The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (17 page)

He was afraid, Wiz realized. Duke Aelric was actually afraid of whatever it was they were facing! Something cold and hard grew in Wiz's stomach.

It was fully dark by the time Wiz went to visit Danny. He was alone in his room, Shauna having taken June and Ian off someplace to try to calm her down.

"Has he gone yet?" Danny demanded sullenly.

"No, and he's not going."

Danny bounced up off the bed. "Fuck that shit! He's going if I have to throw him out of here on his goddamn ass!"

Wiz moved in front of the door. "You're not going anywhere. You're going to sit down and we're going to talk."

"Fuck that." Danny tried to force his way past Wiz, but Wiz grabbed him and pushed him back into the room.

"Listen to me. This is a war, not a popularity contest. Right now we need all the help we can get and he's about the most potent help we're likely to find.

"Maybe something happened between June and Aelric once. But that's over. Now we need each other. That means if you're going to be part of the team you're going to have to work with him." He looked hard at Danny. "Right now Aelric is a lot more valuable to this project than you are. If you can't handle it, I'll have to replace you."

"With who?" Danny sneered.

"With one of the wizards we've been training. Malus, maybe. He may not be as talented as you are, but he can get along with Aelric."

Danny didn't say anything.

"Well?"

"I still don't like him," Danny said sullenly.

"You don't have to like him. You have to work with him. Now, can you do that?"

"Yeah, I guess so. Just keep him the hell away from June."

Wiz released Danny's shoulders. "He doesn't have to come anywhere near June."

"Okay then," Danny said. "Anything else?"

"Not now. We'll have a staff meeting at noon tomorrow to figure out approaches."

Duke Aelric did not stay the night in the Wizard's Keep but he returned early the next morning. Again they met in the Wizard's Day Room: Wiz, Jerry, a sullen but cooperative Danny, and Bal-Simba as the head of the Council of the North. The huge wizard said little and Aelric generally ignored him.

Yesterday Wiz and Jerry had done most of the talking as they filled Duke Aelric in. Today it was the elf duke who dominated.

"Lord, it sounds as if the simplest approach would be to close off the gate into our World somehow," Jerry said when Aelric had finished.

"Simple indeed," Aelric said with a trace of amusement, "if
we but had the key."

"Is there a key?"

In response Aelric lifted a finger and an elaborate, convoluted shape blossomed in the center of the table.

"That is a simple representation," he told them. "There are actually eleven directions, not just three. The narrow part at the top represents the situation when the gate was first opened. Here at the bottom," he gestured at the wildly intertwined strands that seemed to grow out of the table top, "is the situation as it is now. If I knew the total shape, it would be possible to construct the key and so close the door beyond opening again. But . . ." He smiled slightly and shrugged.

"Wait a minute!" Jerry said thinking hard. He scribbled frantically on a slate while the others watched in silence. "That's a fractal!"

"I do not know that word," Aelric said.

"It's a self-similar figure with fractional dimensions."

Aelric arched an eyebrow.

"Just a minute," Wiz put in. "Are you sure that's a fractal?"

"Pretty sure. Look." He passed the tablet over to Wiz.

"Yeah," Wiz said slowly. Then he looked back at the elf. "Look, when you say 'know the shape,' do you mean 'describe mathematically'?"

Aelric frowned. "I do not understand you, Sparrow. When I say 'know the shape,' I use the words as mortal magicians do, I think."

Wiz turned to Bal-Simba. "Lord . . ."

"If the Sparrow means what I believe he means, then yes. A mathematical description is sufficiently precise."

Aelric turned back to Wiz. "Can you do this?"

Wiz nodded. "Fractals have another characteristic. They are generated by iteratively applying a function—that means applying the function over and over—and a lot of those functions are pretty simple."

"There are image compression systems that use fractals," Jerry said. "Rather than store the actual image they store functions that generate fractals to mimic each part of the picture and then combine them. You can compress an image ten thousand to one or more that way."

"Show me," Aelric commanded.

The elf was leaning forward looking at them so intently Wiz almost thought he was going to spring at them like a lion at an antelope.

Slowly and carefully Jerry and Wiz led Aelric through the process that would yield the solution. Although mathematics was an alien language to the elf, parts of it he grasped intuitively. Other parts had to be broken into tiny pieces and gone over and over.

At last his face split into a broad smile. "Brilliant. A whole new way of looking at such things. Thank you both." Then he sobered. "Yes, I think this," he tapped the slate, "is a fair representation of the problem of closing that door. But if I understand you, it is a problem almost beyond solution."

"Almost isn't the same as impossible," Jerry said. "There are ways you can simplify something like that. In principle it is solvable. It is just a matter of putting enough computer power to work on it."

"Now that's something we can do," Wiz said. "Our spell compiler isn't adapted to solving mathematical problems but demons can be made to calculate as well as work magic."

Danny shook his head. "I dunno. This isn't going to be easy." It was the first thing he had said all morning and he looked at the glowing model rather than Aelric when he said it.

"So it's not easy," Wiz told him. "We can do it anyway."

"Okay," Wiz said three days later, "I was wrong."

The same group, less Aelric and with the addition of Moira and Arianne, was assembled in the Bull Pen to review the project. After the initial flurry of writing code, things had settled down to running the program. It had been running day and night for the last two days and as they met the Emac controlling it sat on Wiz's desk in a stall behind them, scribbling away furiously at line after line of glowing "printout."

"This isn't going to work," Wiz said tiredly. "We can't do the calculations fast enough. The problem with the magical compiler is it's slow. We're getting maybe 200 MOPS, absolute tops."

"MOPS?" Moira asked.

"Magical Operations Per Second."

"Two hundred spells a second does not sound slow to me," Bal-Simba said.

"It is for this kind of work. What we're doing here isn't so much spell casting as it is mathematical analysis and that takes a lot of computing power, magic or no."

He sighed. "Back home I used to work on machines that could do five or six million instructions per second and we had access to some that could do two hundred million."

"That is a great deal of calculation," Bal-Simba said.

"The fractal resembles a Mandelbrot set in some respects, although it's defined by a completely different function," Wiz told him. "What that means is there is not an analytic equation which will give us the boundary—which is what I was hoping for. What we do have is a procedure for calculating whether a given point is inside or outside the set."

"I will take your word for it," Bal-Simba said.

Wiz sighed. "What it comes down to is that we can find the shape of the key to any desired degree of precision, but we have to do it by calculating one point at a time. That takes computing power."

"Wait a minute!" Jerry said. "What about parallelism? Each of those points is calculated independently of the others, right? So why don't we get a bunch of copies of the program working on the problem simultaneously and feeding results to each other?"

"Well, machine resources are essentially free,"
Wiz said. "But it would mean rewriting part of the compiler to handle the parallelism."

Jerry nodded. "That's doable. But before we do that we can test it with just a few copies active and one copy acting as supervisor. Kind of like running multiple virtual machines."

"Virtual machines?" asked Moira, catching a phrase in the mass of technobabble that almost sounded familiar.

"That's like a computer that isn't there," Jerry said helpfully.

"It's something that acts like a computer only it isn't," Wiz added.

Moira regarded both of them coldly. "I see. Like your explanations."

Wiz shook his head. "No, our explanations are real. A virtual explanation would be something that acted like an explanation, but wasn't."

Moira nodded. "I rest my case. Well, never mind. Just tell me what you will need to make this machine that is not a machine and I will see about getting it for you."

Wiz looked at the setup and nodded. This wasn't going to be pretty, but it was strictly a proof-of-principal device.

Ranked in front of him were twenty-one Emacs, all sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Bull Pen. All of them had their quill pens out and poised expectantly.

"This will take a while," he told Jerry and Danny quite unnecessarily. "We've only got twenty processors here and that key is a twelfth-order function. On the other hand, our algorithm will converge on that function. We'll start seeing a representation almost immediately, but it will be real fuzzy."

"And the more processing time we put on the sharper the image will get," Danny interjected. "We helped you write the damn thing, remember?"

Wiz blushed, nodded, and raised his staff.

"You know . . ." Jerry said slowly.

"What?"

"I don't know. I have a feeling about this. Like the one I got in the City of Night just before we used the digging spell."

Wiz lowered his arms. "What is it that bothers you?"

"I can't put my finger on it. But there is something about this whole business." He thought hard and then shook his head. "No, I guess not. Go on with the spell."

Wiz looked around for a convenient cover in case he needed it. Then he raised his staff again.

"backslash,"
he proclaimed.

"?"
responded the first Emac.

"fractal_find exe,"
Wiz said. The Emac on
the far left turned to the others and began to
gabble at them. The other twenty Emacs bent to their tasks immediately.

The air above the Emacs began to thicken and take on a bluish tinge. It grew denser and bluer until a neon blue cloud hung over their heads.

"It's working!" Danny said.

Wiz just stared at the slowly coalescing shape and wondered why everything the Emacs turned out was in such violent colors.

As the cloud solidified it began to show hazy lumps and hollows. It wasn't even solid enough to be called a shape yet, but already Wiz could see similarities between it
and the thing Duke Aelric had called up on the conference table. The process was slowing as the algorithm had to work harder and harder to discover which points were part of the shape and which were not.

The form began to pulse and Wiz realized he was getting a headache. He looked away, but the afterimage remained burned in his retinas. His vision grew dark around the periphery and everything seemed fuzzy. He shook his head to try to clear it but that only made things worse.

"Do you guys feel all right?" Wiz asked.

"I feel fine," said a large Saint Bernard dog with Jerry's voice. To his left a six-foot-tall cockroach waved its feelers in agreement.

"Well, I don't," Wiz sang with two of his mouths, creating a bell-like harmony. Vaguely he realized they were standing not in the Bull Pen but under an enormous crystal canopy that shimmered with pastel highlights. And wasn't he supposed to have only two arms and one body segment?

As he watched, dog, cockroach and canopy all began to melt and run together. He felt his own body grow indistinct at the edges and begin to flow.

"SIGTERM!!"
Wiz screamed.

The universe, canopy, cockroach and dog all froze in a half-melted state.

"UNDO!"
he commanded. Instantly Wiz, Jerry and Danny were standing in the Bull Pen again.

"My God," Danny said shakily. "I mean, well, my God!"

"I think we have a problem here," Jerry said. His voice was calm but he was white and breathing in long, deep gulps.

"I think we just got closer to being inside a system crash than I ever wanted to be," Wiz replied, collapsing onto a bench before his legs gave out.

"You know," Jerry said, "this may not work after all."

Danny collapsed on the bench next to Wiz. "Right now, I'm just glad everything's back to normal."

"Oh yeah?" Jerry said, "look."

Wiz followed his pointing finger. Where the Emacs had been stood twenty mice, all dressed in blue-and-red band uniforms, complete with frogged jackets and plumed shakos, and carrying musical instruments. The twenty-first mouse, wearing a tall bearskin hat, raised his baton. The mouse bass drummer struck three quick, sharp beats and the entire mouse marching band charged into song.

Who's the leader of the club . . . 
 

"UNDO!"
Wiz, Jerry and Danny yelled simultaneously.

It was afternoon the next day when a tired, dispirited team of
programmers met with Moira, Bal-Simba and Duke Aelric.

" . . . and we still don't know what happened," Wiz concluded. "One minute everything is fine and the next minute the world goes crazy."

Aelric looked at him strangely. "You honestly do not know?"

Suddenly Wiz had the feeling they had missed something very obvious.

The elf duke sighed.
"Forgive me, Sparrow. I had forgotten I
was dealing with mortals and I simply assumed . . ."

"What did happen?" Jerry asked.

Aelric paused, weighing his words. "The object we call the key is in some sense a representation not only of the gate, but of this World as well.
As your spell moved closer and closer to producing the shape of the key it began to have an ever-stronger effect because it became an ever-more exact replica of the World."