Trio of Sorcery (30 page)

“Already on the test server and working fine. It'll go in on the morning outage.” Kevin beamed at her.

“Well done. Now, my second question. Have you lot been watching the Wendigo? Paying attention to what it's doing?”

They all nodded. Ellen took a deep breath of pizza-flavored air. “And?”

The exchange of glances around the table told the tale. None of them wanted to say it out loud, but…

“It's learning.” Tom broke the silence. “More than the AI should be able to, that is. It learns who is the most dangerous to it, and the next time, it zeroes right in on that person and tries to plant him first.”

She nodded. “Hence, Kevin's dingus—it's a Temp Power that will at least keep it from absorbing the strength of the people it plants. Your own code and the myth will make it lose that power over time. We can't starve it out, because it still has its basic strength no matter what, you already know we can't weaken it because it won't take a patch, but we can keep it from getting any stronger. And that will buy us some time.” She rubbed her sore eyes. “As for the rest of the zone, Toby is still looking things over. My thought, though, is that the mythago is operating not only when it spawns, but when it's despawned too, by altering the spawn-tables for the other zone monsters,
making them harder than they should be to defeat. I don't know why it's doing that—but we are dead certain this is what is happening.”

Mark Taylor let out his breath; until then, none of them had been aware he was holding it. “All right, Ellen. Can we do anything else before the morning outage?”

She shook her head.

“All right then.” He looked around the table. “All of you, go home. You've gone above and beyond and there is nothing we can do for now. Get some rest while you can.”

She saw the relief on their faces. They had been expecting to pull an all-nighter.

Well, that still might happen, but right now…she needed more research. And it was not the sort of thing she could explain to any of these people.

“I'll see you all in the morning” was all she said.

On the one hand, Tom would have liked to stay. He hated leaving problems unsolved.

On the other hand, he knew a campaign when he saw one, and this had just been the opening skirmish. Though he'd had one hell of a jolt when Mark Taylor had called the consultant by her first name. Mark didn't do that with anyone he didn't consider to be a peer.

Damn. Now he wished he'd been the proverbial fly on the wall for
that
conversation.

That had been nearly as much of a jolt as when he'd seen with his own eyes how ownership of the god-mode code had flipped from Quiet Knight to Wendigo and back again. No matter how much she'd babbled about flipping bit switches, it hadn't been
real
to him until that moment.

“Skynet became self-aware at 2:14
A.M
. EDT August 29, 1997,”
he thought to himself, as he headed for his car, and felt a chill running down the back of his neck. Okay, so the thing in there probably wasn't self-aware at all, just doing a convincing simulation. And even if it
was
self-aware, it was—what had she called it?—a mythago, a spirit thing…

He realized he was glad,
damned
glad, they hadn't built that animatronic Wendigo for the trade shows. Somewhere in the dim, dark recesses of his memory stirred vague images of a sci-fi thing, maybe a made-for-TV movie, about an evil sentient AI that jumped into someone's animatronic monster, and he shuddered.

Okay, it would have been tethered by an umbilical of cables five inches around, but still…

It's not an AI, it's not an AI,
he kept reminding himself.
It's not self-aware. No code is self-aware.
No, it was something else, some malevolent haunt that was using their code to write itself a new life. Something that had invaded their servers from outside. They just had to find a way to exorcise it.

He wondered, was it a bunch of mini-Wendigos, separate mythagos, or was it a single entity spread out across
all the servers? If it was the former, they could take it out server by server, but if it was the latter, they'd have to eradicate it across all of them at the same time. There wasn't supposed to be a connection across all the servers, but technically there was. The global chat system let players talk across servers to their friends and the bug reporting system also linked all the servers. If the Wendigo was a kind of ghost spread out in pieces across the servers, it could communicate through either of those systems without a lot of trouble. And that meant it could probably find a way to hide itself somewhere they wouldn't think to look for it when they started taking it out. He worried at the problem all the way back to his apartment, where he logged onto chat just long enough to catch Bev and let her know the vague outline of Major Problem at Work.

Heard the new zone was giving you fits,
came the reply. Bless Bev, bless her for typing articulate sentences. Having to deal with l33tkidz who texted everything, leaving him to try to decipher what the hell the trouble log was about, made him deeply appreciate anyone who knew how to string nouns and verbs together properly.
No worries. When you put the baby to bed, I'll claim a steak dinner off you.

He grinned, despite the current worries.
With all the trimmings,
he replied.
Night, babe.

Her icon went inactive and he was about to log off when jquest77 pinged him.
Thought you might want to know, there's a couple of Chinese gaming clans getting waxed by the Wendigo over on Topaz server. Did you hire Ellen?

He blinked.
Yeah, why?

Good. We're not just gaming buddies, Ell and me.

No duh. There was no chance jquest77
(and I know your real name, Milton!)
could have known just what Ellen did for a living if they were “just” gaming buddies. But now he was curious, so he asked the leading question.
Really? How so?

I work for the DoD.

For a moment, he thought jquest77 had typed D
and
D, for the game…but no. Jquest77 was a precise guy and rarely mistyped. DoD. Department of Defense? Tom blinked again. What—

We go back a long ways, college, in fact, and I was just as skeptical as you when she first told me what she does. Then—well, let's just say that it's a good thing there's a black budget for things like this, or Congress would be having litters of kittens right now. When this is over, I'll tell you the story of how she exorcized a stealth fighter. Right now, get some sleep. You're gonna need it.

Jquest77's icon went inactive.

Tom stared at the screen for a long time before finally flagging himself as inactive. It was not going to be an easy night.

“Mistress, this could be very dangerous.” Toby's prim little voice did not properly reflect the amount of anxiety the
familiar was feeling right now. Ell didn't blame him. She was feeling a fair amount of stress herself.

“I know it is, but this is the only way to get the information firsthand,” she replied. “Magic traces are not going to show up in the machine the way they will truly be acting in the game world. And our ugly friend is investing himself in the game world right now. I need a first person viewpoint.”

The AIBO pawed at its ear. “I do not like it, I do not like it at all. But I concur, mistress. Please be careful.”

Careful; oh yes, she was going to be careful. She'd done this with animals before but never with something that only lived inside a computer. And she was going to be helpless here, Toby was going to be the puppet master. For this run, anyway. If she needed to do this again, she'd find a way to be more than just a passenger.

Tom had set her up with an endgame character, as high as you could go, with all of the bells and whistles, just short of actually having god-mode. She'd had him leave it outside the portal into Dark Valley. Best to get used to this in a safe zone first.

Here goes nothing.

She logged in her avatar; an elfy-looking chick armed with sword and dagger, chest as flat as you could get it in the character generator and still be female, and costumed to have the least amount of skin showing. The last thing she needed right now was hormonal teenyboppers hitting on her avatar. Tom had also set her up with some temporary
weapons, the sort of loot that would only last a few days or a bunch of uses. Hers were all distance weapons; properly run, this little flower was lethality on two legs.

She'd asked Tom to program the avatar so that its combat moves autofired if anything unfriendly got within range. If anything got close, barring the Wendigo, of course, it would be coleslaw. You weren't supposed to automate more than one move, but that's what devs are for, right?

She'd told him it was because she wasn't used to hack and slash, but she'd lied—in the real world she'd been doing reenactment and stage fighting since she was in her teens. It was so that all Toby had to do was steer; AIBO paws were not good for mashing buttons.

Note to self; hack the little shite some hands.

All right, there was Stevie the Elf and here she was, and it was showtime.

Ellen drew on Toby's energy and murmured the mnemonic for spirit transfer at the same time that she sketched the pattern in the air with the special new twist that should send her—

She found herself sitting on her very shapely ass, looking up at a flat blue sky with painterly clouds scudding across it. It looked less real than a ceiling painting, especially because she was seeing it in a kind of double vision. Ghosted under the sky was…code. Machine language, which meant it would take her a while to decipher, but she had a good idea what it was she was looking at—the code
that specified what the sky was, what the ceiling was (so a flying character didn't find himself outside the zone), how the clouds moved and in what directions, what color everything was…

In short…the sky.

She was fairly relieved that she didn't actually
feel
anything other than enough to give her a kinesthetic sense of where her limbs were. That was good. If something started shooting at her, she really did not want to be feeling pain….

In fact, she felt a curious disconnect. She felt no weight, felt no pressure of any sort on her skin. Every moment of every day, a human being was aware, if not consciously, of all the little adjustments that had to be made, the feedback from skin and gut and muscle and nerve, things that registered wellness or illness, the downward pressure of gravity. Everything had a scent, and though your conscious might not register it, your subconscious did.

But not now. Ell felt nothing. Nothing had an odor. There was no taste of anything in her mouth. There was none of that. She had done sensory deprivation once, and even that was not like this. She had sight and hearing and body sense.

Hmm.

Suddenly, without warning, her body leapt to its feet and spun around in a deadly circle of steel. She didn't register that something was attacking her until her two
blades had already marked the attacker and deflected a knife.
Black clothing, head wrap, Oriental eyes, and katana. Great. Why are the game ninjas after me?

Even while she was thinking this, her body was moving in on the NPC, a ninja that was probably something generated by the computer to make her life exciting.

All right, there's no two ways about this,
she thought, as her body executed the patterns in the macros as mechanically as the ninja was executing its own macros. Which was fine going against something the AI was running, but the Wendigo was not in the AI.
I am going to have to have full in-game control next time I do this. If I go up against a living Wendigo, or the blasted Wendigo figures out how to flip the Player versus Player switches to let the hypercaffeinated crowd into Dark Valley, I would be in deep kim—