Cybermage, page 3
“I haven’t seen much of Terry of late, he’s been either studying or locked away in the N-room,” Thea said. It was not likely they were being spied on, but she was still reluctant to utter the word ‘Nexus’ out loud in public.
Humphrey pulled out the wrist-gadget with a keypad which he had shown Thea before, on the library steps. “That’s why I brought this,” he said brightly. “You can weave us into the N-room. Using the N itself, remotely. Watch.”
He toggled something on the side of the keyboard panel, and it slid down with a click, revealing a tiny screen behind it. Carefully using just his fingertips on the tiny keyboard, he pressed three keys apparently at random, and the screen lit with a dull green radiance, a tiny cursor blinking in the upper left-hand corner. Humphrey typed in something, the screen blipped, and a new line of text appeared, demanding a password. Humphrey typed one in, and the screen changed colour, became a deep jewel-hued blue.
He passed the gadget to Thea. “Go ahead,” he said, “do your thing. Type in whatever you need, hit enter. It will be as though you’re doing it on the N keyboard.”
Thea took the keypad gingerly. “Wow,” she said, staring at it. “This is… awesome.”
“It’s safer, too,” Humphrey said. “You know how you leave your… I don’t know… shadow self behind at a computer when you do this? Well, with that, you don’t–you’re carrying it with you, the computer on which you typed in the necessary. Your shadow self is never left vulnerable or exposed. Nifty, eh?”
Thea lifted her eyes to stare at him. “They’ll never let me keep this,” she said. And then tightened her grip on the thing, just a little. “You did say you’d brought it for me, didn’t you?”
“If I make you a secret agent of the FBM, it’s legitimate equipment,” Humphrey said, “and trust me, in order to work on that cube you’re going to need clearance. Pretty high clearance. High enough for that.”
“Hang on,” Thea said, bringing her attention back to the thing in her hand. “Let me try this.”
She pecked out a series of letters with the index finger of her right hand, and then hesitated, poised above the tiny button marked ENT. Humphrey nodded encouragingly. Thea closed her eyes and stabbed the button.
“Where did you come from?”
At the sound of Terry’s astonished voice Thea opened her eyes and looked around–finding herself, with Humphrey in tow, right beside the desk in the secret Nexus room below Principal Harris’s office. Humphrey wore a proud grin; Terry’s face was a mask of bewildered confusion.
“New toy,” Thea said, brandishing her keypad. “Humphrey brought it. We needed to… He needed to speak to you.”
“Nice to see you again, Terry,” Humphrey said, sticking out a hand.
Terry reached out and shook it reflexively, still blinking at the two of them. “I don’t get it–which computer…”
“Yours,” Thea said, enjoying herself enormously. “The Nexus. Remotely.”
Terry let his breath out with an explosive sigh of denial. “That isn’t possible,” he said, spinning his chair back to stare at the monitors. “I would have known. And you’d need the password to get…”
“Terry,” Thea said, “it’s Humphrey May. From the FBM. He has the password.”
“But I would have noticed…” Terry said obstinately.
“It would have been a blip, if anything,” Humphrey said.
Terry turned around to face him again, his eyes huge. He had actually gone white. “If I can’t even tell when the Nexus security has been breached… how many of those things are there?”
“Only two, the one that Thea’s holding and another, locked in a safe somewhere in the FBM maze back in Washington,” Humphrey said. “And even if they were available on every street corner, relax, Terry. I have a special password; you would have known if anyone else had tried to actually hack in there.”
Terry was still shaking his head. “But the security risk…”
“My responsibility,” Humphrey said. “And I honestly don’t think Thea is about to go showing this thing off.”
“You’re leaving it with Thea?” Terry squawked.
“Are you?” Thea said, glancing up.
“As I said,” Humphrey said, nodding. “We need you for the cube. You need that. I will have your word that you will be hyper-responsible with this thing. It doesn’t leave your side, and nobody knows what it does, outside of this room.”
‘Not even my parents?” Thea asked. “When I go home…”
“I will speak to your parents,” Humphrey said. “But that’s it. Not your brothers. Not anybody else. Are we clear?”
“Absolutely,” Thea said.
“One more thing–I will have your word on it that you will not be using this to go on any solo flits for the sake of fun and adventure. It isn’t a toy.”
“I never…” Thea began defensively, but he shook his head and lifted his hand in emphasis.
“Thea. You came to get me, from that hell-place I had got myself locked up in. I am grateful, but if you’re going to be riding off to the rescue of someone else using that thing, I want your word that you will let me be the judge of the wisdom of it. With this, you’re an independent force; I will not have you use it to get yourself killed. You must promise me–no matter what, you come get me first. Do we have a deal?”
“I promise,” Thea said.
“Fine, then. I officially entrust the prototype to you–and remember, it’s my head if you misuse it. Now, Terry. I want to know what you think of these.”
He fished in an inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a small envelope and an opaque CD case; setting the CD down on the desk, he fumbled with the envelope.
“If I were anywhere else on this planet I’d just snap my fingers and I’d have the papers I wanted in my hand, straight from my office safe,” he grumbled, while undoing the clasp on the envelope and extracting what looked like a few pages of computer printout. “This is some of the data we got from those tapes which were retrieved together with Beltran del los Reyes and the Elemental cube, back in the summer,” he said. “Everything we have is on that disk–we don’t keep any of it in a permanent hard drive, it’s been transferred onto a handful of disks and they have been entrusted to people for safekeeping; we don’t want a trace of this anywhere that it can be potentially hacked at, no matter how many layers of security we wrap it in. You can look at the whole thing later–on the disk, don’t copy anything–but take a look at these, in the meantime.”
Terry took the papers and flipped through them. The first page looked densely covered with type, but Thea could glimpse plenty of blanks in the rest of it. Some pages were mostly blank, in fact; one of them had just a single line of text that went from edge to edge of the paper, as though it had got in the way of some slithering snail-like creature leaving letters for a trail.
“What is this?” Terry asked, his attention caught. “Some of it looks… almost familiar. Almost like something… I’ve been playing with…” His head snapped up suddenly. “Some of this looks like code, the code that I’ve just been tweaking… to get Twitterpat back online. I mean, Mr. Wittering.”
Humphrey laughed. “I know of the nickname,” he said. “But that… is interesting. Your code, the, um, Twitterpat code… that’s recent. You’re talking about the holographic image I saw when Keir and Luana and I first came here, right?”
“Yeah,” Terry said. “All I could get him to do, back then, was to ask for whatever it was you said to him to be repeated because he insisted his faculties were limited–but I found that there was a loop in the system, and once I got past that… well… I’ll show you.”
He piled Humphrey’s papers on the edge of the desk and started typing something on the keyboard in front of him. Thea reached out curiously and picked up the papers, riffling through them as Terry typed. It meant nothing to her, a mess of gibberish words, out-of-place punctuation marks, lines of what looked like mathematical formulae.
“There,” Terry said suddenly, dragging her attention away from the papers. “Look.”
On the other side of the computer desk, the air shimmered slightly and then snapped into an image–slightly blurred around the edges, but recognizably Twitterpat. Thea caught her breath.
“Good afternoon, Terry,” the image said. Twitterpat’s own voice. Thea gave a small whimper.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Wittering,” Terry said. “We have visitors today.”
The image blurred, blinked in and out once or twice, and then re-formed, this time facing Humphrey and Thea. “Patrick Wittering,” it said courteously, apparently by way of introduction.
“Humphrey May, Federal Bureau of Magic. We met a number of times when you came out to Washington on Nexus consultations. And one of your former students at the Wandless Academy, Thea Winthrop.”
The image did its blur-blink-regenerate thing again.
“Why is it doing that?” Thea hissed into Terry’s ear.
“Processing,” Terry whispered back. “It’s capable of responding, but it doesn’t have independent sensors–it can’t ‘see’ you, it can just be aware of your presence.”
“There’s something wrong with it,” Thea said.
“Hands,” Terry said briefly.
The image was still. The characteristic hand motions, which had partly earned Twitterpat his nickname, were missing. His appearance was detail-perfect, his voice was Twitterpat’s down to its nuances, but those expressive hands were still, hanging down beside him. The rest of him, if the hologram’s edges were to be sharpened just a smidge more, was almost enough to make anyone believe that Twitterpat had returned, that he was not, in fact, dead–but those hands, so motionless, were the thing that made Thea acutely aware that this was just a copy, an image, a high-tech ‘living’ puppet.
“Can I be of assistance in any way?” Twitterpat inquired, still facing Humphrey.
“Terry, is it possible for the entity to offer independent insight or was it just whimsy?” Humphrey said in a low voice.
“It’s… helped me with things, once I knew how to ask, and what to ask,” Terry said. “I’ve typed in questions, or scanned in things–and there is an analytic ability.”
“Real intelligence? Rudimentary AI?”
“I am perfectly capable of answering those questions, Humphrey,” Twitterpat said. “When I was created, it was with cutting-edge holographic and fuzzy logic algorhythms. I am very much ‘intelligent’, if you wish to phrase it that way. It is what I was created for–an interactive intelligence that might be useful for providing insight machine logic, at a speed and precision that is still beyond an unassisted human brain.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Humphrey said. “I never knew that Patrick Wittering had fine-tuned it this far.”
“Can I be of any assistance?” Twitterpat asked again.
Terry glanced at Humphrey. “Is it okay if I let him at the disk?”
“Can’t hurt,” Humphrey said.
“Let me see those printouts again,” Thea murmured, as Terry slipped the CD out of its case and fed it into the drive for Twitterpat to examine. She had noticed something in those incomprehensible pages, something that now tugged at her memory and understanding, something she couldn’t quite put into context. Terry glanced at Humphrey and, at his nod, passed over the papers; at the same instant the Twitterpat image did the processing wibble and began speaking again.
“The data is incomplete,” it said.
“I know. We are still trying to rescue more material from the tapes, but I think this is about the best we can do right now with what we’ve got. If you recognise any of it, perhaps you can fill in some of the blanks.”
“My own code has roots in some of this,” Twitterpat said. “I do recognise some of the algorhythms. However, there is an anomaly.”
“What anomaly?” Humphrey said, his attention suddenly utterly focused on the insubstantial holographic wraith standing before him.
“The data is, as I said, incomplete, but I can begin to understand what the material behind it is about,” Twitterpat said. “Some of the working methodology appears to be obsolete. Some of it resembles what I know of the current state-of-the-art data on artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. And the rest of it appears to be of unknown provenance. I would…” He blurred rapidly, and then blurred again. “I’d be grateful if you could rephase the question. My abilities are limited at this time,” it said after a moment, its voice gone oddly flat.
“Aw, damn,” Terry said, striding back to his main keyboard. “It’s gone into the loop again. Whatever you fed it, Mr. May, you scrambled its brain again.”
“What’s this?” Thea asked suddenly, pointing at the page with the single line of type. Humphrey glanced over.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, shrugging. “That page, as it happens, was the product of one of the attempts to open up the cube–one of the better ones, where I think we came closer than most times. The consensus seems to be that we asked the thing its name, and it told us.”
Thea drew her finger along the line of type. It appeared to be a single word, repeated over and over again:
SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE
“Slate,” Terry said, poring over Thea’s shoulder. “The cube says its name is Slate?”
“No,” Thea said, staring at the page.
Humphrey turned sharply to look at her. “What?” he said.
Thea reached out for a pen which Terry had left lying on the computer desk and underlined five letters on the page:
SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE SLATE
“Not Slate,” she said slowly, looking up at Humphrey. “Tesla. The Elemental Mage who created the Professor’s house. Nikola Tesla. It’s his cube.”
THREE
Humphrey stared at the paper in his hand with an expression that was equal parts astonishment and furious indignation.
“I cannot believe I didn’t see that,” he said after a moment of silence filled with quiet outrage. “It goes a long way to explaining why we haven’t made much headway with the thing. Tesla was the only quad-Element mage in the history of the human race–the only one that we know of, anyway–stands to reason that a uni-Element mage couldn’t even begin to make a dent in it, and even bi-Elementals were out of their depth.”
“Where’s the cube now?” Thea asked.
Humphrey glanced at her, his eyebrow raised. “In a safe back at the Bureau,” he said. “Why?”
“Have you tried taking it back to the house… the Professor’s house? That, too, was Tesla’s doing. Maybe something in the house could help unlock the cube…”
“That,” Humphrey said, chagrinned, “is not a bad idea at all, and once again I should have been the one to think of it. I simply stopped at the Professor, I never thought beyond his person–it never occurred to me to figure that the house might be helpful…” He pulled a silver-grey cell phone from a pouch at his waist. “No good,” he muttered, staring at the phone screen, “no signal in this underground bunker. Thea, can you get us out of here? I need to make a phone call. Terry, I’m really sorry about screwing up your hologram, but if you can make anything of those scanned pages, I’d appreciate knowing about it. If I missed the obvious clue in SLATE, who knew what else I might have passed over in there.”
“Will do, sir,” Terry said, sounding stalwart but mystified.
Humphrey glanced over at Thea, she nodded imperceptibly, and in the next moment they were back in the drizzly woods of the school grounds.
Humphrey immediately punched a speed-dial key on his cell phone and stood tapping his foot impatiently waiting for someone on the other end to pick up.
“Rafe?” he said abruptly, when someone apparently did. “No time to explain now, but get Slate and ‘port immediately to Professor de los Reyes’ house… yes, in San Francisco…yes, I know the Professor is still in the hospital. Just do what I say, quietly. I have access to the house, everything is cleared at the highest level. If anyone does try to cross you, tell them you’re acting on my authority, but try to avoid attention if you can, and most particularly try not to trip any of Luana’s wires. Certainly if I were Slate I would think twice about manifesting with her waiting to pin me out on an examination board like a rare butterfly. Yes, now, Rafe. I know it’s late. I’ll meet you there.”
He flipped the phone closed and turned back to Thea.
“What are you going to do?” Thea asked.
“I don’t have a clue,” Humphrey said frankly. “Try things and see what, if anything, works. I don’t think we’re dealing with anything remotely familiar here, I might have to go back in the archives and read up on things that nobody’s needed to know in decades. I need to get to the Professor’s house myself, in a hurrry.”
“Can I help?”
“I’ve a car here, I can drive down to the nearest public ’port and I can…” He broke off as Thea lifted her wrist, her new gadget still strapped to it, and gave him an innocent smile.
“I can get you there faster,” she said.
“And then we’ll both get into trouble,” Humphrey said, chuckling. “I’ve no wish to add kidnapping to my list of sins.”
“But it wouldn’t be kidnapping, not really. You said that you had an idea about what I can do, and now there’s, what do you call it, Slate?”
“You might be right, at that. We could solve two mysteries with one blow.”
He hesitated, but only briefly; then he appeared to come to a decision, flipped his phone open again, and punched in another number.
