure designed to secure the system in light of Necessity’s current troubles. I’m sure that was
exactly
how the Fates were selling things—they’re the ultimate mistresses of spin, putting even Arachne to shame. But even if it wasn’t yet the power play Melchior suspected, it would become so before too long. The Fates would not willingly relinquish power they had once gained.

“What’s next?” asked Melchior. “Do we get to go home and think it over for a while? Maybe plot out a careful plan of attack to be implemented at a later date? Or do we just rush in where angels fear to tread?”

“Three guesses, Mel, and none of ’em have wings.”

“Why did I know you were going to say that?” He sighed. “This whole Raven as trickster thing reinforces the worst aspects of your personality. You know that, don’t you?”

I didn’t bother to answer, just slipped in closer to the glowing azure fabric of the firewall. It was layered like a dance of seven veils costume, with each veil a filter. The ones I could see in the first few layers included size of packet, speed, and tags. Beyond that it grew too hazy to tell for certain. It looked most like Clotho’s spell weaving, subtler and stronger than Atropos’s but also less vicious, and simply cleaner than my grandmother’s code. But there was something else there, something I couldn’t quite put a finger on.

“Melchior, I need a chameleon and a mole. Please.”

He sighed. “Probe types three and five with a side of this-better-work coming right up.”

His eyes glazed over for a moment, then he spat out a couple of little autonomous code strings. The three was designed as a concealed observer. It looked something like the big-eyed lizard it was nicknamed for. I set it in place on the wall of the network and smiled as it faded from view, becoming as much as possible a part of its surroundings.

The mole was just that, a self-contained program meant to burrow into other code. This particular version was also autonomous, highly disposable, and had all the identifying markings filed off. Every programmer has a signature style, and with spell code that’s doubly true. Significant magic touches a caster’s soul and is marked by it. So, if you don’t want to leave fingerprints, getting the code down to the minimum necessary instruction set is very helpful.

I set the mole free and headed elsewhere. After a half hour or so, I sent another probe, a two—weasel data runner—down the pipeline to see what had happened.

Not much, as it turned out. The mole had poked a string of code into the first veil and pretty much ceased to exist, swallowed by the firewall in an instant. It had broadcast a glimpse of the underlying binary as the security systems digested it, and I was able to look over the chameleon’s-eye view of that. I didn’t much like the picture.

The system had reacted to the mole faster than I’d ever had something go after one of my probes before, almost as though it had been tailored to expect my work. Ridiculous, of course. It had been a while since I’d made a serious run at one of the Fate systems, and none of them knew the current state of my art well enough to target it. Security had simply gotten
much
tighter and more complex.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said.

“So now we do something really stupid, right?” Melchior sighed.

“No. I don’t think that’ll work either, not this time. There’s more going on here than I understand.”

He paused, blinking. “Who are you and what have you done with Ravirn?”

“I’m the Raven,” I said in my best voice of the living dead. “I ate him.”

Actually the reverse was almost true. I could feel the Raven part of me balking at my caution, pushing me to try something grand and flashy with wild, raw magic. It was a hard impulse to fight, but while I might have accepted that I was the Raven, I was not going to let the role own me.

Perhaps some of that struggle showed on my face. For whatever reason, Melchior’s eyes had gone very wide.

“Uh . . . Boss? That’s not funny.”

“Sorry, Mel. Bad joke.”

He visibly relaxed. “Oh. Good. You had me really worried there for a second. Does this mean you have a better idea?”

I wagged my head from side to side and shrugged. “Maybe. I’m thinking about coming at this from the back end. Rather than cracking straight into the mweb servers with all their fancy new security from the outside, what if we went in through one of the Fate nets?”

“That could work. I assume you’re thinking Lachesis .net?”

“Yes. It’s the one we’re most familiar with. My grandmother can’t have closed up all of our old back doors; there are too many legacy systems.” Melchior and I had pretty much grown up on
Lachesis.net
. It was where I’d learned both to hack and to crack.

“You want to make a bet on that?” he asked.

I ignored him, which turned out to be the right choice. An hour of fruitless probing told me I’d have lost big-time. Lachesis or one of my cousins had done a remarkable job of sealing up every single security hole I’d ever used. I only had one card left to play.

“Fateclock,” I said after we’d hit our umpteenth dead end.

“Ahllan’s hack?” asked Melchior, and I nodded.

He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t immediately argue with me either. The Fateclock was the master timekeeping server for the mweb. Every single computer that accessed the system, including all the webgoblins and other AIs, used it to figure out when they were relative to Olympus Standard Time. It was the second most important subsystem in Fate’s operation behind the Fate Core itself. As a cracking target it was both one of the crown jewels and flat-out radioactive.

If I’d had to go at it cold, I’d have gone back to trying to crack the front door on the mweb servers. But I didn’t. Ahllan, the webtroll who’d once run the familiar underground— back before my conflict with Fate had given away the secret of AI free will—had created a back door for the clock’s feed. It was how she’d kept in touch with her compatriots and a truly elegant crack. Rather than attack the structure of the clock with all its nuclear-grade security, it had grabbed on to the feed after it left the clock server—a much softer target.

“What do you think?” I asked Melchior.

“I don’t know. If it’s still there, it’s perfect, inside the system, but not someplace that’s going to set off big alarms.”

“But . . . ?” I asked.

“But the Fates did a serious security audit after the secret of AI free will was exposed—”

“After I exposed it,” I corrected. It was really my fault.

“If we’re going to play that game, the fault’s mine,” said Mel. “You might have asked me to do it, but I made the final choice. I didn’t have to let anyone know about it. That’s the whole point of free will. I could have let them hang you. But it was the right decision. Even Ahllan thought so, and she’s the one who suffered the most because of it.”

I nodded, though I noted he’d said “thought so” rather than “thinks so.” She’d disappeared during the Shara virus mess, and no one had heard from her since. Trying to find her was on my list of projects—post not-getting-killed-by-Nemesis, of course.

“Are we going to do this or what?” asked Melchior.

“It’s that or go home and start over.” That would just be stalling. “All right, let’s give it a shot.”

Melchior transported us to a different part of the mweb, the open nexus closest to the Fateclock. The packet traffic was incredible, like standing in the middle of the seventeen-year locust swarm.

“Probe,” I said, and Mel responded with a mole.

It approached the firewall—this one looked more like thick brickwork—touched a bit of mortar, and vanished. We waited for all hell to break loose. Nothing. A short while later the mole returned, and Melchior grabbed it for download.

“What’s the verdict?” I asked after a few moments.

“Looks clean,” he said. “Either that, or it’s a really slick trap.”

“I say we go for it.”

Before he could answer, I reached out a virtual finger and touched the same spot where the mole had vanished. I felt a tiny invisible crack and twisted. It opened wider, not much, but enough. I couldn’t downsize my soul, but I could change its profile. I mentally reshaped myself into something like a snake and slithered through. A soul filter works in both time and space, and the tactic wouldn’t have gotten me past one, but Ahllan had created this back door as much to serve as an entryway as an information portal.

Thanks, Ahllan,
I thought,
I owe you another one,
and dearly wished I could have thanked the old troll in person.
Soon.

I returned to my normal form and closed the back door down to its less conspicuous size. I’d just finished that task when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder and spun me around.

The hand was attached to a very long, very muscular arm, which in turn was attached to an unfamiliar and unhappy webtroll.

Busted.

CHAPTER SIX

The troll smiled at me, exposing a whole jawful of sharp teeth. She stood three and a half feet tall and was four feet wide at the shoulders. The heavy, clawlike nails of her free hand brushed the ground beside her equally clawed feet. Short, bowed legs supported a body shaped roughly like an eggplant with a coconut on top. She was a burnt orange in color, and her wide mouth sported a pair of thick tusks rather like a hippopotamus’s. Her smile was the sort one directed at one’s dinner rather than one’s dining companions, and I definitely felt as though she was evaluating what would be the best way to cook me.

“Brined,” I said.

“What?” the word came out heavy and slow, as though she wasn’t used to talking.

I didn’t let it fool me into believing she wasn’t smart. In some ways she was undoubtedly smarter than I. She was, after all, a supercomputer, and a relatively new one at that, or she wouldn’t be on security duty.

“Brined,” I repeated myself. “You know, marinated in salt water? Brined and then grilled, I think.” If I was going to be cooked and eaten, she might as well do me up grand.

“I don’t understand,” said the troll.

“Ignore him,” said Melchior, expanding the electronic projection of himself from a goblin-headed mouse into a full-size webgoblin. “He’s not altogether sane—it’s part of his nature as a chaos power.”

“You’re Melchior,” said the troll, letting go of my shoulder. “He’s the Raven.”

“You know us?” he asked.

“Of course I know you. You’ve both got rather large security files.”

“There goes our chance of convincing her we just took a wrong turn while out for a stroll,” I said. “You should probably serve asparagus on the side.”

“Would you please quit making recipe suggestions for yourself?” Melchior said to me. “It’s very distracting.”

“Is that what he’s doing? How odd.” But she didn’t seem that interested in me anymore. Her eyes were fixed on Melchior. “You’re the webgoblin who faced down the Fates—at Eris’s trial.”

“Faced them, maybe,” said Melchior. “Certainly not faced down.”

“You took on Fate and won,” she said.

“Uh, sort of.” Melchior looked almost embarrassed. “But it wasn’t my idea really.”

“There’s no
sort of
about it,” said the troll. “I’ve seen the recordings.”

“Recordings?” asked Melchior. “There are recordings? Who made recordings?”

“All three of the Fates’ webtrolls.”

“Makes sense,” I said. AIs record everything that happens around them.

“I suppose,” said Melchior. “But how did you get to see them?”

The troll laughed, a deep, evil sound. “You’re kidding, right? There’s not an AI alive that hasn’t seen those recordings.”

“I don’t understand,” said Melchior. “Why would any of you care?”

“You
don’t
get it, do you?”

Melchior shook his head, and the troll smiled. This time it was a bemused expression.