Cybermancy (25 page)

Shara had put her finger on something that had been tickling the back of my brain as well. The goddess changed the way you saw things. I had to stop whatever she was doing to the mweb, and I had to fix whatever was wrong with Shara. The network was simply too important to allow anyone to destroy it, and while I might have busted Shara out of
Hades,
I clearly hadn’t finished the task.

I should have hated that, hated the idea that I’d been set up, that something I’d been tricked into doing had loosed whatever was devouring the mweb and messed up Shara. But I couldn’t seem to work up a good head of outrage. Maybe that was because my new ties to chaos caused me to see the mess in a different light. Or maybe it was just because Persephone had pulled off a hell of a hack, and my inner coder had to tip its hat to her. Whatever the reason, I felt more sympathy for her than anger.

“I guess I’d never thought about it like that,” Cerice said to Shara, visibly deflating. “Can I at least be mad on your behalf?”

“I’d appreciate that,” said Shara. “That, a stiff drink, and maybe some TLC from blue boy over there, and I’ll be halfway to recovery.” The latter came with a wink in Melchior’s direction and some of her old Mae Westian growl.

I was glad to hear it. I hated to bring her mind back to the problems at hand, but Tisiphone was fast approaching the foot-tapping stage of impatience, and we still had some ground to cover. I turned to Tisiphone.

“Does that give you enough to work with?”

“As far as keeping my sisters off your back?
Not by half. I believe you, and the case against Persephone works for me. But I don’t operate independently. Necessity has final say over matters involving Fury-level action. Even in lesser matters, I’m only one vote out of three. Megaera and Alecto are not stupid. They know how I feel about you, and they’re not going to believe anything I say on your behalf without solid proof. Neither will Necessity.
Finding that proof needs to be job one.
I’d try to get it, but I don’t know when I’ll next have a chance to get into the master servers. If you can find it yourself, it would sure help your case.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You and your sisters are the security administrators for Necessity and the mweb’s core architecture?”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to hack into that system to do what you can’t?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And if I get caught? I’m guessing you won’t be bailing me out.”

“No. I’ll probably have to kill you. If that’s what Necessity decides, it’s what I’ll do.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and her fires dimmed. “In fact, in full-on Fury mode I’ll even enjoy it. Tisiphone the individual and Tisiphone the Fury are fundamentally different creatures, with fundamentally different agendas. I’m sorry.” With that she opened her wings and leaped skyward.

Before she’d climbed fifty feet she brought one clawed hand around in a vicious slash, tearing a ragged hole in the stuff of reality. A moment later, after she’d passed through, it closed behind her.

“I’m sorry, too,” said Shara, “about my part in all this.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Persephone messed around with your OS, changed who you are. Like Tisiphone said, the individual and the role aren’t always in sync. Sometimes none of us has a choice.” Did that include me?

I didn’t know the answer to that. Not anymore. I’d made some truly crazy decisions in the rush to break Shara out of the underworld. Was that plain old Ravirn’s love of a challenge?
Or the Raven’s trickster nature calling out for risk taking?
Who was I now?
And what?

“What now, Boss?”

“I guess we’re going to have to try hacking Necessity again.”

“Do you think we’ll get anywhere?”

“I don’t know. A lot depends on exactly what we’re up against.
Shara?
Can you tell us anything more? About what happened to you on the way back from Hades or about the thing that wears your face?”

“Maybe.
It’s . . . hazy. I seem to be missing some bits.”

“How could that be?” I asked. “I thought webgoblins had perfect memories.”

“Oh shit,” said Melchior. “Why didn’t I see that before?”

“What?”

“The e-mail version of Shara that we sent from Hades was 2.29 terabytes.”

“And?”
I asked.

“The one that we received was only 2.21.”

“So,” I said, “something like eighty gigabytes of Shara went missing on the way home. How much virus do you think we could put into eighty gigabytes?”

That was a
lot
of memory. I didn’t like the idea much at all, though it would certainly explain a supervirus in Necessity’s core systems.

Apparently, neither did Cerice. “Last year, a twenty-eight-kilobyte worm almost took down the whole internet in my Harvard’s DecLocus. That’s less than one-two-millionth of the size.”

“Hell,” I said. “Scorched Earth was only a few dozen
meg
, and that’s the program I crashed the mweb with. Sure it was temporary, but . . .”

“I think it’s worse than that,” Shara said very quietly. “The more I think about it, the more I think I must have copied myself into Necessity’s system so that I could fulfill both the commands of Persephone and the needs of friendship. I’ve got no way to prove it, but it would explain why I feel like I’ve been split in two, like half of me, of my soul, is elsewhere. I’m guessing that’s where these weird flashes of memory are coming from. Maybe it’s just lingering aftereffects of being dead but . . .”

“No,” said Melchior. “I think you’re right. That gorgon wasn’t just a construct, not even eighty gigs’ worth. It had real presence and awareness. I told Ravirn that something about it seemed both strange and familiar and that it gave me the deep down creeps. That’s why; because it was Shara and not-Shara at the same time.”

“Tell me that you’re not suggesting that an evil clone of Shara is now in control of security for the servers that run the mweb,” said Cerice.

“Well,” said Melchior,
“ ‘evil
clone’ sounds pretty trite when you’re talking about souls and software instead of flesh and blood. But I think it’s also mighty close to the truth.”

I sighed. “I guess we’d better have another go at Necessity’s security. We need to rescue Shara again. And this time, we have to get it right.” I looked at her. “What do you suppose the chances are that
your
duplicate will welcome us with open arms?”

“Like I said, I can’t remember much. But if Persephone programmed this thing in such a way that it’s willing to destroy the whole damn mweb, what do you think the chances are that it’ll blink at killing one of us?”

“That’s about what I figured. So what do we do first?”

“Clear out of this DecLocus.” Melchior made a loop with his finger to include all of our surroundings. “No mweb here. Garbage Faerie is completely cut off. I just wish Ahllan had been here. She’d be a real help, and I’m worried about her.”

“There’s no help for that,” I said with a sigh. “Shara and the mweb come first. I guess that means
it’s
faerie ring time.”

“Where to?” asked Cerice.

“I guess we just jump around until we hit a DecLocus that’s still on the net.”

“That might not work out so well,” said Shara.

“I know I’m going to hate the answer,” I said. “But why do you say that?”

“What happens if you and Melchior are jacked in, and then the world you’re working from gets cut off?”

I thought about that for a moment, about the possibility of the all-important psychic link back to my body getting severed.
“Bad things.
Very bad.
Melchior might survive as a sort of self-aware subroutine on the server, but probably not.”

“And you’d be dead,” said Cerice.

“Yeah.
Anybody got any bright ideas?” I asked. Nobody spoke up. “I was afraid of that, because the only one I’ve got is really stupid and unnecessarily dangerous.”

I wondered again about how much of my current thinking was Raven and how much Ravirn. I was starting to picture the Raven part of me as an invisible entity eternally hovering overhead, a sort of feathery sword of Damocles.

“So,” said Melchior after a while, “are you going to tell us what this idea is?”

“First let me make a last call for other plans,” I said.
“Anyone?
Nope?
Nothing?
OK. The mweb servers are located within the
Temple
of
Fate
at the foot of Olympus. They’ve got an actual hardwired link from there to wherever it is Necessity keeps her network. It doesn’t matter what happens to the world resource locator forks. The temple computers can’t be taken off-line, not with anything short of dynamite.”

“You want us to sneak into the
Temple of Fate
?” demanded Melchior. “Atropos probably has wanted posters with our faces on them plastered on the front doors. That’s crazy!”

“Yes. It is.
Completely.
But I’m not quite there yet. What I’m thinking is that Cerice can go to the temple. She’s still in good standing.”

“Sort of,” said Cerice. “It’s not like Clotho doesn’t know about our relationship. Your thread might have been erased, but mine is still firmly in the hands of Fate. She can look at it any time she wants and see exactly what I’ve been doing.”

“So don’t act suspicious,” I said.

“Oh, that’s very helpful.” She sighed. “But I guess I’m with Mel here—no better idea. So I casually saunter into one of the most heavily guarded computing centers in existence.
Then what?”

“Then you plug Shara in and create a virtual network as a back door. We log onto that from one of the computers on Olympus proper, and we’re in.”

“Wow.” Melchior shook his head. “That’s so stupid it just might work. Whose computer were you thinking of using, Zeus’s?” He chuckled.
Then smiled.
Then, when I didn’t smile along with him, he started frowning. “You are, aren’t you?”

“Come on,” I said. “We don’t have a lot of choice. All of the wireless access on Olympus is controlled directly by Athena, and her security is nearly as nasty as Necessity’s. I’d really rather not add another layer of killer hacking to the job. Besides, how bad could it be? We’ve at least been in Zeus’s office, back when we fixed his little browser problem. He never uses that computer for anything but downloading porn anyway. He’ll never notice.”

“Sure, why not?” Melchior sighed. “Besides, Eris suggested you get the big guy pissed off at you anyway, so you could finish collecting the set of annoyed pole powers. Man, when you become a force for chaos, you really become a force for chaos. Just for the record, I officially hate this plan.”

“But I’m not hearing the word
veto
.”

“No,” he said. “You’re not, because I really don’t have a better idea. Besides, when you compare the possible consequences of invading Zeus’s personal space with the risks inherent to hacking Necessity, it’s really hard to work up too much of
a lather
over the former. He’s only going to
kill
us. Whereas she . . .” Melchior mimed an eagle pecking at my liver.

“Yeah, thanks, Mel. That one’s starting to get a little old. We’ll just have to make sure we don’t get caught.”

“Could somebody just shoot me and save all the suspense?” said Shara. “Hades is no fun, but hey, at least I know my way around now.”

“Which reminds me of something I’ve been worrying about on that front,” I said.

“Oh goody,” said Shara. “Do I want to know about this?”

“Probably not, but it’s only fair that I pay you back for the bit about being cut off from the mweb midhack. Also, I think it’s something you need to be aware of.”

“All right, hit me.”

“If your soul really is split between you and the Shara in the machine, what happens if one of you dies?”

Panic flitted across her face for a second. Then she steadied down. “You’re right. I didn’t want to know that. Why do you bring it up?”

“Because I want all of us to be very careful about how we deal with the version of you that’s running around outside your body.”

“Got it.”
Shara gave a crazed little laugh. “Try not to kill myself when I see me, even if I’m not really me but a twisted monster instead. And here I thought this evil clone stuff would just make for a great way to double-date. You know, much as I hate to say it, dead had its pluses, eternal peace high on the list.” She shook her head. “Shall we get this disaster going?”

“Probably.
If you’ll all just join me in the faerie ring, I’ll get us moving in the right direction.” Urgh, I was becoming blasé about faerie rings. Not a good sign.

Once more I had the experience of being simultaneously in thousands of different places all at once. This go-round I had a brief moment to wonder how that experience of space related to my internal time. If you experience a tenth of a second spent in ten thousand different places all at once, have you actually burned a thousand seconds of your life?

Then we arrived, and I had more pressing matters to attend to. Our point of entry was a circle of dancing satyrs in a small glade. The sky was overcast, and it was cold and damp. With Persephone in Hades, winter held sway on the slopes of the mountain. Well,
The
Mountain really. The original Olympus was the first island in the great sea of chaos, where the Titans founded their dynasty. All other mountains everywhere are just reflections of Olympus, or at least that’s the legend.
The truth?
Who knows? Gods lie all the time, and there was no one else around to bear witness.